One of the best things about running this site is it offers the excuse to ask smart people to write about their lives and perspectives. This is a long (unedited) interview that I think deserves and will repay your close attention.
1. Tell us a bit about who you are – where and when you grew up, and how and when you first learnt about climate change,
Answer: My name is Anthony Negus, known to many people by my second name, Shane, and I was born in Beverley (Ballardong Noongar name: Wergijan), Western Australia in 1957 to the farming couple Geoffrey and Shirley Negus.. My Australian settler-colonial forebears on both sides were almost all farming people, back to the 1830s on my paternal side and the 1850s on my maternal side.
As we have been in Western Australia so long, I am of mixed ancestry, which made my family rather unusual in those times inasmuch as many of these forebears married across both religious and class lines: free settler Presbyterian Scots with Irish Catholics of convict stock (a taboo subject when I was a child, convict ancestry being widely seen still as a stain on a family’s reputation and standing in small country communities). Welsh non-Conformists and Church of England members wed and bred and some of their offspring went on to marry Catholics who had converted from Judaism. None of this was easy in Beverley/Wergijan at the time for those who crossed sectarian divides, which also usually meant crossing the class divide: landed gentry who lived on large farms and “Nobs Hill”–for snobs, I guess–versus the hoi-polloi of lesser pedigree and far less wealth in most cases, certainly those who were Catholic. However, there was a plus in this situation for me: our family was by and large much more tolerant of difference and diversity than was typical of country Sandgropers (Western Australians). All this religious bigotry and animosity faded gradually from the early 1960s onwards but I still recall kids from the state school and those of us at the convent school taunting each other with ugly shouted insults and chants such as ”Catholic dogs stink like frogs, in and out of water logs”. This made for an interesting transition for those of us enrolled in the state school after the convent school closed. Happily, it all went pretty smoothly.
Less fortunate by far were the Noongar kids who attended Beverley Junior High. This was very much still the era of white supremacy pervading every aspect of the laws and culture of WA society, symbolised most tellingly in the White Australia Policy and the infamous WA Aboriginal Act 1905, a major influence some decades later when a newly elected racist government in South Africa legislated the country’s apartheid regime, drawing much of its inspiration and specific measures that would segregate the races from longstanding segregationist laws in both WA and Queensland. I witnessed the appalling living conditions for Noongar people at the Beverley native reserve. The poverty and lack of even the most basic services or amenities shocked me. My parents were hardscrabble farmers who lived with three children in a house that would be today considered very basic, if quite comfortable by the standards of the day. But we had running water; the Noongars on the reserve did not; we wadjellas (Noongar: non-Indigenous people, overwhelmingly whites of British and Irish ancestry then, as now) could move freely in the community but the Noongars had to abide by a curfew every night; by law, employers were permitted to pay Noongar workers a much lower wage than their wadjella co-workers doing the same job; and certainly the cruellest and most unjust thing the state government’s Native Welfare Department bureaucrats did, usually carried out on the ground by policemen was forced removal of so-called “half caste” Noongar children from their families, after which the littlies, some just babies, went into missions run most often by Christian denominations of one sort or another. This happened to a close friend of mine, now a much respected and outspoken elder, a woman who, as a young girl was used by a number of Benedictine priests, in her words, as a “sex slave”. She wasn’t the only one and many decades later the report issued by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse found that the New Norcia schools run by the Catholic Church represented one of the worst hotspots for such abuse in all Australia, a veritable paedophiles’ picnic.
I attended school locally at the Beverley Convent School, which closed in 1966 due to falling enrolments, then attended the Junior High School from Year 5 in 1967 to 1972. After that, I attended Aquinas College in Perth/Boorloo as a boarding student and completed my Leaving Certificate in 1974, achieving matriculation, which meant that I could apply to enrol in one of a wide range of courses at the University of Western Australia because my examination results were high enough to qualify me to do so. Our family farm was small, just 1000 acres on hard country and with three children to support on a very modest income, made more difficult by a bad drought in 1969 and death duties levied on my grandfather’s farm following his death in 1968. The farm was now managed by my father and he was faced with inherited debts, impending death duty liabilities and a harsh drought which resulted in a poor crop. If it wasn’t that I won a Commonwealth Student Scholarship at the end of Year 10, my parents wouldn’t have had the money to enrol me at Aquinas College.
This financial struggle for my parents during the whole of the 1970s prompted me to take what was known as a student teacher bond. This scheme enabled students to obtain a Teachers Certificate at very low cost because the WA government paid for one’s course without requirement to repay the money received, on one proviso: that a bonded graduate would serve for a minimum of three years somewhere in the state. As I wanted to become a secondary school English, History and Media Studies teacher, I seized the opportunity to sign up for the bond, thus greatly reducing the financial contribution my parents would have had to have made towards my tuition at WASTC and boarding costs at a university residential college. In fact, my father made it very clear that if I couldn’t find my own means of paying to attend three years at the teachers’ college, I’d have to abandon the idea because he didn’t have the money to support me for so long.
