Florentine’s front line

Sue Neales Mercury
Miranda Gibson, a fragile-looking teacher from Brisbane who specialises in caring for special-needs pupils, has been living rough in the Florentine Camp run by the Still Wild Still Threatened group for the past year. She endured a hard winter, with snow on the ground, during which the activist presence at Camp Flozza shrunk to just four cold and bush-bound members enduring icy winds off The Thumbs and Sawback Ranges. But that experience did not prepare quietly spoken Ms Gibson, 27, for the alleged confrontation with timber workers eight days ago in an immobilised car blocking access to a nearby logging coupe. Ms Gibson admits she expected to be arrested by police and charged with trespass when she and fellow protester Nish Datt, 22, locked themselves to a concrete block, which was set into the logging road through the floor of a car wreck. But the unlikely activist, whose mother in Brisbane saw the YouTube footage of the incident on the TV news before knowing her daughter had been involved, acknowledges she was not ready for confrontation with workers. “We never set out to provoke contractors and, in my experience, most of them are never aggressive,” Ms Gibson says. “I didn’t really have any time to think or feel afraid.” Police have charged three logging contractors with assault, while four protesters face trespass charges. Read more here