Richard Flanagan on why we should never stop fighting for the causes we believe in

My family and I moved to Tasmania to be more closely connected to nature. We bushwalk, climb mountains and swim in the ocean at all times of the year.

As I have documented on LinkedIn, last year I decided to maximise my professional life for impact, while walking the Three Capes Trek.

This year, as a “recovering journalist” without any need to pursue idealistic – potentially outdated – notions of impartiality, I’ve got more involved with environmental causes that I’ve championed for decades but not worked on directly for a long time.

I fundraised for The Wilderness Society Australia as a backpacker in Australia in 2003, and after witnessing horrific environmental destruction in Borneo, Australia (yes, Australia) and the Amazon on that RTW trip, I worked for Friends of the Earth’s media team in London in 2004-5.

Last year I joined the committee of Neighbours of Fish Farming a local environmental group. A couple of weeks ago, in the wake of a catastrophic mass mortality event in the salmon farms we live beside, that saw our local beaches covered in chunks of dead salmon, my family and I joined a “Vote Salmon Out” rally at Verona Sands, where we witnessed a powerful speech by the charismatic Gerard Castles Strategic Communication Specialist, who was very involved with NoFF, the Friends of North Bruny (where he lived) and the Tasmanian Alliance for Marine Protection.

Tragically, Gerard passed away unexpectedly on March 31 while bushwalking in Tasmania's iconic Walls of Jerusalem National Park.

Last Saturday, I attended Peter George's campaign launch. An illustrious former ABC foreign correspondent and Four Corners reporter, Peter has stepped down as NoFF's president to stand against the incumbent in our local seat Julie Collins, the Federal minister leading the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.

I’m doing what I can to help Peter’s campaign, volunteering on the booths, and providing advice to his fantastic campaign manager Madeline McShane and campaign social media manager Jessica Coughlan, who is also NoFF's campaigner. Peter is a fantastic fella, with a deep love for Tasmania and a drive to protect our unique waterways, beaches and forests.

He argues – like many successful Climate 200 supported community-backed independents before him – that Labor and the Liberal/National coalition is selling Australia out.

Saturday’s absolutely packed event heard a series of powerful, understandably emotional speeches. None more powerful than Richard Flanagan’s – as you might expect from a Booker Prize Foundation winning author – who gave a beautiful valedictory recalling his long friendship with Gerard Castles, and urging all of Peter’s supporters to keep fighting.

I haven't been able to stop thinking about Richard's speech since I heard it, so I thought I'd share it here: the full text is below (any errors in transcription are mine).

Address to the Peter George campaign launch, Motor Yacht Club of Tasmania, Lindisfarne

By Richard Flanagan

Every day this campaign is picking up strength, picking up volunteers, picking up more and more supporters. It's been an extraordinary thing.

Every day this campaign is picking up strength, picking up volunteers, picking up more and more supporters. It's been an extraordinary thing

And then we had the terrible news on Monday night of Gerard's death.

Gerard Castles was my dear friend. 

I knew him for near half a century.

He was a beautiful man, a beautiful, loving man who always transformed the world into something marvellous.

His overriding reaction to all things was gratitude for this world, for friends, for our beautiful island, for today, for something we might share: a drink, a laugh, a story, an observation about a highland lake or plain he found wondrous.

“Isn't it amazing?” Gerard would always be saying.

“Aren't they wonderful?”

“Aren't we lucky?” When you were with Gerard, it was as if the murky light of the day fell through the prism of Gerard's unquenchable delight in life and you saw your own world refracted back.

Your own world and all the people in it refracted into a rainbow of wonder.

Gerard was ceaselessly astonished by the world, not least his own life. 

He had grown up on a poor 50 acre farm in the northwest, stumbling in the thick, wet, red earth furrow left by his father's plough, which up until the time they went broke and had to sell up when he was 12, was still being pulled by a draught horse.

Extraordinarily, he became, by dint of talent, a globally sought after corporate consultant counting top CEOs as friends.

But he was always more at home having a beer with a Bruny island wood hooker. 

His sudden death while walking in the Walls of Jerusalem on Monday has left us all, and Peter's campaign in particular, reeling, because Gerard was everywhere.

Indispensable, indomitable, inspiring in a generous, gentle, understated way. Helping here, helping there. When you least expected it, he was always with you. When it was darkest, he'd just laugh and he'd never, ever give up.

He lived and loved furiously, with a fervour that perhaps only now makes sense.

His love of our island demanded of him that he stand up and speak out for it. Both things that came to him far less easily than most would know.

Gerard made you feel special because he was.

We were next door neighbours at Bruny from 2005 Together we took on the salmon farm opposite our places For many years we tried to work with the salmon company and the government, but slowly we came to see we were being duped. If there is a moment when you can say the anti-salmon movement was born, it was when Gerard and another neighbour, Essie Davis, stood in front of Gerard's beloved Bar Crusher runner there at Tinderbox and told a Mercury journalist the salmon farms had to get out of D'Entrecasteaux Channel. No one had ever said that before.

No one had dared say, not simply no to new salmon farms, but no to all salmon farms.
After that everything began to change slowly but inexorably. Other people began saying the same thing. It was time they went, people began to say. That they got out of the sea and onto land or they got out of Tasmania. Never give up, Gerard would keep on saying, and he never did.

Then Gerard's thinking went further. We had to demonstrate that people cared as he knew people did by getting anti-salmon candidates elected. Only when Labor and Liberal politicians understood they would lose their jobs would things begin to change. 

Gerard loved Peter George, a brave man himself. He deeply admired Pete's courage and standing for election. 

He wanted Pete to win because after 20 years of fighting the salmon companies and after a life in so many other ways trying to make our island better, he finally come to the realisation that we must seek power if we are to create the island home of which we dream. 

I know he would say to you today if he was here: fight and don't stop fighting. He would say that we can win this and we must win it. He knew it is possible, but it is we now who must make it happen. Big heart, big love, deeply caring, grateful for everything that life brought him, delighting and laughter and stories other than the salmon companies, he bore malice to none. 

I miss him terribly and I can't believe he's gone. But I know this. He would not want his death to halt or slow this extraordinary campaign to get Peter George elected as an independent. Rather, he would say to us, never give up. Go harder.

The morning after Gerard died, Essie, who had stood with Gerard at Tinderbox Beach all those years ago, went and with others waved wobble boards for Peter at oncoming traffic on the bridge for an hour and a half because she knew that's what Gerard would have wanted. 

Never give up. I can hear Gerard over the roar of his Bar Crusher outputs. 

Keep fighting.

Isn't it wonderful?

You're amazing, he is saying to us here.

You're all amazing.

Never stop believing you can have a future as wonderful and beautiful as our island.

We will win, he is saying to us.

We will win.

Aren't we lucky?

Aren't you all amazing?

Never give up.

And let's do this for Pete so that Pete can do this for us.

Let's win Franklin on election day.

Because that is what Gerard would say, and that is what he would want us to do.

Thank you.

Richard Flanagan at the Motor Yacht Club of Tasmania, April 5, 2025