More than a hundred years before Captain James Cook sailed into Botany Bay in 1788, a seedling struggled to find its way up from the leafy floor of a karri forest on the other side of the continent. By the time white settlers struggled ashore at the Swan River colony in 1829, the karri sapling had reached 70 metres in height; by Federation, it dominated the forest skyline in that heavily timbered part of Western Australia. For many more decades, it stood tall among hectares of mature trees until September 1997 when, on Monday the 8th at 11:20 am, the tree's massive girth was severed and it crashed back down towards the forest floor.
The log it produced was prized native hardwood, from over 20,000 hectares of karri and jarrah forest cut each year by WA's timber industry. The log's fate fell into two categories; roughly half the log would be milled for structural timber to build houses in Perth's spreading suburbs. The rest remained, a reject saw log on the cleared forest floor, until a passing logging supervisor chalked the word "chip" on the end. It was destined for the chipmill. Like the log itself, roughly half of WA's forest output ends up as sawn timber, the other half is turned into woodchips for Japanese paper and newsprint.
But this karri tree's fate was to take a bizarre turn. Nine months after its felling, in June this year, a van passed through the same forest coupe, near the small town of Northcliffe. Riding inside was a camera crew, an ex-forester, and a football coach. Mick Malthouse, a household name as the West Coast Eagles coach, had not come for a day out from AFL finals training. He was on a mission.
When he spotted the word "chip" on the log's 1.8m girth, Malthouse ordered the car to stop. He asked the ex-forester, a convert to the anti-logging movement, about it. Then standing before the log, he recorded a message that would be broadcast on a commercial TV station later that week. "To think that's been chopped down for woodchip [and] a very quick profit by someone," he told the camera with suppressed rage, "is an indictment of the organisation and the government that allowed it ... We are astounded at the devastation of the forests in Indonesia and Malaysia and yet, right here on our doorstep, we can take a stand and we are not doing it."
THE FUTURE OF WA's FORESTS FOR THE NEXT TWO YEARS hangs in the balance. Held up by the recent Federal election, a document sits in a pile ready for signing between the re-elected Howard Government and its WA counterpart. Known as a Regional Forest Agreement, or RFA, it will define the way the State's forests are managed for the twin objectives of timber and conservation. Like RFAs in other States, it will mean the end of the Commonwealth's statutory controls over State forest conservation, and remove the need for Canberra to issue export licences for woodchips.
The RFA is also intended to "reach community consensus" about the use of native forests. Yet the choice of tough-talking Wilson Tuckey as the Minister for Forestry and Conservation has not reassured the "green" movement, which promptly changed Tuckey's nickname from "Ironbar" to "Ironbark".
And in WA, the RFA process has only deepened the cavernous rifts between city and country, greenies and loggers. Within hours of the telecast of Malthouse's plea to stop logging in old karri forests, forest workers in the string of timber towns rallied forces: at one mill, the staff burned the Eagles flag and vowed to cancel their club membership.
A small section of the log was trucked into Manjimup, the southwest's biggest timber town, and displayed in the local timber park with a sign, "Malthouse's Mistake". Didn't the ignorant coach know at least part of the log was too knotted for milling? Malthouse had already signalled his indifference to such tactics. "If it means losing a friendship over a forest, then I'll do that every time because," he motioned to the forest stand behind him, "this is forever."
By now he had new friends, prominent Western Australians who came out publicly to back his opposition to old growth logging. They were a disparate group, including businesswoman Janet Holmes a Court, former Olympic gold medallist Shirley de la Hunty, the mayors of Fremantle and the Perth suburb of Subiaco, well-known fashion designer Lit Davenport, and Liberal Party matriarch Dame Rachel Cleland.
Much is at stake in WA's native forests, which form the lifeblood of the timber industry. WA is unique in its reliance on native timbers compared with other States; in 1995-96, more than 68 per cent of its sawn wood was produced from native hardwood, not plantation wood. Plantation conifer reduced reliance on native forest to 36 per cent in NSW, 38 per cent in Victoria and 21 per cent in Queensland. If access to WA's southwest forests stopped, so would the current timber industry.