As a fairly solitary farm boy I spent a lot of my time until I was 15 walking through bushland and along the banks of the local river, the Avon (in Ballardong, Gugulja Bilya), observing very closely the native plant and animal species; which I continued doing when back home on holidays from Aquinas in 1973 and 1974.
My siblings and I grew up witnessing regular flooding events, the worst of which caused major damage to roads, bridges and buildings. There were a lot of heavy rainfall events from April onwards, through to late spring. Frosts were a part of everyday life on most winter mornings, some of them ‘black frosts’ which were colder and more penetrating than lighter frosts, so did more damage to frost-sensitive plants kept under cover on verandas. The upside was that fruit trees such as apples and pears, which require at least 300 chill hours, that is hours below 7-degrees Celsius, across autumn-winter-spring, did well and fruited heavily. Frosts are now significantly less frequent or severe, with an occasional cold snap perhaps lasting a few days, but nothing like we experienced in the mid-20th century.
Bureau of Meteorology weather records taken since the 1950s show that annual rainfall has declined in the south-west of WA by at least 20 percent and frosts are much less common than they were. It’s also now much warmer across all seasons on average. The early signs of the impacts of anthropogenic global heating began to become evident from the mid-1970s on, especially to those of us deeply connected to the local natural environment and involved in maintaining healthy, productive domestic gardens. The climate simply wasn’t what it used to be.
In 1977, I became the first member of my family in Western Australia to obtain a tertiary education degree, which happened when I graduated from the Western Australian Secondary Teachers’ College. I was employed by a leading Catholic school named John XXIII College, which had only come into existence that year following an amalgamation of the all-girls Loreto Convent and the Jesuit-run all-boys St Louis School. It was the beginning of a long and successful career at John XXIII College, during which time I rose from a fledging first-year teacher on probation to serve for five years as deputy principal, from 1994 to 1999, after which I gained employment as an educational consultant and, finally, researcher at the Catholic Education Office of WA. I left education in 2005 and retrained as a horticulturalist, a career I pursued until I retired from the paid workforce in 2023.. The last ten years of that period was spent working as a sole trader, offering horticultural services to customers back in my Wheatbelt town where I’d relocated from Perth/Boorloo in 2012, largely because I wanted to live close to my elderly parents and to do some caring for them (cooking meals, driving them to medical appointments in Northam, a regional hub for the Wheatbelt and very often to the ‘big smoke’.
As a horticulturist living and working back in my hometown, the impacts of global heating on the environment were clear for all to see: massively increased bushfire risk, depletion of plant and animal species, the aforementioned much reduced annual rainfall, annual temperature increases across all seasons, very rare flooding events (and those that occurred weren’t so much during winter, as in the 1950s to 1970s, but as the result of summer thunderstorm events.)
Long before all this, though, I was coming across reports in the news about the theory of human-induced global warming and predictions of super-cyclones if our species kept emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at the rate then taking place, since much accelerated by the burning of ever-increasing amounts of fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil.
Climate scientists were already modelling the changes in climate and probable adverse impacts of AGW on the climate of south-west WA. This was in the mid-1980s and they were warning of much more severe impacts in coming decades unless the burning of fossil fuels wasn’t drastically reduced, not just in WA but across the entire world. I had no hesitation, like my colleagues, many of whom also grew up on farms in the State or “over east”, of teaching students in Social Studies classes about global heating and what the future held for them and future generations of AGW wasn’t dealt with by the world’s governments.
We are certainly paying a heavy price for that inaction in the south-west of WA, our largest population centre by far, with mass tree deaths in the Jarrah and Karri forests due mostly to having not received ANY significant rainfall during the hottest summer on record. My 92-year-old mother had to get though night-time temperatures in her house of over 30C for days on end during repeated power outages in January and February. She couldn’t sleep, having not even a fan to cool her off a bit. As a result of this experience, she asked her three children, of whom I’m the eldest, to put her house on the market so she could move into a modern air-conditioned aged care facility that has back-up power storage if there’s a system blackout. The house sold quickly and she’s now happily ensconsed in a new beaut facility.
A farmers’ wife who used to read The Australian (a Murdoch newspaper) and believe their climate denialist commentary and reports has become utterly convinced that human-induced global heating is real. I’d expect the penny has now dropped for hundreds of thousands of Western Australians who swallowed the News Corps lies about climate change—the evidence of its massive impacts is now staring them in the face and many have endured a summer they would never want to go through again but are certain too. The alarming thing is that we are only at the early stages of a rapidly warming planet and much worse is to come.
