The Greens Leader & Jimi Hendrix

Dr Bob Brown (above) the leader who has taken the Australian Greens party to such extraordinary heights with 9 Senators now holding the balance of power in the Upper House for the next six years, resigned today as party leader and as an MP.

The openly gay Brown plans to spend more time at his Tasmanian property with partner Paul Thomas. Needless to say the media, notably News Corp which vowed in an editorial to "destroy The Greens" has already begun to promote conspiracy theories for his resignation, pinning it to the Carbon Price (earth to News Corp-it's a price not a tax) and so on, ignoring the fact that next year Brown would undoubtedly be re-elected and faced serving in the Senate until he was 75.

What is less well known is that Brown in 1970 as a young doctor having graduated from Sydney University was working as a locum at St Mary's Hospital in South Kensington when Jimi Hendrix's body was brought in.

Brown says it was obvious Hendrix had been dead for some hours and the presumption was that he had died from a drug overdose. Despite talk at the time that Hendrix had been murdered, Brown says there was no way of proving as much by an autopsy which he assisted with and he was never spoken to by police over the matter.
And it was Bob Brown who faced the British media that morning to announce that Jimi Hendrix had passed away.
You can hear an interview Brown gave on the subject some years ago to 2GB here on the Greens website.

G.W.Lambert self portrait 1920

Kit Lambert

## Jimi Hendrix who died in at the age of 28 had another Australian connection with some degrees of separation. It was Kit Lambert, the man who discovered The Who who was the first to realise the potential of Hendrix when he saw Jimi performing in a pub in West London. He recalled later :
"He was amazing, not only playing the guitar with first his right hand, then left but eventually with his teeth. I had to have him and in my mind I created an instant record label, Track Records and signed Hendrix before we even knew how a record was produced".

Lambert was the son of the English classical composer Constant Lambert who was the son of one of Australia's first great artists and the Official War Artist at the WW1 Gallipoli campaign, George Washington Lambert.