Fishing for Stars Read Free Page B

Victoria.
    I had lain naked in my tent under a mosquito net, drowning in my own sweat, teeth chattering, shivering from the fever raging through my body, imagining my homecoming. Boy soldier, broken by malaria, returns home a hero to claim his faithful love. She sits tearfully at his bedside holding his hand in the military hospital. When he finally recovers they walk together into the sunset . In my fevered imagination I could practically hear the violins in the background.
    Commander Robert Rich, Marg’s husband, was and always had been a great bloke. He subsequently welcomed me as a friend, and in the twenty years that followed he rose to the rank of admiral. Pretty bright in his own right, with the added advantage of Marg – a charge of dynamite in his life – there was no stopping his climb up the ladder. Together they raised two intelligent and thoroughly delightful children, John and Samantha, and appeared to be very happy. Alas, he was killed in a freak accident in 1965. While on a routine inspection at the Cockatoo Island Dockyards in Sydney, he was hit by a steel beam that fell from a crane.
    In the five years that followed, Marg grew weary of tea and sympathy, garden parties and official dinners, which she attended alone wearing her husband’s medals. While she’d enjoyed being the admiral’s wife and raising a family, she’d been a captive of her husband’s career. Now she found herself trapped in her new role as the admiral’s widow, expected by the naval establishment to do good works within the navy family.
    Marg is a woman with the energy of a buzz-saw and she was slowly rusting away in a corner of the work shed. At fifty-four she was a highly articulate and still extremely attractive woman who craved a new start, longing to walk out of the shadows cast by her former life. Finally, fed up to the teeth with fetes and charity functions, she resumed her maiden name and went to live in Tasmania.
    She joined the Australian Conservation Foundation and she became actively involved in the rolling battles to save the Tasmanian wilderness. She was among the first members of the United Tasmania Group, the world’s first green political party, which was formed in 1972. This led eventually to membership of the Tasmanian Wilderness Society, where the Tasmanian Greens were born as a political party and ultimately to her election as a member of the Tasmanian Legislative Council.
    Marg knew how to get things done, and quickly became a bloody nuisance in Hobart and as a lobbyist in Canberra where both Labor and the Coalition thought her political party at best temporary and at worst a bad joke.
    Always the closest of friends, she and I returned to a somewhat peripatetic though more intimate association after she went to Tasmania. I’d visit her in Hobart or Canberra when I was in Australia or she’d visit me at Beautiful Bay. It seemed I had finally managed to jump the emotional chasm.
    When she retired from the Tasmanian Legislative Council in 1985 she returned to live in Sydney. By that time she’d earned the sobriquet ‘Madam Termite’, for her ability to undermine the halls of conservatism and complacency that seemed particularly common in Tasmania, especially the Tasmania Club, which she regarded as the greatest single assembly of silly old farts in the land.
    Now, at the age of seventy-seven with all her marbles very much intact, she’s the Martin Luther King of climate change, preaching the hot gospel of global warming and the cold logic of melting icecaps. She’s the old woman and the sea, relentless defender and spokesperson for all creatures great and small, those that swim, fly, run, crawl, slither, hop, burrow or simply exist.
    When Marg began her crusade she lived in a lonely world where most politicians thought of her kind as tree-hugging ratbags. She and they have come a long way, but not without suffering the slings and arrows of the environment sceptics. Last year she was invited as a