Early Life
Lee Rhiannon was born Lee Brown, the daughter of Bill and Freda Brown, who were long-term members of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and later the Soviet-aligned Socialist Party of Australia (SPA). Her parents' membership of the CPA led to documentation of her life by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) from as early as the age of seven. She joined the SPA around 1973.
She sat the New South Wales Higher School Certificate at Sydney Girls High School in 1969 and graduated in 1975 as a Bachelor of Science, majoring in botany and zoology with honours in botany, at the University of New South Wales.
During the 1970s Rhiannon was arrested during anti-apartheid protests. In the 1980s she helped organise a "peace camp" protest outside the joint US-Australian defence facility at Pine Gap, central Australia. According to Mark Aarons, she left the Socialist Party in the early 1980s. Rhiannon edited the Soviet-funded and backed newspaper Survey from 1988 until it ceased publication in 1990. She joined the Greens in 1990.
Lee Brown married Paddy O'Gorman, from whom she separated in 1987. They had three children. Following their separation, she adopted the surname "Rhiannon", the name of a figure from Welsh mythology.
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