The following article by SPA member Tom Gosling appeared in the Canberra Times in October 1998 to mark SPA's 10th anniversary.

In the movie Titanic the captain, E.J. Smith, receives radio warnings about icebergs, but ignores them because he has been told by the ship's owner to increase speed. Smith, after ordering the last four boilers lit, pockets the radio messages and retires to his cabin, a pathetic figure soon to go down with his ship.

The theme is familiar … supreme confidence in technology, a vainglorious conviction that size and power will conquer everything, deafness to the voices of caution and whammo! - mother Nature proves yet again that she has an ace up her sleeve. It is precisely to oppose this "bigger, faster and to hell with the consequences" mentality that a courageous band of souls assembled ten years ago.

The half-dozen founding members of Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population (AESP) first met in the Canberra suburb of Bruce on October 12, 1988. They resolved to try to convince the public that Australia's population growth should be halted as soon as possible, and that the Australian government should increase foreign aid related to restricting global population growth. The message has been dismissed as "pessimistic" by many - even by some in the environment movement - but has found influential supporters.

Photo: Pictured in October 1998 on the 10th anniversary of SPA's establishment are our then patron, poet Judith Wright McKinney (seated), with founding members (left-right) Hugh Oldham, Jenny Goldie, Anne Edgeworth, Mark O'Connor, Greg Dunstone, Eileen Dunstone & Chris Watson.

NSW Premier Bob Carr opened AESP's National Conference in Sydney last year, and congratulated AESP for putting the issue on the agenda. "We've got to dispose once and for all," Carr said, "of the notion that Australia is an underpopulated continent, an empty continent waiting to be filled up." It's a view that has over the years also found support from some of the icons of Australian public life: Nugget Coombs, Manning Clark, A.D. Hope, Sir Macfarlane Burnet, Professor Frank Fenner, Sir Mark Oliphant (who opened the first National Conference in Canberra in 1989) and Judith Wright McKinney (the organisation's patron).

Coombs, as far back as 1977, called for population growth to be "halted, reduced and stabilized at an ecologically safe level", while Wright McKinney, in 1988, complained that the need to control population growth had "not even been recognised" by governments. "Australia is perhaps one of the last countries on earth in a position to ensure that its population does not exceed its resources," she said. "With its enormous problems of land degradation, water and rising pollution levels, Australia is far from being limitless."

Others who share this view have included Sydney University professors Charles Birch and Johnathon Stone. In 1994, the Australian Academy of Science recommended Australia encourage contraception and limit its net annual immigration to 50,000, so that the population would stabilise at 23 million in the year 2040. More recently, author Tim Flannery, whose book and TV series The Future Eaters have been widely acclaimed, has argued that Australia's long-term sustainable population is probably well below its current size. Professor Ian Lowe, chair of Australia's first State of the Environment report, commissioned by the Federal Government, has argued that "continuing population growth is not necessary or desirable", and that "we should aim to stabilise the Australian population at a level that allows sustainable living standards and protects our environment".

AESP's numbers have now grown from the original six to 900, and it has branches in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, South-east Queensland, Townsville and Cairns in addition to the ACT. Yet it has failed (perhaps because of its insistence on a non-racist immigration policy) to burst upon the national consciousness in the way that the One Nation Party did.

A major obstacle, AESP believes, is that powerful commercial interests - particularly in the real estate, construction and media industries - are applying strong pressure on the leadership of both major political parties to ensure that Australia's population growth continues, and is even accelerated, regardless of the environmental consequences and regardless of the opinions of the "passengers" on HMAS Australia.

AESP, funded entirely from individual donations and modest membership fees, has held conferences, sponsored public lectures and debates, lobbied politicians, issued press releases, prepared submissions for government inquiries, written articles and letters to the editor, handed out leaflets and done just about everything - short of demonstrations and running for parliament - a group can do to get across its message.

Measured in terms of what has happened with population growth, however, it has had about as much success as the radio operators had in 1912 in slowing down the Titanic. During most of the ten years of AESP's existence, Australia has had the world's highest per capita rate of immigration, and our population has grown by 2.3 million (from 16.5 million in 1988 to 18.8 million today). The rate of population growth slowed during the decade, but is now showing signs of picking up again.

