The life and legacy of activist Caroline Graham reflects decades of struggle across feminism, environmentalism and Palestinian solidarity, writes Dr Evan Jones.
INDEFATIGABLE ACTIVIST Caroline Graham died on 24 April, aged 87. Her colleague Shamikh Badra gives her a powerful tribute at Green Left, 25 April.
Caroline, with others, co-founded the Women’s Electoral Lobby in 1972.
Caroline was a sometime journalist with Murdoch’s The Australian in its early years (with Wendy Bacon) before Caroline abandoned ship (she claims that she was sacked) as the paper’s editorial lurched hard starboard.
Caroline had a remarkable ability to digest and synthesise material and to provide a cogent narrative for readers preoccupied with busy lives. Such is the case with a 7,000-word article on the seemingly genetic disposition to violence of those with hierarchical dominance over subject individuals, especially when that dominance is manifest in a uniform and a gun.
Britain’s colonisation of Terra Australis, compounded by its convict outpost character, provided an ideal breeding ground for the mentality. The article is ‘Of Warriors, Bad Apples and Blood Lust’, in Meanjin, winter 2021 (a short version appeared in Pearls and Irritations, 11 December 2020).
Caroline was an inveterate letter writer to the papers (including to The Australian — imagine having the stomach to read it).
Here’s one from the Sydney Morning Herald, 27 October 1986:
SIR: Viewed in historical context, the decision by the Australian Government [a Bob Hawke initiative, see below] to overturn the United Nations' “Zionism is a form of racism” resolution is a gesture of solidarity between two colonial settler States. Australia and Israel are among the few colonial settler States which, having failed to negotiate a treaty or settlement with the indigenous peoples they dispossessed, are also failing to compensate in material terms for the havoc they have wrought.
A society in which Aborigines were being massacred as late as 1928 is unlikely to be moved by the genocidal attacks on the Palestinians.
Quite. Forty years later, this (Sydney Morning Herald, 3 March 2026):
Now the U.S. and Israel have begun their unprovoked attack on Iran, Australians need clarification from our government: Do we, or do we not, still support the fragile system of international law? It's because of the humiliating rapidity of our government and other Western nations to offer unconditional support to the U.S.'s illegal bombing of Iran that we deserve to know our position. After all, Foreign Minister Penny Wong often upheld our commitment to the rule of law in the past, yet now has completely reneged. It's time for ambiguity to cease and for the government to let us know exactly where it stands.
Quite again. The common element in these years-apart events is the opportunism and obeisance of Labor governments.
It is for Caroline’s pro-Palestinian activism that I came to know her (without, alas, ever having met her).
Caroline was long involved in producing a Middle East Report program on Sydney’s (university-funded) 2SER radio station on Broadway on Sunday evenings. In 1981, the Zionists attempted to have the program shut down. Caroline faced off against a barrister heavy at the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal and the program survived.
Caroline was a key force in the NSW branch of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign (PHRC) organisation during the 1980s, including an offshoot at Sydney University, where she then worked in the Government Department.
According to fellow activist Antonina Gentile, during the 1980s, many of the overlapping groups’ preparations, production of materials and organisation of rallies took place at Caroline’s home in Petersham until activities were relocated in the late 1980s to the Palestine Centre at the Addison Road Community Centre in Marrickville.
Antonina recounts one memorable occasion in which Caroline’s contacts helped to get the then Waterside Workers Federation to blockade from Australia the Israeli Zim Line during the 1982 Israeli Invasion of Lebanon. (Zim, until bought by a German company in early 2026, was a joint state and para-state entity integrally involved in the construction and maintenance of apartheid Israel.)
Several of Caroline’s writings, in particular, deserve to be recalled for greater and long-term exposure. In 2021, Caroline exposed to the broader public the duplicitous role of former Deputy PM HV Evatt in the facilitation and legitimation of the creation of the State of Israel in May 1948.
Evatt declined to meet Palestinian representatives over the absurd partition plan endorsed by the UN General Assembly on 29 November 1947 and he ignored the Pakistani delegate Muhammad Zafrulla Khan, an equally eminent lawyer, who demanded that the partition plan be submitted to the recently empowered International Court of Justice.
In the public mind, Evatt’s role is seen positively as integral to his role in the institutionalisation of human rights through the United Nations. In Zionist accounts, Evatt is praised to the high heavens. Numerous Evatt biographers (including Gideon Haigh’s 2022 The Brilliant Boy) ignore or treat casually Evatt’s role in playing midwife to the birth of Israel.
Caroline notes that Evatt’s dismissal of Palestinian claims was consistent with his racist approach to other indigenous populations, a persistent behaviour curiously overlooked by Evatt’s admirers.
Along with the Evatt exposé, for me, Caroline’s most powerful written contribution documented former PM Bob Hawke’s love affair with the Zionist Jewish community and with Israel. Titled ‘The Making of a Zionist Prime Minister’, this two-part account appeared in the low distribution and short-lived publication, now relatively inaccessible, the Palestine Human Rights Campaign - Information Bulletin, No.8-9 (March-April 1983) and No.10-11 (May-August 1983).
