“Don’t send that little red Pommie Commie up here again!”
That was the message from Toowoomba in Queensland after a visit by activist Wendy Turner, who had migrated from England as a young mum in 1977 to live in what journalist Chris Masters called “The Moonlight State”; Queensland during the reign of Joh Bjelke-Petersen.
On Friday night, the “Pommie Commie” was feted at Melbourne Town Hall, after receiving the 2025 Jerusalem (Al Quds) Peace Prize from the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network for her years of work advancing the cause of Palestinian rights in this country.
Introducing Wendy to the packed Main Hall, 2018 Jerusalem Peace Prize winner Professor Stuart Rees called her “a resister”, someone whose life of trade unionism and human rights work has resisted bullies and political fatalism, whether it was in the workplace or the streets or the corridors of power. In the latter, APAN president Nasser Mashni described her as “kicking down doors” so that Palestinians could walk through.
Rees connected Wendy’s resistance to the defiant refusal of Palestinians in Gaza to leave their homeland and to the words of poet Dareen Tatour, who was jailed by the Israeli authorities for writing “Resist, My People, Resist Them”.
After receiving the prize, Wendy took the audience back to the Bjelke-Petersen era, remembering the struggle for freedom of association and the right to demonstrate, including one conga-line march in single file that ended at Parliament House in Brisbane. She drew a line from the activism of “those dark days” of infiltration, arrests and beatings by police to the fight for justice for First Nations people, the Your Rights At Work campaign and advocacy for Palestinian rights.
A union-sponsored study tour to the Middle East in March 2010, which took her from the refugee camps of Lebanon to Gaza’s al-Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital (destroyed by an Israeli air strike in 2014), also included current ACTU secretary Sally McManus. It set Turner on a course to meet Palestinians and activists across Australia, leading ultimately to the formation of APAN at a conference in Canberra and her election as its inaugural secretary.
Turner was similarly instrumental in founding Labor Friends of Palestine, and she was keen to remind her audience of the resolutions passed at conferences and the motions carried at branches across the nation, including calls for Palestinian recognition and against continued military ties with Israel, through the efforts of rank-and-file Labor Party members.
“I have been asked by my Palestinian friends why I am still in the Labor Party,” she said. “We too are angered when the government does not use the words or take the actions we would like to see.
“There are those who would love to see the likes of me and others leave, but that, my friends, would be just another win for the Zionist lobby.”
Vowing to keep the question of Palestine in front of the ALP, she declared: “I ain’t going anywhere.”
It was a defiant note in keeping with another poem Professor Rees cited, “Blessed is the Man” by American poet Marianne Moore, which praises the one “who does not excuse, retreat, equivocate; and will be heard”.
On a night when hundreds came together in sombre remembrance of the terrible atrocities of the last 16 months, but also to celebrate the work that has been done to keep the cause of Palestine before the eyes and ears of the Australian public and to combat the scourge of anti-Palestinian racism, the figure of Wendy Turner standing at the lectern was a reminder of the power of one committed to the work of many.
A small woman born in Yorkshire stood tall in the Town Hall in the company of politicians, journalists, Indigenous and Arab and feminist and queer activists and supporters of the Palestinians from every creed and walk of life.
If only her friend from Toowoomba could see her now.