‘Well-behaved women rarely make history.’

Susi Newborn was born in London as the daughter of an Argentine diplomat. She describes her upbringing as loving and privileged. At a young age she showed great concern for social and environmental injustice. She is about five years old when she took action against the felling of a tree in their garden. After her father’s early death she decided to follow her heart and she committed herself fully to the protection of the environment. Together with her friends Denise Bell and Alan Thornton she established Greenpeace UK in 1976.

These three, without a penny to their name, make a wild bid on a old trawler, the ‘Sir William Hardy’. It was Susi who gave the ship the new name ‘The Rainbow Warrior’. Thanks to a grant from the Dutch branch of the World Wildlife Fund the friends were able to buy the ship and Susi and Denises’s signatures adorned the deed of purchase, writing history in the process. With the purchase of their first ship Greenpeace starts campaigning in Europe.

Susi and her friends make the rusty barge seaworthy, and together they form the crew on the Rainbow Warrior’s first trips to Iceland and Spain against whaling, and against the transportation and dumping of nuclear waste by the UK and France.

Martini Gotjé and Susi share a cabin on the Rainbow Warrior and fall in love. They have daughter Brenna in 1981, but the relationship does not last and Susi leaves for America to do a 4-year degree programme in Human Ecology. Between 1981 and 1985 she keeps her distance from Greenpeace, but after the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in 1985 she flies immediately to New Zealand to talk about what to do with ‘her ship’. She has never left the country since.

In the early 1990’s Susi buys a plot of land on Waiheke in Awaawaroa Bay, together with Henk, Bunny and Hanne. Their goal is to start an ecological community, partly based on the philosophy of the Transition Town and is now called The Transition Movement.
She does not have enough money to build a house on the plot, but there is no lack of ideas. She explored the possibility to build a house of old telephone books, but it didn’t work. Now her dearest wish is to build an Earthship [http://www.earthship.net/].

Susi wrote a book, ‘Bonfire in my mouth’ published by Harper Collins in 2003 about her turbulent life to date, but she is not yet resting on her laurels. She has never given up campaigning. Currently she works as Oxfam New Zealand’s climate campaigner and is active in the Waiheke island community. You can read more from her on her weblog http://pipl.com/directory/people/Susi/Newborn or http://susi2008.wordpress.com/about/