Author: Mark Dapin

Date: 08/02/2014

Co-founder of the Climate Council isn’t afraid to let out his inner lab rat, writes Mark Dapin.

Tim Flannery is a big guy, a power-lifter. His triceps curve like biceps, lending his upper arms a broad ellipsoid symmetry. He likes to feel strong – and he needs all his strength. Last year, at the age of 57, he became a father for the third time. He also lost his job as chief commissioner of the Climate Commission, when it was abolished in one of the first acts of Tony Abbott’s government.

The Coalition’s contempt for the work of the commission – originally a Gillard-government initiative to communicate “reliable and authoritative” information about climate change in Australia – was shown when the commission’s website was taken down, including 27 reports which, Flannery says, “various ministers in opposition had endorsed, and which cost millions of dollars to put together, and were fact-based and being used by many people in education around Australia”.

In an astonishing and apparently globally unprecedented initiative, Flannery and most of the other commissioners decided to use crowd-funding to launch a new climate-education organisation, the Climate Council, to take over where the commission left off. Within five days, they had raised close to $1 million, and are still receiving about 10 donations a day.

The Climate Council, Flannery says, will play only an educative role, and will not get involved with politics. He says he is not, and never has been, a political person; he rejects ideologies, and his only interest is the development of good policies.

We are sitting in a dark corner of chef Shane Delia’s Maha restaurant in Melbourne’s city centre. Swirling, whirling Middle-Eastern music courses through the speakers, and it would feel quite romantic if Flannery did not have a beard. We choose to eat from the soufra – or “open table” – menu, allowing the chef to choose for us three savoury courses. And it’s really, really good.

The Climate Council has an office in Sydney, but Flannery works from home in Melbourne. He recently moved to Victoria to live with his partner, Kate Holder, a former heroin addict and sex worker who became an Age columnist and an accomplished, poetic memoirist. Their son, Colby, is four months old.

Flannery says he does not like to talk much about his living arrangements, as the famously temperate broadcaster Ray Hadley revealed the location of Flannery’s house on the Hawkesbury River, and News Ltd’s mild-mannered columnist Andrew Bolt published details of his mortgage. He received threats, he says, and the Climate Commission called in the Australian Federal Police to give him protection.

Not against Bolt, surely?

“There’re a number of very weird conspiratorial right groups who believe that the United Nations is trying to take over the Earth using climate change as their beachhead,” he says. “There’re quite a few unhinged people out there who latch on to some of this, and you do worry there’s a risk of people taking justice – as they see it – into their own hands.”

Flannery has a glass of sauvignon blanc with our first course, magnificent slices of local salmon with chargrilled asparagus, and a smoked chickpea hummus with chicken and pine nuts.

“I’m drinking less and less these days,” he says. “I’m quite happy to go half the days of the week without a drink.”

I’m not.

“That’s the ambition,” he admits. “I don’t know if I’m achieving it.”

Is Flannery surprised at the staying power of climate-change sceptics, some of whom seem, if anything, more deeply entrenched in positions opposed to the scientific consensus?

“The history of science teaches us people will long be convinced by fallacious arguments,” he says. “It’s human nature, I think – particularly when there’s such big vested interests in this. The fossil fuel industry is, at a very late stage in the game, waking up that they’re under serious threat. They’re pulling out all the stops now to turn the tide back.”

But he believes society is inexorably shifting from one energy source to another.

“Once it starts moving, it gains a certain momentum,” he says. “It’s very hard then to turn back. A decade ago, roughly, we were about 90 per cent dependent on coal for electricity. The last time I looked, the figure was 69 per cent.”

Flannery was born in Melbourne, brought up as a Catholic (“I am no longer a Catholic,” he says) and educated by nuns and brothers.

“One of the toughest nuns gave me the greatest gift in my childhood,” he says. “She was interested in trees, in botany, and she showed us a lemon-scented gum, a eucalyptus citriodora, you can pick them by smelling the leaves. I thought, ‘Shit! Actually, there’s more than one kind of gum tree? That’s amazing. She opened my eyes: it’s like the moment when you see the world is much more complex and more interesting than you could ever imagine.

“For me, it was this big moment,” he says. “I guess for the other kids it wasn’t so much.”

He did not enjoy school much. “There were a number of teachers who should have been superannuated some years ago,” he says. “And there were a number of brothers who … must’ve had difficulties in their lives. It was a really harsh environment. I remember the first day, someone nicked my hat and chucked it on the roof of the school, just for the fun of seeing me get the strap for coming to school without my hat.”

Flannery was deeply religious until he was about 14, when he realised the Blessed Virgin Mary, although extremely prominent in the Catholic Church, appeared in fewer than four paragraphs in the gospels.

