While
working on the history of the Clarence Valley Conservation Coalition (CVCC) for our
recent ReWeavers Awards night, I was reminded of how seemingly “ordinary”
people sometimes step up and achieve remarkable results. One such person was Rosie Richards who in
September 1988 became the first President of the Clarence Valley Conservation
Coalition. She led the campaign against Daishowa’s proposed Clarence Valley chemical
pulp mill.
Rosie was an
ideal person for the job in many ways.
In the conservative Clarence community she was not publicly associated
with any of the recent or on-going conservation issues such as the Washpool
campaign. While she was concerned about environmental impacts, both short and
long-term, and made no secret of the fact, she did not look like a greenie – or
the conservative view of what a greenie looked like.
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| Geoff and Rosie Richards at their son's wedding in 1995 |
Rosie was 56
years old. She was a grandmother. Her
background was not that of a stereotype greenie either. She grew up in Pymble
and in the early fifties was a member of the Liberal Party Younger Set. Her other life experiences included years as
a farmer’s wife and the wife of a professional fisherman. (Her husband Geoff had been both.)
Rosie’s
personality also qualified her for this leadership role in the pulp mill
campaign. She ran both the Coalition
committee and general meetings efficiently.
She was calm, sincere, friendly, articulate and very much “a lady” in
old-fashioned terms. But she was also
determined and possessed a “steel backbone”.
This “steel backbone” and her courage were very necessary in the
campaign to obtain information and disseminate it to the North Coast
community.
Courage was
necessary to the campaigners because those promoting the benefits of Daishowa’s
plans attacked the Coalition, referring to its spokespersons as scaremongers
and “a benighted group who distort the facts.” Those in power locally and at
the state level weren’t in any hurry to provide
facts but they decried the efforts of community members who were trying to find
information on pulp mill operations.
However, this did not deter the CVCC.
It sought information on pulp mills and pulping processes from around
the world, asked questions of those in power and disseminated information to
the community
Following
Daishowa’s announcement that it would not be proceeding with its pulp mill
proposal Rosie wrote to The Daily Examiner (4 April 1990) praising the efforts
of the community in defeating the proposal:
“It has been an interesting nineteen months; a period
that has seen the resolve of north coast people come to the fore; we have seen
People Power used in a democratic way to say ‘No’ to something that we knew would harm our
existing industries and our air and water.
If it had not been for the people of the Clarence Valley and their
attendance at public meetings, their letters to politicians, to newspapers in
Tokyo and our own Daily Examiner, and their strong support of the Clarence
Valley Conservation Coalition, we may have had a huge polluting industrial
complex set down in our midst, without a whimper.”
People Power
did do the job – but Rosie Richards and the others on the CVCC Committee played
a very important part in organizing and channelling that people power.
- Leonie Blain
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| Rosie and Geoff at a function in late 2002. |
