It’s easy to paint the conflict in Tasmania’s forests as feral greenie vs redneck. The reality is much more complex. Anna Krien went into the woods to unpick the stereotypes.
It was a short blurry video that made me book a ticket to Tasmania. An activist friend had sent me the footage taken near a blockaders’ camp set up in the Florentine forest (about an hour and a half’s drive south-west of Hobart). It shows loggers dressed in hi-visibility vests and armed with sledgehammers smashing a car that’s blocking a forest access road. There are two young activists inside the car. I learnt later that the car had been cemented into the road, its wheels and ignition removed, to block this particular logging crew from going to work. The boss of the crew had lost his temper when he saw the obstacle and led the charge against the activists, who quickly pulled a blanket over their heads to protect their faces from the shattering glass. You can still view the footage on YouTube, and a warning – it is a disturbing little window into Tasmania’s forest conflict.
The night before I arrived in Hobart and three days after this particular incident, a group of men visited the Florentine blockade around midnight. Again cars were smashed, as well as a temporary hut. The activists hid in the forest, ignoring taunts to come out into the open. The men then doused the camp in petrol and set it alight before driving away.
So by the time I arrived, the explosion of violence had lured many journalists to the story of these young kids who had been living in the Upper Florentine forest for more than two years. Some of this motley crew had donned wetsuits in the depths of winter to climb trees and push snow off their tree-sits. Reporters with the price tags still flapping on their Blundstone boots wandered through the camp; some television reporters struggled as their high heels sunk into the mud.
I soon realised it wasn’t a particularly original story, so in the midst of the media flurry, I slipped into the background. I stayed at the forest blockade and at the activists’ town base – the ‘Pink Palace’ – a salmon painted weatherboard share-house that was degenerating with half-finished chores. The backyard was littered with food rescued from supermarket dumpsters (actually an incredible source of swanky stuff such as gourmet brie and high-end vanilla bean yoghurt thrown out because the packaging is dented or it’s just past the use-by-date). The front porch was strewn with teenage vagabonds. I became close with the activists. We shared stomach bugs, gastro and ideas.
I also spent time with loggers, hanging out in small-town pubs and spending time on their worksites. I discovered that many of the guys had left school at age 14 to work in the bush, and some even had families to support before they were 20. Many of these men, after asking not to be named, confided that they were being put under stress not just from the local environment movement but from the native woodchipping market – a product which relies on clearfelling whole forests, a very different practice from the old-timer’s method of selecting mature sawlogs from a forest over time. Incidentally, jobs have been plummeting in the timber industry since the 1970s, around about the same time clearfelling started.
I met talented bushmen who had made the ‘ethical’ decision to cease working with wood, not because they believed it was a bad material but because they refused to work within an industry that championed woodchips, a high-volume, low-value product, harvested often to the detriment of the forests’ future.
It didn’t take long for me to realise that the often publicised and explosive situation between the activists and loggers was a ‘false battleground’. Writer Chloe Hooper coined that term in The Tall Man, her investigation into the death of an Aboriginal man in police custody on Palm Island. “The war between police and Indigenous Australians is a false battleground,” she reflected. “The spotlight on Hurley [the accused policeman] and Doomadgee locked in a death struggle ignored the great horror taking place offstage.”
Similarly in Tasmania, I realised the conflict between two stereotypes – the ‘feral’ activists and ‘redneck’ loggers – was a convenient decoy for key players in the island’s timber industry, namely Gunns Limited, the world’s biggest exporter of hardwood chips, plus an assortment of state politicians. As a result, the conflict appeared archaic and unchanging, a hopeless and 40-year long battle between the state’s timber industry and environment movement that was constantly tweaked, nipped and tucked to no end.
I wanted to get past the slogans and spin that tends to swarm around most environmental stories. I studied science and biology high school textbooks because so many people I met seemed to have science on their side. I especially wanted to strip the stereotypes back to the bone, something that the luxury of time can allow.
In the 24-hour news cycle, stereotypes are often used as a way of creating an instant rapport with its audience. In the mid-’90s, American social psychologists Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson coined the term the ‘stereotype effect’ after discovering that the assumptions and stereotypes we hold about other people can cause these targeted people to behave in such a way as to validate these assumptions. Their research, focusing largely on the behaviour of minority groups, found that stereotypes are so affective that the targeted subjects have little confidence to argue with them; rather they simply collapse into the role and confirm it. With this in mind, I did meet ‘conspiracy theorist’ greenies and ‘shoot, fuck and drink beer’ rednecks, people who were true to life caricatures, but I also met a collection of fiercely intelligent individuals – activists committed to their cause and men who are good at their jobs.
At the Florentine blockade, I watched as these young adults built tree-sits (platforms the size of a single bed) and lugged them about 30 metres up in the canopy, digging shit-pits, lugging fresh water from the creek, documenting species and sightings of native fauna, liasing with police, and lugging chains, tools and equipment through the freezing bush in the middle of nowhere to set up an obstacle at 3am in the morning.
Once they built an enormous pirate ship out of leftover logging debris at the mouth of a contentious logging coupe. There was this incredible commitment juxtaposed with a stubborn moral high ground and an off-putting subculture. In court in Hobart, I got a sense of just how different these young activists are to their peers as judges read out the daily charges of drink driving, shoplifting CDs, nightclub assault, and then moved on to the activist with their charges of trespassing in logging coupes, stopping work at a woodchip mill and blocking log trucks. Whether I agreed with the activists or not, I couldn’t dispute their passion.