Certainly it’s a massive issue for most voters in Kate Chaney’s federal seat of Curtin where trees and shrubs are dying as they’ve reached the point of terminal wilting and commuters into the city centre and home again are in peak hour traffic, crawling past tree after tree that are either dead or clearly dying. The weather forecast is for another three months of above average maxima and minima, and with very little rainfall in prospect until late June, early July. If relieving rains do come, it will be far too late save millions of trees in state forests and along street verges in the Metropolitan area. I’m observing all this around the leafy—or should I say, increasingly much less leafy—western suburbs of Perth/Boorloo, in the heart of Curtin, once a jewel in the crown of the WA Liberal Party, the membership of which is rapidly decreasing and Kate Chaney’s prospects of being re-elected at the 2025 federal election are looking better by the day, unlike the fate of our vegetation and animal species acutely impacted by the prolonged, truly unprecedented drought.
It’s really very depressing yet our state Labor government is gung-ho about developing more huge gas projects in the north and mid-west of the state, knowing full well that the IEA, WMO, NOAA and more than 99 percent of the world’s climate scientists, as well as many scientific bodies around the world, have declared that no new fossil fuel projects can be opened from here on if we are to avoid catastrophic impacts of AGW in coming decades. It’s nothing less than state capture by the big gas companies such as Woodside, Santos and the Stokes’ family’s interests in gas companies like Beach Energy. The full influence and power of WA’s monopolistic SevenWest Network is all but total and neither major party dares to defy the damage that could be inflicted by Stokes using Network Seven and his newspapers as an organ of propaganda for Big Gas or deployed them to campaign against any party which says it will take real action to lower WA’s GHG emissions.
2. When did you first start to see changes with your own eyes? What were they? What changes have you seen over the decades? Do you think the pace and/or scope of change is increasing?
As stated above, I’ve been noticing the impacts of AGW on our climate in the south-west of WA, both in the Wheatbelt and here in the city, since at least the early 1970s.
Much can be gleaned about my perspective on this issue from this letter I wrote, published in The Farm Weekly back in May 2019, another very hot year, just as it was to be during the black summer fires over east in late 2019, early 2020…
Last Thursday, an out of control bushfire raged in the hills near Mundaring on a day which reached a maximum of 30-degrees Celcius. It is mid-May, WA has recorded its hottest autumn on record, and we’ve yet to receive any significant rainfall.
It is little wonder to me, then, that 23 former fire and emergency services chiefs from across Australia, people with over 600 years of combined experience, recently warned that “the burning of coal, oil and gas is worsening extreme weather events, including hot days, heatwaves, heavy rainfall, coastal flooding and catastrophic bushfire weather.”
Having grown up in heartland Country (National) Party territory, I’m well aware that many primary producers are leery of meta-scientific theories such as anthropogenic global warming. Therefore, I offer the following argument for a paradigm shift based on a conservative rather than progressive perspective.
What do the following pragmatic conservative institutions, corporations and organisations have in common?
The British royal family, Bank of England, Insurance Council of Australia, National Farmers Federation, U.S. Defense Department, Exxon Mobil Corp, Catholic Church, Reserve Bank of Australia, and the centre-right governments of the UK, Germany and many European nations.
Answer: they all accept the scientific consensus on human-induced global warming and the need to take urgent action to both reduce the rate of future global temperature increases and to ameliorate the effects which now cannot be avoided because of carbon emissions already locked into the world’s atmosphere.
That so many leading conservative entities across the world have reached this position on climate change should come as no surprise. One of the bedrock principles of conservatism is to protect, conserve and be good stewards of the environment on which human civilisation and prosperous economies depend.
True conservatives also adhere to the precautionary (or prudential) principle of making fact-based decisions calculated to minimise the risk of avoidable and potentially catastrophic events in the future. Hence the insurance industry’s longstanding acceptance of the science on climate change.
I’m an ardent republican but I couldn’t agree more with Prince Charles, our likely next monarch: “We should be treating the whole issue of climate change and global warming with a far greater degree of priority than I think is happening now.”
3. What changes do you think are coming to your part of the world?
Please distil my answer to this question from all I’ve said above. In a phrase, we are facing a real and imminent existential threat.
4. Beyond “all of us”, who is to blame?
That’s a toughie because the culprits for a very large percentage of GHG emissions across the world cover their tracks with obfuscation, dodgy science done by their hireling scientists, massive positive PR campaigns about their bogus claims of taking real action, mobilising Australia’s media to regurgitate the propaganda sent them by Big Carbon outfits (to say nothing of the threats of losing advertising dollars if particular media companies go hard on the issue—thank God, not a big problem for the likes of The Guardian Australia and The New Daily).
