After our conversation, I thought about how interdependence is the heart of independence. I thought back to that blustery February morning on Verona Sands when a small group of locals came together to share their common grief and helplessness at feeling the weight of forces beyond their control. And how one man had stepped forward and said in a low, clear voice, “We can do this.”
THE PETER GEORGE CAMPAIGN FOR FRANKLIN
It was a late-February morning on Verona Sands beach. The surf was rolling under the eucalypts. Dog walkers smiled hello while a few brave swimmers towelled themselves dry. People started to gather by the stairs leading to the toilet block, until a group of about 20 had assembled.
Word on the beach was that the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) had finally responded to one of us about the stinking, oily globs we’d found smeared along the tideline a week before. For days, strangers with buckets and rakes had been cleaning the beach, refusing to identify themselves or answer our questions about what the stuff was or where it had come from. Dogs that had eaten it had become sick.
The EPA’s email said that tests were ongoing, but there was essentially nothing to worry about.
Bewildered, frustrated, we looked at each other and asked, what should we do? What could we do? Something had happened on our beach – something wrong – but there was no information or direction from authorities.
As we talked, I noticed a tall man with a kind face framed with glasses, white hair and beard. He was standing to the side and listening. He seemed familiar. I asked a neighbour who he was, and they whispered he was Peter George, a former ABC journalist and President of Neighbours of Fish Farming (NOFF), who had recently decided to run as an independent for Franklin in the coming federal election.
Much has come to light since that first meeting on the beach. We’ve learned that the oily globs that first appeared on Verona Sands were the rotting remains of Atlantic salmon from nearby fish farms. The combination of unusually warm water and a bacterial outbreak in salmon farm pens across southern Tasmania had caused a “mass mortality event”, leading to thousands of tonnes of farmed fish being dumped – dead and alive – into neighbouring landfills. Unknown quantities of antibiotics have been poured into fish pens to treat the outbreak, and Salmon Tasmania confirmed that infected fish were sold on supermarket shelves.
Struggles between government, big business and environmental movements are at the heart of Tasmanian history: dams, pulp mills, native forest logging; and now, open-net salmon farming. As headlines flooded my inbox, I thought of that tall figure who stood listening on the beach. If I wanted to learn the history of what was happening in our waterways, I would need to talk to Peter George.
It’s an April evening in Hobart, just weeks out from the election, and George has agreed to take time out from his busy campaign schedule to meet me for a chat at Hadley’s Hotel. As we settle into our cozy armchairs beneath a dramatic oil painting of a wild Tasmanian coastline, I ask why someone who has led an extraordinary career reporting on wars, famines and revolutions around the world would leave their comfortable retirement in the serene surrounds of Cygnet to throw themselves into the maelstrom of federal politics.
George leans forward, pausing before he answers. “I’m driven by four children and six grandchildren, and trying to leave the planet a better place. That might sound a bit clichéd, but it’s true.” His experience as a journalist has also given him insights into human nature, in all its darkness and light. “I think spending a lifetime finding people’s stories, thinking things out, reporting on the nefarious ways of governments, reporting on the ways societies can be treated by the elite ... I think that sets me up quite well, if I were to be elected.”
. . .
Born in 1951 to an Australian mother and a British father in the Royal Navy, Peter George had already seen a lot of the world before his family settled in Sydney when he was 15. His first job was at The Sydney Morning Herald, and after a stint in New Zealand doing TV and radio, and at The Canberra Times, the ABC hired him to build up its Tasmanian bureau in the mid-1970s. “I always knew I could come and live here,” he says with a smile. But for an ambitious young journalist, Tasmania was too small a canvas to paint the big stories he wanted to tell.
George worked in London during the Thatcher years, covering major events like the Brixton Riots in 1981, the Falklands War of 1982, and the Coal Miners’ Strike in 1984. Around this time the ABC invited him to become their first Middle East correspondent. He decided to base himself in Cyprus, partly for logistical reasons (it offered freedom of travel and no press censorship), but also because it was a nexus of foreign-based business, diplomats, and a floating intelligence centre for the international community. “Full of spies!” he chuckles.
In 1992, after three years raising a young family in France, George got another call from the ABC asking if he’d come back to start a new program called Foreign Correspondent. It was to be a weekly current affairs program, hosted by George Negus. In one year, Peter George filed 10 stories, from South-East Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, France and South Africa. Foreign Correspondent became one of Australia’s leading news programs, winning multiple awards.