But another agency is linked by a lifeline to WA's native timber industry. If logging in native forests were ended and timber royalties stopped, the Department of Conservation and Land Management (CALM) would lose 93 per cent of the income it generates for its own activities, or 72 per cent of its total annual budget. CALM is the State's major conservation agency, receiving wide praise for its work managing WA's far-flung national parks, researching its fauna and flora and successfully breeding near-extinct animals for return to the wild.
But CALM's dual role as the State's forester often gets less favourable headlines. For years, conservation groups have railed against CALM's control over the timber industry, overseeing annual clearing of thousands of hectares of native forest. How could CALM act thus, they argue, as the agency responsible for conserving the State's finite forest resource? "CALM - it's a contradiction in terms," Malthouse bluntly declared.
When the RFA process was set up in WA, conservationists cried "foul" at the installation of CALM as the lead agency representing the State Government. "Having CALM running it is just putting the fox in charge of the chook house," said Helen Nixon, an anti-logging shire councillor from a small southwest town.
Nixon's 500-strong local forest protection group joined a dozen other groups in voting to boycott the RFA process. The State's main "green" body, the WA Conservation Council, did the same. Supporters of the timber industry were contemptuous; "they had their chance and they spat the dummy", a timber miller observed, "so they should shut up."
But Mick Malthouse's public outburst was an uncomfortable reminder that the hearts and minds of ordinary Western Australians remained to be won by the pro-timber lobby. Seventy-four per cent disapproved of logging of old-growth forest and 83 per cent disapproved of such forest being used for woodchip, the Conservation Council asserted, on the basis of a small poll. Even the RFA committee noted that up to 66 per cent of people in regional areas were "not confident that native forests are being well managed in WA".
"Around half the public remain sceptical that our forests are indeed being responsibly managed," a public affairs manager for the National Association of Forest Industries told a conference earlier this year. And, their own polling had told them, "concerns about forests are more pronounced amongst females, the upper middle class and West Australians".
A "precisely targeted" campaign was launched to sway Western Australians, with a blitz of costly TV and magazine advertising that "forests regenerate after logging". Within 2.5 million hectares of public native forest, the message went, "vast areas are contained in reserves where no logging is allowed". Almost half the remaining rare karri forest (found uniquely in WA's southwest) and one third of the jarrah forest is reserved in conservation zones.
And, the glossy brochures explained, the RFA agreement would see "about 60 per cent of remaining 'old growth' forest and samples of every forest eco-system (about 15 per cent of pre-European extent) conserved "for ever". So where, the unspoken question asked, is the problem? And why is the WA public so obstinately refusing to be reassured?
AS YOU DRIVE DOWN SOUTH, OPEN GRASSLAND and green pastures roll out prettily between the suburbs of Perth and the southern timber country. Yet the pastures are the result of a botanical holocaust, - millions of hectares cleared of plant species with among the richest, most dense variety on earth. Further inland, the bulldozer's whine reached fever pitch in the 1960s; the State's wheatbelt is now dotted with white, salt-encrusted scars that seep up from land scraped bare of more than go per cent of its original vegetation.
Nick Oaks, the tall red-haired union boss of WA's timber workers, can't understand the fuss over the forests when compared with the extent of clearing for agriculture. "Why is it all right to farm, but not to cut trees down?" he asks, as he sips a coffee in a Bridgetown shop. As a younger man Oaks was anti-logging: "I had this image in my mind about nice big straight trees disappearing up the chimney. It was bullshit."
Twelve years ago, he joined the industry and was led to forest that had been "flattened" in the mid-30s. "I was cutting down trees that had grown again. I realised we had a sustainable industry." Now, he is an Australian Workers Union organiser and he's not about to let the "greenies" lock around 2000 timber workers out of WA's native forests.
