A crocodile attack can reveal the truth about nature in an instant.

But putting that insight into words can take years.

(Many people who have never read a word Val wrote know of her as the woman who survived a crocodile attack in Kakadu – here is her account of an experience which most don’t survive.)

By Val Plumwood

In the early wet season, Kakadu’s paperbark wetlands are especially stunning, as the water lilies weave white, pink, and blue patterns of dreamlike beauty over the shining thunderclouds reflected in their still waters. Yesterday, the water lilies and the wonderful bird life had enticed me into a joyous afternoon’s idyll as I ventured onto the East Alligator Lagoon for the first time in a canoe lent by the park service. “You can play about on the backwaters,” the ranger had said, “but don’t go onto the main river channel. The current’s too swift, and if you get into trouble, there are the crocodiles. Lots of them along the river!” I followed his advice and glutted myself on the magical beauty and bird life of the lily lagoons, untroubled by crocodiles. Today, I wanted to repeat that experience despite the drizzle beginning to fall as I neared the canoe launch site. I set off on a day trip in search of an Aboriginal rock art site across the lagoon and up a side channel. The drizzle turned to a warm rain within a few hours, and the magic was lost. The birds were invisible, the water lilies were sparser, and the lagoon seemed even a little menacing. I noticed now how low the 14-foot canoe sat in the water, just a few inches of fiberglass between me and the great saurians, close relatives of the ancient dinosaurs. Not long ago, saltwater crocodiles were considered endangered, as virtually all mature animals in Australia’s north were shot by commercial hunters. But after a decade and more of protection, they are now the most plentiful of the large animals of Kakadu National Park. I was actively involved in preserving such places, and for me, the crocodile was a symbol of the power and integrity of this place and the incredible richness of its aquatic habitats.

After hours of searching the maze of shallow channels in the swamp, I had not found the clear channel leading to the rock art site, as shown on the ranger’s sketch map. When I pulled my canoe over in driving rain to a rock outcrop for a hasty, sodden lunch, I experienced the unfamiliar sensation of being watched. Having never been one for timidity, in philosophy or in life, I decided, rather than return defeated to my sticky trailer, to explore a clear, deep channel closer to the river I had travelled along the previous day.

The rain and wind grew more severe, and several times I pulled over to tip water from the canoe. The channel soon developed steep mud banks and snags. Farther on, the channel opened up and was eventually blocked by a large sandy bar. I pushed the canoe toward the bank, looking around carefully before getting out in the shallows and pulling the canoe up. I would be safe from crocodiles in the canoe I had been told but swimming and standing or wading at the water’s edge were dangerous. Edges are one of the crocodile’s favourite food-capturing places. I saw nothing, but the feeling of unease that had been with me all day intensified.

The rain eased temporarily, and I crossed a sandbar to see more of this puzzling place. As I crested a gentle dune, I was shocked to glimpse the muddy waters of the East Alligator River gliding silently only 100 yards away. The channel had led me back to the main river. Nothing stirred along the riverbank, but a great tumble of escarpment cliffs up on the other side caught my attention. One especially striking rock formation a single large rock balanced precariously on a much smaller one held my gaze. As I looked, my whispering sense of unease turned into a shout of danger. The strange formation put me sharply in mind of two things: of the indigenous Gagadgu owners of Kakadu, whose advice about coming here I had not sought, and of the precariousness of my own life, of human lives. As a solitary specimen of a major prey species of the saltwater crocodile, I was standing in one of the most dangerous places on earth.

I turned back with a feeling of relief. I had not found the rock paintings, I rationalized, but it was too late to look for them. The strange rock formation presented itself instead as a telos of the day, and now I could go, home to trailer comfort.

As I pulled the canoe out into the main current, the rain and wind started up again. I had not gone more than five or ten minutes down the channel when, rounding a bend, I saw in midstream what looked like a floating stick one I did not recall passing on my way up. As the current moved me toward it, the stick developed eyes. A crocodile! It did not look like a large one. I was close to it now but was not especially afraid; an encounter would add interest to the day.

Although I was paddling to miss the crocodile, our paths were strangely convergent. I knew it would be close, but I was totally unprepared for the great blow when it struck the canoe. Again it struck, again and again, now from behind, shuddering the flimsy craft. As I paddled furiously, the blows continued. The unheard of was happening; the canoe was under attack! For the first time, it came to me fully that I was prey. I realized I had to get out of the canoe or risk being capsized.

The bank now presented a high, steep face of slippery mud. The only obvious avenue of escape was a paperbark tree near the muddy bank wall. I made the split-second decision to leap into its lower branches and climb to safety. I steered to the tree and stood up to jump. At the same instant, the crocodile rushed up alongside the canoe, and its beautiful, flecked golden eyes looked straight into mine. Perhaps I could bluff it, drive it away, as I had read of British tiger hunters doing. I waved my arms and shouted, “Go away!” (We’re British here.) The golden eyes glinted with interest. I tensed for the jump and leapt. Before my foot even tripped the first branch, I had a blurred, incredulous vision of great toothed jaws bursting from the water. Then I was seized between the legs in a red-hot pincer grip and whirled into the suffocating wet darkness.

Our final thoughts during near-death experiences can tell us much about our frameworks of subjectivity. A framework capable of sustaining action and purpose must, I think, view the world “from the inside,” structured to sustain the concept of a continuing, narrative self; we remake the world in that way as our own, investing it with meaning, reconceiving it as sane, survivable, amenable to hope and resolution. The lack of fit between this subject-centered version and reality comes into play in extreme moments. In its final, frantic attempts to protect itself from the knowledge that threatens the narrative framework, the mind can instantaneously fabricate terminal doubt of extravagant proportions: This is not really happening. This is a nightmare from which I will soon awake. This desperate delusion split apart as I hit the water. In that flash, I glimpsed the world for the first time “from the outside,” as a world no longer my own, an unrecognizable bleak landscape composed of raw necessity, indifferent to my life or death.

Few of those who have experienced the crocodile’s death roll have lived to describe it. It is, essentially, an experience beyond words of total terror. The crocodile’s breathing and heart metabolism are not suited to prolonged struggle, so the roll is an intense burst of power designed to overcome the victim’s resistance quickly. The crocodile then holds the feebly struggling prey underwater until it drowns. The roll was a centrifuge of boiling blackness that lasted for an eternity, beyond endurance, but when I seemed all but finished, the rolling suddenly stopped. My feet touched bottom, my head broke the surface, and, coughing, I sucked at air, amazed to be alive. The crocodile still had me in its pincer grip between the legs. I had just begun to weep for the prospects of my mangled body when the crocodile pitched me suddenly into a second death roll.

When the whirling terror stopped again I surfaced again, still in the crocodile’s grip next to a stout branch of a large sandpaper fig growing in the water. I grabbed the branch, vowing to let the crocodile tear me apart rather than throw me again into that spinning, suffocating hell. For the first time I realized that the crocodile was growling, as if angry. I braced myself for another roll, but then its jaws simply relaxed; I was free. I gripped the branch and pulled away, dodging around the back of the fig tree to avoid the forbidding mud bank, and tried once more to climb into the paperbark tree.

As in the repetition of a nightmare, the horror of my first escape attempt was repeated. As I leapt into the same branch, the crocodile seized me again, this time around the upper left thigh, and pulled me under. Like the others, the third death roll stopped, and we came up next to the sandpaper fig branch again. I was growing weaker, but I could see the crocodile taking a long time to kill me this way. I prayed for a quick finish and decided to provoke it by attacking it with my hands. Feeling back behind me along the head, I encountered two lumps. Thinking I had the eye sockets, I jabbed my thumbs into them with all my might. They slid into warm, unresisting holes (which may have been the ears, or perhaps the nostrils), and the crocodile did not so much as flinch. In despair, I grabbed the branch again. And once again, after a time, I felt the crocodile jaws relax, and I pulled free.

I knew I had to break the pattern; up the slippery mud bank was the only way. I scrabbled for a grip, then slid back to-ward the waiting jaws. The second time I almost made it before again sliding back, braking my slide by grabbing a tuft of grass. I hung there, exhausted. I can’t make it, I thought. It’ll just have to come and get me. The grass tuft began to give way. Flailing to keep from sliding farther, I jammed my fingers into the mud. This was the clue I needed to survive. I used this method and the last of my strength to climb up the bank and reach the top. I was alive!

Escaping the crocodile was not the end of my struggle to survive. I was alone, severely injured, and many miles from help. During the attack, the pain from the injuries had not fully registered. As I took my first urgent steps, I knew something was wrong with my leg. I did not wait to inspect the damage but took off away from the crocodile toward the ranger station.

After putting more distance between me and the crocodile, I stopped and realized for the first time how serious my wounds were. I did not remove my clothing to see the damage to the groin area inflicted by the first hold. What I could see was bad enough. The left thigh hung open, with bits of fat, tendon, and muscle showing, and a sick, numb feeling suffused my entire body. I tore up some clothing to bind the wounds and made a tourniquet for my bleeding thigh, then staggered on, still elated from my escape. I went some distance before realizing with a sinking heart that I had crossed the swamp above the ranger station in the canoe and could not get back without it.

I would have to hope for a search party, but I could maximize my chances by moving downstream toward the swamp edge, almost two miles away. I struggled on, through driving rain, shouting for mercy from the sky, apologizing to the angry crocodile, repenting to this place for my intrusion. I came to a flooded tributary and made a long upstream detour looking for a safe place to cross.

My considerable bush experience served me well, keeping me on course (navigating was second nature). After several hours, I began to black out and had to crawl the final distance to the swamp’s edge. I lay there in the gathering dusk to await what would come. I did not expect a search party until the following day, and I doubted I could last the night.

The rain and wind stopped with the onset of darkness, and it grew perfectly still. Dingoes howled, and clouds of mosquitoes whined around my body. I hoped to pass out soon, but consciousness persisted. There were loud swirling noises in the water, and I knew I was easy meat for another crocodile. After what seemed like a long time, I heard the distant sound of a motor and saw a light moving on the swamp’s far side. Thinking it was a boat, I rose up on my elbow and called for help. I thought I heard a faint reply, but then the motor grew fainter and the lights went away. I was as devastated as any castaway who signals desperately to a passing ship and is not seen.

The lights had not come from a boat. Passing my trailer, the ranger noticed there was no light inside it. He had driven to the canoe launch site on a motorized trike and realized I had not returned. He had heard my faint call for help, and after some time, a rescue craft appeared. As I began my 13-hour journey to Darwin Hospital, my rescuers discussed going upriver the next day to shoot a crocodile. I spoke strongly against this plan: I was the intruder, and no good purpose could be served by random revenge. The water around the spot where I had been lying was full of crocodiles. That spot was under six feet of water the next morning, flooded by the rains signaling the start of the wet season.

In the end I was found in time and survived against many odds. A similar combination of good fortune and human care enabled me to overcome a leg infection that threatened amputation or worse. I probably have Paddy Pallin’s incredibly tough walking shorts to thank for the fact that the groin injuries were not as severe as the leg injuries. I am very lucky that I can still walk well and have lost few of my previous capacities. The wonder of being alive after being held quite literally in the jaws of death has never entirely left me. For the first year, the experience of existence as an unexpected blessing cast a golden glow over my life, despite the injuries and the pain. The glow has slowly faded, but some of that new gratitude for life endures, even if I remain unsure whom I should thank. The gift of gratitude came from the searing flash of near-death knowledge, a glimpse “from the outside” of the alien, incomprehensible world in which the narrative of self has ended.

I had survived the crocodile attack, but not the cultural drive to represent it in terms of the masculinist monster myth: the master narrative. The encounter did not immediately present itself to me as a mythic struggle. I recall thinking with relief, as I struggled from the attack site, that I now had a good excuse for being late with an overdue article and a foolish but unusual story to tell a few friends. Crocodile attacks in North Queensland have often led to massive crocodile slaughters, and I feared that my experience might have put the creatures at risk again. That’s why I tried to minimize publicity and save the story for my friends alone.

This proved to be extremely difficult. The media machine headlined a garbled version anyway, and I came under great pressure, especially from the hospital authorities, whose phone lines had been jammed for days, to give a press interview. We all want to pass on our story, of course, and I was no exception. During those incredible split seconds when the crocodile dragged me a second time from tree to water, I had a powerful vision of friends discussing my death with grief and puzzlement. The focus of my own regret was that they might think I had been taken while risking a swim. So important is the story and so deep the connection to others, carried through the narrative self, that it haunts even our final desperate moments.

By the same token, the narrative self is threatened when its story is taken over by others and given an alien meaning. This is what the mass media do in stereotyping and sensationalizing stories like mine and when they digest and repackage the stories of indigenous peoples and other subordinated groups. As a story that evoked the monster myth, mine was especially subject to masculinist appropriation. The imposition of the master narrative occurred in several ways: in the exaggeration of the crocodile’s size, in portraying the encounter as a heroic wrestling match, and especially in its sexualization. The events seemed to provide irresistible material for the pornographic imagination, which encouraged male identification with the crocodile and interpretation of the attack as sadistic rape.

