JACKO THE TRACTAVIST HEADS OFF EAST

Laura Jackson Leaves The Vales
Fierce Seaford Heights Activist
Chases Her Muse To Green East
by PHILIP WHITE


There are people who live in places where you also live who love it as much as you do, and who, for one reason or another, suddenly go somewhere else to live.

The one reason or another usually have to do with love or hate.

Or perhaps to do with the complete lack of both.

Which is not the one happening to Laura Jackson, a good buddy and fellow musician in McLaren Vale. Music and love have drawn her to another of the most beautiful places in Australia, the south coast of New South Wales, where the great musician and writer, Heath Cullen, happens also to live, loving it.

And, conversely, hate has a lot to do with it, too.

Laura, or Jacko, was the one who set up and drove the powerful Facebook site We Oppose Seaford Heights. This alone excited and united and agitated the McLaren Vale region to rise up against the stale South Australian Labor government. She wisely hated the dumb government plan. In one breath those bastards told us they’d be saving our region from ghetto rot and the spread of cancerous eave-to-eave Tupperware Tuscany whilst they simultæneously proceeded to plan the horrid sub-division of one of the very best, most agriculturally lucrative, and most visually significant bits of it.

During her time in McLaren Vale, Laura worked at Mixmaster Studios, Shottesbrook, Primo Estate, and Settlement Wines, as well as being present, and often playing this or that instrument, at many musical soirees, at which the Vales excels.

But her role in political activism is the one we should revere the most.

During her establishment and management of the Facebook site We Oppose Seaford Heights, with viticulturer and winemaker James Hook she helped arrange and stage the biggest Tractor Action demo this senior agitator has seen.

This was both – impossibly – extremely, determinedly angry and overtly polite. The police seemed to like it; the pollies hated it. For her efforts, at the 2010 Bushing King feast, before many hundreds of locals, Laura was awarded the coveted Trott Family Trophy for her work protecting the spirit, environment, aspect and amenity of her beloved McLaren Vale.

Since then, one Minister of Planning has left his head in the bucket, and must inevitably be joined by another. If the opposite conservatives can show and sell some intellect and intelligent leadership, which they are far from doing thus far, the entire government may well follow those belligerent peanuts into oblivion.

The precious Seaford Heights site, with its rare and special 650 million year old siltstone geology, perfect for the gardening of anything from barley to Barbaresco, has not yet been touched by the developer’s spade.

It is up to us who stay to see it too stay, while those in Bega will be extremely lucky to have Jacko’s quiet determinism locking its hubs when the savages make their stupid, destructive advance.

Which they will.

JACKO AT THE MASS TRACTOR ACTION DEMO TO SAVE SEAFORD HEIGHTS ... WITH DUDLEY BROWN, PROPRIETOR, INKWELL WINES AND FORMER CHAIRMAN OF THE McLAREN VALE GRAPE WINE AND TOURISM ASSOCIATION, CHALK HILL PROPRIETOR JOHN HARVEY, THE AUTHOR, AND PETER DAWSON, FORMERLY CHIEF WINEMAKER BRL-HARDY, NOW CHAIRMAN OF THE AUSTRALIAN WINE RESEARCH INSTITUTE photo LEO DAVIS