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whose grit andresourcefulness built this country and made it what it is.
    The message instilled by my parents was that you didn’t need to be a plutocrat to have an opinion. I also learned very early that you do not rise by planting your foot in someone else’s face. Our way, the Aussie way, was to extend a hand so that no one was left behind. This is not nostalgic platitude but the plain unvarnished truth of how my parents and our neighbours lived. For my father, this truth expressed itself in a lifelong commitment to trade unionism. Although money was always tight, if a fellow worker was in a bind or unjustly treated, you went on strike, and you went without, together. Other neighbours worked through the church, quietly taking care of needs that were never spoken of, merely dealt with.
    It is true that these same neighbours did not, generally speaking, embrace my father’s brand of leftist politics, or my mother’s enthusiastic multiculturalism. Australia had been in the grip of its post-war conservative mood for decades, and that gripwas slow to loosen. But you could feel the beginnings of something, even from where I stood, a convent schoolgirl on the cusp of adolescence. Opposition to the war in Vietnam was roiling at Sydney University, the Valhalla towards which all my thoughts were bent. Instead of rock stars, my idols became the draft resisters and their fabulously articulate student advocates. In 1966, when the American president, Lyndon Johnson, visited Sydney, 10,000 demonstrators — a remarkable number — turned out to protest. I begged my parents to let me go to the city and join the rally. I was eleven, and even though they were no fans of Johnson and his war, their answer was a very firm ‘No’. So I watched the protesters on the news that night, chanting along with their cries of ‘Hey hey LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?’
    When the camera focused on a very young woman being dragged by police off the road in front of Johnson’s motorcade, I wanted to be her. (Later on, I still wouldn’t have minded being Sandra Levy, who went on to be the head of television at the ABC and to run the Australian Film, Television and RadioSchool.) More recently, when I read barrister Charles Waterstreet’s memoir, Repeating the Leaving , I envied him, too. His private school had delivered a busload of its students to the official Sydney welcome for the president, titled, rather deliciously, ‘Make Sydney Gay for LBJ’. But when the bus arrived, Waterstreet took off his school blazer and did a runner, joining the protesters.
    All this political and social ferment took place in a city poised for immense physical change. Construction cranes perched on the horizon like a flock of strange prehistoric birds hovering over their prey. The historic heart of The Rocks was to be torn down, razed for office blocks. Much of Centennial Park was to be concreted over and sacrificed for a stadium. The iconic waterfront and neighbourhoods of Woolloomooloo and the character of Kings Cross were about to be high-rised into history. But the Vietnam protests were a kind of yeast, and the bubbles worked in all kinds of unexpected places. A group of North Shore women — women not unlike my mother, but a bit better off — decided that they didn’twant to lose their neighbourhood’s precious remnant of urban bushland to another development. In 1971, they asked for, and received, help from an unlikely quarter, the Builders Labourers Federation. And so in the affluent Sydney suburb of Hunters Hill the green bans were born, and with them, a few hundred unskilled labourers, led by a man who, like my mother, had left school aged thirteen, saved the city. At the height of the green ban movement, Jack Mundey and the Builders Labourers Federation had stopped work on projects valued at 3000 million dollars. I cannot begin to calculate what that sum would be in current dollars, but I