Although I had survived in part because of my active struggle and bush experience, one of the major meanings imposed on my story was that the bush was no place for a woman. Much of the Australian media had trouble accepting that women could be competent in the bush, but the most advanced expression of this masculinist mind-set was Crocodile Dundee, which was filmed in Kakadu not long after my encounter. Two recent escape accounts had both involved active women, one of whom had actually saved a man. The film’s story line, however, split the experience along conventional gender lines, appropriating the active struggle and escape parts for the male hero and representing the passive “victim” parts in the character of an irrational and helpless woman who has to be rescued from the crocodile-sadist (the rival male) by the bushman hero.

I had to wait nearly a decade before I could repossess my story and write about it in my own terms. For our narrative selves, passing on our stories is crucial, a way to participate in and be empowered by culture. Retelling the story of a traumatic event can have tremendous healing power. During my recovery, it seemed as if each telling took part of the pain and distress of the memory away. Passing on the story can help us transcend not only social harm, but also our own biological death. Cultures differ in how well they provide for passing on their stories. Because of its highly privatized sense of the individual, contemporary Western culture is, I think, relatively impoverished in this respect. In contrast, many Australian Aboriginal cultures offer rich opportunities for passing on stories. What’s more, Aboriginal thinking about death sees animals, plants, and humans sharing a common life force. Their cultural stories often express continuity and fluidity between humans and other life that enables a degree of transcendence of the individual’s death.

In Western thinking, in contrast, the human is set apart from nature as radically other. Religions like Christianity must then seek narrative continuity for the individual in the idea of an authentic self that belongs to an imperishable realm above the lower sphere of nature and animal life. The eternal soul is the real, enduring, and identifying part of the human self, while the body is animal and corrupting. But transcending death this way exacts a great price; it treats the earth as a lower, fallen realm, true human identity as outside nature, and it provides narrative continuity for the individual only in isolation from the cultural and ecological community and in opposition to a person’s perishable body.

It seems to me that in the human supremacist culture of the West there is a strong effort to deny that we humans are also animals positioned in the food chain. This denial that we ourselves are food for others is reflected in many aspects of our death and burial practices the strong coffin, conventionally buried well below the level of soil fauna activity, and the slab over the grave to prevent any other thing from digging us up, keeps the Western human body from becoming food for other species. Horror movies and stories also reflect this deep-seated dread of becoming food for other forms of life: Horror is the wormy corpse, vampires sucking blood, and alien monsters eating humans. Horror and outrage usually greet stories of other species eating humans. Even being nibbled by leeches, sandflies, and mosquitoes can stir various levels of hysteria.

This concept of human identity positions humans outside and above the food chain, not as part of the feast in a chain of reciprocity but as external manipulators and masters of it: Animals can be our food, but we can never be their food. The outrage we experience at the idea of a human being eaten is certainly not what we experience at the idea of animals as food. The idea of human prey threatens the dualistic vision of human mastery in which we humans manipulate nature from outside, as predators but never prey. We may daily consume other animals by the billions, but we ourselves cannot be food for worms and certainly not meat for crocodiles. This is one reason why we now treat so inhumanely the animals we make our food, for we cannot imagine ourselves similarly positioned as food. We act as if we live in a separate realm of culture in which we are never food, while other animals inhabit a different world of nature in which they are no more than food, and their lives can be utterly distorted in the service of this end.

Before the encounter, it was as if I saw the whole universe as framed by my own narrative, as though the two were joined perfectly and seamlessly together. As my own narrative and the larger story were ripped apart, I glimpsed a shockingly indifferent world in which I had no more significance than any other edible being. The thought, “This can’t be happening to me, I’m a human being. I am more than just food!” was one component of my terminal incredulity. It was a shocking reduction, from a complex human being to a mere piece of meat. Reflection has persuaded me that not just humans but any creature can make the same claim to be more than just food. We are edible, but we are also much more than edible. Respectful, ecological eating must recognize both of these things. I was a vegetarian at the time of my encounter with the crocodile, and remain one today. This is not because I think predation itself is demonic and impure, but because I object to the reduction of animal lives in factory farming systems that treat them as living meat.

Large predators like lions and crocodiles present an important test for us. An ecosystem’s ability to support large predators is a mark of its ecological integrity. Crocodiles and other creatures that can take human life also present a test of our acceptance of our ecological identity. When they’re allowed to live freely, these creatures indicate our preparedness to coexist with the otherness of the earth, and to recognize ourselves in mutual, ecological terms, as part of the food chain, eaten as well as eater.

Thus the story of the crocodile encounter now has, for me, a significance quite the opposite of that conveyed in the master/monster narrative. It is a humbling and cautionary tale about our relationship with the earth, about the need to acknowledge our own animality and ecological vulnerability. I learned many lessons from the event, one of which is to know better when to turn back and to be more open to the sorts of warnings I had ignored that day. As on the day itself, so even more to me now, the telos of these events lies in the strange rock formation, which symbolized so well the lessons about the vulnerability of humankind I had to learn, lessons largely lost to the technological culture that now dominates the earth. In my work as a philosopher, I see more and more reason to stress our failure to perceive this vulnerability, to realize how misguided we are to view ourselves as masters of a tamed and malleable nature. The balanced rock suggests a link between my personal insensitivity and that of my culture. Let us hope that it does not take a similar near-death experience to instruct us all in the wisdom of the balanced rock.

Val Plumwood survived this incident in February 1985. After a stint as visiting professor of women’s studies at North Carolina State University, she has returned to Australia and is now ARC Fellow at the University of Sydney. Her latest book is Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (Routledge). Adapted from The Ultimate Journey (Travelers’ Tales, 1999).

https://kurungabaa.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/being-prey-by-val-plumwood/

 

Imagine driving down a long narrow dirt road. If you meet someone coming out you may have to back a fair way to find room to let the other vehicle pass. You park three quarters of the way in, just before the dry sclerophyll forest becomes moister, and walk the last couple of kilometres, watching the soil change from granite to basalt; the ferns proliferate and the leaves deepen in their green. There are a number of people walking in and all are carrying food in backpacks or baskets.

You greet old friends and see people you did not expect to see.

The road widens into a grassy clearing. There is smoke rising from somewhere and the colours of clothes, shirts, jackets and scarves appear in the makeshift meeting place. There is a great deal of grey hair. And quite a few dreadlocks; crewcuts; flowing manes of every hue and sensible boots. The billy is on; there are plenty of cups and teabags and tables laden with every sort of food, some of it from the garden around us.

Nearby is the hexagonal stone house built by the owner and creator of the garden and caretaker of the nearby forest. The sun is shining, yet the air is moist so the sun’s rays are palpable, showing the life in every surface they touch.

Nearby is one of the most stunning views you will ever see. You view it from a stone enclave at the top of the escarpment behind the house, where a dozen people can sit comfortably. You look east over the long bones of forested mountains. Never mind that much of the forest is regrowth, it all has the same blue-green-grey tinge as the mountains recede to end near the ocean glimmering blue far away. And then the sky goes on forever. Once again the universe is putting you in your place.

At the centre of the party is the host. Her voice is in the air, but she is silent. This is the last time we will be able to see her as a physical being. It is the second most important occasion in her life, and you are privileged to be here for it. None of the guests were present at the first.

But then, she is not going away entirely. She plans to stay here forever and she will. This event has her hand upon it, although she is the seemingly oblivious guest of honour.

Val Plumwood’s friends are gathered on Plumwood Mountain to say farewell to her physical form.

They follow the pallbearers up a short narrow path to the grave dug just a few metres from the house. The rock was hard and extensive and needed a few more scrapes of the shovel before the coffin would descend.

Val wanted to be buried standing up; I don’t think she wanted to be so deep, where the worms wouldn’t find her. There must be a law against it, the ‘six feet under’ rule perhaps.

Val died of ‘natural’ causes, a stroke, on February the 29th; an anniversary that can only be authentically celebrated every four years.

As people spoke, and cried, and the fiddle played (her tin whistle silent) a butterfly appeared from the garden and hovered round the group. It dipped and glided, occasionally alighting on a shoulder. Once the coffin was interred, it disappeared.

That was when Val’s friends ate fine food and chatted, and put together their stories.

“This land is my best friend,” she had said.

When she named herself after the mountain, did she envisage becoming part of it?

Val working inside her house. 1997. Photo: Terry Milligan.

As it happened, some worms were buried with her, so her mingling has already begun.

Most people are surprised, like I was, at how easy it can be to make sourdough bread. A few days ago I shared my sourdough method with a group of people at Tubbut. Its a frustrating activity in a way, because sourdough answers only to itself and most people had to head home with their loaves uncooked. Those above were cooked a couple of days later in Laura’s oven on the Errinundra and as you can see, it was well worth the wait. On the left is Laura’s sourdough rye/wholemeal and on the right, Zian’s white loaf. Just yum

When it works, there is nothing better than sourdough bread: a crisp browned crust and a soft firm crumb inside with a nutty irresistible flavour if the oven is hot enough.

A pizza oven makes perfect bread. It is VERY hot and after the pizzas have been eaten, you can pop the bread in. It will cook in half the time of your oven at home. In many European villages, people prepared their bread at home and cooked it together on the same day in a central bread oven, enjoying each other’s company. It makes sense to light the fire to heat the oven only once a week and make enough bread to last each family a few days. They would share sourdoughs too, each family with their own, perhaps a result of many years of breadmaking.

 

Why make Sourdough bread

The ‘starter’ or ‘leaven’ was probably discovered accidentally when someone left a bit of flour and water on the bench too long. It could be used for pastry and cakes before baking powder and indeed supermarkets started supplying all our needs.

As communities get more sophisticated, without time or patience to put up with sourdough, people got used to the light fluffy bread that came sliced in a plastic bag and got stale after a couple of days. I can remember when this began in the 1950s; gone were those crusty loaves that you ripped the insides out of on the way home from the shop. This bread, usually made entirely from white flour, provided little nutrition apart from the wrong kind of carbohydrates but added to our salt and sugar burden.

Some people found that their chronic stomach pain was due to their consumption of gluten, found in wheat, rye and some other grains and, of course, bread. Gluten is the protein that yeast eats. Commercial bakers increase gluten to make their bread rise larger and faster. The good thing is that in sourdough bread, the gluten is transformed by the acebactor and lactobacilli, making it much easier to digest. Its good for your gut.

So if you have trouble with gluten, don’t give up bread (unless you are a coeliac), try sourdough. Living in this glorious region of Tubbut-Bonang we have the bread (pizza) ovens to do it well.

The starter

Easiest way to get a starter is to get some from someone else. It doesn’t have to be very much. But if you want to make your own, that’s easy too.

Combine 50g of flour, rye if you have it, with one quarter cup of unprocessed water. Cover with a clean cloth and stand at room temperature for 24 hours.

Over a fortnight, feed by adding the same each day. Sniff it – the smell is the best test of its health. At this stage, it doesn’t need to be refrigerated. It is ready to use when it doubles in size, so use a container – glass jar is good – where you can see this happen. Now you can keep it in the fridge with a closed lid. Get it out at least a few hours before you need to use it and allow it to warm to room temperature; if need be, wake it up with a spoonful of flour and add some lukewarm water.

You can feed your starter with any flours you have at the time, including gluten-free.

• Use only rainwater
• Salt – a decent pinch – is a good addition, being ‘antiseptic’ and slowing down rising
• Sometimes I add a spoonful of honey to my bread as sugar also feeds the yeast
• If you don’t bake often, feed your starter once a week. If you do, leave it on the bench covered with cloth
• I keep my starter in the fridge except in winter when the back porch is colder than the fridge.

Making sourdough bread

Best to give yourself lots of time as sourdough runs to its own timetable. Many a night have I had to stay up past midnight because that is when it is ready to bake.

You shouldn’t hurry up the rising process because slower makes the sweeter loaf. Yes it may take a couple of days but patience will be rewarded.

You can make a wet dough loaf or a dry kneaded loaf. They are different textures so choose which you like best. Kneading is a traditional part of breadmaking, but good mixing can replace it.

My method

I get the starter out of the fridge and tip it into a bowl. I add potato water if I have it, with a bit of hot water to make it the right temperature – yeast likes this – or tepid water made from mixing hot and cold to the temperature where it feels neither hot nor cold on the skin.

I then add about half the flour I will need and let it absorb that. It is ready to start using when bubbles surface.

At this point I take out some and put it back in my starter jar (which I have washed) and pop that in the fridge for next time.

Then I may add more liquid depending on how many loaves I want to make. I usually make about 4 loaves and freeze some so breadmaking is fortnightly.

I usually use about a litre of liquid and however much flour is needed to make a kneadable dough. I love kneading bread but you might prefer to keep it wet and use the wet dough method. This means getting the dough to a thick consistency like a cake.

This is the point at which you add honey and fruit if you want to make a sweet loaf. You can also add a handful of rolled oats, sunflower seeds, olives, cheese, mashed cooked pumpkin or potatoes or whatever to make an interesting bread to your taste.

If you are making a dry dough, knead it until it is lively and smooth.

I have my pans greased for either method, as I do the final rising in the pans. I choose a warmish spot, perhaps the windowsill.

Using a knife I put some shallow cuts on top so I can see how it is rising. I cover it with a clean wet teatowel while rising as it can dry out.

