Biography
Jim Dowling is a longtime Brisbane Catholic Worker arrested at Pine Gap and Talisman Sabre military exercises in Australia for nonviolent civil disobedience against U.S./Australian war exercises.
2013 episode review October 13, 2026: The Nuclear Resister 171, September 2, 2013, page 6, Australia, names Jim Dowling among four people arrested July 19 at the Rockhampton barracks blockade. This replaces the unsupported December 31 arrest and admission entries. The page's subsequent overnight detention concerns two different activists, not Dowling; its separate hours-later release concerns a German action. Neither is assigned to him. His own admission, discharge and final disposition remain unresolved.
The March 2017 Toowong Cemetery report identifies Jim Dowling as removing the metal sword from a war-memorial cross during a March 1 Catholic Worker action, while Tim Webb reshaped it into a garden tool. It reports Dowling’s subsequent arrest on a willful-damage charge and release pending a March 16 court appearance. The reproduced newspaper account places charging on Thursday rather than simply assigning the action date as his arrest date. No prison admission, completed jail day, later verdict or new current-status claim is inferred. This adds historical biographical context to his separately recorded military-base protest cases.
Jim Dowling’s first-person Pine Gap account corroborates his September 29, 2016 arrest with four other peace pilgrims, detention in police vans and a cell, and release after Judge Daynor Trigg dismissed the charges because the required Attorney-General authorization was absent. He expected possible renewed charges, not a final adjudication on the merits. The threatened seven-year maximum was not imposed imprisonment. Contemporary report, The Nuclear Resister.
