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disaffected with the ideological obsession of the leadership and their blind support of their political beliefs. There were too many examples where the leadership was focused more on the power and influence of the union rather than on the interests of the workers. At one stage, I even spent several weeks on a picket line in a dispute with another union over who covered the workers on that site. So I left that role in 1981, and after a year of unemployment (it being quite hard to land a job when your last one was as a labor organizer!), I joined the military.
    This was a great surprise to my friends and family, who assumed my political leanings would prevent such a life turn. For me it was a consistent move. I was pursuing a life of making a contribution to society, and I saw the Australian military as doing just that.
    While in the military and now with my second child, Asher, born, I became very concerned about the threat of nuclear war. Being in the military naturally led to great interest in matters of national and global security—after all, this was the 1980s, with Ronald Reagan, Star Wars, and a massive global movement against nuclear weapons.
    I particularly remember a newspaper story from a science conference at the time reporting that an alarming proportion of teenagers believed there would be literally no future for them, as nuclear war was inevitable. They therefore felt there was no point in working toward a better life. It struck me that whether that assumption was accurate or not, the fact that we had a generation growing up with such a view was of great concern to me as a young parent.
    I believe this period of global focus on the nuclear issue, when many came to understand that we had the capacity to destroy most of life on earth with a nuclear holocaust, was critical to later developments in society’s collective thinking. It provided a deep and direct understanding of the idea of intergenerational impact and that we humans could easily and irreversibly affect the entire planetary system. I think some people today still struggle to believe we really have the power to damage the earth’s environment as a whole. Sure, we could destroy a river here and a forest there, but the planet is so big, surely we couldn’t wreck it all?
    The prospects of a nuclear winter—a sudden global cooling triggered by a massive nuclear holocaust coating the planet with fine dust particles—showed that in fact, yes, we could, and with just a few buttons and phone calls. It was a sobering time. We had learned to understand the implications of Rachel Carson’s comment that we had “now acquired a fateful power to destroy nature.”
    Motivated by this threat to my children’s future, I was by 1985 still serving in the military but spending my personal time active in waterborne protests conducted by an activist group, the Sydney Peace Squadron, on Sydney Harbour against visits by nuclear-armed warships from the United States and the United Kingdom. At that time, I still enjoyed serving in the military and continue to this day to have great respect for our armed forces.
    While the Australia military exists in a clear democratic framework and was surprisingly tolerant of what I did on my own time, we did in the end agree that a long-term career in the military was probably not compatible with a personal life as an antinuclear campaigner, especially since our protests were against allied countries’ ships. After some interesting (!) conversations with military intelligence, who came to check out my threat level, we amicably agreed to part company in 1986. I then committed myself full-time to my antinuclear campaigning; by that stage I was separated from my first wife and living with my two children.
    Not being able to afford housing, the children and I occupied an abandoned government-owned house. It was badly dilapidated so we had to first rebuild the roof and put in doors and windows from scrap