Last weekend, dozens of protesters jumped in kayaks and paddled into Newcastle Harbour to stage a blockade in the world’s largest coal port, part of an action organised by climate activist group Rising Tide.

More than 130 people were arrested. Among them was independent investigative journalist and activist Wendy Bacon, who at 79 has no fear of water, cops or vast hulking coal ships. She was charged with breaching sections of the Crimes Act by paddling into an exclusion zone set up around the harbour with the approval of Transport Minister John Graham designed to protect the shipping lane.

Journalist and activist Wendy Bacon at the Rising Tide climate protest in Newcastle on the weekend.

Attending the large, almost carnivalesque protest on Newcastle’s Horseshoe Beach with Knitting Nannas, an organisation of older female climate activists, Bacon told CBD she was driven by a sense of frustration at the way both state and federal governments had approved coal and gas projects with little apparent concern for environmental impacts.

“People who run fossil fuel industries only think of short-term profits. They don’t pay serious attention to their children and grandchildren,” she said.

Not that this is the first rodeo for Bacon, a Walkley winner and former journalism academic at the University of Technology, Sydney, who has just about lost count of how many times she’d been........

© The Sydney Morning Herald