THERE ARE TWO CONTROVERSIAL PRACTICES that "greenies" like Mick Malthouse see red over. Clearfelling and woodchipping were introduced only over the past couple of decades, but now dominate forest harvesting practices. When logging teams move in and raze every tree and shrub in patches of between ten and 80 hectares, and then set fire to it, the scene is a shock to uninitiated eyes.
But Nick Oaks views it differently; clearfelling means "you get even - and Fast - tree regrowth ... It comes down to what we are managing the forest for, and timber production is an important although not the only - reason. We don't want to grow a forest that doesn't grow timber.
Nothing is wasted in the clearfelling process, he adds. Non-millable wood is chipped, like mincing the offcuts left after the prime steaks have been cut from a cow's carcass. Woodchipping is an efficient adjunct to forest logging, Oaks would argue, and without its revenue the industry could not afford to pay for good forest management.
Timber mill owner Brian de Rusett is rolling a cigarette in the heart of forest, only a few kilometres from where Malthouse's log fell. On each side of the logging track, the forest is visibly different. He points to karri regrowth on the left, a shimmering, uniformly high forest canopy of a single tree species that has grown back since the old growth trees were cleared out nearly two decades ago. To the right is forest haphazardly logged years before; non-karri species like marri (useless for timber) are growing where a new karri forest could reappear.
"If the greenies understood the way forests grow, they might have a different opinion," says de Rusett. "It would be detrimental to the forest if you leave big trees [standing] because they will have shade all around them and, in the case of karri, you won't get good regeneration under that tree.
De Rusett accepts the inevitability that Mick Malthouse's log would be half milled, half reduced to woodchip. New techniques are already ensuring that more good wood is milled than chipped, he adds. But you can't cut down half a tree, and if you left it there, it'd be a loss to the economy of the State. It's the people's tree and it's not doing any good by leaving the whole thing there. Malthouse's tree probably contained the roofing for three or more houses, he says.
It's as if each side is wearing 3-D glasses that enable them to view hitherto invisible characteristics of the forest. To de Rusett's professional eye, non-karri trees are "rubbish" and woodchipping is a sensible way to use up residue timber and offcuts which once rotted on the forest floor. Oaks sees the forest landscape in a similar way. He talks of "scruffy forest" on the perimeters of his home town, where poor logging produced "low value" regrowth. If half the volume of forest material goes to woodchips, "unfortunately that is the [kind of] forest we have".
But Oaks says his own union members have initiated an incentive scheme to reward men for producing more sawn timber, and less woodchip. He fears a simple equation, that reducing the amount of loggable forest equates to fewer jobs. And the "greenies" are trying to impose a double-whammy: he believes; by pushing for longer time cycles before loggers can go bad; into regrowth forest, even more jobs could go. As far as Oaks can tell, they just want to lock everybody out and throw away the key.
DON A PAIR OF GREENIE GOGGLES AND YOU see the argument from Jim and Mary Frith's viewpoint. They are unlikely radicals, an agriculturalist and a retired biology teacher, both nearing their seventies, who sharecrop softwood trees under contract to CALM on once bald hills on their farm outside Bridgetown. Jim Frith chuckles at the rapturous praise of timber workers for clearfelling and the vigorous regrowth it produces. "Any timber user would think it was great you get fairly uniform trees ripe for the chainsaw. Of course they think it's lovely"
The Friths are unshakeable in their belief that "we are staring a major tragedy in the face". They scribble complicated equations that they say confirm that only four per cent of the State's original unlogged jarrah, and ten per cent of the karri, is secure from logging. "We lie awake at night listening to the woodchip trains," sighs Mary Frith. "The train from Bridgetown only carries woodchips these days.
In April this year, Jim Frith stood in a Hobart court before a panel 'of High Court judges, to whom his Bridgetown based "Friends of the Forest" group had sought leave to appeal. It was the end of the road in a bitter case that had involved forest blockades and legal injunctions over four forest blocks; the Australian Heritage Commission had deemed parts of them to be of "high conservation value" back in 1992, yet this had not stopped CALM's logging plans. Frith's group had argued CALM had a duty to conserve forest life and consult local communities; on legal technicalities, the High Court threw out the appeal.
