Bob Brown is walking, but nearly wasn’t.

In July, while on the Tasman Peninsula, south-east of Hobart, staying at a friend’s cabin with his partner, Paul Thomas, he rose from bed one morning, took a few steps to the lounge room and began gasping. He couldn’t suck in enough air and had to sit. And he noticed his left calf was sore.

Having trained as a doctor more than 50 years ago, the celebrated environmentalist and Australian Greens’ lodestar quickly diagnosed himself: he had a pulmonary embolism. A blood clot that formed in a vein in his leg had risen to an artery in his lungs and was stopping the blood flow. Possibly in more than one spot.

He wondered if that might be it.

“I was thinking it could be,” he says more than two months on. “And that it might not be. But I know it’s coming

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