After several years, Four Corners came calling. Now in his mid-50s, George met his current wife, Jessica, who’d been an editor at Four Corners for 20 years. Both felt ready for a break from the relentless pressures of the news cycle. “So, I persuaded her to give up work and go sailing around the Pacific.” They spent the next five years at sea, until one day they sailed into the little port of Cygnet, and knew they had found their home.
. . .
I asked George when he first noticed the salmon farms. “The first salmon farms I ever saw were probably in the ‘80s in Scotland, and I thought, these are a brilliant idea,” he said. It could be really sustainable. It meant you weren’t catching wild fish, especially wild salmon because at that time they were becoming endangered.”
He thought the same of the growing Tasmanian salmon industry, until issues started to emerge. “Initially it was the light, the noise, and the debris washing up on our beaches, the algae. And I thought – this was really naïve, for someone who had been a Four Corners reporter – I could try to engage with them [the salmon companies] and sort of see what they could do to tone their operations down.”
Neighbours of Fish Farming was founded in 2015 as a way of coordinating community dialogue with the salmon companies. “I was asked to become the neutral chair of public meetings at which the Benders [Peter and Frances], who then owned Huon Aquaculture were asked questions, and they came and addressed the community.” But like almost any community organisation, it languished. “You set it up with a great deal of enthusiasm and energy, but it’s hard to actually pull people together.”
The first tipping point came around two years later, when George was speaking with one of the company’s public relations people on the phone. “She said to me, ‘I was only saying to the Minister for Agriculture the other day, what a reasonable person you are to deal with.’ And the light switch came on. I’d been sucked into this vortex where they’d embraced me so tightly, I thought I was making progress ... but I was making no progress at all.” That’s when, George says, NOFF decided to go from being good neighbours to being the neighbours from hell.
“As soon as we started to question them, that’s when they started to attack us. All of a sudden, we’d gone from being a community group to activists to nay-sayers and NIMBY’s ... but we did have the advantage that the people who were running the two companies at the time [Huon Aquaculture and Tassal] loathed each other. So they tended to dump on each other, which was quite useful.”
The second tipping point for George was Richard Flanagan’s book Toxic (2021). “I worked a bit with Flanagan on that ... I wouldn’t say I was particularly helpful, but I did do some of the fact checking for him. We thought, somewhere in the 240 pages we’ll make one mistake, and we’ll be crucified for it. But they’ve yet to find a mistake.”
Toxic has since sold more than 150,000 copies in Australia alone. “I think the mistake the industry made was that it was just going to be another news story – here today, gone tomorrow. They failed to recognise that a book remains on bookshelves, it is in bookshops, it becomes a reference. That book is now referenced by campaigners all around the world.”
In 2021, NOFF became a founding member of the Global Salmon Farming Resistance, which now has 108 member organisations around the world. The recent “mass mortality event” has made Tasmania a flashpoint in a much larger, global story about the sustainability of large-scale open-net salmon farming in the era of climate change.
. . .
George is now 15 weeks into his campaign, which has been steadily building momentum in the local community. Four hundred and forty volunteers have signed up, and individual donations are coming in daily. “It’s very humbling. Because you know the reason those people are there is that they’ve put their faith in you. And it’s a bit extraordinary for people to put their faith in you.”
The people signing up to support him are not just motivated by the salmon issue, George says. “The seedbed of this campaign is salmon. But truth be told, I don’t think you have a healthy society unless you have good education and good health. There’s too much short-term thinking.” He pauses again, weighing his words. “What I’d really like to do, whether I succeed or fail, is to find someone – preferably female, preferably younger – whom I could mentor. Then we could keep Franklin independent.”
. . .
After our conversation, I thought about how interdependence is the heart of independence. I thought back to that blustery February morning on Verona Sands when a small group of locals came together to share their common grief and helplessness at feeling the weight of forces beyond their control. And how one man had stepped forward and said in a low, clear voice, “We can do this.”
Rayne Allinson is a writer and teacher with a PhD in History from the University of Oxford. She has worked and travelled in many parts of the northern hemisphere, and is now Assistant Publisher at Forty South.