When it is ready for the oven, I brush with olive oil to get a crisp brown crust. You can use milk too.

The oven must be very hot to start. – 220 degrees. If my stove is not cooperating, or it is too hot to light it, I use my barbecue which has a lid. Its not perfect, the bottom can burn, but it achieves that alchemy that I am looking for (when metal turns to gold, when flour and yeast turns into bread).

Putting a bowl of water in the oven to make steam helps in the cooking process. Alternatively, placing the bread in a dutch oven can achieve the same effect.

Start checking after 20 minutes or so – the bread may need turning around in the oven. Sometimes I take mine out of the tin and turn upside down and cook a further 5-10 minutes to create a crisp crust on the bottom as well.Turn out to cool and resist cutting while hot as it will crumble. However, I usually can’t wait. And now – enjoy!

 

An eagle spotted on my way to Tubbut a few years ago.

I am still reeling from the news which exploded across my Facebook yesterday –

100 wedge-tailed eagles found dead at Tubbut in East Gippsland

Oh no …. This last sanctuary for wildlife, with its many hectares of national parks and untracked craggy hills. Where, even after the last devastating fire, the wombats and wallabies are returning because where else can they go?

The eagles have long soared above these hills. They don’t know it, but their right to do so is legislated and they should feel the safer for it.

It turns out that, in our area they have had no reason to feel safe.

Settler Australians have a poor record of ‘caring’ for the bush. In they came with their cattle, sheep and horses and everything seen as a threat to their commercial activities was soon removed by whatever means necessary.

The carnage started with the First Fleet. The tendency to regard all wildlife as threatening regardless of evidence was noted in the media in 1910.

“An eagle found on a dead sheep is supposed even by experienced bushmen to have killed the animal. Part of the persecution the bird suffers arises from that misapprehension. All anyone need do to dissipate the notion is to examine a dead eagle’s talons and muscles. It drives in its talons, and with small prey crushes life out immediately, occasionally using its beak to tear. But it must rely upon the talons to carry the prey.

The eagle is not a ground feeder, except where the animal is carrion — a sheep or a bullock— and too big to carry away to a high tree. Even a moderate-sized lamb is too heavy for such holding capacity. But the bad character has gone abroad, and the real delinquencies of the bird have been exaggerated and multiplied until human murders are cited against it. Our wedge-tailed eagle has to carry some of the bad reputation of the eagle of the Alps, though it has long been known that the latter bird’s evil character is largely due to the imagination either of simple peasants or sensational fictionists. Kill him, therefore, has been the cry since the beginning of settlement. Indeed, before occupation actually began, the white man looked on it as a creature to be slaughtered. Sir Joseph Banks, who, with Captain Cook, went ashore on a small island, called by them Eagle Island, shot many of the birds. Sir Joseph remarks in one place: ‘We found the nest of an eagle, the young ones of which were killed.'”

The methods have become even more effective, involving tricking the birds into their own death. If, as in this case, more than 100 eagles were killed by the tried and true method of baiting a sheep carcass with poison, there must be a huge dent in the local population of eagles. This is carnage at a staggering scale. For the sake of a few lambs, kept in a paddock distant from human oversight. Shepherds were employed by the early squatters of the Monaro to safeguard their sheep. Not a great gig and often the only men available were ex-convicts and ticket-of-leave men and they are our forefathers.

Since then we have seen the demise of the koala from the Tubbut-Delegate River-Bonang area. A bounty was placed upon them due to the value of their fur which was fashionable in the streets of London in the 1920s and favoured by anyone who had to travel to the Arctic. The native cat or tiger quoll has all but disappeared for a variety of reasons, all human-related.

When we first came to this area in 1971 we were treated to the sight of a wedge-tailed eagle pinned to a fence in Tubbut. It gave us a general idea of the local attitude to wildlife at the time. In my first week in the area, I wrote a letter to the editor of the Bombala Times in response to an article that boasted about the number of wombat the dog-trapper had caught. It was beyond me that this creature would be seen as a pest and that the government would sanction its death in large numbers in this painful way. I didn’t save the wombat and my credentials as a greenie were established early in my residency. Before then all greenies were assumed to be city-based.

We do live in more enlightened times as the evidence mounts up about our disappearing species. The eagle was not endangered in Victoria yesterday but, for sure, the loss of so many must take them closer to the brink.

The conference dinner was brilliant with local food and this great speaker, Brian Dawe. Nothing like a bit of political irony to get councillors laughing.

Thanks to East Gippsland Shire Council, I was one of four people from our area to attend a conference in Lakes Entrance on the theme of ‘Rural Liveability’. It was the annual summit of Rural Councils Victoria.

I am wondering why, if this was the topic, we were overwhelmed by keynote speakers who looked and spoke as though they hadn’t moved outside the city limits till then and who left immediately after their presentation. It was hard to imagine the people they described moving far from their fave cafes and it was obvious that such people would never be separated from their screens and devices.

Connectivity is all.

We had been sponsored by our shire to give us ideas for our economic development. We listened and tried to dig the useful nuggets from the great volume of information so we could relay them to people back home.

On one hand, we had a state government representative (Richard Bolt, Secretary of the Department of Economic Development, Jobs, Transport and Resources) telling us that ‘Without rural Victoria, Victoria is not Victoria at all’ while acknowledging that 80% of Victoria’s growth was occurring in Melbourne. When he and others started talking about ‘the regions’, it became obvious that they weren’t looking beyond Ballarat and Geelong with maybe a glance towards Bendigo, cities by anyone’s definition. So much for rural Victoria.

Nonetheless, Richard was optimistic for us, listing advances in farming technology, opportunities to value add to our produce, wind farms and doing things to coal as our economic opportunities. Then there is tourism – improved transport (the government is looking after this), bike and walking trails, holding large conventions in our towns and the arts will help in this. He warned us against economic monocultures ‘globally exposing’ us and acknowledged that there are ‘concentrations of disadvantage’.

We were reassured to be told that Melbourne gets why rural development is essential.

East Gippsland’s CEO Gary Gaffney followed with the sombre news that in just a few years 44% of the shire’s residents will be over 60.

So here we are, an ageing population in one of the world’s most beautiful places, with our poor telecommunications and lack of public transport, being told by Global Futurist, Chris Riddell, that the Amazon Effect is defining our future. Apps have replaced customer service and we have to do things differently. Fortunately technology is here to help us.

Meanwhile, trust in our institutions is at its lowest ebb and truth has become a service, one among many. Instead of seeking enjoyment in nature, we will be looking for mind-blowing experiences on our devices and it may be difficult to discern the line between the real and the virtual. Indeed, we will be able to augment reality and the next Pokomon phenomenon may be set in the bush.

The launch of Uber in rural areas could have solved some transport problems but again, ‘rural’ really meant Ballarat, Geelong, Bendigo and the Mornington Peninsula.

Blockchain technology will change everything, according to Chris. It will put all our information into one place which can then be passed on to organisations – of our choice. This will enable lenders, for instance, to make an instant decision as to whether we are eligible for a mortgage.

‘The future is about sheds’: ah, we rural dwellers could identify with that. But perhaps our sheds are different from the ones where Apple, Hewlett & Packard and Google were launched.

‘Every moment is now a technology moment.’ Mobile phones are disruptive technologies which have ‘changed the game’. Rural areas with poor mobile reception will not be popular with the growing number of Nomophobes who are fearful of places where they cannot connect via mobile or internet. We will need excellent mental health services to deal with the depression, panic, fear, dependence, rejection, low self-esteem and loneliness that nomophobic visitors are likely to experience, particularly in remote rural places. Currently, many ‘towns’ cannot offer even a store, a café or a service station to give people unused to disconnection their bearings in our landscapes.

Chris did touch Earth from time to time. He admitted that the digital generation does what people have always done but in a different way. This is the touch screen generation.

The digital world is by no means neutral, although the ability for people to choose topics, web sites and games is touted as a form of balance. Anyone who remembers being a child knows that in fact, most people do what their generation is doing, by choice. Thus, at present, kids are playing a video game called ‘Call of Duty’ which allows them to fight in World War II as a character of their choice.

Darren Chester, our local Federal Member, had just come from the plane, where he wrote the speech we heard; it was directed to his ‘home’ audience, unlike the others who delivered their off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all, presentation. Knowing his electorate well, he is aware of the contribution rural areas make to the wealth of the nation – economically, socially, culturally and environmentally. In such an urbanised country – only 10% live and work in rural areas outside cities – our critical contribution is not recognised by governments and most of the 90%. That our kids leave for educational and work opportunities is to be expected; that we can’t attract them back is the problem to address.

Chester has a different idea of decentralisation to his fellow National, Barnaby Joyce, who thinks it means moving disgruntled public servants out to the regional city in his electorate. Darren supports local business as the driver of decentralisation. The government is the dominant landholder in East Gippsland Shire but invests little in it. He didn’t but let’s explore further what that means – well-managed national parks, preparedness to fight fires, ecologists to monitor and ensure species are managed well and educators to introduce visitors to the wonders of our mountain and coastal ecosystems. Jobs, and good ones.

Darren thinks rural people are too polite for their own good. He listed the ten ‘p’s for politicians: the passion to bring others along, identification of the problem, planning for success, partnerships demonstrating skin in the game, positivity, persuasiveness, persistence and praise and promotion of your project. Finally, be parochial and prescient (that one’s mine) and make sure your project rolls out before elections.

Grattan Mullett is a Kurnai man who grew up at Lake Tyers. He works for GLAWAC overseeing the joint management plan with DELWP. Still in its early days, the plan offers employment for Indigenous rangers and tourist guides.

Kerry Anderson, businesswoman and author of ‘Entrepreneurship – its everybody’s business’ followed Grattan and put her foot in it straight away by talking about East Gippsland as though it was a blank canvas before Europeans started putting down roads and buildings. She works with rural towns concerned about their future – her most useful advice is that change is more achievable if it’s led by community for the community.

James Flintoft of Regional Development Victoria told us what his organisation is doing to support regional communities. It supports activities which increase economic potential, such as enhancing broadband in some areas and offering free wifi in Shepparton and North Geelong.

Urban planner Laura Murray took the view that planning policy would need to be strengthened to encourage people to move out of cities to rural areas. The ’20 minute neighbourhoods’ that planners aim for are difficult to apply in rural settings and towns can, of course, emulate the suburbs of large cities. There is more room for the large houses Australians love and we don’t have many flats. All in all, I don’t think Laura would easily apply her planning expertise to rural Victoria.

Food production is the backbone industry of rural Victoria. Nicola Watts is the Chief Executive Officer of East Gippsland Food cluster which covers all of Gippsland and works collaboratively to promote a Gippsland brand. Exemplifying the ability of food to bring a town alive, Anton Eisenmonger runs a restaurant in the tiny town of Lindenow that patrons queue up to enter. His wife returned to her family home, he came too and The Long Paddock provided a living for them, an outlet for local producers and full-time employment for six people. Anton stressed the strong support they received from local people who dropped off clothes when their baby was born and still bring fresh food at any time.

Richard Cornish is a food critic – one of those people who slides into restaurants as an ordinary customer and then rips them apart or praises them – in a weekly mouth-watering column in daily newspapers. He told us about restaurants that are the flavour of the moment in Mildura and Paynesville. In Europe whole journeys are made in pursuit of regional food and East Gippsland can be the place where people look for good food and wine.

Councillor Reeves wondered how we’d avoid becoming like Tilba while the regulations around roadstalls concerned others.

Ah, the roads. How could a bunch of rural councils meet and not talk about roads? In this case, they sidestepped and allowed Scott Lawrence, Regional Director Eastern of Vicroads, to take the flack. The statistics are staggering. Country Victoria has 23 thousand kilometres of road and $560 million will be spent on roads this year. Country road users are four times more likely to die on country roads.

A new division, Rural Roads Victoria, will be established this year to provide a focal point for community and councils. It will run a rural call centre based in the rural remote town of Ballarat.

Scott has good familiarity with our area including our desire to have the last 11 kilometres of the Bonang Road sealed. He is honest with us and thus his response to my question was: this will happen only if we convince the politicians even though $343 million has been allocated to repairing and restoring Victoria’s worst roads. He promised to come up and meet with local people sometime this year, to be organised by TNH.

As Darren Chester advised, we will persist.

Stuart Outhred is Senior Planner for RACV but his transport interests go far beyond cars and roads. Getting people out of cars into public transport and on to bikes benefits road users in the end – less congestion. For that reason he lobbies Vicroads to consider bicycles when they put in new roads or upgrade old ones.

Claire Madden was the second keynote speaker who might have come from another planet. She acted as an interpreter between the audiences – most of whom were baby boomers, dominating the space as usual – and the newspeak of Generations Y and Z. The idea that everyone belongs to a generation has taken a firm hold in media and business. Due to my year of birth, I am a ‘baby-boomer’ and therefore a member of the wealthiest generation ever to live. My children span Gen X and Gen Y.

Gen Z, born from 1995 on, was the focus of Clare Madden’s study. The era-definers, whoever they are, have gone back to the beginning of the alphabet to label children born after 2010 as ‘Alphas’. It adds a nice Greek touch, suggesting that we can continue to label people forever using the world’s languages with their many alphabets.

