Never give up: The long view from North Head

On the wind-shaped headlands above Sydney Harbour, a small room opens its door every weekend. Inside are field guides, hand-drawn maps, trays of seedlings, and the quiet hum of people who care. Outside, the Eastern Suburbs Banksia Scrub leans into the salt air—fragile, ancient, holding on. And tending to this place, as they have tended to so many others, from the beginnings of the Franklin campaign to tending their local patch, are Geoff and Judy Lambert. 

Interview by Rhiannon Cunningham, photographs by Andrew Cowen.

North Head: From little things

Before it was a sanctuary, North Head was a stronghold of story: sandstone cliffs, wind-stunted scrub, and a view stretching out to sea. Located on the edge of Manly, a suburb in northern Sydney, it sits at the entrance to the harbour on the unceded homelands of the Gayamaygal people, who have cared for this Country for thousands of years.

Today, it holds one of the last surviving fragments of Eastern Suburbs Banksia Scrub—a critically endangered ecological community that once stretched across Sydney’s coastal fringe. This Banksia Scrub, or ESBS as Judy and Geoff call it, is comprised mostly of woody shrubs like banksia and acacia, species of hakea and grevillea, and home to a variety of small creatures like the New Holland honeyeater and the long-nosed bandicoot.

Layered with cultural, environmental, and military history, North Head has long been a place of duality: contest and care.

If not for Geoff, Judy, and a host of like-minded local councillors, heritage professionals, and the mayor of Manly, duality could have become duplexes.

In 1998, the Army packed up their operations on North Head and marched out. A question loomed—what would happen with all that land? Of course, many people saw dollar signs. 

“When Defence were moving out,” Judy explains, “I was getting bombarded by local residents saying, ‘We can’t let Defence sell this off.’ It was the era when governments sold land deemed ‘surplus to needs’.”

They didn’t even know, back then, how much of the bushland on North Head was ESBS, they just knew whatever was up there was special.

So they organised. They formed the North Head Sanctuary Foundation, held meetings in Manly Council chambers, lobbied the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust, and secured a presence on site.

What began as a defence against development became a decades-long project. Luckily, Judy and Geoff Lambert are no strangers to the long haul.

The meeting that changed everything

When Judy and Geoff Lambert first walked into a community meeting in the late 1970s, they weren’t planning to join a movement. They were simply looking to meet people.

Back then, Geoff and Judy were scientists. They met while studying pharmacology, and had spent three years in New York pursuing post-Doctoral studies.

Judy had just returned to Australia to take up a research position in Sydney, and Geoff who was still overseas would soon to follow. 

“I got a notice about a meeting of what was then the Southwest Tasmania Action Committee,” Judy recalls. “It was my first week back. I thought, that sounds interesting, we need to get to know people in Sydney. So off we went.”

It wasn’t until they arrived that they realised it was actually a recruitment night.

Geoff remembers the moment vividly. “When we rocked up to that meeting, there were five or so people, each had a job to do: recruit everybody who came in. One of them said to me, ‘What are you good at?’ I said, ‘I’m pretty good on maps.’ He said, ‘I’ve got a job for you.’ That’s how it started.”

Judy recalls that she favoured helping with the written side of things: letters, submissions, anything that needed her signature brand of clarity. They both became regulars at the Southwest Tasmania Action Committee—which would eventually become the Wilderness Society Tasmania.

The Franklin campaign hadn’t yet taken over the national imagination, but something was already taking root for the Lamberts.

The Franklin years: Learning to lose, learning to win

Geoff recalls being in Lutruwita / Tasmania for unrelated reasons when he was asked to join a meeting at Bob Brown’s farm.

“There was this tall, gangly bloke walking across the bridge to me and he said: ‘G'day, I’m Bob Brown’,” laughed Geoff. Unbeknownst to him at the time, that encounter would pull Geoff into the Franklin zeitgeist.

“They wanted a poster,” he says. “They gave me a negative. I brought it back to Sydney and reproduced the first ‘Don’t Flood the Franklin’ poster.”

That first poster would become a symbol of the campaign, but it wasn’t the only thing Geoff helped bring to life. “We went out to Phantom T-shirts to see them coming off the press,” he recalls. “I grabbed the first one that came off—hot and steaming. That’s the very first Wilderness Society teardrop T-shirt.” The version most people received was slightly different: a curve added by the printer in place of a straight line. But Geoff’s remains the original. “It’s unique in many ways,” he says proudly. 

It occurs to me that the Lambert's ability to see uniqueness in a great many things is perhaps one of the qualities that has spurred them on.

Then came the ‘No Dams’ triangle. “During the 1983 election,” Geoff says, “a third of all cars in Sydney had the bumper sticker. It was everywhere.” With word that others were trying to co-opt the design, Geoff went to the Patent Office to register it as intellectual property so the Wilderness Society could keep using it. “I owned it for about 30 years,” he says. “Eventually the Wilderness Society bought it back. It’s probably the most iconic T-shirt of the whole campaign.”

