Extinction Rebellion founder, Roger Hallam, says if you’ve not been in jail, you’re not doing your job properly. Here we talk with some people who are doing their job properly on behalf of the planet — Dr Ginny Barrett (Extinction Rebellion) and Kyle Magee (Frontline Action on Coal). 

Both have been in jail for a cause. They’re not afraid to put their name to their cause. They don’t need lawyers and highly paid spin doctors to make them look like they have integrity. 

They are the climate rebels. 

We often see them howled down by the conservative right for disrupting traffic or ministerial events, hurling paint on artworks, shoveling coal from trains, glueing or chaining themselves to bollards, walls or trees, smashed into divvy vans, handcuffed behind their backs, beaten, rounded up, shouting their message whilst pushed to the ground. The climate rebels. Who are they?

Melbourne-based Kyle Magee has two young daughters; they are the reason he fights and the reason he’s spent a good portion of their childhoods in jail. Just before Christmas 2021 he and Franz Dowling, both supporting Frontline Action Against Coal (FLAC), boarded an ADANI coal train with a pair of golden-painted shovels and spent the next days and nights shoveling up to 80 tonnes of coal over the side under the glowering eye of the local Queensland constabulary, who could do nothing until reinforcements arrived. 

The local cops had to wait a good 24 hours for trained operatives to deal with them, deployed all the way from Brisbane. In the meantime, Kyle and Franz just kept shoveling, day and night, dripping with sweat and shirtless. Buzzing around the country, pics on social media made them the overnight pin-up boys of the anti-coal movement. 

“We gave ‘em their golden shovel moment,” said Kyle. “In spades.”

Kyle Magee shoveling 80 tonnes of coal from an ADANI coal train in Queensland.

Defiant to the end, he was refused bail but took his battle to the Supreme Court. This wasn’t the first time. When Scott Morrison was refusing to go to COP 26 in Glasgow, Kyle and comrades ‘broke in’ to the coal port at Hay Point and ‘locked on’ to stop the conveyor belts. To ‘lock on’, protestors use a metal tube with a right angle and cable to the wrist. Authorities are forced to deploy trained operatives called a cut-crew to dislodge them. First, they cover them in flame retardant and then cut through the metal elbow and cables with an acetylene torch. 

“It all takes time, but it shuts down the operation for long enough to make a point.” says Kyle.

In most operations, Kyle works with supporters, drivers and spotters from FLAC, usually from a private base. They are amazing and dedicated people, he says. During one of his stints in the Townsville watch house, supporters ran crowdfunding to help him make bail so he could see his daughters for Christmas.

As well as being in jail 10 times across a total of 72 days, Kyle has been fined close to $1 million, one of the first times for spray painting over a video advertising board at Flinders Street station, where the cost to replace the board was $250,000. Kyle engaged Legal Aid lawyers, refused to apologise, and was locked up indefinitely until his case went to the Supreme Court. He’s also painted over billboards and tram stops from St Kilda to Fitzroy, often accompanied by a film crew to post his protests on Instagram under ‘democraticmediaplease’.

“Yes, I worry about leaving some financial safety for my girls but here’s the thing. The reason we need money to make our kids safe, the reason we buy into the whole mess of this atomized ‘piece of shit’ society is because we haven’t made it safe for them or ourselves at a structural level. I’d rather fight for a safe democracy than sell out and feed the machine.”

“The central problem in our whole political discourse is control by corporate capitalism, and they control the narrative through media and advertising. So, my main strategy is to attack this at the source. We shouldn’t have advertising in public spaces, physical or online. Messages in the public space should be mandated to serve democracy, our future and our people, and not the 1%. 

“Here’s an irony — Jeff Kennet opens up Victoria to pokies and casinos and then has the audacity to head up Beyond Blue. What a joke. We’ve been reduced to a system that makes everybody want to kill themselves — inequality, warfare, destruction of other species are all so interlinked now that we can’t separate them. We pretend we have a democracy, but we don’t anymore, and the first thing we have to do is reclaim the narrative back from corporate greed.”

“Short of the bastards shooting off to Mars or living in some sort of weaponized biodome, we only have one planet and the 1% will need to learn to share.” 

Kyle says jail isn’t so bad but there are a lot of broken people inside and a culture of hypermasculinity, so you need to shrink yourself down and not inflame people. He says he’s tough enough to cope and will carry on the good fight on behalf of future generations.