It is easy to get carried away by the hype of the future, as these speakers did. They loved shocking us with the jargon of the Zs; most of us were too old to remember the list and are unlikely to use the words.

Have a practice and translate the following (answer at end of article): Its SOML that fam gives me tmi but I swipe right and think they are lit, hbu?

We gasped at the idea of self-driving vehicles and wondered how they’d manage on winding dirt roads. We saw black spots everywhere and wondered if we should offer Zs and Alphas a safe, virtual rural experience instead of our messy, unconnected bush: an all-encompassing visual/audio/three dimensional experience through headphones and screens from a restaurant on top of Mt Delegate. The connectivity is awesome there.

Mt Delegate is on Ngarigo country and has been a beacon over millennia for people on the southern Monaro and the Errinundra Plateau. Now it generates mobile coverage to Delegate and Bendoc, a cross border service reaching as far as the view.

People don’t need to be in a place to experience it and virtual reality is far more convenient than actual reality. Nor is the year relevant when a $40 device enables people visiting London and other historic places (where apps are available) to see 300 years of history at their choice. Would Gen Z be interested in our landscapes as they were 300 years ago, with the occasional traditional owner passing through and the flicker of birds and native animals?

Claire reminded us that remote Victoria has the oldest population with a median age of 54, compared to regional Victoria 46 while Melbourne has absorbed our young to give it a median age of 34.

So how can we oldies entice young people out to the bush? We are ‘brilliant at community, that city people could learn from, authentic community’ though lacking on-line space. Do we understand that Gen Z needs to be able to recharge their phone batteries and have wifi wherever they are? These ‘digital linguists’ are connecting with their devices before they get out of bed in the morning; if they want something they’ll ask Siri and if they are researching info, they will rarely go beyond Google’s first page.

Gen Z recognises that their lives are unbalanced and don’t know how to satisfy a longing they have no words to describe. They are comfortable communicating on-line, less capable in face-to-face situations. But, as they told Claire, they can’t turn off their Facebook and Instagram etc because then they will feel excluded.

Perhaps the bush has something to offer them after all.

There was a strong National Party presence at the conference. Darren of course, and Tim Bull made a brief appearance but left the talking to Peter Walsh, the Shadow Minister for Regional Development. He thinks the current state government fails rural Victoria as its Infrastructure Victoria looks only at Melbourne and larger regional centres. We need to think back to the previous Liberal-National government to compare – was it better for us?

Matt Phahlert is the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Centre for Rural Entrepreneurship (ACRE). Scotland and Portland (US) offer the best examples for encouraging community initiatives through social enterprises: when the jobs aren’t there, people must create their own. Scotland has a special program, the ‘Less Favoured Areas Support Scheme’, which offers ‘essential support to fragile farming businesses in remote and constrained rural areas’. Is this what we need?

Matt is behind the purchase of Beechworth Gaol which was going to wrack and ruin until crowd-funding enabled its purchase. Now it houses many micro-businesses and philanthropic groups; it is a condition of their occupation that they must support each other. Cycling is the focus of their entrepreneurial efforts.

John Smithies of the Cultural Development Network talked about the importance of goals which represent the values of residents in developing a cultural program. Shires have the resources to support a strong cultural life, using local halls and festivals. Facilitator Darren McCubbin from Wellington Shire told us that Sale’s new cultural precinct, a new library and art gallery, is popular with all who use it.

So where did all that take us? For me the take home message was that the world and its people are changing fast and rural remote Victoria is just hanging off the coat-tails. Continuous connectivity, sterile standardised accommodation and venues, all the things young people apparently want, are outside the reach of most rural remote communities. The futurists spoke as though people come in one standard model according to their generation; that they are more tuned into virtual reality than the landscape they are exploring it in. That might be what the companies that profit from the standardised human model want – but human diversity paints a different picture.

And thank goodness for that. The futurist keynote speakers seemed to forget that no matter how digitally literate people are, they still need to eat, drink and they produce waste. They live in an environment. It might be our role as rural communities to make this more visible to them for Gens X, Y, Z and Alpha will have to tackle some mighty big problems that no app will be able to solve for them.

Translation of Gen Z jargon: It’s the story of my life that my best friends tell me too much but I like them, think they are brilliant, how about you?

Deb Foskey

Time: mid-1980s

Scene: Coffee lounge in Canberra where people can know of each other, about each other but only occasionally get to know each other.

We are interested in one group in particular, a group of people in their mid-thirties to early 40s. Around them are the very young – or so it might seem to the people we are zoning in upon. This is a university setting.

The group comprises three men and two women. They are all involved, one way or another, in environmental issues. The men and one of the women are lecturers in either environmental law or environmental philosophy and so on. The men are all going to a film: Letter to Brezhnev. One of the women thinks she might go too. But this meeting has been arranged by the two women for over a week, after several unsuccessful attempts for a month to get together. It goes without saying that these are busy people, not given to idle hours over pots of tea.

The men are only there because they recognised the women and joined them.

The men leave, the women stay.

First woman:   You should have gone to the movie if you really wanted to.

Second woman: No, now they’re gone, I’m quite pleased I didn’t. So how are you getting on? Have you settled into Canberra yet?

First woman: Yes, no, sometimes. I must say, it’s hard in winter. People seem to close themselves up. Its necessary to remember, its not me, its them, its winter. Many mammals hibernate. People do too, only they don’t recognise it. And besides, I felt so high over summer and autumn, this feels like depression by contrast. What about you, how are you going?

Second woman: Well, my life is determined by this book I’m trying to finish writing. I’ve just about finished the first draft. And besides, I don’t live in Canberra you know, I only come in once or twice a week and I’m usually dying to see people. So I have a different slant on it to you. I come here to enjoy myself, and I do.

First woman: Mmmmmm. Must be nice, living in the bush, but close enough to come in when you need people. Choosing when you see people. Sounds almost ideal.

Second woman: Yes. But you know, I miss the spontaneity and haphazardness of sharing my life. Knowing that I’m in charge of nearly everything that happens to me, it can be a bit lonely. Though mind you, its years since I’ve lived with someone, you know. But every now and then I realise that I still think there might be some man

First woman: I don’t want to live with a man in that way ever again. And you probably don’t either, if you really think about it. It gets so you lose the sense of where you end and he begins. And that seems to be the beginning of the end of a relationship.

Second woman: How are you feeling about Julius now? I must say, it was a bit of a shock when you told me it was finished.

First woman: Yes. (Laughs) One minute he’s making a special appointment so that he can ask permission to talk about the time we are together; and a month later he tells me that he doesn’t want a capital R relationship with me any more. His jargon, not mine. I find that black/white view, capital R letter Relationships, a heap of bullshit, an attempt to objectify what can’t be.

Second woman: And yet, you know, I thought Julius had a lot of promise. Of course, that was three years ago. Did he ditch you for a younger woman?

First woman: Aha! Just as I thought he would from the first moment he started using the capital R relationship jargon. I suppose the fact that I predicted it gives me some satisfaction. A little.

Second woman: Sounds so familiar.

First woman: Its not easy, is it, being an older woman? I mean, I really thought Julius was different and I thought that was because he was young, different generation, different culture and conditioning and all that. But its all on a continuum of maleness isn’t it? Men against patriarchy – feminist fuckers I call them in my cynical moments.

Second woman: Yes, this thing about being an older woman.

First woman: It puts us in danger of being used by men on their way somewhere else.

Second woman: Perhaps they think we don’t hurt as much.

First woman: I don’t think that consideration enters their heads.

Second woman: Well, I thought Julius was different. Though I never felt comfortable around his crowd. You know, different music, and this puritanical streak which is supposedly ideological. I preferred it when he came to my place and stayed the weekend.

First woman: On your own ground?

Second woman: I suppose so.

First woman: Well, he never came to my place, the place I call home, I mean. Down in the forests. (Laughs) He would have felt a proper fish out of water down there. Would have done him good. Whereas I don’t feel really at home in Canberra, his stamping ground. We’d go to parties and he’d fly around talking to everyone, putting his arm around beautiful women that he’s probably slept with or will sleep with.

Second woman: You know, I was really cut up when he told me we were through. Same scenario. He was ‘in love’. Actually, mad for a younger woman. But he didn’t want to talk about it or try to work things out. He left me to cold turkey. And I was more vulnerable than he was. You know, despite our age differences, he was much more experienced than me.

First woman: I think it’s a power thing. Julius is so obviously on the climb, trying to mix his radical politics with bureaucracy. Only an infant would think that could be a success. And we are both women with power – from a distance. But when he ‘gets’ us, its almost too easy. And there we are, with our insides hanging out, soft and open and ready for the boot. I resisted for ages, but the minute I capitulated I felt him beginning to distance himself.

Second woman: I’m interested in two men at the moment. I’ll have to decide between them.

First woman: Why?

Second woman: Because they don’t know about each other now, but there’s no way that can last. I’m sure neither of them would tolerate me having relationships with two men.

First woman: Must be nice, feeling desired and all that.

Second woman: Takes up so much time. And they are such different people, if I could put them together, I would have one ideal man.

First woman: Ha! If only it were that easy. You sound as though you wouldn’t be monogamous if you had the choice. Are you older than these two men?

Second woman: Yes of course. But not so much older than I was in comparison to Julius.

First woman: We’re pioneers really. There are no guideposts. It seems that we have only our own experience to rely on.

Second woman: And that of our friends. I wonder why no-one’s written a book about it.

First woman: Yes, there really ought to be a book about it. God, its good to talk to you.

Second woman: Yes, you must come out and stay with me some weekend. Come in spring and I’ll show you the rainforest.

First woman: And let’s not talk about men, eh?

They laugh.

A Canberra conversation.

 

This stream on the Errinundra was protected in a national park by the efforts of scientists and environmentalists in the 1980s. Every new park, reserve or extension to reserves has been hard-fought.

People who have been involved in forest politics for a while will remember the effort that went into trying to make the Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs) mandated by the Keating Federal government in the early 1990s. These were developed on a state basis and Victoria has five of them to cover the major areas where native forests are destroyed for the sake of a dying industry that should have moved over to plantations a decade or more ago.

The RFA agreements have not been reviewed as the legislation required. Now, unless we get active, they may just be rolled over for another 20 years. That will be the end of the remnants of unprotected forest that remains; we will see more fights in the courts to save the habitat of endangered species, forest block by forest block.

Back in the 1980s when Concerned Residents of East Gippsland began its fight to keep woodchipping our of East Gippsland we thought that good sense would have prevailed and the forests would be safe by now.

Sadly this is not the case as the continuing destruction attests. It really is time to pull the finger out people and tell the Victorian Government that

No Way RFA!

GECO http://www.geco.org.au/no_more_lawless_logging and Victorian National Parks Association https://vnpa.org.au/give-your-time/take-action/regional-forest-agreements/ have made it easy for us to express ourselves. Please take advantage and add your voice. Here is my adaptation of the VNPA proposed response.

To whom it may concern,

I write regarding progress with implementation of the Victorian Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs) from 1 July 2009 to 30 June 2014. While five forest areas are covered by separate RFAs, I have particular experience of the impact of the RFA negotiated for East Gippsland, where I live.

The organisation, Network for a Sustainable East Gippsland (NetSEG), was set up to connect people who want an ecologically and economically sustainable future for this area for which we can see so much potential. One of the major deterrents to achieving such a future for East Gippsland is the stranglehold that the native forest-based timber industry has over forest management. The logging practices of the 1980s have hardly been altered by the RFAs which in hindsight were more about protection of the timber industry than threatened native species.

The rhetoric said that the RFAs would balance and protect the full range of environmental, social, economic and heritage values. However the Victorian RFAs have comprehensively failed to meet these objectives.

To see them rolled over for another 20 years would be the death sentence for our forests and expensive for government (and taxpayers) to retreat from when concern about forest destruction accelerates, as they promise the industry ‘resource security’.

VNPA has summarised the issues:

RFAs fail because they are:

• Obsolete and out of date – Many of the standards for the protection of ecosystems fall below international benchmarks. The agreements do not even mention climate change and its potential impacts.
• Threaten species and ecosystems – In 2015, mountain ash forest, one of the key target species for logging, was listed as critically endangered on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Ecosystems.
• Ignore fire impacts –RFAs ignore the successive or cumulative impact of bushfire, even though there have been extensive fires in the last 10 years.
• Ignore other forest values – RFAs do not recognise, include or account for non-wood forest values (such as water, ecosystem services, recreation and tourism) that are contributing significant sums to the state’s economy, and could contribute further.
• Ignores previous review – Recommendations relating to improved threatened species outcomes, from the previous RFA five-yearly review in 2009, have still not been complied with.
• Unjustified special treatment for native forest logging – Most industries have to follow the law, yet regional forest agreements are exempt from national environmental laws.
• Stifles innovation – the method of harvesting native forest, clear fell logging, has not changed significantly in 30 years and has a dramatic impact on the native habitats and drinking water production.
• Regulatory relic – Western Regional Forest Agreement. The last RFA independent review in 2010 recommended that the western RFA be canceled, but as recently as mid-2017, revised ecologically damaging logging plans have been released for targeted logging of woodlands right across the west, which will take place in areas known to harbour more than 20 threatened native animals and 14 threatened native plants.

