White Collar Dreaming

The Fight For The Forests

In southern Tasmania, tourists walk among 300-year-old giants in the Styx Big Tree Reserve, while in the distance chainsaws can be heard. The road leading into this attraction – run by Forestry Tasmania, the manager of the state’s native forests – is lined with stage sets of wilderness, behind which the landscape is cleared and burned. For tourists passing through, often in hire cars not insured to go off-road, the easy 50m boardwalk may give them a sense of kinship with some of the tallest trees on earth. Most will never know of a long-running game of hide-and-seek going on in the labyrinth of logging roads beyond them.

There is, for example, the Camp Florentine blockade in the Upper Florentine Valley, a 90-minute drive west of Hobart. For almost three years now, Camp Florentine has been a base for protesters blocking a proposed 4km road through the valley that will open it up to logging. In January, carloads of police, including dog-squad officers, arrived at the campsite. But the activists, beneficiaries of an anonymous tip-off, were ready.

“There’s something you should know,” said 29-year-old protester Ula Majewski, greeting a police inspector at the edge of the campsite. “There’s a 5m tunnel beneath us and we’ve got someone in there.” Police had been prepared for the usual activist strategies – people locked to obstacles in the road or perching high up in trees – but this was something new. “I think it’s the first time a tunnel has been used in activist tactics in Australia,” says Majewski, a spokesperson for a group called Still Wild Still Threatened. It took input from a mining engineer, a 30-degree day and police cutting off ventilation pipes built into the tunnel to coax the protester from the dark, wet and warm hole – 34 hours later.

But there has not always been this degree of civility. People have been hurt in ugly confrontations. Late last year at the campsite, a violent clash occurred between timber workers and protesters. Footage of a car being smashed while activists sheltered inside ended up on YouTube, sparking headlines across Australia. In response to the incident, Tasmanian Premier David Bartlett said: “I think the protesters need to take a good, hard look at themselves and make sure they’re not impeding the legal work of forestry workers.”

To a degree, some protesters agree with this. “We know we are targeting the wrong people,” says Jess Wright a young activist. “It’s Gunns [the timber company] and Forestry Tasmania who should be seeing us everyday. But if we are not out here 24/7, it’ll be gone. It’s a shit feeling, watching logging trucks round the corner only to find us in their way. And all those clichés about putting food on the table and having mortgages, they’re true.”

It’s too simplistic, however, to depict this as a struggle between greenies and timber workers. To see both the forests and the trees, it is necessary to factor in the economy, the environment, the global-warming debate and even carbon emissions. The timber industry has recently seized on an argument that old trees release the carbon they have stored as they age and die. The ‘green’ thing to do, it is claimed, is to harvest the old trees and plant new ones which, just like sponges, will suck in carbon. Barry Chipman, state manager of Timber Communities Australia, puts it this way: “Out of all the primary industries, we are the only one that is renewable. We use solar energy and we sequester carbon.”

All of this takes time, of course. Activists, workers and politicians come and go, but some of the trees, before they become timber, are centuries old. “This is the problem with the carbon argument. It is only managing for carbon... It doesn’t allow for biodiversity or water,” says Gemma Tillack, an environmental scientist and campaigner for the Wilderness Society in Hobart. Deforestation and forest degradation is known to generate at least 20% of global greenhouse emissions, but the Kyoto ledger doesn’t require forestry to include these emissions as the land is cleared for new and very thirsty trees.

Most people, including those who would say their allegiance is with those trying to save Tasmania’s forests, like wood. As a building material, many prefer it to bricks. In his office at the McKay sawmill in Glenorchy, a suburb at the foot of Hobart’s Mt Wellington, general manager Tony Jaeger tells me he believes that 99% of the population like nice timber. But, he adds, “show them the process and they get worked up. It’s like eating steak. They don’t want to make the connection between the animal and the meal.” You don’t get wood without cutting down trees. The question is: which trees can be harvested and which must be saved?

