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.
Queensland Fire Department escorted the woman out of the tree safely after a power line was removed to clear the way down.
The tree sits at Kurilpa Common, a state-owned lot taken over by “guerilla gardeners” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The woman who had been in the tree since 2pm on Monday is in police custody.
Police said she would be charged with trespass.
A cherry picker was used to get the woman out of the tree. (ABC News)
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.
“I’ve never climbed a tree in this kind of way, but I turned up when I heard what was happening,” she said.
“It was the only way that I could see holding off the process of selling it off to developers.“
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, and not to eat fruit or vegetables grown there.
Brisbane woman Sharai says she felt climbing a tree was her only option to try and save the space. (ABC News)
Sharai said the site had a lot of meaning for her, and she had scattered her friend’s ashes on the block.
“We’ve been fighting off developers for quite some time,” she said.
“This is a place that is really special to all of us and significant so we’re going to fight to save it.”
She was lifted down from the tree shortly before 1pm.
Queensland Housing Minister Sam O’Connor said the common “was never a sanctioned community garden”.
“It might have been the use that people had illegally moved in there to do … but that was never what this site was,” he said.
The land was previously owned by Brisbane City Council, before it was bought by the state government and sold to be developed into housing.
The block was turned into a garden in 2020 but this was “never sanctioned”, the state’s housing minister said. (ABC Radio Brisbane: Kenji Sato)
“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.
The site was featured in a 2022 episode of Gardening Australia, which interviewed the Growing Forward “guerilla gardeners” who transformed the site at the start of the pandemic.