NetSEG calls for the abandonment of native forest logging as it is currently performed. A sustainable timber industry for East Gippsland may still be possible but it will not emerge from the RFA regime. The intrusion of logging into precious areas like the Kuark are a signal of the RFA’s abject failure to protect forests and it has not made the industry sustainable; without government concessions and subsidies, the timber industry in East Gippsland would have drawn to a close years ago.

If not abandoned, the following modifications must be enacted, at a minimum ending the special treatment this industry enjoys under the RFAs by:

• end the regulatory relic which is the western forest agreement and comprehensively review proposed logging plans;
• discontinuing the industry’s exemption from national environment laws in all RFAs;
• accounting for other forest-dependent industries—such as conservation recreation, tourism, agriculture, water, and carbon—in any arrangement or agreements going forward;
• Strengthen management prescriptions for threatened species, climate change impacts, and fire;
• Make substantial additions to the formal reserve system.

The looming expiration of the RFAs provides a once-in-two-decades opportunity to put in place improved and modern and transparent arrangements for management of Victoria’s publicly owned native state forests—based on current science, and on community views about how our state forests should be valued, used and managed.

This overdue five-yearly review ought to recommend the RFAs be abandoned and a transition plan put in place to move out of native forestry, in its current form.

Sincerely,

Deb Foskey

-- 
Dr Deb Foskey
25 Warm Corners Track
Cabanandra
via Bonang
Vic 3888
phone 02 64580399

Music in the Blood

In this, the wildest part of our back yard, I was least likely to be seen. It was the limit of the territory I was allowed to roam after dark. This night the moon was full, lighting a path which ended at the back fence, exactly where a dancing body would end up if it rode a moonbeam from the back door. Mostly I was a lump, but that night Rachmaninov wove me into gossamer.

Don’t ask me how his second piano concerto came to be resounding through our house on a starlit summer evening. A lucky night on radio, I suppose; we didn’t own a record player. I didn’t know much about classical music; although I was learning the piano I hadn’t progressed beyond Moonlight Sonata and Fur Elise, beginners’ versions.

Classical music was the Opera Dad listened to every Sunday at 4 pm. We all had to hush (or leave the house, a preferable option). It didn’t turn me on. Forced to choose between the brands of my generation – “Are you a Jazzer or a Rocker?” I’d taken on the ‘Jazzer’ label. Although I preferred rock music to jazz, I liked jazzers’ clothes more

In other words, music was skin deep with me.

Till I heard Rachmaninov.

That summer night when I was 12 or 13, I discovered my sixth sense. I don’t mean intuition or telepathy. This is visceral. I haven’t pinpointed it but there is a membrane somewhere between the skin and bone marrow which vibrates when the right notes are struck. Everyone has it, but some people never find out because they refuse to recognise it.

I was lucky to learn of its existence at a young age although I’ve kept this potent incident to myself until now. It’s not easy to describe music and one’s response to it in words. It’s an overwhelming invasion of the body. The thinking brain turns off, a welcome relief from its monotonous critique. New paths of synapses and neurons spark and set off electronic charges in bone and muscle. The body can’t keep still as sinews stretch and limbs glide.

The concerto awakened me to a different kind of body. At the end of the first movement the swell of violins awakens a corresponding wave around the heart; the passionate piano pounds in the belly. And so transported by the combination of notes he has put together is Rachmaninov that he devotes the second and part of the third movements to developing and expanding those resonant and evocative musical phrases.

I lay on the lawn under the walnut tree after the music had finished. There is nowhere to go but here. Every listening since, live and recorded, has allowed me to re-experience that early bliss.

Composing this concerto marked the end of a period of despair and depression for Rachmaninov. This gives the music a powerful magic, a glimpse into the very deep, of oneself and the universe to which, for the length of a concerto, we are deeply connected.

I know, on the last day of the year you are supposed to get a year in review. Not from me you won’t; I am sick of hearing and reading 2017 reviews and don’t think in these neat 12 month segments in any case.

I prefer to think ahead as the urgency of our task grows every year as once more governments, corporations and most households fail to take on the climate and biodiversity crises which await us.

That’s what I’m going to be thinking and writing about this year.

Now I do want to look back as a marker of where we have come from and might be going. In 1982 the introduction of the woodchipping industry to East Gippsland’s magnificent native forests brought together a group of concerned people. There were 50 at our first meeting but it wasn’t until later that we took a name. We deliberately chose a label usually associated with conservative values, calling ourselves the Concerned Residents of East Gippsland (CROEG).

To draw attention to the threat that woodchipping posed to our forests, we organised a two day walk down Yalmy Road, in 1981 I think, starting at Bonang and ending at Goongerah. We were lucky to have organisers el supremo, Jurg Hepp, Bob McIlroy, Will Cramer, Fiona McIlroy – and others too numerous to remember – and good weather so it went well. We found the big tree on Monkey-top track. In those days there was much more forest still intact.

The coup de grace was the presence of Judith Wright and Nugget Coombs who joined us for the end of the walk from Mt Jersey Track and for dinner at Goongerah Hall where we watched some films from up on NSW North Coast (it was from one of these that we took our title) and heard the speech below delivered by Judith.

I have no doubt that she adapted this speech for a number of events – but I believe she wrote the first version for our event. Thirty-five years later, it is still relevant.

By the way, that was the first Forest Forever camp, which has been going for 35 years organised by CROEG, then our successor, EEG, and now VNPA.

Will sense come to those who manage forests in 2018? Probably not but the politics might require it.

Read this and think for yourself, ‘What has changed?’

Enjoy Judith – and happy 2018.

Our trees protect us…

Judith Wright – 1981

Three versions of “Trees protect us–protect them”, conservation addresses in Queensland and Victoria, 1981, each about 9 pages (NLA entry)

 

Before I begin on the theme that trees protect us, I think it would be useful to outline the history of the movement to protect trees, so far as I’ve been involved in it. It begins, of course, a long way before my entrance on the scene – with the achievement of a few people, a number of decades ago, in convincing State governments that it would be wise and practicable to introduce legislation to make National Parks, as well as state forests, and to provide reserves as well where certain especially spectacular or important tree species could not be taken by sawmillers. These first steps to recognize the right of trees to survive and of people to enjoy them were not easily or lightly taken. The work of national parks associations and the like went much against the grain of governments and departments concerned with timber-getting.

And those national parks which were declared were always in danger of being revoked in favour of the interests of commercial timber-users. Only when, with the end of the Great Depression and the war which followed it, tourism became an important factor in the national economy, did the parks become popular at last. But well before that, those few parks (which had of course mostly been declared in areas nobody wanted for anything else) had proved their worth in protecting steep hillsides from erosion, protecting lowlands from the worst effects of flooding, and keeping major catchment areas from water pollution and turbidity. The Lamington National in Queensland, for instance, not only attracts many thousands of tourists but helps keep their water supplies clear and clean, controls flooding which probably would otherwise have long ago washed the Gold Coast out to sea, and provides a backdrop for that coast which is a joy to look at. Yet the battle to convince the then State government that a national park would be the best use for those steep slopes and high plateaux took one or two people and their supporters many years of hard work. So did the battle for practically every other nation al park ever declared in Australia. For we have always regarded trees, not just as expendable standing cellulose (a forester’s phrase, that one), but as enemies – an attitude left over from times when pastoralists and farmers sought to remove as many trees as possible to allow every acre they held to support as many sheep ore cattle as it possibly could.

 

Towards the end of the ‘sixties and in the beginning of the ‘seventies, a second battle to protect trees began. It involved, for the first time, a confrontation of a serious kind between people and the foresters to whom they had delegated the care of the publicly owned forests. Until then, Forestry commissions and departments had been relatively minor in influence, and their operations had been chiefly confined to manage the few forests left them after the attacks of ringbarking teams, fencers, farmers and graziers and the other tree users who had no responsibility to see that trees survived. Foresters saw themselves as the conservers of trees, and saw the rest of us as their exploiters. They were responsible for ensuring that loggers and sawmillers should have a continuing supply of timber – which would certainly not have happened if loggers and sawmillers had not been restrained from taking the lot.

 

This conservative management was altered very suddenly, when in the late ‘sixties Japanese interests moved into Tasmania and set up a woodchipping industry for export to their own mills. Woodchipping was something new in Australia, an operation on the same sweeping scale as open-cut mining. It became necessary to work out quite new theories on the regeneration of clear-felled forest species, and since theories were needed, they came into existence, and were hotly defended as facts.

 

At that time, I was president of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland; and if you wonder why Queensland’s native forests have not yet become the subject of a woodchip industry I can tell you why. Firstly, although Queensland has vast forests still, it also had a very extensive system of pine plantations, for while much of the so-called wallum country near the coast had been cleared and planted by enthusiastic foresters, and these weren’t yet ready for the woodchip industry. They are now, however, and one will shortly begin, with a pulp mill over whose site nobody can yet agree. Secondly, much of the forest remaining near Queensland ports, after the establishment of so much sugar-plantation, was rainforest and on steep slopes. Because of the woodchip industry’s preference to establish itself near ports, the first application for prospecting rights for such an establishment was for an area near Cairns….

 

Meanwhile, I had got further involved in the issue by becoming president of the NSW-based Campaign for Native Forests. This campaign, sparked off by the Harris-Daishowa woodchipping enterprise at Eden, held its inaugural meeting in February of 1973 in the Sydney Town Hall. It heard speakers from the NSW Forestry Commission and from Harris-Daishowa, in favour of the Eden project and declaring that neither the project nor its effects would be in the least bit dangerous to environmental values or to the Commission’s economics. Independent experts thought differently; so did the meeting; and a strong set of resolutions went to the newly formed Department and its Minister, who responded encouragingly. No new export licences would be granted unless it was proved that on both environmental and economic counts the proposal was clearly in the public interest, and environmental impact statements would be required in all cases. ….

 

By that time I had retired from the campaign, which in fact had achieved its objectives with the new requirements brought in by the Federal Government, and I had become a member of the newly appointed Committee of Inquiry into the National Estate. It was clear that its recommendations in the matter of forests would be subject of much concern to foresters and to the new enterprises of clear-felling for woodchip and for pine plantations; and when we attended the Forwood Conference in September-October 1973, the atmosphere was one of considerable anxiety and hostility to our inquiries and presence. (As indeed it had been ever since the first questioning of the clear-felling programmes.) The Committee’s report issued early in the following year in fact recommended that woodchipping and other operations involving clear-felling be discontinued until environmental effects were better known and properly assessed, that further pine planting at the expense of native forests be suspended for further research into economic and environmental justification, and that multiple use and conservative management of forests should be a primary aim for forest authorities. Some foresters privately agreed with these recommendations, indeed helped us formulate them; for others they were anathema.

 

Since that time, the EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) legislation has been subject to insidious erosion, and the exercise of Federal government powers to prevent the export of materials where this is decided not to be in the national interest has been used only in the case of the sandmining of Fraser Island (a praiseworthy exercise, but it should not be sole of its kind.) Now. I seem to be coming back into the arena of the forests, with the clear-felling and woodchipping arguments being revived on practically the same lines as before, I have at least one governmental sanction for this talk, in the Commonwealth’s rather ironic slogan for World Environment Day – ‘Our trees protect us – conserve them’. But it is not a slogan the States are likely to welcome; in Victoria particularly, the arena for woodchipping has shifted from the wrecked forests of Eden to the East Gippsland area. And the EIS on the Gippsland forests and on the proposed pulpmill will not indicate that these are areas where the national interest demands a ban on an export licence.

 

I quote from a paper lately given by a Victorian (not a forester) on the state and future of our native forests (J.R.J. French): “In Australia we are overcutting our native forests, and moving towards fast-grown, short rotation eucalypt plantations, and exotic pines for future sawlogs, with native forests seen as major woodchip and wood pulp resources by the forestry planners…. Environmental Impact Statements are mere smoke-screens, as we have little information on E.G. forests, either before, during or after such large-scale operations. This ‘plethora of problems’ suggests that the time has come when a forest will be valued as much for its life-support capacity, as for its yield of products and services. By life-support I refer to the role of forests… in maintaining the quality of air, water and food along with other energy necessary for the human civilization to survive and prosper.” As he adds, until now it has been timber production which has been seen as the main function of public forests. Apart from objecting that it might well be that trees and forests have rights of their own to exist, apart from those of being ‘necessary to human civilization’, this seems a fair statement of the case. And an overdue one.

