Bob Brown (b. 1944), environmentalist, doctor and former politician, is an environmental campaigner and the first Parliamentary Leader of the Australian Greens. Brown studied medicine at Sydney University before moving to Tasmania, where he worked as a general practitioner in Launceston. In 1976, having taken a rafting trip down the Franklin River, he became a founding member of the Wilderness Society. From then until 1983 he led the campaign against proposed dam works on the Franklin, which was subsequently preserved with a World Heritage Listing. In 1983, he began a decade in the Tasmanian House of Assembly as the Member for Denison. He was elected to the Federal Senate as a member of the Tasmanian Greens in 1996 and later co-founded the Australian Greens, which he guided from a fringe to a mainstream political force before resigning from the leadership in 2012. That year he established the Bob Brown Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation supporting environmental causes.
Harold Thornton travelled to Tasmania and joined Brown and the 6000 protestors blocking the construction of the Franklin dam in December 1982. Thornton painted this portrait of Brown while he was in the wilderness campsite and in his Hobart and Sydney studios. Despite its fanciful elements, this painting provides a remarkably faithful record of events in the early 1980s.
Gift of the Estate of Harold Thornton 2009
© Estate of Harold Thornton
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