***

“One hundred and seventy years of history destroyed in an afternoon,” said a TV reporter on the Hobart evening news when the Myer department store was destroyed by fire in September 2007. People gathered to watch the fire burn late into the night. Some wept, others held up their phones to take pictures. In the aftermath, the burned shell was referred to as “the hole in Hobart’s heart”. In town for an afternoon, I visited the spot where Myer once stood. I felt … nothing much: it was difficult to feel the absence of something you never experienced. The hole in Hobart’s heart exists only in the memories of those who knew what was once there. I wonder if the same applies to Tasmania’s forests: you can’t miss something you have never seen. The green movement’s use of words such as holocaust and Hiroshima to describe aggressive logging practices is certainly manipulative. Then again, the word holocaust is derived from the Greek holos (completely) and kaustos (burned). It suggests leaving no trace of what was previously there. This is a precise description of an area in a forest where all trees have been cut down.

It is difficult to convey what it is like at a clear-fell. It is like a trapdoor has opened in the earth’s floor. I was shown coupe SX10F by some of the Camp Florentine blockaders. Black stumps poked out of a choppy sea of dirt and charcoal. Our legs sank in the debris as we walked through the coupe, hands touching the odd collapsed fern. Last winter, when it was snowing, there weren’t enough blockaders to go scouting. “My heart was breaking,” said Miranda Gibson, a 27-year-old blockader. “I just knew that while the forest we were in was still standing, coupes were falling all around us.”

“I’m usually okay, but seeing SX10F killed me,” Majewski recalled. “They knew how much we cared about it. It was a revenge operation. At all our meetings with Forestry [Tasmania], I kept pushing for them to keep the chainsaws out of it.” She learned a hard lesson in forest activism: never specify exactly what you want protected. The stump of a huge tree was mostly hollow, and big enough for a tea party. Bridget, an activist in her early twenties who didn’t want her surname printed, climbed up on the stump with me, mimicking a logger: “It’s rotten up the inside, love! It was dead anyway.” We laughed. The sound echoed in the vast empty space all around us.

***

Unlike the on-location fight to save the Franklin River, which put Tasmania in the environmental spotlight during the early 80s, Tasmania’s current forest war is fought largely through the media and public relations. Green activists try to strengthen the public’s connection to the concept of wilderness, while the timber industry works on disconnecting the public from these “unmanaged forests”.

During my time at Camp Florentine I take many solo walks through the forest, leeches secretly sucking on my legs. At the end of the unfinished road, past unearthed twisted roots of trees and exposed lichen drying to the colour and consistency of tobacco, the forest glows green. It is difficult to be objective when you step inside it. A carpet of moss stretches over the wilderness and feather boas along the tree branches. A tiny black bird with a hot-pink ruffled chest strikes a dozen sharp poses for his plain brown female companion. Huge ferns knit around each other, seeking a patch of sky.

Then I try to see this place as a merchant might: as commercially viable timber, as furniture, as the skeleton of houses, as toilet paper, chopping boards, fruit bowls, souvenir barometers and placemats. Every now and then I come across a giant tree so high that I have to lean backwards to take it all in. It will grow back, I have been told by timber spokesperson.

More than any other Australian state or territory, Tasmanians are divided over the fate of their island’s wilderness. Cars idle side by side at traffic lights, their rear windscreens revealing a battle of the stickers: Save our Styx and No War versus Greens Tell Lies and Earth First, Log the Other Planets Later. On the cliff near a road going through the Styx Valley, graffiti reads Greenies are Scum. Cafes and bakeries provide forest blockaders with food – but often on the sly. Memories of the firebombing in 2004 of the Something Wild animal sanctuary in southwest Tasmania after a pro-greens sticker appeared in its window still linger.

Critics from the mainland or overseas will often wade into the debate. Seven years ago at Sydney Airport, next to the departure gates to Tasmania, green groups unveiled a billboard that read: Discover Tasmania – Before 2003. (Forestry Tasmania had earmarked controversial forests to be logged in 2003.) Airport officials soon removed the billboard after Qantas was swamped with complaints from the Tasmanian Government and tourism officials. To local politicians and timber workers, it seems unfair. “How would you like it if almost half of your state was locked away?” asks Chipman from Timber Communities Australia. It is a difficult question to answer – Victoria has been in a drought since I was a teenager. Friends and I joke that it is the Brazilian state, because much of it has been plucked into a stretch of semi-arid vegetation due to farming and the gold rush. No wonder many Tasmanians are defensive. Mainlanders have no right to thumb their noses at them.