 

I lately visited the Errinundra Block, just south of the NSW border in north-eastern Victoria – an area now at extreme risk, if not already committed, to the woodchipping program. I had heard of this area back in 1973, when the Campaign for Native Forests had a letter from an inhabitant of Bairnsdale, saying that woodchipping industry representatives had been visiting private landholders in the southern Monaro and in far north-eastern Victoria, offering a down-payment on their timber – to be taken at some later unspecified date. …

 

I went to the Errinundra Block under the guidance of local people and relatives of my own, who were already involved in the issue of the forests. They showed me not only the areas of past selective logging, which appeared to have recovered very well, but a large area of past clear-felling where eucalypt and other regrowth have evidently never been thinned or managed – so that their small thin stems are crowded to the point of impenetrability to a height of two or three metres – an area of wreck where a whole small valley has been poisoned from the air with one of those defoliants which end by killing or crippling the users; a reserve in which sassafras and shining gum reach splendid health and proportions’ and an area adjoining the forest proper where clear-felling for woodchip on private land has left the usual tragic sight of bared torn-up soil bordered by burned tree-trunks pushed into the nearest stream-bed and left to rot. We looked at the steep slopes which drop south into the river valleys of the Bemm, the Cann, the Brodribb and the Errinundra, now clothed with protective forest cover which holds the soils from descending en masse into the rivers. We saw that already along the logging roads blackberries are growing and rabbits have penetrated everywhere; such weed and animal pests will certainly increase with further exploitation.

 

Now the Conservation Land Council’s report of 1974 on the area states that soils are generally granitic, or sedimentary. The cover in the Errinundra block, though selectively logged for many years, remains dense enough to have kept erosion low except for some rilling – which will certainly turn into gullying and tunnelling if left bare for long enough. “Once the native vegetation is removed”, says the Council’s report, “severe water erosion can occur quickly because of the high and often intensive rainfall. The hazard is greatest in the largely uncleared mountainous two-thirds of the area because of its steep slopes.” It is here that the new application for woodchipping is made.

 

There can be no doubt that a woodchipping industry in this area could be even more destructive than that at Eden has proved to be – and to anyone who has seen that area, with its silted streams, rivers and lakes, its polluted estuary and port, its eroded slopes and gullied roadsides, its pathetically raped aspect. And the blackened areas where fires have spread from dumps of waste bark to destroy large areas of timber and national parkland, the prospect of the loss of the Errinundra forest to similar forces is evil indeed. There is little settlement in the area – it formerly supported three sawmills, but now – because of the loss of private forests to the machinations of the woodchippers and foresters – has only one; but the rivers below it and the farms of eastern Gippsland are largely protected by those forested slopes from severe flooding. To bare them would increase water heights, velocity and turbidity, and therefore erosion and the flooding of farmlands.

 

Says the Institute of Foresters of Australia in its statement on the use of forests for woodchip production: “ The use of forested lands to support large projects such as the export of woodchips has important environmental, social and economic consequences…” Decision-makers should “take account of alternative forms of forest use, and weigh their direct and indirect costs and benefits in terms of community welfare, economic gain and national interest. The benefits to be considered must include all those production, protection, recreational, aesthetic and scientific values which forests provide.” The Land Conservation Council’s report on the area asserted that nature conservation is a high priority in Errinundra, with its range of forested habitats, its variety of slopes and aspects, its ‘very high quality timber’ of shining gum, mountain grey gum, messmate, cut-tail, sassafras and the scientifically interesting easternmost occurrences of alpine ash, as well as a rare stand of mountain plum pine and the forest of the Goonmirk Rocks area which is so splendid that it seems fire has not reached it for many hundreds of years. Its wildlife includes the bobuck (trichosurus caninus), the ground parrot, the eastern bristle-bird and others, becoming rare; its ferntree and sassafras gullies are splendid. Its rainfall goes as high as 2000 mm and its growing season is long – which is why there is so far little erosion.

 

Now, if the Commonwealth were to take seriously its injunction to conserve the trees that protect us, the Errinundra forest would be a prime candidate for protection and no export licence could possibly be granted over a woodchip operation there. The situation in which the Tasmanian forests and that at Eden were sold off to Japanese interests without the least pretence at research into or knowledge of the effects of such wholesale operations on soils, rainfall, wildlife, adjoining farmland, tree species or regeneration rates, no longer applies. We have at least, now, Commonwealth legislation requiring environmental impact statements and the condition that both economically and environmentally the project shall be judged to be in the ‘national interest’ before export licences are issued; we also have the Victorian Environment Effects Act of 1978 and the NSW Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979. This should make it a far cry from the conditions under which Tasmania and Eden were committed to the bulldozers. But does it?…

 

Economically, woodchipping has been ruinously priced, not to the buyer but to the seller. As the Routleys’ book The fight for the forests proved, if environmental costs had been included in royalties payable, there could have been no woodchipping industry in Australia. Since foresters wanted jobs, and the kind of authority that goes with power, and since State governments are, to put it politely, not very bright, the bargains struck were little more rewarding to the owners of the forests – the Australian public – than a half-price clearance sale. Indeed, this is how foresters regard the woodchipping industry – as a method of ‘getting rid’ of what they call ‘degenerate forests’ in order to test out theories of regeneration and successive clearfelling which are – as honest foresters admit – no more than theories. There are already signs that projected time-scales will be too low and costs far too high. Necessary inputs of energy and fertiliser are rising in price so fast that earlier costings are going to be knocked sideways.

 

Environmental costs, on the other hand, have never been reckoned. They cannot be, for even on the short time-scale, they are unknown, and on the longer scale they will be cumulative far into an unknown future. Dredging of ports, silting of water supplies, flooding of farmlands, increase in weed infestation and losses by bushfires are all possible costs that won’t be charged against the woodchip industry. ….

 

As for employment: already sawmills around Eden are closing down for lack of sawlogs; the three mills in the Errinundra are now reduced to one because of the loss of logs from private land to the woodchipping interests of Eden. The pulpmill proposed for Bairnsdale (Orbost) will pollute important fishing areas and lessen Bairnsdale’s tourist dollars. In the long term, farmlands which support important industries will deteriorate. Nothing is to be gained from the woodchipping industry, which, as a Tasmanian once told me, is one of the most ruthless ever to move into Australia. (And that is saying something!)

 

I have nothing whatever to say against the Japanese decision to increase and improve its own already large forest area at the expense of other countries weak or foolish enough to sacrifice theirs. Or to export pollutive industries such as wood-pulp mills from an already highly polluted country. I do question, first, the use to which our exported wood-pulp is being put in wasteful over-packaging, and second, the refusal of Japanese interests to pay a price which will allow us to regenerate the areas already devastated in their projects. Above all, I question the arguments put forward by foresters here in their favour and the extension of present areas into new ones. The so-called degeneracy of our native forests can, I think, (and my inspection of Errinundra seems to confirm it) be put down squarely at the doors of Forestry Commissions and governments. It results from poor management, bad practice, and lack of planning of land use both overall and in particular interests. CSIRO’s latest report indicates that more than half our present pastoral and agricultural land is eroded to the point where major and highly expensive works should be undertaken to save our soils and large areas should be withdrawn from production altogether for such works; and that much o9f this deterioration can be put down to unwise clearing of forests. We can’t afford to lose any more of our protective trees. We have a responsibility to the world itself to keep our soils as productive as possible, both for food to be consumed here and for export. We have absolutely no responsibility to devote more of our very scarce forests to the bulldozer and the woodchip industry to be turned into expensive and unnecessary packaging and litter.

 

That is why I think it is time for Australians who have an interest in this country’s future to unite in defence of our remaining forests. If greedy and paralytic governments decide to sell out more – in the face of what even foresters admit to be drastic environmental deterioration in present project areas – we must get rid of those governments in favour of others which will act to protect and regenerate them wisely, and to protect our essential interests in soils, water and offshore fishing industries. If we do not speak now, and speak loudly and clearly, we betray our own future. The trees which protect us are in imminent danger – and their danger is our own danger.

 

Our trees protect us…

Judith Wright – 1981

Three versions of “Trees protect us–protect them”, conservation addresses in Queensland and Victoria, 1981, each about 9 pages (NLA entry)

 

Before I begin on the theme that trees protect us, I think it would be useful to outline the history of the movement to protect trees, so far as I’ve been involved in it. It begins, of course, a long way before my entrance on the scene – with the achievement of a few people, a number of decades ago, in convincing State governments that it would be wise and practicable to introduce legislation to make National Parks, as well as state forests, and to provide reserves as well where certain especially spectacular or important tree species could not be taken by sawmillers. These first steps to recognize the right of trees to survive and of people to enjoy them were not easily or lightly taken. The work of national parks associations and the like went much against the grain of governments and departments concerned with timber-getting.

And those national parks which were declared were always in danger of being revoked in favour of the interests of commercial timber-users. Only when, with the end of the Great Depression and the war which followed it, tourism became an important factor in the national economy, did the parks become popular at last. But well before that, those few parks (which had of course mostly been declared in areas nobody wanted for anything else) had proved their worth in protecting steep hillsides from erosion, protecting lowlands from the worst effects of flooding, and keeping major catchment areas from water pollution and turbidity. The Lamington National in Queensland, for instance, not only attracts many thousands of tourists but helps keep their water supplies clear and clean, controls flooding which probably would otherwise have long ago washed the Gold Coast out to sea, and provides a backdrop for that coast which is a joy to look at. Yet the battle to convince the then State government that a national park would be the best use for those steep slopes and high plateaux took one or two people and their supporters many years of hard work. So did the battle for practically every other nation al park ever declared in Australia. For we have always regarded trees, not just as expendable standing cellulose (a forester’s phrase, that one), but as enemies – an attitude left over from times when pastoralists and farmers sought to remove as many trees as possible to allow every acre they held to support as many sheep ore cattle as it possibly could.

 

Towards the end of the ‘sixties and in the beginning of the ‘seventies, a second battle to protect trees began. It involved, for the first time, a confrontation of a serious kind between people and the foresters to whom they had delegated the care of the publicly owned forests. Until then, Forestry commissions and departments had been relatively minor in influence, and their operations had been chiefly confined to manage the few forests left them after the attacks of ringbarking teams, fencers, farmers and graziers and the other tree users who had no responsibility to see that trees survived. Foresters saw themselves as the conservers of trees, and saw the rest of us as their exploiters. They were responsible for ensuring that loggers and sawmillers should have a continuing supply of timber – which would certainly not have happened if loggers and sawmillers had not been restrained from taking the lot.

 

This conservative management was altered very suddenly, when in the late ‘sixties Japanese interests moved into Tasmania and set up a woodchipping industry for export to their own mills. Woodchipping was something new in Australia, an operation on the same sweeping scale as open-cut mining. It became necessary to work out quite new theories on the regeneration of clear-felled forest species, and since theories were needed, they came into existence, and were hotly defended as facts.

 

At that time, I was president of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland; and if you wonder why Queensland’s native forests have not yet become the subject of a woodchip industry I can tell you why. Firstly, although Queensland has vast forests still, it also had a very extensive system of pine plantations, for while much of the so-called wallum country near the coast had been cleared and planted by enthusiastic foresters, and these weren’t yet ready for the woodchip industry. They are now, however, and one will shortly begin, with a pulp mill over whose site nobody can yet agree. Secondly, much of the forest remaining near Queensland ports, after the establishment of so much sugar-plantation, was rainforest and on steep slopes. Because of the woodchip industry’s preference to establish itself near ports, the first application for prospecting rights for such an establishment was for an area near Cairns….

 

Meanwhile, I had got further involved in the issue by becoming president of the NSW-based Campaign for Native Forests. This campaign, sparked off by the Harris-Daishowa woodchipping enterprise at Eden, held its inaugural meeting in February of 1973 in the Sydney Town Hall. It heard speakers from the NSW Forestry Commission and from Harris-Daishowa, in favour of the Eden project and declaring that neither the project nor its effects would be in the least bit dangerous to environmental values or to the Commission’s economics. Independent experts thought differently; so did the meeting; and a strong set of resolutions went to the newly formed Department and its Minister, who responded encouragingly. No new export licences would be granted unless it was proved that on both environmental and economic counts the proposal was clearly in the public interest, and environmental impact statements would be required in all cases. ….

 

By that time I had retired from the campaign, which in fact had achieved its objectives with the new requirements brought in by the Federal Government, and I had become a member of the newly appointed Committee of Inquiry into the National Estate. It was clear that its recommendations in the matter of forests would be subject of much concern to foresters and to the new enterprises of clear-felling for woodchip and for pine plantations; and when we attended the Forwood Conference in September-October 1973, the atmosphere was one of considerable anxiety and hostility to our inquiries and presence. (As indeed it had been ever since the first questioning of the clear-felling programmes.) The Committee’s report issued early in the following year in fact recommended that woodchipping and other operations involving clear-felling be discontinued until environmental effects were better known and properly assessed, that further pine planting at the expense of native forests be suspended for further research into economic and environmental justification, and that multiple use and conservative management of forests should be a primary aim for forest authorities. Some foresters privately agreed with these recommendations, indeed helped us formulate them; for others they were anathema.

 

Since that time, the EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) legislation has been subject to insidious erosion, and the exercise of Federal government powers to prevent the export of materials where this is decided not to be in the national interest has been used only in the case of the sandmining of Fraser Island (a praiseworthy exercise, but it should not be sole of its kind.) Now. I seem to be coming back into the arena of the forests, with the clear-felling and woodchipping arguments being revived on practically the same lines as before, I have at least one governmental sanction for this talk, in the Commonwealth’s rather ironic slogan for World Environment Day – ‘Our trees protect us – conserve them’. But it is not a slogan the States are likely to welcome; in Victoria particularly, the arena for woodchipping has shifted from the wrecked forests of Eden to the East Gippsland area. And the EIS on the Gippsland forests and on the proposed pulpmill will not indicate that these are areas where the national interest demands a ban on an export licence.

