Climate Action Burwood/Canada Bay

Ken Enderby was born in 1955, and has degrees in history and economics. After brief stints as a high school teacher then as a scriptwriter, he became a peace and human rights activist in the 1980s. It was a role that took him to parts of the world where conflict and oppression were rife. He travelled to East Germany and Czechoslovakia to meet with critics of the Soviet-backed regimes, trekked upcountry in El Salvador and the Philippines to interview Marxist guerrillas, ventured into the Guatemalan highlands to investigate the government’s campaign of genocide, and visited Israel and the Occupied Territories to talk with moderates and extremists on both sides. Ken was in Poland during martial law, in Nicaragua during the war with the Contras, and in Western Europe during the anti-missile protests. He gave talks and interviews in more than thirty countries, took part in demonstrations and in letter-writing campaigns, raised money for aid projects, and contributed to journals and newspapers in Australia and overseas.

Throughout this period, Ken financed his activities by working as a casual teacher in TAFE and at Sydney University. Then, in 1989, he accepted a full-time job at Bankstown TAFE, where he taught history, economics and politics for the next thirty years.

Despite settling down to a relatively quiet life, Ken maintained his interest in economic development and human rights. He raised money for aid projects in different parts of the world, and worked to secure the release of Mamdouh Habib from Guantanamo Bay. More recently, he has undertaken study trips to North Korea, East Timor and the Philippines, and has returned to the Middle East on several occasions to assess the situation in the Occupied Territories.

Since retiring in 2019, Ken has focused his attention on climate change, something that has interested him for decades, and is currently president of Climate Action Burwood/Canada Bay in Sydney. He is also a trainer with Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project and a facilitator with Climate for Change. In 2020, he completed a course on climate science at Queensland University, and now concentrates on debunking myths perpetrated by climate deniers. He is the author of Climate Myths and How to Respond to Them.

Ken is also the author of a major study on American foreign policy, and co-author of the novel Trail of Deceit, published in 2011. That same year he featured on ABC Radio’s Conversations with Richard Fidler. He has written for both television and radio, and is currently scripting and acting in the comedy series The Adventures of Sgt Grit Grinder’s Suicide Squad, available on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkAsXRt-RJpscWCZr2jCidw) and Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/4fCK74zZ17WElN9CvyrYz1).

Ken speaks French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian and Indonesian. He is married, with two adult children, and lives in Concord, Sydney.