A career in public service. Then a line on a map.

When I was fourteen, a rip off Hawks Nest Beach carried me out past the break towards Cabbage Tree Island. A surfer I never saw again hauled me onto his board. Afterwards my father walked the tideline beside me and said, without looking at me, "You are still here. That is what matters." I never told my mother. I was back in the water the next morning.

That beach made me. My great-grandfather, a Hunter coal miner, helped build the Hawks Nest hall and cut the steps up Yacaaba. My grandmother paddled out to the island on a wooden board. My sister and I slid through the fence of the Tea Gardens pool at night and crept home smelling of chlorine. When my father died in 2019, Bruce and I came home for good.

In October 2023, Bruce turned his phone around at MeMa's bakery and showed me a map. A green rectangle covered the ocean off our beach: 1,854 square kilometres, declared by Chris Bowen three months earlier, with room for three hundred floating turbines, each 260 metres tall, across the only feeding waters of the rarest seabird in the world and the path of forty thousand humpback whales. Nobody we knew had been told. Consultation had come and gone.

I spent thirty years in the Australian Federal Police and in national security. I know what evidence looks like and I know what a done deal looks like. I wrote letters. Bruce and I organised the first protest our two villages had ever held. I found the scientist who saved Gould's Petrel from extinction, and he told me the precautionary principle screamed stop, and that I could never quote him because he needed his job. Then a young woman from the local Labor member's office drove an hour up the coast to an emptying church hall and told me they knew who I was and they were watching me.

I wrote this book because of what I found when I stopped looking only at my beach. In Martin Place a banner read NOT HERE. NOT THERE. NOT ANYWHERE. Hawks Nest was one square on a national map. So Bruce and I hired a campervan, and for the best part of a year we drove to the other squares: Steven Nowakowski's blasted ridgelines in Far North Queensland, the Creeds' black soil at Smoky Creek, Katy McCallum's general store at Kilkivan, Grant and Annette Piper's frost at Coolah, Amanda De Lore's hospital chair in the Illawarra, Nathan Lidgett's locked gate at Myrniong, Mary Morris under the Goyder giants. Every one of them had a letter, a leaflet or a map. Every one of them had written, submitted, rallied and been ignored.

Governments hold power on one condition: they answer to the people they govern. That is the social contract. I watched this one break it, over billions of dollars nobody would count, across land and sea nobody was asked about, and then call the people who objected cookers.

I wrote it all down because these people are real, their places are real, and the fight is still going on. You are still here. That is what matters.