Even though I grew up in Tassie it wasn’t until about six years ago that I visited the Styx Forest and stood under, and unfortunately, on some of the oldest trees in the Southern Hemisphere. I grew up in a town with three sawmills, was used to the roar of loaded timber trucks and the huge logs they carried. My dad was a carpenter and I grew up with the smell of sawdust in my nostrils and the feel of finely finished timber under my fingers. I still have a piece of "King Billy" pine that I sometimes scratch just to release the celery, sweet / sour odour and am immediately transported back to my earliest memories of sitting on the shaving littered workshop floor playing with my toy cars while dad worked at his bench.
I recall later times when I went to my mates farms near the small towns in the region behind my home town of Ulverstone and how we played soldiers in the bush. We went rabbiting and sometimes slept over in the rough. We chased cows back to the tracks and rode horses along dark trails enclosed by tall timbers. I learnt to drive in the bush. We used the dirt and gravel tracks to learn the techniques of rally driving – or at least that’s what we called it. An older mate with a license, a car and a lot of nerve made for a great Saturday afternoon. I rode my trail bike down tracks I had also hiked. I passed the cubbies we built as kids and the forts that our sworn childhood ‘enemies’ had constructed. I passed ‘battle fields’ in which boys acted out their movie heroes roles.
When I was older I hiked to the tops of hills and looked out over the green / blue haze of a late summer afternoon. I took lovers into the forests and enjoyed the warmth of earth and body. I fished in rivers that were so clear you could see the waving of the moss on the rocks on the bottom and I remember getting sunburnt under the chin one day from spending too long sitting on a rock with my line dangling while the sun beat down and reflected off the surface. Sun screen everywhere but there.
I remember paddling my kayak up the Leven River for miles. Jumping fish, platypus’ on the bank and dive-bombing Kookaburras for distraction. I remember a time when we camped on a property and went for a midnight walk and almost fell in the Leven when we broke through the bush with the water lapping at the tree roots.
We had family friends who had been Hydo workers and who had lived at Poatina, Strathgordon, Gowrie Park and Miena on the Great Lake. I visited the Cradle Mountain Chalet a few times each year. I hiked around Lake St. Clair and visited Rosebury, Zeehan and Queenstown where my dad had built mining houses. Yet for the first 20 years that I lived in Tassie I had never visited the Styx.
When I did it changed my mind and it was a drug and alcohol free experience. My mate and I had driven in from Hobart while on holiday. We found our way to the tallest and oldest trees in the Southern Hemisphere. We drove to the remains of stumps so large that two twenty seater buses could be double parked on top. We jumped into the hollow and were swallowed up in the vast cavern rain, rot and small animals had created. We walked to a tree so tall that when you looked up on the rainy day we were there, the rain drops fell into your nostrils. Then we had to leave. On the way out we got lost. Eventually we found a logging road and thought we could use it to get back to the main road. As we rounded a bend just a few minutes later a scene of utter and terrifying destruction confronted us. Due to the road conditions we had not been travelling fast but now we were compelled to slow down.
The ground around us resembled a scene from one of those apocalyptic movies where you see everything and nothing. You know what it was that was there, but nothing remains. The ground had been dug up in what looked like clay formed waves, like a huge farrow had been pulled though behind gigantic horses. Up and down each crest and trough lay the blackened remains of old growth forest. Trees that had taken hundreds if not thousands of years to grow were now broken, blackened sticks floating on an ocean of destruction. On and on it went for kilometre after kilometre until we found a locked gate just short of the main road and we had to turn around and track back through the grisly scene once more.
I had seen log trucks rushing into and out of Ulverstone for twenty years but like so much else in our sanitised, obsfucated world I was never told what really occurs in order to get those logs out of native, old growth forests. Unlike the plantation forests which are neatly sown with laser guided planters, native Australian bush is distinctly unkempt. It adheres to no pattern or growth logic. So when it comes to clear fell "harvesting", ‘good’ and ‘bad’ tress are taken together but only the trees that can be ‘value added’ are removed. The rest are fire bombed, burnt and left to rot. The result is sterile, ‘scorched earth’ that will take hundreds of years to regenerate if the rain doesn’t turn the topsoil into mud and wash it into the nearest stream or river choking the life out of that habitat as well.
My grandfather, my father’s father, was a labourer and forester. I guess that in part explains my dad’s reason for going into the wood working trade. I remember grand- dad’s grinding wheel. It was foot operated and was about 600mm in diameter. I recall taking the end of more than one finger if my hand slipped off the axe blade before I got it off the wheel. Until he died grand dad used to ride his pushbike three miles each way to his old mate’s place and they would split wood together. My grandfather’s last act was to split wood with his mate. One night after doing the six-mile round trip he had a heart attack. A week later, never recovering from the faint he had fallen into, he died.
This week both parties announced their forest policies. All I can say about Labor’s is that it is about what one would have expected. Another 12 month inquiry and a pile of money to support "industry restructuring". The Coalition policy does nothing to stop the destruction of new tracts of native, old growth forest in the Styx and other so called ‘protected areas’ and will only codify those places already known to be inaccessible and of no interest to the logging companies. In my opinion neither goes far enough, but much and all as I am loathe to say it, the Labor plan does offer some way forward in resolving what will inevitably occur as capital continues to cut a swathe through our native forests.
I have fond memories of growing up in a town that relied on fishing, saw milling and farming for its survival but what I have felt this week has been more than some nostalgic reminiscences. What I have felt is anger that the ones who stand to lose are not the forestry workers of Tasmania, but their and our children and grandchildren. Its simple maths really. An old growth forest got that way because its older than white settlement. None of us were around then and none of us will be around if new growth reaches old age.
The forestry workers will have to retool anyway. Plantation timber is the future. Its cheaper to develop, harvest and process. It’s the natural development of the political economy of the timber industry. The bottom line is, many timber workers will be out of work eventually simply because they are harvesting something that, for all practical purposes, is not ‘renewable’ in their lifetimes or the lifetimes of the children they say they want to feed and care for. I don’t know who organised the rally in Launceston this week, but rest assured neither the Coalition Parties or the Tasmanian State government are on the side of the timber industry workers. While they say they support the industry, this should be read as ‘supporting the profit making potential of the owners of the companies that employ the workers and contractors’.
This Saturday is not just about old growth forests. It’s not just about ‘the economy’, interest rates or when John Howard will retire. Its about the future we get to chose. I guess from this you can discern where my vote will be going. However, you and your conscience will have to live with where your vote goes. I like to think that my vote in some way will in some way, like my grand dad who died in old age doing what came naturally, allow the trees in the Styx forest to grow old and die as nature intended them to.