John Englart

John Englart received the Environmental Sustainability Award from Moreland Council in 2019 at the Moreland Awards ceremony for his cintinuing advocacy on climate action at the local level.

In 2014 some of Englart's early citizen photojournalism work of Gay Pride Week events in Sydney in 1973, donated to the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives, were featured in a Melbourne photographic exhibition curated by Dr Marcus Bunyan.

In 2013 he joined Margo Kingston's team of citizen journalists for the Nofibs website to report the 2013 Australian federal election within individual electorates. Englart covered the candidates and issues for the Federal Division of Wills with Labor sitting MP Kelvin Thomson.

His contributions to activism as a founding member of Jura Books in 1977 and other activist book collectives plus his citizen journalism were recognised by the Eureka Australia Medal award conferred by Dr Joseph Toscano and the Anarchist Media Institute at Bakery Hill, Ballarat on December 3, 2009.

John Englart worked for Telstra Corporation for 31 years before being made redundant in 2005. He has worked in web design and web content administration since 1996. After being made redundant, he attended TAFE to do a dual Diploma in IT Web Development and Multimedia. After finishing his course he was employed in the web team at Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE, now known as Melbourne Polytechnic.

For the Friends of the Earth Australia book published in 2004 on the history of Friends of the Earth campaigns in Australia he contributed an article on the Rides against Uranium in the 1970s, which he participated in. These events helped launch FoE to prominence as an environmental organisation in Australia.

Since 2004 Englart has gradually increased his focus on climate change and environmental issues in his journalism and blogging, and is involved in local groups Sustainable Fawkner and Climate Action Moreland. In 2015 Englart was an accredited NGO delegate for Climate Action Moreland and Climate Action Network Australia to the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. Subsequently, he also attended the 2016 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Marrakech.

He documented the growing peace movement protests in Melbourne after the September 11 attacks on New York in 2001 and the subsequent invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, including publishing an 80-page booklet covering the period from 2001 to 2007.

In 2000 during the S11 (protest) at the World Economic Forum in Melbourne he started contributing to Melbourne Indymedia, a node of the global Indymedia network, with his written reports and photos of the protest. He continues to contribute reports to Indymedia nodes in Australia and internationally.

His work as a citizen journalist initially came to widespread public attention in the 1998 Australian waterfront dispute where he ran a website called Takver's Soapbox - War on the Wharfies that collated and paraphrased the daily news reports with his own reporting of Melbourne events to present an accurate and timely account sympathetic to the Maritime Union of Australia point of view as a pro-union anarchist.

The website was awarded LabourStart website of the week in April 1998.

His pseudonym was adopted in 1997 from a minor character in Ursula Le Guin's novel The Dispossessed. On his website he outlined a reason for adopting this pseudonym: "By adopting the name of Takver, I pay tribute to Ursula Le Guin and her humanism as a person and her skill and integrity as a writer. It is also an attempt to articulate that history is made by lots of ordinary people - not just governments, or the rich and famous."

John Englart (born 1955), pseudonym Takver, is an Australian citizen journalist, photojournalist, Videographer and blogger from Melbourne.