***

I’ve got four layers of clothing on and a sleeping bag stuffed with blankets. Bridget is at the wheel. Her tiny yellow car sways in the breach of oncoming logging trucks. She looks at them coolly in her rear-view mirror, identifying the wood. “Old growth” she says, or “sawlogs”, “plantation”, “woodchips”. “You used to see a giant tree loaded up on a truck going through town,” she says. “A single trunk the size of a petrol tanker. But you won’t see that too often anymore.” Hauling huge trees through town is no longer a good look. Originally from Huonville – a small town southwest of Hobart, Bridget is dreading the day she comes face to face with old schoolmates at an action. “I have no idea how they’ll react. And I feel bad because most of them left school at year 10 to become loggers. They don’t know any other job.”

As we travel on, the road lifts and we can see skullcaps of snow on the mountaintops. Gangs of black cockatoos with feathers like lemon peel under their ears squawk overhead. Bridget drives furtively through Maydena, a mostly pro-logging town about 20 minutes’ drive from Camp Florentine, which when first seen, looks like a mess. It pokes out onto the main tourist road to Lake Pedder like an unseemly burp of tree stumps and gravel. A cobweb of ropes and cables are woven across the logging road and a small hut made out of corrugated tin and branches, logs and stumps left behind by the road makers is nestled between two tall trees. Underneath it, old cars are star-picketed and cemented into the ground. During a bust or attempt to start logging, activists will ‘lock on’: threading their arms through a series of pipes onto padlocks embedded in the cement.

Behind the hut is a fire with a pot of water eternally on the boil. The kitchen looks like a bar on a Bali beach – wooden and rickety. Boxes of donated food are stored underneath the bench. One box of homemade bread has a note attached detailing the ingredients: rosemary, olives, pumpkin, dates… I spy another box filled with tubes of coriander paste, plastic-wrapped cubes of cheese, potato chips, and packets of ravioli. Bridget says it is food rescued from dumpsters. I’m appalled until I see a container of gourmet vanilla-bean yoghurt poking out. Then I tuck in happily. Gibson, one of the core climbers living at the camp, joins me.

Quiet and unassuming, with straight brown hair hanging shyly over her eyes, Gibson has spent days and nights high in a tree. There are three tree-sits, each about 30m up in the eucalypts with buckets for waste hanging beneath them on a rope. While they are there, legal requirements are any tree felling must be done at least twice the tree’s height away from the tree-sit. In 2006, a policeman had to abseil out of a helicopter to end 21-year-old Peter Firth’s 51-day vigil at the top of a 75m tree in the Styx Valley. The tree was chopped down the same day Firth was plucked from it. “It’s tough for the search-and-rescue police,” says Matthew Newton, a freelance photographer. He has documented a lot of the activity at camp, and has also photographed search-and-rescue police. “Those guys are into the outdoors, that’s why they’re in search and rescue. Most of them love these places as much as the activists.”

Gibson reads novels and writes letters during her long stints in the canopy. She agrees the forest debate is overly focused on the tall eucalypts, some more than 100m tall. She thinks Australia is obsessed with big things – the Giant Lobster, the Big Pineapple, and now, down south, the Giant Tree. “Something shouldn’t have to be big to be protected,” she says. “People come here and want to know how old each tree is. I tell them that the tree is 200 to 400 years old, but this forest is thousands of years old.”

The tourist road near Camp Florentine holds first place for the most animals killed on the road in all of the state. Bandicoots, wallabies, quolls, possums, feral cats and pademelons are smeared on the Gordon River Rd. Sometimes swerve marks go towards the animals. But it is the sight of these kids, some tattooed and most with dreadlocks, that makes the locals angry. Some yell out “Fuck off, ferals!” from their cars. Sometimes, say protesters, swerve marks go towards them.

