{"id":41171,"date":"2026-06-30T04:39:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T04:39:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/41171\/"},"modified":"2026-06-30T04:39:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T04:39:10","slug":"brisbane-tree-protestor-taken-down-with-cherry-picker-at-unsanctioned-kurilpa-common-community-garden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/41171\/","title":{"rendered":"Brisbane tree protestor taken down with cherry picker at unsanctioned Kurilpa Common community garden"},"content":{"rendered":"

A protester who spent 23 hours up a tree in an unsanctioned community garden near Brisbane’s CBD has been removed by emergency services in a cherry picker.<\/p>\n

Queensland Fire Department escorted the woman out of the tree safely after a power line was removed to clear the way down.<\/p>\n

The tree sits at Kurilpa Common, a state-owned lot taken over by “guerilla gardeners” during the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n

The woman who had been in the tree since 2pm on Monday is in police custody.<\/p>\n

Police said she would be charged with trespass.<\/p>\n

\"a<\/p>\n

A cherry picker was used to get the woman out of the tree. (ABC News)<\/p>\n

Sharai, who refused to give her last name, spoke to the ABC via a phone lifted up to her in the basket of a pool skimmer.<\/p>\n

“I’ve never climbed a tree in this kind of way, but I turned up when I heard what was happening,” she said.<\/p>\n

“It was the only way that I could see holding off the process of selling it off to developers.”<\/p>\n

Locals barricaded themselves in the garden in 2025 in an attempt to stop it closing. Gardeners had also been warned the soil could be contaminated<\/a>, and not to eat fruit or vegetables grown there.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Brisbane woman Sharai says she felt climbing a tree was her only option to try and save the space. (ABC News)<\/p>\n

Sharai said the site had a lot of meaning for her, and she had scattered her friend’s ashes on the block.<\/p>\n

“We’ve been fighting off developers for quite some time,” she said.<\/p>\n

“This is a place that is really special to all of us and significant so we’re going to fight to save it.”<\/p>\n

Guerilla gardeners defy health warnings<\/a><\/p>\n

The Queensland government says illegal gardeners are putting their health at risk by eating food grown on an unused plot of land in Brisbane.<\/p>\n

She was lifted down from the tree shortly before 1pm.<\/p>\n

Queensland Housing Minister Sam O’Connor said the common “was never a sanctioned community garden”.<\/p>\n

“It might have been the use that people had illegally moved in there to do \u2026 but that was never what this site was,” he said.<\/p>\n

The land was previously owned by Brisbane City Council, before it was bought by the state government and sold to be developed into housing.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

The block was turned into a garden in 2020 but this was “never sanctioned”, the state’s housing minister said.\u00a0 (ABC Radio Brisbane: Kenji Sato)<\/p>\n

“We’ve got a mandate to get houses out of the ground and to use our state land as best as we possibly can,” Mr O’Connor said.<\/p>\n

Greens councillor Trina Massey, who represents the Gabba Ward, said she believed the Brisbane City Council should buy back the land.<\/p>\n

\"Trina<\/p>\n

Councillor Trina Massey says she believes the council should buy back the land. (ABC News)<\/p>\n

“But also, if it is not being sold back, the state government needs to build social and affordable housing,” she said.<\/p>\n

“We are not going to solve the housing crisis by selling off public land and not delivering houses that everyday people can be in.”<\/p>\n

The site was featured in a 2022 episode of Gardening Australia, which interviewed the Growing Forward “guerilla gardeners”<\/a> who transformed the site at the start of the pandemic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A protester who spent 23 hours up a tree in an unsanctioned community garden near Brisbane’s CBD has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":41172,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[99,32843,32844,1210,32845,25726,12696,1047,1865,211,212,1239],"class_list":["post-41171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brisbane","tag-brisbane","tag-brisbane-council","tag-community-garden","tag-development","tag-housing-development","tag-kurilpa","tag-park","tag-police","tag-protest","tag-qld","tag-queensland","tag-urban-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41171\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}