On 8 February, Australian medical researcher, activist and founder of the Nuclear Disarmament Party, Michael Denborough, passed away at the age of 84. As part of Michael’s medical training in Cape Town, South Africa, he spent time treating people in the black townships. Later as a Rhodes Scholar walking the halls of Oxford he saw the stark contrast between the two worlds and his passion for social justice was ignited.

World War Two had a profound effect on him; the people he’d known at school were sacrificed in an “appalling waste of humanity”. He said “the nuclear industry seems to embody everything that is worst about human nature. It could destroy all life on earth 50 times over, simply for greed.”

In 1970, Michael found evidence of an increase in radioactive iodine uptake in sheep’s thyroid glands every time the French conducted a nuclear test in the Pacific. When the politicians refused to act on this information, he and his medical colleague Roger Melick wrote a press release and sent it to all the national newspapers.

The Australian public was horrified and the outburst led to the matter being taken up by the newly elected Gough Whitlam. Whitlam then sent his attorney-general Lionel Murphy to the International Court in The Hague, which forced the French nuclear tests underground.

In 1983 Michael organised an International Symposium at the Australian National University on “The Consequences of Nuclear War for Australia and its Region” with the aim of promoting international nuclear disarmament. Physicians and scientists from eastern and western countries, including the former USSR and the USA, came to see what they could do to fix the greatest threat to world health – the threat of global nuclear war. It was a huge success and Denborough edited a book of the speeches made.

In 1984, as a response to the Labor Government’s sell out on their anti-nuclear platform, he founded the Nuclear Disarmament Party. It was a single issue party with three planks: no uranium mining, no nuclear weapons and no US bases in Australia. The then Socialist Workers Party played an important and constructive role in those early days. Two of the Party’s senators were elected, one in 1984 and one in 1987, and the NDP continued to highlight nuclear issues in elections until 2009.

Michael remained a committed activist throughout the years. He was arrested for protesting at AIDEX (an arms bazaar) in 1991 and then again in the mid 90s outside the French Embassy after the French government resumed their nuclear tests in the Pacific.

In 2003, when the US invaded Iraq, he set up a solo vigil outside Parliament House in Canberra, where he stayed for 52 days. On the day John Howard committed Australian troops to Iraq, he was thrown out of Parliament for protesting loudly from the gallery.

Michael will be remembered for his deep conviction and relentless opposition to war and the dangers of the nuclear industry. He was always heartened to hear of the ongoing work of many wonderful activists, dedicated to the cause of nuclear disarmament and a more peaceful world.