The annual growth rate peaked at 1.7 per cent in 1989, and during the 1990s gradually slowed to 1.1 per cent last year. The latest figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, however, show it again on the increase. Last month's Australian Demographic Statistics show our annual population growth rate is now 1.2 per cent, and our net overseas migration is up to more than 100,000, having been down to less than 84,000 in 1997. In combination with a relatively high fertility rate for OECD nations (1.77 children per woman) this means Australia's population is on track to continue rapid growth. At the current rate, our population will be around 27 million, and still growing, by the middle of next century.

It's a depressing prospect for the "father" of AESP, retired CSIRO soil scientist Dr Chris Watson, who has put a lot of time and energy into the organisation in the past decade, holding office as national president, national secretary and more recently as president of the ACT Branch. Watson, now 63, became interested in population issues when he went to the United States to do some postgraduate work at the Riverside campus of the University of California in the late 1960s.

Having spent a decade working as an agronomist for the South Australian Department of Agriculture, he was "overwhelmed" at the sprawl and pollution of Los Angeles. "The Riverside campus was at San Bernadino, about 80km from downtown Los Angeles, but even then it was an urban sprawl all the way," he said. "It got me thinking about tying human numbers into our effects on the environment." He returned to Australia, to the CSIRO Soils Division in Canberra, in 1970, where he was responsible for monitoring the soils of the Murray Irrigation Area. "I could see the land deteriorating before my very eyes … with increasing salinity, especially around Deniliquin and northern Victoria."

A few years later he became a councillor of the Australian Conservation Foundation, and at the ACF's quarterly meetings in Melbourne, struck up a friendship with a like-minded Monash University sociology professor Bob Birrell. "The ACF Director Geoff Moseley was also very concerned about population issues, but we were in a minority - most ACF councillors thought population was a bit too radical to get involved with and even thought it would detract from the warm feeling for the forests and so on." When Birrell came to the ANU's Centre for Resource and Environment Studies for a year's sabbatical in 1987-88, they got together and started a newsletter called Population Stability for Australia, which spawned AESP. "When Bob went back to Melbourne I strongly felt the need to be with a group of people," he recalls. "I found I couldn't get many people interested at CSIRO, or in science circles generally, but I did notice that there were people writing letters to The Canberra Times so I phoned them and asked them if they wanted to form a group. "I didn't get a single knock-back."

The first meeting of AESP was held at the home of radar engineer Greg Dunstone and librarian wife Eileen. Those present included poet Mark O'Connor, retired Bureau of Mineral Resources geologist Hugh Oldham, Australian Democrats political adviser Jenny Goldie (formerly Jenny Macleod), a former assistant secretary in the Immigration Department, Duncan Waddell, and CSIRO staffer Peter Martin. It proved an inspired gathering: Goldie was an organisational dynamo who served as secretary and president, playing a key role in setting up branches in Sydney, Melbourne and South-east Queensland; O'Connor served as vice-president for nine years and attracted many members from the literary community, also spreading the word by appearing on national TV programs such as SBS's Meet the Press; Oldham played an invaluable "back room" role as membership secretary (a post he still holds) and editor of the quarterly AESP newsletter, and Martin established the Adelaide branch of AESP when he moved there in the early 1990s. O'Connor, who stepped down as vice-president at the beginning of this year, has continued to be a powerful force in advocating the low population cause.

Last month, Tim Flannery launched his O'Connor's new book, This Tired Brown Land, which is sub-titled "how Australia's booming population is destroying our environment and why discussion of this has been stifled". O'Connor says there was tremendous enthusiasm in the first couple of years, and hopes were high that AESP would grow to assume a higher national profile than it now has.

"We didn't realise the intense negativity of much of the media," O'Connor said. "At first, the letters to the editor page, especially of The Canberra Times, was one of the few places where these new ideas were permitted. "It's a bit disappointing that we still have only 900 members, but it's a remarkably loyal membership, it's grown steadily, and it's been achieved against great odds," he says. "It's very hard for any activist organisation to have a great number, but every year about 95 per cent of our members rejoin - that compares to only 75 per cent in most organisations. "We've also held our membership against a long-entrenched ideology of growth from newspapers like The Australian, which has consistently run a propaganda campaign on the virtues of high immigration."

As an example, O'Connor cites ALP leader Kim Beazley's announcement earlier this year that the ALP would introduce an environmentally responsible population policy when next in office. "It drew a fierce response from senior Murdoch journalists, with opinion headlines like 'too many fogeys, not enough people'," he said. "Beazley subsequently changed his tune, announcing in August that he was in favour of increased immigration."

