local Hunters Hill resident Betty James wrote how local children had pulled up a long line of survey pegs laid out through "their bush" as a heartfelt protest. Her article read like a love-letter to Kelly's Bush, describing its deep gullies of bracken fern, its blueberry ash, lily-pilly, tea tree and a rare stand of healthy banksias. James...also talked about it as an outdoor laboratory and living museum: there were Aboriginal middens and carvings in the sandstone. In September 1970, James and 12 other neighbours gathered at All Saints' parish hall and christened themselves the 'Battlers for Kelly's Bush'. The group, which the Hunters Hill Council would dismiss as "13 bloody housewives", elected James as President, Kath Lehany as secretary and Monica Sheehan as assistant secretary. Most of the women were lifelong Liberal Party voters who had never been involved in politics but each had a different reason for joining...Miriam Cunningham...had realised when she had been to Australia Square, then Sydney's tallest building, that Kellys Bush was the only patch of green she could see on the Parramatta River. "It was the lungs of Sydney.". A group of concerned citizens had formed by this stage and called themselves "The Battlers". Unwittingly, the battlers set down a blueprint for the modern-day protest movement. They wrote hundreds of letters. They organised a "phone tree" to pass on news. They invited media to "boil the billy" days in the bush and plied them with baked goods. They ran essay competitions for schoolchildren about why the bush should be saved. They made badges and banners and got their teenagers to hang them around Hunters Hill. They enlisted the local school band, which marched form Hunters Hill High School to Kellys Bush, calling for "browsing not housing". They even roped in local Kylie Tennant to write protest poems. Dinner parties became battlegrounds and the peninsula community divided over the issue. Some wanted the sewage pipes that A.V.Jennings promised to build for the whole area or believed local state Liberal MP Peter Coleman, who said Council rares would drop when Jennings came...Over the course of several months, the battlers sent several delegations to the Liberal Premier of the day, Robert Askin, to argue their case. "Askin derided us as middle-class matrons" says Hunters Hill resident Phil Jenkyn, who says the women inspired him to form a group known as the Defenders of Sydney Harbour Foreshores. They