“I’ll keep fighting and going to jail. And they can’t lock me up for what I might do in the future.”

On the other side of the world, UK activist Dr Ginny Barrett agrees with Kyle and has even received actual training for imprisonment by Extinction Rebellion. Unafraid to speak out under her own name, the former medical scientist is now Roger Hallam’s unpaid assistant. Like Kyle, there is no funding for the work she does. Since ditching academia for motherhood and planetary rebellion, she’s been arrested three times in as many years. Her longest detention was in 2019 for walking peacefully past Downing Street with a sign that said ‘Just Stop Oil’. 

She has no issue with the police. “They’re forced to do the work of billionaires. Forced.”

“On that day back in 2019 each of us were detained by five arresting officers. Rather than fighting and spitting and carrying on, I just spent the four hours talking to the officers about why we do what we do. They were genuinely interested, and I remember more than once their eyes welled with tears as we spoke the truth about what’s happening to our planet. Most of them care as much as the next person. They’re not always the enemy — just people like us.”

Ginny grew up in the same little village where she lives today with her family. An activist of five years now, she was always conscious of trying to live sustainably but it was hearing Greta Thunberg speaking in 2018 that shifted her life’s course. She remembered thinking “this just isn’t right!” 

“The government subsidises fossil fuels, they make record profits that goes to shareholders and billionaires, and the future of our children is destroyed at the Planet’s growing expense.”

“I think it really hit home when the UK Prime Minister’s wife raised $1.5 billion as the PM released 100 new fossil fuel licenses, vowing to ‘max out’ the North Sea!” As it turns out, in mid-2023 just two months before PM Rishi Sunak opened hundreds of new licenses for oil and gas extraction in the North Sea, an IT firm founded by his father-in-law signed a $1.5 billion deal with energy giant BP, one in which his wife had a £400 million stake. What’s more the PM appointed one of the family’s other clients to his business council, Shell CEO Wael Sawan. Astonishingly the UK PM merely dismissed it as ‘not of legitimate public concern’!

Says Ginny: “They don’t even pretend anymore. It really opens your eyes to your own country’s corruption. Not that long ago I had half a million pounds in research funding and I just realized I was playing my part as a cog in a system that’s rotten to its core.” 

So she left. Upended her entire life to fight for the Planet and her children. 

“As a species we are carrying so much grief now. My daughter says if it can be fixed, why don’t we just do it? I think the answer is greed.”

“I’m often cancelled by the local councils or people who own the venues for talks I give to villages on net zero. I make no money. But then I see footage of animals washed away in torrents of fast-moving floodwaters, or of native animals stumbling into flames, and I know I’m doing the right thing. One of the saddest things I’ve seen, one that not many know from last year, was the mass die-off of baby penguins in Antarctica. Not one pair managed to breed in one of the colonies, 10,000 of them died.” Due to a warming climate, the sea-ice underneath the chicks melted and broke apart before they could develop the waterproof feathers needed to swim in the ocean. Ironically, the warmth meant they died of the cold. “The fluffy snow melted to freezing slush and the babies simply couldn’t survive.”

Ginny pauses. 

“Everybody knows the right thing to do; we just need to do it. It only takes a small number of people to make a big difference.”

You can start by reading Roger’s book, Common Sense for the 21st Century (2019), or Michael Blencowe’s Gone: Stories of Extinction (2022). Ginny says the move away from consumerist culture is not that hard as we’ve lived differently for millennia and it’s not that long ago that we lived sustainably in small villages with permaculture, people growing their own food. 

She recalls a documentary where the elderly were interviewed in the 1950s about how life was in the late 1800s. “They had two pigs, they’d walk five miles for a swatch of fabric to make clothes and sew their dresses.” Another important aspect, one that resonates with the message of another author Pat Vickers-Rich, is the need for community — “to be sociable”. Ginny says we need to go to the local arts festival, connect locally, support local people, be part of the community. 

“By fighting I don’t feel helpless anymore — I have hope — and I want to note my gratitude here to good people like Roger. Yes, he’s a fighter but he’s also great fun — he laughs a lot and when it gets hard I just have to remember that a hundred years ago people fought world wars and all I have to do is go to prison — it’s no hardship. 

“The memory of people who fought wars for us and lost their lives for us — we can’t waste that.”