Valerie Brown met the queen, was arrested – and led Greenpeace Australia

Writing in The Conversation, peace studies scholar Marty Branagan reviews the memoir of Valerie Brown — the Australian change-maker who led Greenpeace Australia during the bombing of its Rainbow Warrior yacht in 1985. Brown, now in her nineties, packed multiple careers into one lifetime: TAFE teacher, consumer advocate, public service department head, and professor of environmental health. She met Queen Elizabeth as a young woman, was arrested for distributing a student magazine about sex, and was one of only three women among six hundred science graduates at her university. The review notes she helped register midwives, remove lead from petrol, and supervised more than eighty doctoral students — all while declining to call herself a feminist. Branagan calls her memoir, The Girl on the Roof, a valuable addition to the literature on women change-makers — a life that used privilege to challenge narrow patriarchal systems.

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