Environmental protests in Australia haven't always involved bulldozers, being chained to gates or mass arrests.

In fact, the activism we often see today represents a radical break from the movement's far more genteel origins.

Environmentalists — although they weren't always called that — have been active in Australia since the 1860s.

But it wasn't until the 1960s and 70s, when political agitation for women's rights, Indigenous rights and the end of the Vietnam war swept the Western world, that the modern environment movement was born.

During these decades, the push to protect Australia's rich environmental heritage gradually shifted from polite backroom persuasion to sometimes violent confrontation, in the bush and city alike.

The fight to save Little Desert

A polite campaign helped seal Little Desert's future as a national park. ( Wikimedia: Enguerrand Blanchy )

Action to save the Little Desert in western Victoria from agricultural development in the late 1960s was the last of the genteel campaigns.

A proposal by former Victorian conservation minister Sir William McDonald to develop part of the area for farming brought together people of all classes and political persuasions — from "card-carrying communists" to the gentlemen of the Melbourne Club.

"The people who didn't want it to happen were people who were interested in flowers, the wildflowers, the birds," historian Libby Robin says.

"They were people from all walks of life but they all liked walking in nature and going bush."

Professor Robin says one "wonderful" campaigner was a woman called Valerie Honey.

"She was a housewife at home with no telephone, and she went to a different neighbour every day to ring into talkback to alert people to the Little Desert," Professor Robin says.

Ms Honey researched conservation, set up an information stand at her local shops in Melbourne and gathered a petition with nearly 4,000 signatures.

"It was done as a people's movement with a focus on an individual place and the whole campaign was to get rid of the problem minister, not to get rid of the government," Professor Robin says.

Sir William lost his seat at the next election, and the area is now a national park.

The conservative environmentalists

Pressure on the environment grew during the 1960s, as governments hungry for foreign investment looked for ways to expand an economy that was built on natural resources.

During the mid-60s, Australia's first national environment organisation, the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), was set up by a mix of leaders in the scientific and business community.

Its creation was inspired by a perhaps unlikely figure — the Duke of Edinburgh.

Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, is an environmentalist, and even served as the first president of the World Wildlife Fund. ( Getty: Ray Bellisario )

"He was a conservative environmentalist but the ACF was that in the early days … it had some very, very conservative people on it," veteran environment campaigner Drew Hutton says.

Mr Hutton says the ACF combined a "strong research element" with campaigning — but it took a while for them to "get that they had to campaign very hard".

"Probably the catalyst for that was the Lake Pedder campaign," he says.

A huge loss and a 'militant atmosphere'

Lake Pedder, in south-western Tasmania, was formed during the last Ice Age.

"It was a beautiful wilderness lake. It had this beautiful pearly white beach that went around one half of the lake and you had to bushwalk to get in there," Mr Hutton says.

A new campaign is currently underway to restore Lake Pedder ( Getty: Grahame McConnell )

In 1967, its status as a national park was revoked and in 1972 Tasmania's Hydro-Electric Commission flooded the lake and created three new dams.

The inundation of the lake was a major loss to environmentalists, and brought the environment movement to national prominence.

"ACF did not throw the sort of weight into it that it really needed in order to mobilise those masses and to really put pressure on the government," Mr Hutton says.

"They were still dependent upon old movement-style campaigning. In other words, 'we'll use a few friends that we've got in cabinet or in the governing party', which was mostly the Liberal Party of the time … and it didn't work."

A revolution within the movement occurred soon after, which saw some within the ACF stage a coup to kick out the old guard.

"Right though the 1970s, the whole environment movement in fact was characterised by mobilising and campaigning and a militant atmosphere," Mr Hutton says.

A new campaign is now underway, convened by former Greens senator Christine Milne, to restore Lake Pedder and its surrounding ecosystems.

Trade unions lead the way

As nature-loving conservationists considered how to become more effective campaigners, support for environmental activism came from an unexpected source — the trade union movement.

Unions were active in the anti-uranium mining campaigns of the day and went on to protect Sydney's urban heritage, with the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) putting work bans on redevelopment of areas like The Rocks and Wolloomooloo.

Union movements helped protect Sydney's heritage. ( Getty )

Professor Tim Bonyhady, from ANU's Centre for Environmental Law, says the "green bans" were a product of a strong union movement and the BFL's charismatic leader Jack Mundey.

A group of women from Hunters Hill, an upper-middle-class suburb, approached Mr Mundy as a last resort to save nearby bushland known as Kellys Bush.

"They had no formal avenues to participate in the decision-making or to object," Professor Bonyhady says.

"As a very last resort, the residents of Hunters Hill — primarily women — went to an organisation which they normally would have had no kind of contact with, this communist-led union."

It was a stroke of genius, because the union's members would have been engaged to work on the area's development.

First anti-logging demonstrations in Australia

During the late 1970s, the Terania Creek rainforest of northern New South Wales became the site of the first anti-logging demonstrations in Australia.

"Research, campaigning, militancy, mass mobilisation all came together," Professor Bonyhady says.

Many of the locals had bought land in the area after coming in 1973 for the Nimbin Aquarius Festival, a counter-cultural arts and music celebration.

They were shocked by plans to log forest.

"These are highly educated, highly skilled people living on the land who decided they had to become environmental campaigners," Mr Hutton says.

Protesters Falls in Nightcap National Park was named after the Terania Creek protests of the late 1970s. ( Wikimedia: Peter Greenwell )

Their "excellent campaign" included submissions, letters and lobbying — but to no effect.

In 1979, 100 people took radical action, forming a human barricade to block bulldozers.

"They blockaded Terania Creek and they fought the loggers there and the police non-violently," Mr Hutton says.

Mr Hutton says the NSW premier at the time, Neville Wran, decided there was "some political kudos" to protect the area.

Mr Wran "became very quickly a conservation premier", going on to set up more than 20 national parks during his time in office, he says.

The rise of Bob Brown

In 1978, the Tasmanian Hydro Electric Commission announced plans for the Gordon-below-Franklin Dam, polarising the community.

Leading the campaign against the plan, Bob Brown carved a political career and set the course for green politics for the next decade.

"The river intervened on my life and I came out of the doctor's surgery and went into the conservation movement and found myself fighting for a repository for the human spirit," Dr Brown says.

Protesters rafted the Gordon River in 1982 as part of the campaign against the Franklin Dam project. ( Supplied )

One of the most pivotal moments in the Franklin campaign came over the summer of 1982-83, just ahead of a federal election.

"Something like 2,600 Australians … went to various sites where the hydro was set on working and engaged in peaceful protest and 1,200 of those were arrested," Professor Bonyhady says.

The civil disobedience was coordinated by the Wilderness Society and Dr Brown was among those arrested.

Before he became a politician Bob Brown was the face of the Tasmanian "No Dams" campaign in the 1980s. ( ABC )

"The willingness of Australians to risk the consequences of the law was hugely powerful," Professor Bonyhady says.

"Labor went to the election promising to stop the dam."

The Franklin Dam issue then became vital to the election of the Hawke government.

"The thing which was pretty exceptional about the Franklin case … was that there was an electoral mandate from the people of Australia that the Franklin shouldn't be dammed," Professor Bonyhady says.

The Hawke government's first piece of legislation was to stop the dam; a decision the High Court famously upheld.

The fight against the dam remains one of the most significant environmental campaigns in Australian history.

That campaign, and others of the '60s and '70s, helped lay the foundations for the environmental movement of the 21st century.

Echoes of that early activism can still be heard, in battles by groups like Lock the Gate, which campaigns against risky coal mining, coal seam gas and fracking, and Climate Emergency, which calls for action on climate change.