In his book, O'Connor also says there is also something "deeply wrong" in the culture of some parts of the ABC's news and current affairs sections. "You could tune into a whole year of the ABC's TV 'News' and '7.30 Report' and discover only that our high immigration policy is good and inevitable, and that anyone who questions it is probably a secret member of the Hitler Youth League. "The vast majority of Australians who oppose high immigration are misrepresented as a small and suspect minority, while the tiny minority who endorse it are falsely misrepresented as responsible mainstream opinion."

Jenny Goldie says that while AESP hasn't been "brilliantly successful", net immigration rate has at least come down to 100,000 from the 140,000-150,000 it was 10 years ago. "We certainly haven't achieved our objective of zero net migration (i.e. around 30,000 immigrants to match the 30,000 Australians who leave each year), but we've managed to raise the issue in an objective way and I think it is recognised in the media and official circles that we're a non-racist organisation. "We spent a lot of time at the first few meetings discussing our name and we ended up with rather a clumsy title. "But for all its faults, 'Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population' has actually been quite a good title, because it has signalled to people that our bottom line is ecological sustainability, with no hidden agenda."

Although not in attendance at the first meeting, another active early AESP member was poet, broadcaster and 1997 Canberran of the Year Anne Edgeworth, who recalls a very successful meeting in May 1989 to establish a parallel organisation, Writers for an Ecologically Sustainable Population (WESP). Canberra writers who participated in the meeting, at the newly-built National Science and Technology Centre (also celebrating its tenth anniversary this month) included A.D. Hope, R.F. Brissenden, Alan Gould and Dorothy Green. Edgeworth believes it is "logical" that AESP, now a national organisation, started in Canberra. "Canberra is unique - it's larger than a country town but smaller than any of the other capital cities, so it's still comparatively easy to get from one end to the other," she said. "It's always had a highly educated population because of the public service and the universities, and it's always had an attraction for writers. "And it has a very pleasant physical environment … there's this quality of the city, surrounded by the Brindabellas and the alps, which places it apart in a way."

Concern about population only "crept up fairly gradually" on Duncan Waddell, another of those at the first meeting. Waddell says he began to think seriously about it when he was senior immigration officer at the Australian consulate in New York from 1966-69. "I became aware of America's huge conurbations and the pressures of populations in those tremendous cities, and I began to wonder whether this was a direction we ought to be heading in. I gradually realised we were going to end up with wall-to-wall people, which seemed to me a pretty horrible prospect. "We were destroying all the farmlands and the forests and the wild places and all the other species, and pretty soon there would be nothing but people."

The greatest single step forward in AESP's development has been the establishment of the Sustainable Population Fund (in 1996), under the triple trusteeship of former ATSIC chair Dr Loitja O'Donoghue, Canberra lawyer Margaret Brewster, and University House Master Rafe de Crespigny. The fund, which for the first time has allowed tax deductibility to be claimed for donations to AESP, has attracted several major donations from individuals, and the money placed in it has been used to set up a national office in Canberra and pay a full-time employee, National Director Edwina Barton. Barton says that while AESP has undoubtedly raised the level of public discussion of population growth, in one way its very success has worked against it because the "pro-growth lobby" has intensified its efforts over the past two years in particular. "What we are seeing now is a massively resourced backlash by the pro-growth lobby to regain public - and political - support for endless population growth," she said. "The big problem for us is that we don't have the human or financial resources to match them."

Founding member Hugh Oldham has watched AESP's membership grow through the years, and is happy with the way it's been developing. "AESP has at least made a big dent in the smugness of the pro-growthers and that's as much as I thought we'd ever be able to do," he said. "Most politicians don't want to listen to what we are saying because they don't think it will produce anything useful for them in three years. "There'll have to be a large-scale appreciation of the damage we're doing to the environment and the way we are endangering our children's future before anything much will happen."

Most people, Oldham believes, assume that if there were anything harmful about our lifestyle the government would protect us from it - and if they didn't, God would. "It's like the report in the journal of The Endeavour," he said, "when it sailed into Botany Bay and they saw some Aborigines fishing from a canoe. "They went ashore in a boat and the Aborigines looked at them, but without any real interest, and then got on with their fishing. "It was something beyond their ability to comprehend. It's like us and the population explosion - it's too much for us to take on board."