(The Information Bulletin was the contribution of the Sydney cohort of the PHRC. In 1982, the various state and regional PHRCs forged a national office, which was presided over in Melbourne by David Spratt as national secretary. During the 1980s, Spratt and Frans Timmerman liaised with Ali Kazak to put out the monthly Free Palestine.)
The PHRC-IB articles draw on a lateral reading of two Hawke biographies (John Hurst’s 1979 Hawke: The Definitive Biography and Blanche d’Alpuget’s 1982 Robert J Hawke) and on other public material.
Hawke grew up in a fundamentalist Christian household. His childish grasping of a biblical David and Goliath story is the foundation for an adult attachment to Israel that was pathological in its intensity. Hawke perennially became teary-eyed in his devotion to Israel. Hawke became national president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) (1969-1980), president of the Australian Labor Party (1973-1978), Federal MP from 1980 and Prime Minister (1983-1991).
In those capacities, Hawke worked assiduously for Israel’s interests, undermining Labor’s official policy (although he did not always succeed), working with the Zionist lobby to prevent access of Palestinian representatives to Australia (as for the prominent intellectual Faris Glubb in 1983-84). He even became a de facto roving ambassador for Israel, not least in seeking a change of policy of the Soviet Union in freeing up emigration of Jewish citizens from Soviet territories.
As Prime Minister, Hawke defied National Conference deliberations on Palestine and his Cabinet choices reinforced his own pro-Israel orientation. For his services to this foreign rogue state, Hawke had a forest named after him in December 1976.
As with the Evatt story, Caroline adroitly brought together a central trajectory of Bob Hawke’s career that might otherwise be seen as marginal and sporadic in the political life of Australia and the Labor Party in particular. Hawke later recanted somewhat on his unremitting support for Israel, but his lamentable self-inculcation in the Zionist cause remains unforgivable.
(David Spratt notes that the 1990 Gulf War diverted activists’ energies in countering anti-Arab attacks. Contemporaneously, the Palestine issue was receiving greater recognition in Canberra, not least with Ali Kazak’s presence and involvement. The PHRCs dissipated and were not resurrected.)
Caroline was active in “green” politics. Experiencing “burnout” (my term), she moved to a “bush block” (her term, in Douglas Park, NSW) in the 1990s. But she soon throws herself into another fight. As a spokesperson for the Nepean [River] Action Group and then the Rivers SOS Alliance she was prominent in fighting the longwall coal mining ambitions of BHP Billiton and Peabody Resources in undermining the water catchment of the Nepean River system and Woronora Reservoir (and thus Sydney’s water supply) and even the safety of the towering Douglas Park Bridge on the M31 Hume motorway.
Caroline subsequently moved back to Sydney. Her green activism continued in joining the Pittwater Knitting Nannas.
Her pro-Palestinian activism was revived and she and others formed the Northern Beaches Committee for Palestine (NBCP).
Several other articles that Caroline wrote are of further interest. Thus ‘Blowback: The sewage intifada of Gaza’, AQ, Jul-Sep 2019. Caroline highlights that the maintenance of Gaza’s water and sewage system is impossible under Israeli bombing.
The irony is that polluted water has no politics, knows no boundaries and thus Israel’s desalination plants and some farmers are adversely affected. The Israeli leadership, obsessed with ethnic cleansing, doesn’t care. Even the Jerusalem Post has paid attention to the environmental (and of course the social) catastrophe, noting that several multi-party NGOs (Jumpstarting Hope in Gaza, EcoPeace Middle East) are working to relieve Gazans’ plight.
But given the Israeli leadership’s scorched-earth approach, this is band-aiding an uncurable wound. The global powers look elsewhere.
Caroline also provided a permanent reminder of the deranged former PM Scott Morrison’s kowtowing to Israeli imperatives under presumed biblical injunctions via the Pentacostal sect (‘Slouching Towards Jerusalem: Australia as an Israeli apologist’, Pearls and Irritations, 6 June 2021). The Albanese Government is less strident than Morrison, but its acquiescence to Israel and the lobby is substantively more or the same.
Then there’s the “Gaza nippers” story. Caroline and others at the NBCP were thinking of means to enable Gazans better access to their coastal waters. Gazan-born Shamikh Badra joined NBCP and highlighted what was needed — a surf training program that would allow Gazans to master the waves and, at least, significantly reduce ongoing drowning deaths.
Mohammed Saleh and Hasan Alhabil were brought to Australia in 2020 to train, courtesy of the North Steyne Surf Life Saving Club. After long preparation, the program finally got underway in 2023, only to be stopped by the events of 7 October and after. Since then, some nippers have been murdered, as have associated program staff members.
Mohammed and his family, with assistance from supporters, found refuge in Australia but initially only on travel visas. On the last publicly available information, Hasan remained trapped in Gaza. This writer is unaware of the current status of these courageous people.
Caroline Graham’s long involvement in progressive activism has left a legacy of many friends and admirers.
Dr Evan Jones is a political economist and former academic.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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