“It would definitely help our cause if we didn’t look like ratbags,” admits Warrick Jordan, a long-time forest protester. “The greens had the right look in the 80s. They looked like hikers and librarians.” During the famous Franklin River blockade in 1983, there was a collection of conservative second-hand clothes for protesters to wear during media appearances. It was jokingly referred to as the camouflage cupboard. “I’ve been to Canberra twice now,” Jordan says. “The second time I shaved off my dreads, and you should have seen the doors open.” Now he keeps his hair cropped short and is happy to put a suit on, pulling the shirt cuffs down over his tattoos. “Whatever you’ve got to do to get these forests saved,” Jordan says.

But not all those at Camp Florentine are so flexible. “We are who we are,” says one protester. “In the end the media will still write whatever they want about us.” On the evening news, a TV camera pans slowly over someone’s bare feet and muddy trouser legs. “We live in the forest at a blockade. This is what happens,” says one activist, holding out her long blonde dreadlocks. I am unconvinced. It seems more like subculture than necessity.

In one news report, a journalist commented that the blockaders “sit around the fire drinking cups of tea and smoking cigarettes” and asked many questions about protesters on welfare payments. It is a common accusation: that the Australian public is paying for these activists to do nothing and stop legal work. Some activists are on Centrelink payments, but the camp also survives on wages, savings and donations. Most protesters have part-time work. Everyone pools all they have into the mix.

Since Majewski moved to Hobart five years ago to complete her Masters in environmental management, she has been called a militant, a Trotskyist, a dole bludger and a radical fundamentalist. Her co-campers are a motley crew, with an element of effortless punk and hippy about them. Making it even more confusing (or confounding) for authorities, males have been known to wear dresses on Fridays. “Apparently it is a tradition stemming from a forest protest in Western Australia a few years ago,” explains Majewski. “The story goes that police were refusing to negotiate with or acknowledge any of the female activists, so one Friday, when the cops turned up again, all the boys wore dresses and they were confronted with a sea of frocks. So every now and then we have Frock Fridays.”

Western Australia is a good place to start when it comes to eco-success via image. While the ‘ferals’ had been at the frontline for years, using their bodies as shields between the state’s last forests and logging machinery, it wasn’t until socially accepted personalities such as former West Coast Eagles football coach Mick Malthouse got on board that public opinion began to turn in favour of the environment. Activists at Camp Florentine understand this. “What about Our Mary – Princess of Denmark?” one protester suggests. People nod. A princess would be a great addition.

***

Prior to European settlement, almost five million hectares of Tasmanian land was native forest. Forestry Tasmania maintains that 1.27 million hectares of wilderness is now protected in formal or informal reserves. I am told repeatedly by timber workers that 79% of old-growth forest has been “locked away”. This, however, seems like a figure that can only increase, no matter how much old growth is actually logged. It is a percentage of a diminishing pie. The smaller the pie gets, the bigger the portion of old growth will be. But if the calculations date back to the arrival of white settlers the answers are very different. It seems that around 40% of the island’s natural landscape is protected from logging (but not necessarily mining) while 60% has either already been cleared or is still available to be cleared or logged.

It is not until I surround myself with different maps showing tenure, vegetation, changing boundaries and contours that I begin to get a sense of the conflict over this island’s natural resources. Lines are drawn, erased, shifted a little and redrawn. On an outdated map of the Upper Florentine Valley, a line indicates an area that used to be part of Mt Field National Park. Like a missing jigsaw piece, there is a strange hole in the Hartz Mountains National Park. “The Government swapped it for the Precipitous Bluff forests ages ago,” says Gibson. On maps provided by the timber industry, protected areas are colour-coded red. On maps provided by activists, old-growth forests to be logged are also colour-coded red.

Just like maps, people can look at forests and see different things. When I’m walking through the Styx Big Tree Reserve with Chipman of Timber Communities Australia, who is renowned on both sides of the forest conflict for his folksy charm and bizarre analogies, he waves his hand at centuries-old trees and says: “It’s a little bit like walking through an old people’s home. Personally I prefer regrowth forest. A working forest.” But on the other side of the valley, forest activists point out to me the numerous inhabitants of one tree. “It’s like a block of flats,” says one protestor as we count three different creatures in the hollows. Chipman drives me to a high point of the Styx where we can look out at the “tapestry” of forestry operations. A fungi specialist points out the “black scraping scars” from the same road.