For Judy, the cost of contributing to the conservation cause was personal. “When I gave up my research job,” she says, “my mother burst into tears. She thought I was throwing my career away.”

Campaigning demanded everything: time, energy, conviction, sacrifice.

“We won and lost the Franklin—or lost and then won it—more than once before we finally won,” Judy reflects. “Because you lose a campaign, you haven’t lost. You try another attack in a different direction.”

This philosophy of endurance, flexibility, and recommitment seems to define their lives, surfacing over and over as we talk.

Two heads are better than one

As the Franklin fight rolled into the Daintree and beyond, the Lamberts found themselves increasingly woven into the architecture of the growing national conservation movement.

“I spent three years as the Wilderness Society’s Canberra lobbyist—National Liaison Officer, we were called then,” Judy says. “A very interesting time.”

Geoff’s role expanded alongside hers: “I was national treasurer,” he notes. “And also the local treasurer for several years. At one stage, I was treasurer and Judy was Sydney branch convener.”

Their partnership, as advocates and as huge supporters of one another, is clearly one of their greatest strengths.

In her time as National Liaison Officer, Judy worked with ministers, advisers and bureaucrats to make the case for nature. It was a fraught political moment, with resource industries increasingly mirroring environmental lobbying tactics. “I was always trying to be very helpful,” she says of her dealings with one Senator Richardson, “but sometimes I was thinking, what are they going to do with this information?”

Graham Richardson was the Environment Minister at the time, and her rigour earned respect. “One of the things Graham Richardson did say about me,” she notes, “was ‘you can trust her science’.”

Geoff makes sure to remind me that Judy has an Order of Australia. I notice that Geoff often adds details that Judy is too humble to mention herself. 

In 1990, Judy was sought out to become an Environment Consultant for then-Environment Minister Ros Kelly, and after three years went on to fulfil a variety of roles, including nine years as a local councillor for Manly Council. Which is how, years later, when Defence vacated North Head, local residents knew to call on Judy.

Tending the patch

Now after 20 years, the North Head Sanctuary Foundation runs a citizen science program, native plant nursery, guided walks, speaker series, and a modest but beloved community education room.

“I’ve been the roster coordinator ever since we established it,” Judy smiles. “Somehow, that job always lands in my lap.”

Geoff adds: “We do springtime walks, walks for the Australian Plant Society, we host groups for anyone who wants to come and learn.”

They share that on their biggest day this year, 161 people came to visit the Foundation premises—or Bandicoot Heaven, as they all call it.

And though the work is not on the grand scale of the Franklin, to Geoff and Judy it’s just as critical. It is conservation at the scale of community, borne of physical presence, and a focus on the long term.

“For me, it’s a scaling down,” Judy says. “The principles remain the same.”

And then: “If we had little communities all around the country looking after their patch, imagine how much conservation there would be.”

Judy reminds me over and over that you don’t need grandeur to make a change. In fact it’s the smaller things that make up the big, in the end.

“Campaigns are multifactorial,” Judy says. “You need all the pieces.”

And if anyone should know, it’s the Lamberts. From being in the Environment Minister's ear daily, to holding a patent just so the show can go on, together they’ve held so many of those pieces.

As we begin to say our goodbyes, Geoff offers up the message he hopes the next generation remembers:

“Never give up.”

For Judy and Geoff, it’s a lived truth. The through-line of every campaign they’ve touched—from the wild rivers of Tasmania to the sunburnt shoulder of North Head.

It was a joy to spend an afternoon on a beautiful walk through the Eastern Suburbs Banksia Scrub with Judy and Geoff Lambert and photographer Andrew Cowen. 

Seek out the North Head Sanctuary Foundation for more information about the critically endangered Eastern Suburbs Banksia Scrub, and explore the enduring beauty of the North Head bush for yourself. 

Thank you to the Lamberts for your ongoing work and for taking the time to tell us your stories.

Sarah Banksia - Happiness Is Round

"This is a work of love, originality and beauty"

Pages from an unpublished book written and illustrated by Edith Jean Walker 
with a foreword by Phillip Adams.

"A few years back—quite a few when I think about it—I started corresponding with Jean Walker over the work of her remarkable husband Ralph. She was determined to introduce me to Ralph's paintings, drawings and sculptures many of which were devoted to the theme of the Australian convict. I was thrilled by them—and couldn't account for the fact that Ralph wasn't famous, up there with Nolan and Boyd, that the world hadn't beaten a path to his door. So I did. And met the somewhat grumpy artist and the luminous gracious Jean. The curmudgeon and the angel.

"There are more species on the headlands of Sydney Harbour than in the whole of the British Isles”—Edith Jean Walker.

Thank you to Ian Trafford Walker for sharing these unpublished treasures of his mother. Please explore Journal issue 036 for more of Ian's world and work. 

With gratitude to Edith Jean “Jinny” Walker, 1922–2017.