On the other side of the trenches, I spoke with articulate and considerate loggers, men who rescued sugar gliders and ran their car batteries flat to keep them warm as they worked through the night. These were men who liked to work outdoors, preferring ‘working forests’ to bush that was ‘locked up’ and in their minds, left to ruin.
I found these differing aesthetics fascinating. How could so many people all be looking at the same thing and see it so differently? One forest industry spokesman told me that an old growth forest reminded him of a nursing home, while activists said that eucalypt trees only started to form habitat hollows after 150 years, then pointed to one such tree and compared it to a block of flats.
Michael Field, a former state Labor premier who I met with a few times at a pub in Salamanca, told me that the division in the state over its environment flows from “differing value systems, not some monopoly of the truth”. So I began to wonder, is beauty a value? Is the environment a value – or is it, as environmentalists claim, a fact? And can our aesthetics differ to the bitter end?
In the 1980s, during the Franklin River blockade, Tasmania’s then Liberal premier Robin Gray spluttered in fury that the river was a “brown leech-ridden ditch!” The former agriculture consultant was unable to understand the passion environmentalists felt for the wild rushing river. Greens leader Bob Brown recalls flying over the Franklin in a helicopter at the time with the chief of the Hydro Electric Commission (which wanted to dam the river) who yelled out over the noise, “Look! It’s not beautiful at all, is it?!”
There is something to be said for the environment movement’s confidence that if people could only see the wilderness, any wilderness, they would want it protected. This idea of natural beauty is, I think, the Greens’ double-edged sword, as it doesn’t include us in it. While this is part of the allure of the wilderness, it is also perhaps why we want to make a mark on it, to feel significant within it. In Tasmania, people tend to wax lyrical about the island’s Tolkien-esque trees and Middle Earth forests, but I’m not really a forest person and am far more likely to be moved by rugged plains, beaches, hot bushy scrub and flat red deserts. But having said that, I couldn’t help being affected by Tasmania’s forests, even more so when I revisited them to find they’d been replaced by a big gaping hole in the landscape.
Into the Woods wasn’t meant to be a book. I had intended on only writing an essay about the tense face-offs between loggers and activists in the depths of the forest, and by the time I realised Tasmania’s forestry story was much bigger than that, it was as if the island had coagulated around my ankles like cement. Unfortunately for me, once I’ve waded into a story, there’s no going back. I’m mentally stuck in the story until it’s finished.
So when footage of the loggers smashing the car with two activists inside it made headlines and Bob Gordon, managing director of Forestry Tasmania, accused the activists of taunting the timber workers, I began to ask some questions. It was just as easy to interpret Gordon’s response in another way: these timber workers have been purposely enraged by their employers and politicians, and then turned loose on the activists. So why feed this rift? Why hasn’t this wound that divides ‘greenies’ and ‘rednecks’ healed? In whose interests is it to keep the island fractured?
I remember trying to sleep on the floor of the Pink Palace one night with dogs pulling at my sleeping bag, going through the names of people I need to speak to – those off-stage meddling Greek gods by the name of Gunns Limited, who had an ex-premier on their board.
“It’s a bit like a Monopoly board here,” one activist had warned me. “You go around and around until you have your utilities, where the gentry live and so on.” I was only a quarter of a way around the board, yet to meet the island’s powerbrokers.
Gunns are the biggest hardwood chip exporter in the world and ran close to 85 per cent of the island’s timber industry. Their monopoly put timber workers in compromised positions when it came to bargaining for workers’ rights, compensation, and fair wages. The timber company also appeared to have had a direct line to the state’s key political powerbrokers.
Back in 1989, Eddie Rouse, a media mogul and Gunns director, tried to bribe a minister to cross the floor. More recently, the Gunns’ proposed pulp mill in 2005 saw the Tasmanian government roll out its bizarre Pulp Mill Taskforce prior to Gunns announcing the project. The Taskforce was a $1.4 million dollar tax-paid initiative that included a touring mini-bus to convince locals that the island needed a pulp mill. During the same pulp mill’s assessment, the then premier Paul ‘Big Red’ Lennon (Labor leader from 2004 – 2008) had a Gunns-owned building subsidiary do the renovations on his home; the building company was known for bridges, woodchip mills, hospitals, stadium stands, but not home renovations.
When I asked ‘Big Red’ about the alleged closeness between the state government and Gunns, he had responded with exasperation. “How can you avoid that?” he said. “In a small community such as ours, you’re bound to have one or two companies dominating – we can’t just ignore them because people think it’s unethical for us to meet.”
And Lennon had a point – Tasmania is a small place, home to just 500,000 people. It was easy to see how vulnerable the island is to overt influence and company monopolisation. In a sense, Tasmania seemed to me to be like a little America: deeply conservative, but try to rule it with too firm a hand, and you’ll have these radical spurts of steam. This tiny island at the bottom of the world is, after all, home to the world’s very first ‘green’ political party, the United Tasmania Group, which was founded in 1972.
This same smallness is perhaps why the story of Tasmania’s forest wars needed to be told by an outsider. At one point during my journey, I was driving along the highway after interviewing a local who had pleaded with me not to use her name and I realised just how hard it is for a local to speak out in such a small community, let alone write the story I was aiming to tell about Tasmania’s timber industry. Things like getting a job, a government grant, feeling safe and welcome – all of these things that I took for granted on the mainland could be at risk if one spoke out. At that point, I had to pull over and take a deep breath on the side of the road because I realised that I too – by writing Into the Woods – was risking my relationship with the island. Even though I wasn’t dependent on the place, I had definitely fallen in love with it.
Into the Woods: the battle for Tasmania’s forests by Anna Krien, published by Black Inc., RRP $29.95.