 

I quote from a paper lately given by a Victorian (not a forester) on the state and future of our native forests (J.R.J. French): “In Australia we are overcutting our native forests, and moving towards fast-grown, short rotation eucalypt plantations, and exotic pines for future sawlogs, with native forests seen as major woodchip and wood pulp resources by the forestry planners…. Environmental Impact Statements are mere smoke-screens, as we have little information on E.G. forests, either before, during or after such large-scale operations. This ‘plethora of problems’ suggests that the time has come when a forest will be valued as much for its life-support capacity, as for its yield of products and services. By life-support I refer to the role of forests… in maintaining the quality of air, water and food along with other energy necessary for the human civilization to survive and prosper.” As he adds, until now it has been timber production which has been seen as the main function of public forests. Apart from objecting that it might well be that trees and forests have rights of their own to exist, apart from those of being ‘necessary to human civilization’, this seems a fair statement of the case. And an overdue one.

 

I lately visited the Errinundra Block, just south of the NSW border in north-eastern Victoria – an area now at extreme risk, if not already committed, to the woodchipping program. I had heard of this area back in 1973, when the Campaign for Native Forests had a letter from an inhabitant of Bairnsdale, saying that woodchipping industry representatives had been visiting private landholders in the southern Monaro and in far north-eastern Victoria, offering a down-payment on their timber – to be taken at some later unspecified date. …

 

I went to the Errinundra Block under the guidance of local people and relatives of my own, who were already involved in the issue of the forests. They showed me not only the areas of past selective logging, which appeared to have recovered very well, but a large area of past clear-felling where eucalypt and other regrowth have evidently never been thinned or managed – so that their small thin stems are crowded to the point of impenetrability to a height of two or three metres – an area of wreck where a whole small valley has been poisoned from the air with one of those defoliants which end by killing or crippling the users; a reserve in which sassafras and shining gum reach splendid health and proportions’ and an area adjoining the forest proper where clear-felling for woodchip on private land has left the usual tragic sight of bared torn-up soil bordered by burned tree-trunks pushed into the nearest stream-bed and left to rot. We looked at the steep slopes which drop south into the river valleys of the Bemm, the Cann, the Brodribb and the Errinundra, now clothed with protective forest cover which holds the soils from descending en masse into the rivers. We saw that already along the logging roads blackberries are growing and rabbits have penetrated everywhere; such weed and animal pests will certainly increase with further exploitation.

 

Now the Conservation Land Council’s report of 1974 on the area states that soils are generally granitic, or sedimentary. The cover in the Errinundra block, though selectively logged for many years, remains dense enough to have kept erosion low except for some rilling – which will certainly turn into gullying and tunnelling if left bare for long enough. “Once the native vegetation is removed”, says the Council’s report, “severe water erosion can occur quickly because of the high and often intensive rainfall. The hazard is greatest in the largely uncleared mountainous two-thirds of the area because of its steep slopes.” It is here that the new application for woodchipping is made.

 

There can be no doubt that a woodchipping industry in this area could be even more destructive than that at Eden has proved to be – and to anyone who has seen that area, with its silted streams, rivers and lakes, its polluted estuary and port, its eroded slopes and gullied roadsides, its pathetically raped aspect. And the blackened areas where fires have spread from dumps of waste bark to destroy large areas of timber and national parkland, the prospect of the loss of the Errinundra forest to similar forces is evil indeed. There is little settlement in the area – it formerly supported three sawmills, but now – because of the loss of private forests to the machinations of the woodchippers and foresters – has only one; but the rivers below it and the farms of eastern Gippsland are largely protected by those forested slopes from severe flooding. To bare them would increase water heights, velocity and turbidity, and therefore erosion and the flooding of farmlands.

 

Says the Institute of Foresters of Australia in its statement on the use of forests for woodchip production: “ The use of forested lands to support large projects such as the export of woodchips has important environmental, social and economic consequences…” Decision-makers should “take account of alternative forms of forest use, and weigh their direct and indirect costs and benefits in terms of community welfare, economic gain and national interest. The benefits to be considered must include all those production, protection, recreational, aesthetic and scientific values which forests provide.” The Land Conservation Council’s report on the area asserted that nature conservation is a high priority in Errinundra, with its range of forested habitats, its variety of slopes and aspects, its ‘very high quality timber’ of shining gum, mountain grey gum, messmate, cut-tail, sassafras and the scientifically interesting easternmost occurrences of alpine ash, as well as a rare stand of mountain plum pine and the forest of the Goonmirk Rocks area which is so splendid that it seems fire has not reached it for many hundreds of years. Its wildlife includes the bobuck (trichosurus caninus), the ground parrot, the eastern bristle-bird and others, becoming rare; its ferntree and sassafras gullies are splendid. Its rainfall goes as high as 2000 mm and its growing season is long – which is why there is so far little erosion.

 

Now, if the Commonwealth were to take seriously its injunction to conserve the trees that protect us, the Errinundra forest would be a prime candidate for protection and no export licence could possibly be granted over a woodchip operation there. The situation in which the Tasmanian forests and that at Eden were sold off to Japanese interests without the least pretence at research into or knowledge of the effects of such wholesale operations on soils, rainfall, wildlife, adjoining farmland, tree species or regeneration rates, no longer applies. We have at least, now, Commonwealth legislation requiring environmental impact statements and the condition that both economically and environmentally the project shall be judged to be in the ‘national interest’ before export licences are issued; we also have the Victorian Environment Effects Act of 1978 and the NSW Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979. This should make it a far cry from the conditions under which Tasmania and Eden were committed to the bulldozers. But does it?…

 

Economically, woodchipping has been ruinously priced, not to the buyer but to the seller. As the Routleys’ book The fight for the forests proved, if environmental costs had been included in royalties payable, there could have been no woodchipping industry in Australia. Since foresters wanted jobs, and the kind of authority that goes with power, and since State governments are, to put it politely, not very bright, the bargains struck were little more rewarding to the owners of the forests – the Australian public – than a half-price clearance sale. Indeed, this is how foresters regard the woodchipping industry – as a method of ‘getting rid’ of what they call ‘degenerate forests’ in order to test out theories of regeneration and successive clearfelling which are – as honest foresters admit – no more than theories. There are already signs that projected time-scales will be too low and costs far too high. Necessary inputs of energy and fertiliser are rising in price so fast that earlier costings are going to be knocked sideways.

 

Environmental costs, on the other hand, have never been reckoned. They cannot be, for even on the short time-scale, they are unknown, and on the longer scale they will be cumulative far into an unknown future. Dredging of ports, silting of water supplies, flooding of farmlands, increase in weed infestation and losses by bushfires are all possible costs that won’t be charged against the woodchip industry. ….

 

As for employment: already sawmills around Eden are closing down for lack of sawlogs; the three mills in the Errinundra are now reduced to one because of the loss of logs from private land to the woodchipping interests of Eden. The pulpmill proposed for Bairnsdale (Orbost) will pollute important fishing areas and lessen Bairnsdale’s tourist dollars. In the long term, farmlands which support important industries will deteriorate. Nothing is to be gained from the woodchipping industry, which, as a Tasmanian once told me, is one of the most ruthless ever to move into Australia. (And that is saying something!)

 

I have nothing whatever to say against the Japanese decision to increase and improve its own already large forest area at the expense of other countries weak or foolish enough to sacrifice theirs. Or to export pollutive industries such as wood-pulp mills from an already highly polluted country. I do question, first, the use to which our exported wood-pulp is being put in wasteful over-packaging, and second, the refusal of Japanese interests to pay a price which will allow us to regenerate the areas already devastated in their projects. Above all, I question the arguments put forward by foresters here in their favour and the extension of present areas into new ones. The so-called degeneracy of our native forests can, I think, (and my inspection of Errinundra seems to confirm it) be put down squarely at the doors of Forestry Commissions and governments. It results from poor management, bad practice, and lack of planning of land use both overall and in particular interests. CSIRO’s latest report indicates that more than half our present pastoral and agricultural land is eroded to the point where major and highly expensive works should be undertaken to save our soils and large areas should be withdrawn from production altogether for such works; and that much o9f this deterioration can be put down to unwise clearing of forests. We can’t afford to lose any more of our protective trees. We have a responsibility to the world itself to keep our soils as productive as possible, both for food to be consumed here and for export. We have absolutely no responsibility to devote more of our very scarce forests to the bulldozer and the woodchip industry to be turned into expensive and unnecessary packaging and litter.

 

That is why I think it is time for Australians who have an interest in this country’s future to unite in defence of our remaining forests. If greedy and paralytic governments decide to sell out more – in the face of what even foresters admit to be drastic environmental deterioration in present project areas – we must get rid of those governments in favour of others which will act to protect and regenerate them wisely, and to protect our essential interests in soils, water and offshore fishing industries. If we do not speak now, and speak loudly and clearly, we betray our own future. The trees which protect us are in imminent danger – and their danger is our own danger.

Our trees protect us…

Judith Wright – 1981

Three versions of “Trees protect us–protect them”, conservation addresses in Queensland and Victoria, 1981, each about 9 pages (NLA entry)

 

Before I begin on the theme that trees protect us, I think it would be useful to outline the history of the movement to protect trees, so far as I’ve been involved in it. It begins, of course, a long way before my entrance on the scene – with the achievement of a few people, a number of decades ago, in convincing State governments that it would be wise and practicable to introduce legislation to make National Parks, as well as state forests, and to provide reserves as well where certain especially spectacular or important tree species could not be taken by sawmillers. These first steps to recognize the right of trees to survive and of people to enjoy them were not easily or lightly taken. The work of national parks associations and the like went much against the grain of governments and departments concerned with timber-getting.

And those national parks which were declared were always in danger of being revoked in favour of the interests of commercial timber-users. Only when, with the end of the Great Depression and the war which followed it, tourism became an important factor in the national economy, did the parks become popular at last. But well before that, those few parks (which had of course mostly been declared in areas nobody wanted for anything else) had proved their worth in protecting steep hillsides from erosion, protecting lowlands from the worst effects of flooding, and keeping major catchment areas from water pollution and turbidity. The Lamington National in Queensland, for instance, not only attracts many thousands of tourists but helps keep their water supplies clear and clean, controls flooding which probably would otherwise have long ago washed the Gold Coast out to sea, and provides a backdrop for that coast which is a joy to look at. Yet the battle to convince the then State government that a national park would be the best use for those steep slopes and high plateaux took one or two people and their supporters many years of hard work. So did the battle for practically every other nation al park ever declared in Australia. For we have always regarded trees, not just as expendable standing cellulose (a forester’s phrase, that one), but as enemies – an attitude left over from times when pastoralists and farmers sought to remove as many trees as possible to allow every acre they held to support as many sheep ore cattle as it possibly could.

 

Towards the end of the ‘sixties and in the beginning of the ‘seventies, a second battle to protect trees began. It involved, for the first time, a confrontation of a serious kind between people and the foresters to whom they had delegated the care of the publicly owned forests. Until then, Forestry commissions and departments had been relatively minor in influence, and their operations had been chiefly confined to manage the few forests left them after the attacks of ringbarking teams, fencers, farmers and graziers and the other tree users who had no responsibility to see that trees survived. Foresters saw themselves as the conservers of trees, and saw the rest of us as their exploiters. They were responsible for ensuring that loggers and sawmillers should have a continuing supply of timber – which would certainly not have happened if loggers and sawmillers had not been restrained from taking the lot.

 

This conservative management was altered very suddenly, when in the late ‘sixties Japanese interests moved into Tasmania and set up a woodchipping industry for export to their own mills. Woodchipping was something new in Australia, an operation on the same sweeping scale as open-cut mining. It became necessary to work out quite new theories on the regeneration of clear-felled forest species, and since theories were needed, they came into existence, and were hotly defended as facts.

 

At that time, I was president of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland; and if you wonder why Queensland’s native forests have not yet become the subject of a woodchip industry I can tell you why. Firstly, although Queensland has vast forests still, it also had a very extensive system of pine plantations, for while much of the so-called wallum country near the coast had been cleared and planted by enthusiastic foresters, and these weren’t yet ready for the woodchip industry. They are now, however, and one will shortly begin, with a pulp mill over whose site nobody can yet agree. Secondly, much of the forest remaining near Queensland ports, after the establishment of so much sugar-plantation, was rainforest and on steep slopes. Because of the woodchip industry’s preference to establish itself near ports, the first application for prospecting rights for such an establishment was for an area near Cairns….

 

Meanwhile, I had got further involved in the issue by becoming president of the NSW-based Campaign for Native Forests. This campaign, sparked off by the Harris-Daishowa woodchipping enterprise at Eden, held its inaugural meeting in February of 1973 in the Sydney Town Hall. It heard speakers from the NSW Forestry Commission and from Harris-Daishowa, in favour of the Eden project and declaring that neither the project nor its effects would be in the least bit dangerous to environmental values or to the Commission’s economics. Independent experts thought differently; so did the meeting; and a strong set of resolutions went to the newly formed Department and its Minister, who responded encouragingly. No new export licences would be granted unless it was proved that on both environmental and economic counts the proposal was clearly in the public interest, and environmental impact statements would be required in all cases. ….