“Our aesthetics are vastly different,” says Tillack of the Wilderness Society. “We are attached to the aesthetics of an unmanned forest whereas the loggers love the manned forest, because it’s their manning. It’s their work and they’ve created it.” Dr Peter Hay, a lecturer at the University of Tasmania and author of Main Currents in Western Environmental Thought, won’t go so far as to equate what modern loggers feel for forests with love. “I think they love how it makes them feel… They love nature as a context of activity. Love the ocean because they can fish in it. Take away the fishing and, I assure you, they’ll be less keen on it.”

***

Few people in this conflict deny that wood is a special material. On a well-managed site, wood artists salvage the off-cuts. Burls, the bulbous growths on a tree’s body, can go for $300. Where the tree’s limbs crease like armpits, the wood is patterned into a grain known as fiddle back – a nice piece for a coffee table. The tall, straight, middle-aged trees are the ones sought by loggers. Varying in age between 100 and 200, these felled trees are debarked, stacked and marked ‘S’ for sawlog. This is old-growth wood that doesn’t bow or have knots, and will support a house much longer than our own bones will hold us up.

Other trees in the area, such as the celery-top pine, can live up to 900 years. Water resistant and lightweight, celery-top pine is perfect for boat building – if it is allowed to properly mature. “I’m happy for a tree to be cut down,” says Gibson, “but it’s done in such a rushed and greedy manner. They trash everything even if they don’t want it, burn it all and replant a commercially viable forest regardless of what was there prior. Not to mention that 90% of it is going to woodchips.”

At the Triabunna sawmill in the state’s southeast, woodchips roll like sand dunes on the wharf. “I can’t hold my head up this year,” says Michael Woods, a timber contractor based on the island’s east coast, when I ask how much of his yield is sawlogs and woodchips. “But the two years before, we were pulling out about 42% sawlog.” One group that, perhaps surprisingly, is saying similar things to the protestors is Timber Workers for Forests, a grassroots organisation of sawmillers, boat builders, wood-turners and others. It claims that woodchipping in native forests has resulted in low-value wood product and a slashing of jobs. It says the specialty timber sector turns over around $20 million each year and employs up to 650 people – yet regrowth is restricted to fast-growing pulp trees. Timber Workers for Forests says it has been accused of “pissing on our tent from the inside” by Terry Edwards, CEO of Forest Industries Association of Tasmania.

Jobs versus the environment is a pivotal argument in the fight for the forests. “I’ve about 17 fellas working for me, and five of them live in Swansea,” says Woods. Swansea is a small seaside town, popular with tourists, but Woods says it is empty over winter. “I reckon about $600,000 of their wages go into that town. We spend our money at the bakery and cafes and servo stations. If we stop working, it’s not just us that will lose out.” Woods believes that if logging stopped in contentious areas such as the Styx, the Weld and the Upper Florentine, the entire timber industry would shut down.

It is difficult to get conclusive numbers on how many people are employed directly and indirectly by the timber industry, especially as employment figures make no distinction between the two fundamentally different sectors: plantations and native forests. Timber Workers for Forests estimates that fewer than 8000 Tasmanians are employed in the industry, with just over 300 working in old-growth forests. In most Tasmanian timber sectors, job numbers have declined since 1990, often due to machinery replacing jobs. With a state population of half a million, it is difficult to see why this particular industry has so much power. It is also difficult to understand why these jobs, held by a steadily ageing population, are considered more important than others. The answer, say forest activists, is woodchips and Gunns.

Since the rise of timber giant Gunns Limited – the southern hemisphere’s largest exporter of woodchips, which runs 85% of Tasmania’s logging operations – the contracting process for timber workers has become an exercise in frustration. One worker says: “They treat us like dickheads. As if we don’t know what we’re worth.” In old-growth forests, men work in small teams. It can be lonely work. Machinery has made jobs safer, but has also made many jobs obsolete.

