62 AWW.COM.AUAUGUST 2017
FAIRFAX. NEWSPIX. OPPOSITE: PHOTOGRAPHY BY NICK CUBBIN.Paul and Bob as a couple have been
a good thing for all of us.”
Bob and Paul’s paths crossed more
than once in the tight-knit world of
Tassie politics before they became a
couple. They first met back in 1988.
Bob held a seat in the Tasmanian
Parliament and was already renowned
as one of the architects of The
Wilderness Society, the Tasmanian
Greens and the Franklin River
campaign, which proved the power
of the green vote in federal politics.
Paul was both a farmer and a
seasoned activist who had helped
set up the Tasmanian AIDS Council.
At the time, the island state had the
harshest penalty for homosexual
activity in the Western world and
Paul approached Bob to speak at
a gay rights meeting.
They met again seven years later.
Bob was living at Liffey, in the state’s
north. “A friend drove up to visit
and brought Paul with him,” Bob
recalls. He has often said that he
“didn’t forget Paul after that visit”,
and he didn’t have time to. Paul
volunteered to work on the Greens’
campaign for the federal Senate
the following year. Camaraderie
grew on the campaign trail; they
shared a rambling bushwalk on
election day. Then, one morning,
there was a
knock on Bob’s
door at half-past
seven, “and when
I opened it,
there was Paul,
holding a bag
of croissants”.
Bob was 52 and
Paul washis first
romanticpartner.
Bob had grown
up, one of twins, in a kindly,
conservative Presbyterianfamily
in country NSW. His father was a
policeman and his mother, the daughter
of a dairy farmer, bequeathed to Bob
her love of the bush. As a teenager,
Bob struggled in equal measure with
his sexuality and his faith. He moved
to Sydney to study medicine, then
on to Canberra, London and, finally,
Launceston. He asked difficult
questions at Christian fellowship
meetings, contemplated suicide and
enrolled in a course of painful “aversion
therapy” withelectric shocks. It was an
unsteady start for aman who would
eventually come out, publicly and
courageously, in the conservative
atmosphere of 1976 Tasmania, and
would go on to become the first openly
gay member of federal Parliament.
It was a bittersweet irony that Bob
found his life partner on the very day
he was elected to the Senate and for
much of the next 16 years he and Paul
would be apart. They made the best
of it and on every day the Senate was
sitting, Bob hand-wrote a letter home
to Paul. “I think Paul has stood very
strongly behind Bob in his work and
Bob has been able to do the things he’s
done because Paul has been part of
his life,” says Mary.Those things
have included
growing the Greens from a minor
player in the Senate to a formidable
party with nine senators, one seat in
the House of Representatives, and
26 of its members sitting in state and
territory Parliaments around the
country. Bob led the Greens through
the Gillard years, when they held the
balance of power in the Senate andFROM TOP: Bob on the Franklin River in
1980; protesting the dam construction
in 1983; in March 2017, he launched the
campaign to stop the Adani coalmine.negotiated some critical concessions.
He was also accused of “political
lunacy”, “environmental vandalism”
and “ruthlessness” when the party
votedagainst Kevin Rudd’s emissions
tradingscheme in 2009.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing, but
Bob left the Senate in 2012 with a
reputation as a man of principle and a
staunch advocate for the environment,
the peace movement and human
rights. ABC journalist Richard Fidler
describes him as “one of the few
people who you could honestly say
has changed Australia.” And Dick
Smith, who has been ropedinto a
number of Bob’s causes, hassaid that
he is “a person with compassion and
commonsense, but he’s probably
30 years before his time.”
Bob’s retirement from his role as
leader of the Greens was a radical
change of pace for both him and Paul.
“My farming days are over,” Paul
quips. “I’ve become a secretarial
assistant. You may not be aware that
Bob never uses the computer and
when he was in the Senate, he had
a staff of 20 to decipher his hand-
written notes. Now that’s up to me.”
Bob concedes it’s true. “Paul is
there every morning spending an hour
or two sorting out invitations and
correspondence, and we have far
more than we can handle. On the
day I retired,
somebody
asked Paul
what he
thought I would
be doing next
and he said he
hoped I’d take
on a greater
share of the
domestic duties.
I got at least
a dozen tea
towels in the mail, plus an apron,
and I’ve put them to good use.”
The pair has managed to take a
couple of long road trips in the past
five years, including a three-month
drive around Australia. It gave Bob an
opportunity to exercise his campfire
cooking skills – a specialty is roast
banana with sugar and cream. That»