THE DISTANCE
360 steps.
For one year, one of my Maroubra people lived almost absurdly close to me in Dubbo. We had deliberately made sure it happened that way.
THE OTHER BEL
Special Counsel. Mum of four boys.
Public-interest environmental law, community rights, climate work, soccer, school life and all the rest of ordinary family chaos.
THE THING ABOUT OLD FRIENDS
They remember who you were.
And somehow make room for every version you become after that.
ONE OF MY SYDNEY PEOPLE
Before Dubbo, there was Maroubra.
Belinda is one of those people I think of as part of my Sydney architecture.
Like Eleanor, she belongs to the Maroubra chapter: children, school years, families, friendships that grew around ordinary life and then became anything but ordinary because enough years passed.
Our oldest boys are the same age. Bel went on to have four boys; I had two. Somewhere inside all that noise, lunches, logistics, sport, work, school and family life, we became the kind of friends who know more than the edited version of one another.
There are parts of our upbringings that rhyme. We understand some things without explaining them. We also share a sense of humour that probably works best because neither of us requires the other one to pretend life is more tasteful, tidy or sensible than it really is.
The great luxury of an old friend is not having to introduce yourself every time your life changes.
WHEN LIFE GETS SERIOUS
We have also done the things nobody puts in the friendship brochure.
Our friend Leah was diagnosed with a brain tumour and later died.
There were fundraisers. There was our friend Dr Mary shaving her hair. There were all the strange, practical, emotional things people invent when the truth is that you cannot fix what is happening but you absolutely refuse to do nothing.
There is a photo of Belinda, Mary and me from those years that I love. Not because it is polished. Because it belongs to the real archive — friendship, grief, action, ridiculousness, love.
Sometimes friendship is sitting beside someone. Sometimes it is shaving your head. Sometimes it is organising a fundraiser because action is the only place you can put the love.
360 STEPS
Then somehow Maroubra followed me to Dubbo.
I had already moved west when Belinda’s family needed to spend a year in Dubbo for work.
Naturally, we made sure that if one of my best friends was going to live in my new town for a year, she was going to do it properly.
They found a place 360 steps from my front door.
I know because of course we counted.
For one year, the person who belonged to my old life became part of the geography of the new one. Our families could wander backwards and forwards. The children had each other. We had each other. Sydney and regional NSW stopped feeling like two completely separate versions of my life.
For one year Bel lived 360 steps from my front door. In every way that really matters, she has never been very far away.
THE ROAD WEST
Of course we took the families to Broken Hill.
One of our stops was Menindee.
Bel had been there before when it was painfully dry. When we arrived together, the rain had come and it was beautiful.
That contrast stayed with me — not because every landscape needs to become a metaphor, but because this was Belinda. A woman whose professional life is spent thinking seriously about land, water, climate, decisions, communities and what happens when systems fail the places people love.
And there we were, two families on a road trip, looking at a landscape she had once seen completely differently.
THE WORK
Bel does extraordinary work. She just does not carry herself like somebody who needs you to know that.
She joined the Environmental Defenders Office in 2011 and became Special Counsel in 2021.
Her work spans public-interest environmental law, community legal education, community and landholder rights and climate law. EDO has specifically recognised her ability to take complex legal ideas and make them understandable to people who do not live inside the legal system.
That sounds technical until you think about what it really means.
A community is worried about a mine, a development, pollution, water, climate or a planning process. The rules are enormous. The language is alienating. The power imbalance is real. Belinda’s job is partly to help ordinary people understand where they stand and what they can actually do.
She has worked across significant legal matters, including the Great Barrier Reef Sharks case, but the thing that feels most like the Bel I know is the translation: understand the problem, make it human, give people something useful.
Read more about Belinda’s work with Environmental Defenders Office.
Good advocacy is not only knowing the system. It is helping other people understand enough of it to have a voice.
PARKES
Years later, I drove to Parkes to see my friend at work.
In July 2026 Belinda was in Parkes representing EDO at a community information session about the proposed Parkes Energy Recovery Project.
She was there to provide independent information about the planning and assessment process — exactly the kind of work she has spent years doing.
And I was there because Bel was in Parkes.
That visit spun off into one of those gloriously regional chains of connection that later became my completely separate CWA lemon-curd story. But the beginning of the day was much simpler: one of my best friends was nearby, so of course I went.
Read about the EDO Parkes community session.
FOUR BOYS, AND EVERYTHING ELSE
The professional version is impressive. The whole version is better.
Bel is also a mum to four boys.
A current Parents for Climate profile somehow manages to fit “Special Counsel, Early Legal Intervention, EDO” and “mum to four boys who enjoys watching and playing soccer” into the same tiny biography.
Which is almost comically accurate to women’s lives: serious work, school logistics, values, family, sport, deadlines, dinner, climate law.
See Belinda’s current Parents for Climate speaker profile.
THE WHOLE STORY
This is why Belinda belongs here.
Not because she has an impressive title — although she does.
Not because she has been involved in important environmental cases — although she has.
She belongs because The Orana Woman is becoming an archive of the women who shape our lives as much as the women who shape public life.
Belinda has done both.
She is the woman doing serious work beside communities and the friend who can make me laugh about things that would sound appalling if I had to explain the joke to somebody else.
She is part of my Sydney life and part of my regional life. One of the people who knows where I came from and has also walked into the life I built next.
Some friendships are built around the version of you that existed at one point in your life. The really good ones keep making room for every version that comes after.
— Sharon