Following John Howard’s re-election in 2004, the Tasmanian timber industry was subsidised with an estimated $250 million to restructure and up-skill the industry. The money mostly went into re-fitting machinery. “I thought it was beautiful,” Howard said after he spent an afternoon in the Styx with the then premier, Paul Lennon, gazing up at tall eucalypts. He continued: “I can understand why people who work in the forest industry get hooked on it.” Asked if he also understood how people could get ‘hooked’ on protecting the same trees, he replied: “I understand why people campaign for a whole lot of things, including job security.” The Tasmanian excursion was a pivotal day in Howard’s 2004 election campaign. Loggers in Launceston cheered and clapped the man who was supposedly no friend of workers.

***

Last year, members of Still Wild Still Threatened entered Gunns’ head office, scattered woodchips on the floor and unfurled a banner from the roof that read The Real Parliament. “They couldn’t believe it,” says Majewski. “People have been too scared to face them directly since the Gunns 20.” In 2004 Gunns issued writs for $6.3 million in damages against 20 activists, claiming they had smeared the company’s reputation and put a dint in their profits. Today there are a number of activists still embroiled in the lawsuit while others have settled out of court. Just a few weeks ago, an attempt by Gunns to keep protesters out of forests collapsed. But, in the weird ways of the legal process, both sides claimed victory: Gunns, because the Wilderness Society had to pay the company $25,000 damages following a protest in the Styx Valley; the Wilderness Society, because Gunns was ordered to pay it $350,000 in legal costs.

For the most part, however, protesters’ actions have happened in the forest. Preparation for a protest can take all night and commence at 4am. Strategies vary depending on the location: obstacles known as dragons are dug in the road, huge tripods erected with protesters perched on them, tree-sits dropped down from the canopy, v-shaped pipes attached to machinery with protesters’ arms locked in. When conditions suit, activists will cobweb all the logging equipment left overnight with cables and connect a single protester in the middle of the web. Protesters call out to each other, whistling to let others know down the road that it’s time. In the early hours, the forests are so foggy it seems like clouds are anchored to the ground. Fires are lit along the road so the logging trucks don’t plough straight through them. They are framed in headlights as the trucks push through the fog towards them.

But most protesters and loggers are aware that the forests are, in a sense, a false battleground. Decisions will inevitably be made in boardrooms and parliament. “We’re not stupid, we know we won’t save the forest by hanging banners from branches,” says Wright. “All we’re doing is trying to press pause, so this place has a chance to survive while people with power can think about what is happening here.”

***

In the mid-19th century, legislation regulating the sale of crown land was called the Australian Waste Lands Act. The name spoke volumes about attitudes to wilderness. It was only in 1915, when the Scenery Preservation Act was implemented in Tasmania, that there was an inkling of what was to come in this small island at the bottom of the world. Again, the name of the Act said a lot: the landscape was a pretty backdrop, like scenery in a film. It was the loss of Lake Pedder that first divided Tasmania. A glacial lake with a pink quartz beach, it was flooded in 1972 to make way for the state’s hydro-electric scheme. An image of a lonely protester sitting on a depleting island as the lake flooded around him now seems eerily familiar as climate-change groups circulate photographs of polar bears stranded on melting ice caps.

Today, greenies such as the Upper Florentine blockaders are accused of wanting to “lock everything away” and insisting that forests should just “sit there and do nothing”. Hay from the University of Tasmania believes most people come to the green movement intuitively, concerned about destruction inflicted on the natural world. When the argument becomes economic as well as environmental, the natural world can be reduced to a series of numbers and statistics. In Tasmania today, the forest is cut into coupes and then identified with codes such as SX10F – labels that have the effect of distancing the logging operations from the reality of levelling forests. “To me,” Hay says, “This is not a question of science. It is a question of ethics.”

***

When visiting Snow Hill with timber contractor Woods, I saw trees coming down in an area designated for clearing. A worker climbed inside an orange machine, similar to a bulldozer, but with a saw extending from its arm, and drove over to a section of eucalypts. Three huge trees fell on their sides within eight minutes. The sound reminded me of being in the playground at school and hearing one of the other kids fall off the monkey bars. There had been a sickening crunch as he fell on his arm – the sound of a bone breaking. The difference is that when a tree hits the ground, there is also a huge thump, making the dirt jump under your feet. On the other side of the coupe, another man juggled a log with the mechanical claw of his excavator, dropping and pinching it until it split in two. It was like a huge version of the coin-operated game found in video arcades, where teenagers press buttons trying to make a little metal claw pick up toys and key rings. The logger controlled the claw to scrape out the red wet pith. “The chipper doesn’t like pith or charcoal in our logs,” Woods explained. “It speckles the paper and the Japanese won’t buy it.” I have a feeling these machines are more of a threat to timber jobs than any greenie.

