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LEAD Action News Volume 22 Number 4 December 2024 Page 66 of 131

Roger Green 30 Dec 1955 - 4 Dec 2024 OBITUARY

By Elizabeth “Lizzie” O’Brien, Lead Scientist and Lead Advisor, The LEAD Group Inc. Australia, 30

December 2024

Roger Green would have turned 69 today, but in the words of Haydn Washington, he was a greenie

who was slowly felled by a red gum. Roger always called me “Lizzie”. He was my friend for 53 years,

and my boyfriend in 1972 in 5th form at Chatswood High School on Sydney’s North Shore.

Roger Green acquired meningoencephalitis from fungal spores released when he chain-sawed, by

order of the local Council, a Eucalyptus baileyi (red gum) on his property just outside Canberra in

2002.

Before that, Roger had run a very successful editing and printing business called Green Words and, as

I found out after the last time I saw him at the end of November 2024, five days before he died, Roger

Green had written three books, two of which were published: “Battle for the Franklin” in 1984 and

“Good Business, Bad Business” in 2002.

I was amazed to discover when last week I started to read his “Battle for the Franklin”, that the whole

dam-building tradition and culture in Tasmania was “justified” according to the Hydro-Electric

Commission, on the basis that the energy was needed for mining and forestry. That tradition, of

government’s automatically approving any and all proposals which destroy the environment for the

sake of felling trees and mining the earth, no matter the energy costs (and contribution to the climate

crisis), continues to this day.

I’m certain that if Roger had been able to use a computer in the final month of his life, he would have

signed my Circular Economy for Lead Petition to the Australian Federal Government (see above),

which closed for signatures the day Roger died, 4th December 2024.

Indeed, if he’d been able to talk on

the phone and use a computer for the

last two decades of his life, I feel

certain I could have learned so much

more from him about how to run a truly successful environmental

protection campaign. Earlier visits to Canberra involved an outing

for Roger when he was still able to be transferred from wheelchair

to car, but later, had to be held indoors using a hearing device.

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LEAD Action News Volume 22 Number 4 December 2024 Page 67 of 131

Photo: Lizzie, Roger and Michael Maratea at Arboretum, and Lizzie, Roger and Howard Jacobs at

Roger’s aged care, Canberra visits

I will be forever grateful to have known Roger, and that his legacy – compassion, love of beauty,

brilliance - lives on in his beautiful wife Monika and sons Ned and Will.

Photo: Monika Binder and Roger Green

In the last issue – LEAD Action News vol 22 no 3 – I

included a hastily put-together obituary of another

member of Roger’s friendship group from three of his

schools, Lembit Salasoo, so I’m adding in here some

photos of Lembit that have been found since. This one

was taken a month before Lembit had to retire sick

from General Electric, USA. Photo: (L to R) Philip Wallis,

Lembit Salasoo & Peter Beaumont-Edmonds Nov 2023

Sydney

As an environmental health professional, I feel compelled to add here a note on the potential for

prevention of Roger’s fatal illness…

Botanical Gardens, gardening shows like Gardening Australia on ABC

TV, and government agencies, especially OHS and Councils, in all the

areas in Australia where red gums grow, need to be warning people

not to allow sawdust from red gums or other Cryptococcus-affected

gums to alight on their skin. When creating sawdust during trimming

or cutting down fungus-bearing gums, people should be wearing a

headshield and be fully covered by overalls, socks, boots, gloves, in

order to stop the fungal spores from for example Eucalyptus baileyi

sawdust entering tiny cuts in the skin and eventually making their way

to the brain (which took two years to become evident in Roger’s case).

Photo: Lizzie beside trimmed Eucalyptus baileyi at Australian

National Botanic Gardens (ANBG) carpark Canberra

According to “The wood-chopping farmer with an axe to grind on fungus” by Cherie von Hörchner, 9

Jun 2017, at https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2017-06-09/wood-chop-warning-for-fungus-from-

eucalyptus-causing-disease/8599890 :

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LEAD Action News Volume 22 Number 4 December 2024 Page 68 of 131

[Roger and the

farmer of this article]

contracted

Cryptococcus, a

disease that kills half

a million people

globally each year

and, in Australia,

tends to come from

the Cryptococcus

gattii fungus that

grows in and around

eucalyptus trees.

Photo: ANBG Blakely’s red gum plaque showing south eastern Australian distribution

…James Fraser, a molecular biologist from the University of Queensland [said, “…the

far more common second fatal form of Cryptococcus,] Cryptococcus neoformans is

responsible for half a million deaths a year, predominantly in sub-Saharan Africa and

less privileged countries … these tend to target people who are immuno-

compromised.”

Below you will find “In memory of Roger Green” by fellow Franklin-campaigner Vince Mahon, and

then Roger’s very philosophical Introduction to his book about the successful “Battle for the Franklin”,

but first I’ve included here a page about what is beauty? from Roger’s unpublished book on

philosophy, written for his children and titled: “The Bad Life — Beauty 1, Fear 0”; and I’ve added

photos to the Classmates Eulogy some of us wrote and read at his funeral.

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LEAD Action News Volume 22 Number 4 December 2024 Page 69 of 131