But the couple felt they had to offer an alternative; they have thrown their efforts behind an agroforestry scheme pioneered by a neighbour, to grow plantation timbers at six times the rate of forest karri and 50 times faster than slow-growing jarrah. "This is one of the best places on earth to grow trees," says Jim Frith, pointing proudly to rows of trees growing on pastures still grazed by his stock. In his Utopia, farmers would get an extra income as tree crops take off, and the need for native forest logging would disappear (see box, page 26).
Bridgetown's population is used to running two livelihoods at once; many of its 4000 people depend on jobs in timber, tourism, farming or a mixture of pursuits. The shire council played a part in attracting a $5 million sawmill to town, but there were nagging worries that, of the 46 per cent of remaining forest around the 1700 Square kilometre shire, only three per cent had been put in conservation reserves. "It seemed the shire could be logged from the front gate to the last straining post," says shire president Brian Kavanagh.
Last year, at Kavanagh's instigation, the council passed a motion that it didn't support old growth logging. Timber workers, including Oaks, were incensed. In time, a Timber Action Group supporting logging was formed. The air grew tense; Kavanagh received abusive phone calls and one logging truck operator threatened publicly to take his company's $800,000 fuel account out of town unless the shire changed its mind. "It opened my eyes to the power of the logging industry," Kavanagh says.
Noel Holdsworth runs a small timber mill just out of town. He resented the shire taking a stand "biased towards the green movement", and joined the Action Group. Yet Holdsworth, like many timber workers, had his own conservation views and supported the idea of reserving the shire's dwindling- forest backdrop. "Around the town, you've got to worry about tourism and the people who are living there ... I don't see why CALM should get up and say “We're going to cut every log in the Bridgetown shire”
Holdsworth even concedes Jim Frith's agroforestry option has limited merit, and he privately curses the woodchip train as a "bloody monster" as it hauls past his mill. He recalls protesting years ago when some karri logs he could have sawn up headed for the chipmill; they were summarily chipped the next day.
But with 40 years' experience in an industry he loves, Holdsworth was not inclined to concede around to extreme green" agendas. And when the site manager from the local mill was voted onto the shire council in late June this year, shire president Brian Kavanagh realised the townsfolk were literally at loggerheads. An accord process was initiated to enable each side to listen to the other, face-to-face. An independent arbiter was sought; Jenny Wright, a former shire president and local accountant, was the unanimous choice.
Wright wasn't keen. "I was scared because I thought we'd end up with a great big fight!" she says. "I nearly pulled out, but it was the doggedness of the [participants] that saw it through." Wright has her own thoughts on why WA's forest fight has been so bitter. It is part of Australia's perennial tussle over land, she suspects, exacerbated by changing demographics in WA's southwest, where wineries, craft shops and nature-based tours are multiplying in a new era of eco-tourism. "Bridgetown is a very good example; we have still a fair proportion of people who have been here for more than one generation, and they've cared for the land and loved it.
"We've got others who've come here in more recent times with a body of knowledge and experience, and a strong view on how they'd like to see us live our lives together. They're not always compatible. Yet, to Wright's amazement, accord was reached. After several meetings all parties agreed that the area of protected forest in Bridgetown shire must be increased; "it was just a matter of what was reasonable."
The participants, Frith and Oaks among them, jointly mapped out nearly double the forest area to be reserved around the town (although still only seven per cent), and how further logging should be negotiated. There were heated arguments when lost jobs, due to less logging, were calculated.
"We can actually nominate which families are going to be affected," Wright says, "so we're almost balancing up the personal loss of one family versus the long-term benefit for unknown people." Still, Wright believes the accord was a breakthrough. "The loggers protected their logging, feeling they should have less trouble doing it having given away other areas. The conservationists didn't get quite the preservation areas they would have liked but more under reserve than before. And out of all of this, the tourist people were the great winners and they really held the two together.