In Jaeger’s office at the Glenorchy sawmill, he showed me how trees were cut. “No one has been able to work out why,” he said, “but in Tasmania we can only cut our logs on the quarter.” He drew a picture of a log with its growth rings, concentric layers of wood around the heart of a tree. “There are two ways to cut a sawlog: quarter-sawn and back-sawn.” The latter, Jaeger explained, allows for better recovery of the sawlog. “But in Tasmania, we can only quarter-saw a log. People have been trying to crack the code for years, but I don’t think there is a code. I think it’s the latitude.”

The Tasmanian quirk of having to cut on the quarter means that there will always be markedly less sawlogs at the end of production than its by-product – woodchips. Government legislation ensures the timber industry receives a mandatory minimum of 300,000 cubic metres of sawlogs each year. “We need to access much more than that to even get that amount of appearance-grade timber,” Jaeger explains. “So when the greens say, ‘90% of old growth is going to woodchips’ they don’t understand that without maximising on the woodchip by-product the costs just to get the sawlog out would be too high.” The industry, it seems, is dependant on waste. Any trees with defects go to the chipper. “So we need bigger-sized logs to get to the best lengths of timber,” Jaeger says. “We’ve got to have access to some of that old-growth timber, otherwise we’re gone.”

He continues: “I’m not saying everyone in the industry is squeaky-clean. It’s good that questions have been asked. I’ve no problem with that, but we have changed. There’s no need to shut us down.” I like Jaeger. He didn’t talk to me about the carbon sequestrant values of new-growth forest. Instead, he explained how to saw a Tasmanian log.

***

In January I returned, alongside 500 community members and protesters, to where Camp Florentine had stood. The blockade was gone (though activists have since returned and protesters remain up in the tree-sits). From the road, peering over the police exclusion zone ticker tape, the forest looked much the same. Further in, however, it was possible to see the vast empty space where the forest once stood. The small single-file logging track opened up to a sea of rubble the size of a four-lane highway. Where I had walked previously was gone. The sea of ferns – some 500 years old – is nowhere to be seen. The Upper Florentine looked kneecapped.

In preparation for the public rally, some locals painted Save a Job, Shoot a Green on the rock face next to the road leading into the area. Three carloads of youths stood to the side of the rally, drinking beer and mimicking protesters, one wearing a Rastafarian wig with long black dreadlocks attached. Matthew, a 26-year-old contractor, sat back in his excavator as hundreds of people swamped his workplace, chanting: “Our forest, not Gunns’.” His workmate, in a bulldozer 200m away, played the country-music anthem ‘Proud to Be a Redneck’. Matthew has a mortgage to pay on a house, as well as child-welfare payments to the mother of his two children. He didn’t seem too concerned about the demonstration. “Doesn’t matter to me,” he shrugged. “I’m still getting paid.”

I thought back to one evening last year, during my time at the blockade. Some of the guys had been fishing while one of the women, Wendy, filled a box with oysters she had chiselled off the rocks. Around the fire, jobs were allocated. People volunteered for watch, tree-sits, and early starts. A meal was prepared. Bridget produced some mangoes rescued from a dumpster. It was a magical meal. And then people slipped off into the forest to sleep.

In the morning, the sound of a saxophone woke me. I thought it was the emergency horn for police. Standing in the mud in my thermals, I realised everyone was asleep except for those on watch. I saw a dull-looking grey bird in the forest, flitting from tree to tree. It opened its beak and out came the sound of a saxophone. Sitting near the fire, I stabbed at my tangled hair with a comb. Yanking it with extra force, a knot of hair broke off – a tiny dreadlock in the making. I chucked it in the fire and watched it burn.

The Fight For
The Forests