Valerie Brown Scribe PublicationsAs a child watching people from the roof of her Brisbane home, Valerie A. Brown, now in her nineties, noticed how “their actions did not match their stated ideals.” She dedicated her life to changing this, becoming one of Australia’s foremost change-makers. In an era when most women could only dream of careers, she had numerous highly successful ones, changing Australia’s social and intellectual landscape quietly but profoundly.The list of her roles is long (and exhausting!): TAFE teacher, consumer advocate, activist, public service department head, professor of environmental health, carer and writer. And a wife and mother. “I found I had acquired the skills needed … to keep multiple balls in the air,” she writes.Review: The Girl on the Roof: the life of a change-maker – Valerie A. Brown (Scribe)She started a children’s theatre group, promoted birth control against social conventions, worked to improve health systems in Nepal, and, despite feeling unqualified, headed Greenpeace Australia during the bombing of its Rainbow Warrior yacht in 1985 and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. “My experiences with Greenpeace read like a spy novel,” she writes. As an initiation, she was taken into “a wild sea” off Sydney in a “rubber duck” speedboat. Days later, activists planned to block outlet pipes from spewing chemical waste into Sydney Harbour, but “the waste backing up into the factory could have caused serious damage and even a threat to life”. Her negotiations with the chemical company and the activists averted tragedy, but “left me being perceived by the Greenpeace activists as a wimp”. Worse came soon after, at New Zealand’s Port of Auckland, when French army divers blew up the Rainbow Warrior with bombs fixed to its keel. They wanted to stop it leading a protest flotilla against the French testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific. They killed a photographer, Fernando Pereira. “If the crew had not unexpectantly gone ashore for coffee,” writes Brown, “12 of them would have died.”Brown also ran a national drugs summit and was an early advocate for AIDS prevention. She was in numerous activist, cultural and social groups, and was patron of an anti-war and environmentalist choir.She joins a long line of women who are under-recognised, despite their work changing lives and systems. Her book tells a fascinating story that will inspire those who want to build a better world. A pioneering womanUniversity was a shock after her privileged, Victorian-style upbringing, which included meeting Queen Elizabeth when she gave her first garden party at Buckingham Palace. In about 1949, Valerie was arrested for “peddling pornography” – a student magazine that talked about sex. “I didn’t even know what the offending words […] meant,” she confesses.Encouraged by her father, Valerie studied science – and would be one of three women science graduates, among 600 men. This was a time when a woman couldn’t enter a bar or pour her own drink. “When I graduated, I was denied field-based jobs. In my first job, I had to resign upon marriage,” she writes. Valerie Brown was one of three woman science graduates, among 600 men. Scribe As a tireless advocate for more autonomy for consumers, she helped produce a publication on contraception that was sold under the counter. Later, she changed health systems so they registered midwives, allowed rural nurses to give medical treatments, and successfully advocated for the removal of lead from petrol. Shifting from residential to self-managed health was another focus. At her jobs and positions on boards in consumer and health organisations, including the National Health and Medical Research Council, she was often the only one to have read all the meeting papers. Some claimed she wasn’t a “real community representative”, as she could read scientific papers! Collective power, global projectsInformed by the research of design theorist Christopher Alexander and anthropologist Gregory Bateson, she empowered groups to find their own solutions to problems and work together to enact them.Drawing inspiration from philosopher Isaiah Berlin, she brought diverse groups of people together in hundreds of egalitarian workshops to solve wicked problems in seven countries. They used collective thinking and treated each participant as an individual with their own experience and integrity. It was a revolutionary, but effective, approach. At the time, individual knowledge was regarded as subjective, and community knowledge as anecdotal. Holistic knowledge was dismissed as pie-in-the-sky. Valerine Brown, pictured with Kevin Rudd, empowered groups to find their own solutions to problems. Scribe Starting with ideals, then facts, her groups worked together to generate their own ideas and actions, often producing effective partnerships in the process – on issues like raising women’s status in Nepal, and enabling sustainable management in the Murray-Darling basin.In working with Indigenous people and internationally, she quickly learned the importance of not being an “arrogant do-gooder”. She strove to be culturally appropriate, rather than imposing Western models. Respect and ubuntu, the African belief that all humanity is connected through a universal bond of sharing, were essential.She also built bridges “to link different worlds: science and creativity; ideals and practice; and the parts and the whole,” as well as academic and everyday thinking. Valerie helped to develop a new, holistic public health approach that involved promoting “community, environmental, and social health”. This encompassed issues like domestic violence, drug abuse, racism, sexism, as well as environmental pollution.Her approach is now widely embraced, with communities realising that the health of people, animals and the environment are deeply connected. Fought sexism, but not a feministAn astute leader, who found creative ways around the tough politics of public service and university departments, Valerie struggled against sexism all her life. Given this, it’s surprising she doesn’t regard herself as a feminist – despite benefiting from and greatly contributing to feminism. She sees feminism as a “single-issue goal” and is interested in equity. Surely that’s the aim of most feminists, though?Frequently changing career paths, perhaps she wanted to avoid labels. Her inspirations include activist Vandana Shiva and poet Judith Wright. Valerie’s writing on knowledge cultures, still widely cited today, inspired many change-makers, including Africans working towards decolonisation, and Charles Massy’s innovative work on regenerative agriculture, now taken up internationally. She supervised more than 80 doctoral students, with an overall theme of “how to change existing social environments into equitable and sustainable systems”. She writes: “I still thought life should be fair.”A nature-lover, Valerie and her husband, renowned journalist Wallace Brown, travelled widely and later built a “no-cost cabin” on a bush block from “thrown-away timber, mud and bottles for walls.” When he developed motor neurone disease, she and her family and many friends cared for him lovingly, until he died, aged 76.The Girl on the Roof is an easy read, consistent with her desire to communicate widely. There are a few typos and unclear sections (by “Trash the Joint”, she presumably means the “Destroy the Joint” movement), or early topics skipped across too lightly. Later sections go into more depth, though. Overall, this memoir of a life “rewarding beyond belief” is a valuable addition to the literature on women change-makers. Valerie Brown, AO, used her privilege to challenge narrow patriarchal systems and make the world a better place. This book shows how she did it.Marty Branagan sailed briefly on the Greenpeace yacht Vega in 1982, and has worked in activist movements for almost 45 years. He is currently a volunteer trainer in nonviolent direct action with Rising Tide.