Sandra Bourke’s family has lived beside Hawks Nest Beach, on Australia’s wild Myall Coast, for four generations. The beach borders a marine reserve that protects the rare Gould’s petrel.
When the Australian Labor government declared an offshore wind zone off that beach, she set out to contest it. With her husband Bruce, in a campervan nicknamed ‘Rogue’, she travelled the country and met farmers, shopkeepers, teachers and scientists living with wind turbines, grid solar and steel transmission towers on or near their land and coastlines.
This government created two worlds.
In the bush and on the coast, families watched the government hand their land and beaches over to subsidised industrial renewables.
In the cities, Jewish Australians watched synagogues burn and antisemitism surge, and heard the government equivocate.
In 2025 those two worlds met on the footpaths outside polling booths.
Sandra campaigned against the Greens in the 2025 election, from the Prahran by-election in Melbourne to the Federal Election booths of Melbourne and Brisbane.
Volunteers, including Jewish Australians, stood beside her, handing out "Put the Greens Last" leaflets. Greens campaigners called them neo-Nazis. Two chapters: 'The Undercurrent' and 'Neo-Nazis on the Hustings', tell that story: the volunteers who held their ground, and the complaints to the Australian Electoral Commission that went nowhere.
Her message is simple. When a government stops listening, communities must stand together: against antisemitism, for democracy, and for every Australian’s right to be heard.
She volunteers with the National Rational Energy Network, Let’s Rethink Renewables and local community groups. She spent most of her career in the public service, including the Australian Federal Police, the National Crime Authority and Defence.
To Save a Beach: The Story of Reckless Renewables, with a foreword by Chris Uhlmann, is her first book.