Nationality Australian Name Doug Ralph | Education Self-educated Citizenship Australian | |
Born 10 July 1948 Castlemaine, Victoria Died 24 February 2015
Castlemaine, Victoria Known for Historian, Environmental Activism, President of Friends of the Box Ironbark Forests | ||
Occupation Environmental Activist | ||
Doug Ralph (10 July 1948 – 24 February 2015) was an Australian historian, environmentalist and activist.
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Early life
Doug Ralph was the fifth generation descendant of ancestors who came to Mount Alexander in the Goldrush of the 1850s, and he was born in Castlemaine, living in the area all of his life and working as a self-employed carpenter.
Activism
Doug Ralph became acquainted with a specific forest type found in Central Victoria, the Box-Ironbark, and built his knowledge of its ecology, geology, botany, biology and history during his lifelong study of a very specific area, the Fryers Forest and the catchment of Columbine Creek in particular, and it is for this thorough local knowledge, applicable to far-reaching discovery, that he became known. As contributor of, and consultant about, such discrete expertise he is acknowledged in a number of diverse reports. A passionate protector of the local environment, in 1997 Ralph became founding president of the Friends of the Box Ironbark Forests, for whom he conducted bush walks for more than fifteen years, from the late 1990s. He was a contributor to the formation of, and first president of, Connecting Country, a community-based not-for-profit organisation that "operates at a landscape scale to increase, enhance and restore biodiversity across the Mount Alexander Shire and surrounds in Central Victoria".
Mainstream politics
Doug Ralph contested the seat of Bendigo in the 1996 federal election for the Greens, for whom he won 2,534 votes (3.27%), which represented a significant level support for the new party. He was a Greens candidate in the 2002 Victorian State Election and again in 2006. He contested the 2008 Victorian Council Elections standing for the Greens in Calder Ward.[8] In 2010 he stood in the Electoral district of Murray Valley for the Victorian Legislative Assembly.
Historian
Ralph presented The History Show on 9.49 Main FM under the banner 'there is never one way to look at history'. Self-educated through his own field explorations and research in public archives, he was an advocate of the practice of the 'citizen-historian'. Ralph appears in, and was consultant for, a film written & co-produced by Jan Wositzky about the Monster Meeting of 15 December 1851, in which between 14,000 and 20,000 miners took part, the biggest protest leading up to the Eureka Rebellion of 1854.
Publications and Presentations
He died on 24 February 2015 of a heart attack at his home in Little Bendigo, a suburb of Castlemaine, and is survived by his children Jason, Lindy and Adam.