The passionate advocate has danced in post-Apartheid Soweto, rallied in Paris, and helped out in Georgia, and she's a lot of fun to have a drink with, too
With bright blue eyes, shoulder-length brown hair and standing nearly six feet tall, Veronica Vann of Western Australia
likely disarms many people by virtue of her physical stature alone. This champion crusader for worthy causes such as the environment, participatory democracy and social equality could easily stare down even the staunchest conservatives and make them rethink their views, but instead Vann prefers to take a softer approach and sip a glass of Australian or Georgian red wine and talk earnestly with friend and stranger alike about things that matter very much to her. Invariably, she laughs and smiles a lot, too.
Having already ordered a glass of Georgian Saperavi (Hr 15) at Kyiv’s newest Georgian restaurant, Kazbek on Lesi Ukrainky, we share a toast, which she offers in Georgian, telling me that the Georgian word used in toasting – guamajas – means victory in that language. She should know, having spent much of her life there from 1996 to 1998 while working on an environmental advocacy project for Tblisi’s Regional Environmental Center.
“You learn a lot about a people by the way they greet and toast each other,” Vann says before expounding on her love for Georgian food and wine. She asks if she can order for us both, and it will be a vegetarian feast, as she’s been meat-free for the last 15 years. While ordering for us Georgian cheese bread, or khachapuri (Hr 38), vegetable rolls (Hr 25), ajabsandal, or vegetable stew (Hr 25), baked mushrooms (Hr 32) and little spinach moulds called ispinakhi (Hr 38) she tells me that feast in Georgian is supra, and of the very traditional and “democratic” nature of long-winded Georgian toasts led by the tamada, or toast leader; and she confides that some of the first words she learned in Kyiv during her first trip here in 1996 were bez myasa (without meat).
“I recently had some friends visit from England,” she goes further, “and I had to suddenly learn all the Ukrainian words for different kinds of meat!” she says with a laugh and a smile.
Vann finished high school and married almost straight away, had three children in quick succession, but she felt that there was more to life that that. Once her kids were grown up she went back to school, at Murdoch University in Perth, as a mature student to study psychology. Her idea was to help people improve their lives, but then something struck her: you can change a person’s life, but until you change the whole of society you wouldn’t really be affecting much. With that in mind, Vann started to act.
Grassroots Support
Her career beyond motherhood and a stint working for a local newspaper in Freemantle (near Perth) began in tiny Brunswick, Western Australia (pop. 10,000), during the mid-1980s. She was handing out “How to Vote” cards for a Nuclear Disarmament Party candidate for the Australian senate. Vann met like-minded people who didn’t want Australia turned into a nuclear waste dump, or a haven for nuclear weapons, and the NDP candidate won.
Next Vann became involved with Australia’s Nursing Mother’s Association to support breast-feeding then, at a peace camp in Western Australia a woman whom she befriended chased her down and dragged her to listen to a series of speakers. Vann says she was filled with a sense of injustice that still burns within her.
“There’s the term ‘cognitive dissonance’ in psychology,” Vann offers. “I changed my behavior to fit my attitude instead of the other way around.” Her life was altered. She gave up meat, she divorced her husband, and she began working as an advisor for a Green Party senator, which she did for a “very intense” three and a half years.
Following her advisory work she left Australia and traveled outside of the country for the first time in her life – at 35. She wandered around much of Europe, Southeast Asia and even Africa just before Apartheid ended in South Africa. In trying to return to England, her airline at first said she’d have to have a stopover in Johannesburg.
“I told her if I have to stop in Jo-burg, you can cancel the whole ticket. They moved pretty fast after that and found another way back for me,” she says laughing.
With dual English-Australian citizenship thanks to her English father (who she says may have ties to Russia – the rest of her is a typical Australian mix of Irish, Scottish and English), Vann settled in Paris in July 1995 – at the same time that French President Jacques Chirac decided to resume nuclear testing in the South Pacific. Vann met up with local Australian and New Zealand ex-pats who signed a 10,000-strong petition and subsequently marched down the Champs d’Elysee as part of the protest against the nuclear tests. “It became pretty intense there at that time,” she says, “so I went to London on vacation for one month.
“Again, as everywhere, I got in touch with Greens and someone approached me about attending a conference on environmental protection in Eastern Europe,” she says taking a sip of wine. “I went [to Sofia, Bulgaria] and spent the entire time with my jaw on my chest.” The Sofia Meeting was held in November 1995.
“I heard all kinds of horror stories about nuclear plants [in Eastern Europe] and really connected with people from Eastern Europe,” Vann says. There she met the director of Georgia’s Regional Environment Center, who was keen to have outsiders come to work and share their experiences and expertise. “She offered to have me come there, so I said ‘Sure.’ We each thought the other was joking.”
As it was, from January to June 1996 Vann endured an initial six months of virtually no running water, no electricity and no heating. An illness forced her to return to London, but for the next two years she traveled back and forth, coming to know the language and the people very well.
During her travels Vann finds insight into other countries and cultures. While traveling on buses in Zimbabwe she’s been “adopted” by families who feared for her safety and so took her to stay with them for a time and she danced with mourners of the late black South African activist Joe Slovo in the Johannesburg ghetto of Soweto barely six months after the end of white rule in South Africa, one of only a handful of white people in a crowd of tens of thousands.
“It was the most powerful thing to land in a free South Africa,” she says, but within weeks she was sickened by the attitude and comfort of the whites who had lost power.
“These people I was staying with, two sisters, they said ‘They’ve taken our country away from us,’ and I said to them ‘They probably feel the same way you do.’”
What eventually brought Vann to Ukraine was first a project draft-proofing homes, schools and nurseries in various Eastern European countries. The project, which teaches people to make their homes or schools energy efficient and then pass this knowledge on to others, proved “fantastically successful” she says, smiling.
But she’s not always so gleeful: “I have to rant every once in a while,” Vann says.
“They used to call me the ‘hippie mung-bean sprout’ in the media,” Vann recalls. “I’ve heard it said that the media simply provides what the public wants.
“The media directs public opinion and in politics we’ve lost the idea of leadership.”
She returned to Australia then applied for and got a contract as a team leader/project manager with Royal Haskoning of the Netherlands through a Europe Aid-funded project that brought her to Ukraine in June 2002. The project works with governments in six signatory countries of the June 1998 Aarhus Convention – Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan – to implement the treaty, which relates specifically to public access to information on and participation in local environment issues.
Though her project runs out in December and has been criticized for not being strong enough, Vann enumerates the many positives that have grown out of it. It’s a really gradual process, she admits, but she holds her head high when she talks of it. “For someone who’s passionate about the environment, democracy and people’s well-being,” she says, “it’s the perfect vehicle to address all those things.”
