Townend, Christine Elizabeth

Christine Townend is a passionate woman whose life and talents have been devoted to the cause of animal care and liberation. As an Australian Democrats member she contested the following elections: New South Wales Legislative Assembly, Willoughby 1978, 1984;
House of Representatives, Grayndler, 1977; and the Senate, NSW, 1983. However, in 1988 Christine stood on behalf of the Environment Group in the Legislative Council elections.

Christine Townend grew up in the lower North Shore area of Sydney and became a writer early in her life. She had poetry, short stories and four novels published by the time of her first campaign.

From early in her career she was concerned to protect the environment and stop cruelty to animals, and was a prolific writer of letters to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald on these subjects. She founded Animal Liberation in 1976, after being strongly influenced by Peter Singer’s book of the same name.

She joined the Australian Democrats and ran for election on their ticket four times, always emphasising care for the environment and animals. In time she became discouraged by the lack of results of her campaigns in Australia.

When she joined Milo Dunphy and Alice Oppen to run for the Legislative Council in 1988, under the banner of the Environment Group, she was Secretary of the Australian and New Zealand Federation of Animal Societies, a member of the NSW Animal Welfare Advisoryt Council and the CSIRO Advisory Committee on the Ethics of Animals in Research.

In 1990 she became managing trustee of ‘Help in Suffering’, an animal shelter and registered Indian charitable trust, based in Jaipur. In 1992 she went to live permanently in India, working as a volunteer at the animal shelter and conducting a program to control the spread of rabies in Jaipur.