Ron Guignard

Ron Guignard

ADELAIDE — Ron Guignard died in hospital last week, aged an incredible 78 — incredible because I met Ron when he was part of the group organising the Nurrungar '93 peace protest. I didn't know then that he was 72.

I was even more surprised when we went to Woomera to check out the camp site for the protest and he knew many of the locals. Ron had spent, as he put it, "nine years working for and against the Department of Defence".

Employed as an administrative officer, he spent his time organising the union and being a nuisance. It appears he got the defence job because he was annoying another government bureaucracy by being unemployed and organising in the unemployed workers union.

Readers of Green Left will know Ron from his frequent letters on a variety of matters from the environment to socialist strategy, spirituality and materialist philosophy.

He was a socialist, an anarchist, a greenie, a hippy, a scribe, a Green Left sponsor and a good person to have in any campaign.

But his life was not just a campaign; he lived for the fun too. He refused to conform to what he saw as political dogma, capitalist society or the dictates of wowsers. He succeeded in all three, and will be missed for those reasons, and for much more.

Greg Ogle

From GLW issue 326