 

By that time I had retired from the campaign, which in fact had achieved its objectives with the new requirements brought in by the Federal Government, and I had become a member of the newly appointed Committee of Inquiry into the National Estate. It was clear that its recommendations in the matter of forests would be subject of much concern to foresters and to the new enterprises of clear-felling for woodchip and for pine plantations; and when we attended the Forwood Conference in September-October 1973, the atmosphere was one of considerable anxiety and hostility to our inquiries and presence. (As indeed it had been ever since the first questioning of the clear-felling programmes.) The Committee’s report issued early in the following year in fact recommended that woodchipping and other operations involving clear-felling be discontinued until environmental effects were better known and properly assessed, that further pine planting at the expense of native forests be suspended for further research into economic and environmental justification, and that multiple use and conservative management of forests should be a primary aim for forest authorities. Some foresters privately agreed with these recommendations, indeed helped us formulate them; for others they were anathema.

 

Since that time, the EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) legislation has been subject to insidious erosion, and the exercise of Federal government powers to prevent the export of materials where this is decided not to be in the national interest has been used only in the case of the sandmining of Fraser Island (a praiseworthy exercise, but it should not be sole of its kind.) Now. I seem to be coming back into the arena of the forests, with the clear-felling and woodchipping arguments being revived on practically the same lines as before, I have at least one governmental sanction for this talk, in the Commonwealth’s rather ironic slogan for World Environment Day – ‘Our trees protect us – conserve them’. But it is not a slogan the States are likely to welcome; in Victoria particularly, the arena for woodchipping has shifted from the wrecked forests of Eden to the East Gippsland area. And the EIS on the Gippsland forests and on the proposed pulpmill will not indicate that these are areas where the national interest demands a ban on an export licence.

 

I quote from a paper lately given by a Victorian (not a forester) on the state and future of our native forests (J.R.J. French): “In Australia we are overcutting our native forests, and moving towards fast-grown, short rotation eucalypt plantations, and exotic pines for future sawlogs, with native forests seen as major woodchip and wood pulp resources by the forestry planners…. Environmental Impact Statements are mere smoke-screens, as we have little information on E.G. forests, either before, during or after such large-scale operations. This ‘plethora of problems’ suggests that the time has come when a forest will be valued as much for its life-support capacity, as for its yield of products and services. By life-support I refer to the role of forests… in maintaining the quality of air, water and food along with other energy necessary for the human civilization to survive and prosper.” As he adds, until now it has been timber production which has been seen as the main function of public forests. Apart from objecting that it might well be that trees and forests have rights of their own to exist, apart from those of being ‘necessary to human civilization’, this seems a fair statement of the case. And an overdue one.

 

I lately visited the Errinundra Block, just south of the NSW border in north-eastern Victoria – an area now at extreme risk, if not already committed, to the woodchipping program. I had heard of this area back in 1973, when the Campaign for Native Forests had a letter from an inhabitant of Bairnsdale, saying that woodchipping industry representatives had been visiting private landholders in the southern Monaro and in far north-eastern Victoria, offering a down-payment on their timber – to be taken at some later unspecified date. …

 

I went to the Errinundra Block under the guidance of local people and relatives of my own, who were already involved in the issue of the forests. They showed me not only the areas of past selective logging, which appeared to have recovered very well, but a large area of past clear-felling where eucalypt and other regrowth have evidently never been thinned or managed – so that their small thin stems are crowded to the point of impenetrability to a height of two or three metres – an area of wreck where a whole small valley has been poisoned from the air with one of those defoliants which end by killing or crippling the users; a reserve in which sassafras and shining gum reach splendid health and proportions’ and an area adjoining the forest proper where clear-felling for woodchip on private land has left the usual tragic sight of bared torn-up soil bordered by burned tree-trunks pushed into the nearest stream-bed and left to rot. We looked at the steep slopes which drop south into the river valleys of the Bemm, the Cann, the Brodribb and the Errinundra, now clothed with protective forest cover which holds the soils from descending en masse into the rivers. We saw that already along the logging roads blackberries are growing and rabbits have penetrated everywhere; such weed and animal pests will certainly increase with further exploitation.

 

Now the Conservation Land Council’s report of 1974 on the area states that soils are generally granitic, or sedimentary. The cover in the Errinundra block, though selectively logged for many years, remains dense enough to have kept erosion low except for some rilling – which will certainly turn into gullying and tunnelling if left bare for long enough. “Once the native vegetation is removed”, says the Council’s report, “severe water erosion can occur quickly because of the high and often intensive rainfall. The hazard is greatest in the largely uncleared mountainous two-thirds of the area because of its steep slopes.” It is here that the new application for woodchipping is made.

 

There can be no doubt that a woodchipping industry in this area could be even more destructive than that at Eden has proved to be – and to anyone who has seen that area, with its silted streams, rivers and lakes, its polluted estuary and port, its eroded slopes and gullied roadsides, its pathetically raped aspect. And the blackened areas where fires have spread from dumps of waste bark to destroy large areas of timber and national parkland, the prospect of the loss of the Errinundra forest to similar forces is evil indeed. There is little settlement in the area – it formerly supported three sawmills, but now – because of the loss of private forests to the machinations of the woodchippers and foresters – has only one; but the rivers below it and the farms of eastern Gippsland are largely protected by those forested slopes from severe flooding. To bare them would increase water heights, velocity and turbidity, and therefore erosion and the flooding of farmlands.

 

Says the Institute of Foresters of Australia in its statement on the use of forests for woodchip production: “ The use of forested lands to support large projects such as the export of woodchips has important environmental, social and economic consequences…” Decision-makers should “take account of alternative forms of forest use, and weigh their direct and indirect costs and benefits in terms of community welfare, economic gain and national interest. The benefits to be considered must include all those production, protection, recreational, aesthetic and scientific values which forests provide.” The Land Conservation Council’s report on the area asserted that nature conservation is a high priority in Errinundra, with its range of forested habitats, its variety of slopes and aspects, its ‘very high quality timber’ of shining gum, mountain grey gum, messmate, cut-tail, sassafras and the scientifically interesting easternmost occurrences of alpine ash, as well as a rare stand of mountain plum pine and the forest of the Goonmirk Rocks area which is so splendid that it seems fire has not reached it for many hundreds of years. Its wildlife includes the bobuck (trichosurus caninus), the ground parrot, the eastern bristle-bird and others, becoming rare; its ferntree and sassafras gullies are splendid. Its rainfall goes as high as 2000 mm and its growing season is long – which is why there is so far little erosion.

 

Now, if the Commonwealth were to take seriously its injunction to conserve the trees that protect us, the Errinundra forest would be a prime candidate for protection and no export licence could possibly be granted over a woodchip operation there. The situation in which the Tasmanian forests and that at Eden were sold off to Japanese interests without the least pretence at research into or knowledge of the effects of such wholesale operations on soils, rainfall, wildlife, adjoining farmland, tree species or regeneration rates, no longer applies. We have at least, now, Commonwealth legislation requiring environmental impact statements and the condition that both economically and environmentally the project shall be judged to be in the ‘national interest’ before export licences are issued; we also have the Victorian Environment Effects Act of 1978 and the NSW Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979. This should make it a far cry from the conditions under which Tasmania and Eden were committed to the bulldozers. But does it?…

 

Economically, woodchipping has been ruinously priced, not to the buyer but to the seller. As the Routleys’ book The fight for the forests proved, if environmental costs had been included in royalties payable, there could have been no woodchipping industry in Australia. Since foresters wanted jobs, and the kind of authority that goes with power, and since State governments are, to put it politely, not very bright, the bargains struck were little more rewarding to the owners of the forests – the Australian public – than a half-price clearance sale. Indeed, this is how foresters regard the woodchipping industry – as a method of ‘getting rid’ of what they call ‘degenerate forests’ in order to test out theories of regeneration and successive clearfelling which are – as honest foresters admit – no more than theories. There are already signs that projected time-scales will be too low and costs far too high. Necessary inputs of energy and fertiliser are rising in price so fast that earlier costings are going to be knocked sideways.

 

Environmental costs, on the other hand, have never been reckoned. They cannot be, for even on the short time-scale, they are unknown, and on the longer scale they will be cumulative far into an unknown future. Dredging of ports, silting of water supplies, flooding of farmlands, increase in weed infestation and losses by bushfires are all possible costs that won’t be charged against the woodchip industry. ….

 

As for employment: already sawmills around Eden are closing down for lack of sawlogs; the three mills in the Errinundra are now reduced to one because of the loss of logs from private land to the woodchipping interests of Eden. The pulpmill proposed for Bairnsdale (Orbost) will pollute important fishing areas and lessen Bairnsdale’s tourist dollars. In the long term, farmlands which support important industries will deteriorate. Nothing is to be gained from the woodchipping industry, which, as a Tasmanian once told me, is one of the most ruthless ever to move into Australia. (And that is saying something!)

 

I have nothing whatever to say against the Japanese decision to increase and improve its own already large forest area at the expense of other countries weak or foolish enough to sacrifice theirs. Or to export pollutive industries such as wood-pulp mills from an already highly polluted country. I do question, first, the use to which our exported wood-pulp is being put in wasteful over-packaging, and second, the refusal of Japanese interests to pay a price which will allow us to regenerate the areas already devastated in their projects. Above all, I question the arguments put forward by foresters here in their favour and the extension of present areas into new ones. The so-called degeneracy of our native forests can, I think, (and my inspection of Errinundra seems to confirm it) be put down squarely at the doors of Forestry Commissions and governments. It results from poor management, bad practice, and lack of planning of land use both overall and in particular interests. CSIRO’s latest report indicates that more than half our present pastoral and agricultural land is eroded to the point where major and highly expensive works should be undertaken to save our soils and large areas should be withdrawn from production altogether for such works; and that much o9f this deterioration can be put down to unwise clearing of forests. We can’t afford to lose any more of our protective trees. We have a responsibility to the world itself to keep our soils as productive as possible, both for food to be consumed here and for export. We have absolutely no responsibility to devote more of our very scarce forests to the bulldozer and the woodchip industry to be turned into expensive and unnecessary packaging and litter.

 

That is why I think it is time for Australians who have an interest in this country’s future to unite in defence of our remaining forests. If greedy and paralytic governments decide to sell out more – in the face of what even foresters admit to be drastic environmental deterioration in present project areas – we must get rid of those governments in favour of others which will act to protect and regenerate them wisely, and to protect our essential interests in soils, water and offshore fishing industries. If we do not speak now, and speak loudly and clearly, we betray our own future. The trees which protect us are in imminent danger – and their danger is our own danger.

 

A week ago one of my longest-time friends Scilla died in Claire Holland Hospice, that wonderful place, in Canberra. I had planned to visit her on Sunday after my conference but felt a strong sense of urgency and dropped by Thursday evening. I was early enough to see her before they took her away but too late to see her living self. Cancer had claimed another victim, raging rapaciously through her body in an inordinately short time – two months from diagnosis to death.

Back at Cabanandra, I am mourning quietly and alone today rather than driving the 7 hours return it would take to attend the funeral. Instead I have written this ‘poem’ which says it all really.

I met you Scilla when we were very young

Or perhaps that was just me.

Cabanandra to Lower Bendoc –

I made that trip a few times,

We got together with and without our men

But always with our children.

 

We talked and drank and smoked and were very clever.

Poets, activists, farmers, musicians, teachers – we were all-rounders.

We needed each other in that barren landscape of good people who

Hadn’t heard of Dylan (Bob or Thomas).

 

Yet. Scilla made Dylan (Bob) the focus of her English lessons

at Bombala High where the kids said every day,

‘Why do I need to know this when I’m just going to drive a bulldozer when I leave school?’

But now the phrase ‘Blowing in the wind’ has multiple meanings for them.

 

Our drunken evenings were a highlight of those days

The talk literally shone with wit. But there was always the fire to be kept going,

The children to be fed. Where we women came in.

I remember when I used pineo’clean instead of oil

when ‘helping’ cook dinner in your kitchen one night.

 

Oh our generation was there for a good time

Not a long time.

 

When tragedy struck your family

We were over like a flash

We could not imagine your pain but wanted to share it

But sharing could not take it away.

I lay on your bed with you, love pouring out of me

Knowing it could never fill up that hole.

 

You fled the high country

And left a hole in our lives. We had other friends but none filled that gap.

 

Later when we had our own tragedy

You were there for us, the only person who truly knew

That wound, that hole which went directly into the universe.

Being with you was healing, a reminder that deep pain does pass,

Or emerge less often.

 

We repaired our lives with new children. Sisters to the lone siblings.

Look at them now, could we imagine life without them?

Despite the pain which led to their creation?

 

And yet when we were together, not often enough,

Our lost children sat between us, just quietly,

Not so anyone would notice.

Now you’ve gone Scilla, my friend, my sister and I feel it deep in the bone.