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The site is the Ciancio coupe in the Otway Ranges, 10 minutes east of Lavers Hill, ripe with 60-year-old mountain ash, the long, tall trees prized as sawlogs by the mills. It may be remembered as the site of the loggers' and greenies' last stand in the fight for the Otways. What the police, the loggers and the Department of Natural Resources and Environment (DNRE) are dealing with are seasoned experts in non-violent guerrilla warfare, people very hard to beat because they're prepared to die for their cause, a strategy refined during years of campaigning.
Sure enough, high on a mountain ash, on the edge of a stand of trees that Bluey is meant to be cutting down, a young woman is edging up the last of the long straight trunk to a sitting nest where the branches spread, going so slowly that she seems not to be moving at all. There are at least two other people up high, deeper in the stand. By Friday night, they will have established half a dozen sleeping platforms and hammocks - and a series of deathtraps.
Beyond the stand, the country drops into a rainforest gully of ferns, moss-covered ash trees up to 400 years old, and myrtle beech trees, a remnant species from the Gondwana period, when Australia was still joined to South America.
(There's little doubt that logging close to cool temperate rainforest inflames the spread of myrtle wilt, a fungal disease that kills the myrtle beech. The argument is about just how close the loggers can go.) Sitting on new ash stumps at the foot of this tree are ayoung man and woman offering logistical support. The greetings between greenies and logger are warm but weary.
Bluey has left the chainsaw in the ute. He's known all along that he wouldn't get to use it. "I don't want to kill anybody, " he says, looking up with something akin to admiration. ''You have to say something about their dedication, don't you?" Bluey has turned up for work today, he says, "as a formality". The rest of the crew haven't even bothered. They're waiting for the police to come back.
After a while, Bluey walks up to the greenies' new camp. The police broke up their original scene, which was closer to the logging site. It's a makeshift affair, with army tarpaulins strung out above broken soggy ground at the edge of a coupe that Bluey himself had knocked down a year before. It's been cold and windy, and they're still gettirig themselves together after a gale tore the tent to pieces yesterday.
Smoke drifts from a dozen places, remnants of a regeneration fire, started to germinate the seeds that once lay under the topsoil, but now lie mixed up with, and on top of, the churned, burned ground. "Looks like the Somme," says Bluey. He accepts a cup of tea, nods his head when the greenies say they feel bad for him and his fellows, with their jobs on the line. One of them suggests retraining. Bluey gently scoffs at the notion. Why would loggers happily go from making $2000 or more a week, doing the only thing they know, to making 400 bucks a week?
He stays genial. He confesses to confusion and uncertainty. Bluey reckons the greenies an have become "cannon fodder" in the forest war, that both have been betrayed by the government. Bluey, a man of the chainsaw, knew two weeks ago, before the enemy turned up; that the truce was over, that the war was on again. Everybody knew it was coming. "It was more than loggers' gossip”.
Senior people from the DNRE had told him and his fellow loggers that they were heading to a contentious site. Soon after setting up there, a senior policeman turned up to tell the logging crew the same thing and to advise on strategy. Namely, to walk away, call for the cavalry. Bluey also knew that the enemy hadn't broken the peace. Everybody else knew that too, he says.
Ciancio coupe was listed as contentious and a no-go area for logging in a memorandum of understanding drafted last year by conservation groups - most of them forming an alignment with the Otway Ranges Environment Network (OREN), which sought to administer the agreement from the greenies' position - the timber industry, the State Government, the DNRE, the Construction, Forestry Mining and Energy Union, and local business. The agreement was brokered by the government but has never been signed.
The anti-logging blockades in the 1999-2000 season were constant and increasingly violent. It was the most intense and bitter six months in nearly 20 years of anti-logging campaigning. OREN says it wants to stop all logging in the Otways. But, as a compromise, it agreed to halt blockading at all but a number of coupes deemed "contentious"
"There were (greenies) who didn't want to make that compromise, but they went along with it because they trusted us," says OREN's Simon Birrell, a mechanical engineer by trade who once built defence systems for Australian warships but now works full-time to save the trees.
So it was that the 2000-1 logging season in the Otway Ranges (which started last November) kicked off without incident. Then, in February, Birrell received a letter from the department advising that Ciancio would have to be logged to meet the quota for a Colac mill. (The miller, Mick Murnane, says he's expecting to get his logs, and may sue the government if he doesn't. He hosed down the rumor that he'll go out of business if he doesn't get his trees.)
Birrell says OREN, having already compromised, won't do so again. So, two days after the loggers moved into Ciancio on April 3, the greenies arrived for what's shaping up to be "the last stand" in the battle for the Otways. "It's crunch time,'' he says.
Loss for the loggers will mean the end of their jobs, the end of the lives they have always known.
''What happens here will determine what happens in the future," says Max Radford, the contractor charged with felling the coupe. He says the department told him Ciancio "must be cut'' because there were other contentious coupes listed for next season. "And if we didn't win this one, we probably wouldn't win the others.
" 'I want you to cut that coupe at allcosts,' " Radford says he was told. (The Sunday Age was unable to contact the DNRE officer responsible by time of publication.)
And for the greenies? They know that if they can't stop logging in the Otways, where they have unprecedented support from local businesses, residents and the tourist public (according to one survey, 91 per cent of the local and visiting public don't want logging in the region), they have little chance of winning anywhere.
Otways Facts
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