But I remember seeing a recent article somewhere, probably The Guardian, which reported that something like 60% of all GHG emissions are produced by a surprisingly small number of giant companies across a range of industries. Ah, found it…
The majority of fossil fuel companies produce more emissions after Paris Agreement than before: report – ABC News
And I have to say, too, living as I do in a small, very conservative rural community where upwards of ten percent of voters cast their ballots for Pauline Hanson’s mob of drongoes and a much larger percentage for the climate-denying Liberal MHR for the seat of O’Connor, Rick Wilson, there’s still a big number of people, mostly baby boomers and older, who loudly and aggressively denounce climate change as a hoax.
The pig-ignorant opinions of these people, most of whom have never heard of the scientific method, let alone ever respected the “eggheads” who do, pose a real encumbrance, if not menace, to our society by encouraging the climate deniers in politics to obstruct any real climate action even more boldly, aided and abetted always by anti-science, anti-expertise-in-any-field populists like Hanson, Dutton, Palmer, Stokes and his media lackeys. Their influence extends so far that Labor has been far too timorous in its policy settings on bringing down GHG emissions—and, worse, it is waving through the opening of new fossil fuel developments and expansion of existing projects across the country, all the while disingenuously claiming it is fair dinkum on tackling AGW.
5. What is to be done, beyond bracing for further impacts?
It will mark a big shift in Australian politics when the Millenials become the largest voting bloc, displacing us baby boomers and the so-called Great Generation in the near future. The centre of political gravity on climate change in Australia will lurch, if not altogether towards the Greens, then certainly towards independents like Kate Chaney demanding far more ambitious climate change mitigation and adaptation policies.
It’s going to be very difficult for people in this region of Australia to brace for the enormous impacts that are already unfolding at an alarming pace. The only glimmer of hope I take from our current environmental calamity is that it will make the job of climate denying politicians extremely hard, trying to sell a dog of a policy to promote nuclear power generation to an already VERY sceptical public, given that we’d be unlikely to see any form of reactor, small or large, built and operating, this side of 2040, even if the technology were viable as a part of our energy mix at a commercially competitive price, which it most certainly isn’t as things stand.
The reality is that the federal Coalition is just stalling for time to help their mates out in Big Carbon, major donors to the Liberals and Nationals and likely employers of many a retired politician looking for a handsomely renumerated job lobbying for the likes of Woodside, Gina Rinehart, Kerry Stokes, etc. It’s an incredible fact, related to me by Dr Colin Hughes, a former public health administrator in this State and passionate campaigner for far more ambitious action, that every single retired resources minister across Australia, both state and federal, Coalition or Labor, has landed a job with a fossil fuel company since 2001. It’s state capture like this makes me realise that only people power expressed through protests, shareholder activism, Extinction Rebellion actions, voting for Greens and independent candidates, etc, that we have any hope of overcoming Big Carbon’s capture of the major political parties. I assume you are across what happened at Woodside’s AGM last week—a hopeful development, though unlikely to shift the Executive’s and Board’s heedless disregard for the damage they are threatening to do to the prospects of our young ones here in south-west WA living anywhere nearly as well, safely and securely as my generation and my parents have. Woodside is facing a rapid, sharp reduction in their social licence as things get worse in coming years here.
Though pancreatic cancer will probably claim me in the next few years—unless I defy the odds as Eric Idle has—I’m desperately worried about the impacts AGW is going to impose on the lives of my children and grandchildren. For one thing, Western Australia is sparsely populated and the shores of our north-west regions will be a tempting destination for the vast hordes of climate refugees from places like Bangladesh, the Maldives and other low-lying countries in our region. I shudder to think what an Australian government might do to prevent their arrival. Never mind that Australia has been one of the most recalcitrant of climate laggards—no, too generous, hopelessly irresponsible—in dealing with an existential threat that is likely to affect Australia more severely than anywhere else, as demonstrated by the record flooding events in the east and the unprecedented big dry, certainly since Europeans have been here in WA.
I’m doing what little I can during my cancer treatment to make fossil fuel companies and their media company enablers/collaborators/hirelings realise that they will be remembered as climate criminals in years to come, even by many of their own children and grandchildren. To that end I’ve been making hard-hitting comments about both individuals and companies committing these egregious climate crimes, even daring them to sue me for defamation so I can mount a truth defence argued by barristers representing me pro bono and the many distinguished climate scientists and international bodies like the IEA, WMO, NOAA, Professor Michael Mann and many others who’d be more than happy to give evidence as to the dangers posed by fossil fuel companies continuing to expand their activities with massive projects such as the Scarborough gas project, on which these scientists have belled the cat…
Why this new climate case against the high-polluting Scarborough gas project is so significant (theconversation.com)