“And I discovered masturbation at the same time,” he says, “which is a mortal sin, and I remember the father telling us, ‘Every one of those sperms is a life, boy,’ and I worked out I was worse than Hitler. Things were falling apart for me.

“So for the last few years, I was quite an atheist in a Catholic school. I never met another, but I didn’t have a lot of friends and I didn’t talk to people much about it.”

He was expelled in year 12 for suggesting a prominent abortionist should be brought to the school to counter the anti-abortion arguments to which they were exposed. It was about three months before the HSC and, he says, “my dad paid what I suspect was a handsome bribe to the new sporting facility which was being built at the school, and they had me back”.

He always wanted to be a scientist, but his first degree was a bachelor of arts at La Trobe University, where he learnt, through reading, to write, “which is something most scientists don’t do”. He followed this with a master’s in earth sciences at Monash, then a PhD in biological sciences at the University of NSW. He travelled to Papua New Guinea for fieldwork and then, he says, “I got the one job in all of Australia that I really wanted – curator of mammals at the Australian Museum in Sydney.”

Years later, he became director of the South Australian Museum, “learning to be an administrator, which was an interesting challenge”.

It doesn’t sound very interesting.

“Well, it is actually,” he insists. “You have to go in with the mindset that this is not a job, as such. You’ve just been commissioned as an anthropologist to go in, report on, and study and understand, a very weird tribe called ‘the public service tribe’, who are very diverse in their views of things, and have particular rules and customs that must be abided by. If you do it from that perspective, it can be quite an interesting job.”

We eat Bodrum-style stuffed zucchini flowers with a smoked-eel dressing, and crispy quail’s legs. They are delicate and divine, and Flannery does not get any bits of food stuck in his beard.

He says he is not a member of any political party, and describes himself as “a functionalist … a Benthamite. I think you look at a problem and, on behalf of society, you try and solve it with the least cost impact. I apply that to everything, from drugs policy to the environment.

“I worry the political brand is now so damaged,” he says. “If you slag off people and degrade their reputations, you ultimately degrade your own – because people’s trust in the political class is degraded. And that’s why you get Clive Palmer and people like that elected into Australian politics. People are electing eccentrics as a polite way to thumb their nose at politics.”

Flannery has a Moroccan shiraz with our final course, a 12-hour slow-roasted shoulder of lamb with burghul pilaf and fattoush. He and the impressive sommelier briefly discuss Moroccan viniculture, a subject with which I suspect neither man is overfamiliar.

Most of the time, Flannery sounds exactly like a human being but, on the odd occasion, his inner lab rat creeps out.

I ask him what it’s like to become a father again.

“Bloody fantastic,” he says. “It’s amazing. As a mammalogist who’s studied mammals all of my life, it really roots you in your science.”

Quite.

“It’s just extraordinary,” he says, “to see this being take shape before your very eyes. He loves his dad. He wakes up every morning with a smile. He looks at my face and gives me a great big smile.”

Flannery has two children with his former wife, Paula: David, 29, an astrophysicist, and Emma, 27, a geologist.

“I really am regretful that, when I had my first two, I wasn’t as good a father as I could’ve been,” he says. “When you’re in your 30s and you’re making a career – particularly in my career, when I was off in New Guinea all the time, doing fieldwork – you do miss out on a lot.”

Now, he hates to be away from his son for a single night.

Flannery says he shares the cooking at home, hand washes the dishes, and likes to use his new, earth-friendly heat-pump clothes drier.

Is there anything he does that isn’t environmentally sound?

“Isn’t?”

Yes, think of this as confession with the father.

“Do I get absolution for it?” he asks. “Or just ridicule?”

Er, well …

“Bless me father, for I have sinned,” he says. “It’s been 45 years since my last confession: I probably eat too much meat and fly too much. But I enjoy the protein … when you do weights, you need the protein.”

Life and times

1956 Born in Melbourne

1980 Tutor in geology, school of earth sciences, Monash University

1981-1984 Tutor in zoology, school of biological sciences, University of NSW

1984-1989 Principal research scientist and department head, mammalogy, Australian Museum

1995 Wins The Age Book of the Year, non-fiction for The Future Eaters

1998-1999 Professor, Harvard University

1999-2006 Director, South Australian Museum

2005 Australian Humanist of the Year

2006 Wins NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Book of the Year for The Weather Makers

2007 Australian of the Year

2007-2011 Professor, faculty of science, Macquarie University

2011 Chief commissioner, Australian Climate Commission

2011-present Panasonic professor of environmental sustainability, Macquarie University

2013 Founding member, Climate Council

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