At first it was because I was angry. It might have looked like I was running away but I wasn’t. I was punching the earth with my feet. The faster I went — the harder my soles hit the ground — the better it felt. Because punching people is, you know, illegal. And wrong. But mostly illegal.

Australian ecologists and ecology scientists are reporting increasing levels of interference, intimidation, and straight-out misrepresentation of their views by forces outside of science. Their press releases are being altered to fit policy positions, and sometimes even academic papers and conference papers are constrained by management, or fear or losing funding. Fear of being misrepresented in the media – and the flow-on effects for their work – is also high.

Michael Roe’s retelling of Australia’s public health story from 1884 to about 1921 made me see that nothing we’re going through is new. Every mistake we’re making has been made before, and every strength we have has been in us all along.

If the changes were all taken up, the Aboriginal Heritage Council would move from being an advisory body to one with real power. The ability to enter land to investigate and to bring its own prosecutions would take away its reliance on the State Government to defend Indigenous heritage interests. Local RAPs would have the right to sue developers for civil damages over heritage destruction. They could refuse to approve so-called Cultural Heritage Management Plans (CHMPs), effectively vetoing development.

‘We have to be in the faces of these people because otherwise – silence is acquiescence. So I’m going to be in your face every single day, you people are going to know about me every single day. You’re going to be educated every single day. We’re not going away, we haven’t gone away in 250 years, you tried to wipe us away, we come back generation after generation, yeah?’