But the town's triumph was hollow. It is CALM which dictates the fate of the shire's public forests, not local government, and it has given no sign of changing logging schedules. And under the terms of the Regional Forest Agreement, the remnant forests of Bridgetown and other southwest towns are deemed too disturbed for preservation, or belonging to forest types already "represented" in far away conservation reserves.
FURTHER SOUTH, AT NORTHCLIFFE, A LARGE sign has been painted on the roof of an old shop, "Save our Old Growth Forest". Pro-logging residents objected, saying it reflected badly on the town. "I told them clearfelling didn't reflect well on the town either," says Helen Nixon, a schoolteacher who coaches the local badminton team and is a dissenting voice on the pro-logging Manjimup shire council. "We'll be left with 240 hectares of forest reserve on the edge of town, and a couple of other tiny reserves, and that's all the forest we'll be left."
How much WA forest remains? How much is protected in perpetuity? These simple questions evoke a tidal wave of claim and counter claim. The Regional Forest Agreement was intended to clarify such issues, and "reach community acceptance of forest policy". But it has yet to show it has done either.
In 1992, a report by the State's Environmental Protection Authority noted that, based on information from CALM, "the area of old growth forest ... will continue to diminish rapidly" and that, outside conservation reserves, "there will be no current old growth forest remaining in about 40 years". As for the prized timber tree jarrah, "old growth will largely disappear" in non-protected areas, to be replaced by extensive areas of younger forest that would be logged in cycles [of 60 to 80 years].
CALM's acting manager for the RFA process, Geoff Stoneman, agrees this scenario remains accurate. Under the RFA, three options are put forward to preserve 65.5 per cent, 60.55 per cent or 54.7 per cent Of WA's remaining old growth forest. These would result in a reduction in loggable areas in the first two options (of five per cent and two per cent) and a two per cent increase in loggable forest in the last scenario.
Stoneman says that reserving too per cent of old growth areas was never part of the RFA guidelines. As for criticisms that no maps have been drawn up to show which parts of the forest might be preserved, Stoneman responds the aim was "to focus on broad issues, not specific areas of forest".
Under the RFA, old growth forest is defined as "forest that is ecologically mature and has been subjected to negligible unnatural disturbance". In WA, all forest areas affected by a devastating Fungus "dieback", or that have undergone any degree of logging, roading or clearing, are ruled out as having old growth status. Areas of wilderness (which must be at least 8000 hectares in size) qualify for protection, but WA's southwest is deemed to have none.
In this way, the WA Conservation Council argues, the area of forest to be preserved has shrunk to suit the timber industry's insatiable hunger. As for CALM's calculation of how much "old growth" is already protected in reserves, the Council considers it equally suspect, since it includes narrow buffer strips left along rivers, roads and scenic walks for erosion and aesthetic reasons. They argue that these strips of forest are a few metres wide (but add up to thousands of hectares) and have few of the qualities of actual forest stands.
Stoneman points out that CALM is simply "observing the rules" laid down by the Commonwealth's RFA process and its definitions of terms like reserves" and "old growth". "The conservation movement has been running a pretty vigorous campaign to denigrate CALM's involvement [and] undermine what the RFA is trying to achieve," he says. "It'll continue after it's been signed, sealed and delivered."
There's little doubt on either side about the latter. Even if an area meets every conservation imperative, there remains a "socio-economic impact" test under the RFA that can still permit logging if it can be proven that too many jobs would go without it. Clashes between logging crews and sit-in greenie groups appear inevitable. WA's Environment Minister Cheryl Edwardes recently increased the range of fines for obstruction by forest protesters.
Brian de Rusett remembers one such encounter last year, when a timber colleague was trying to fell a large tree. Suddenly, he had his chainsaw ripped from his hands by a hippie-looking objector who, later in court, answered to the name "Flowing Dolphin". "The guy was fined $300 for putting my friend's life - and his own - in danger.
De Rusett was even less impressed when tankers left in the forest by logging crews were drained of hundreds of dollars of fuel, apparently by activists. "If they start pushing us," he warns, "we'll push back." He's pleased that Tuckey holds the forests' fate in his hands: "He's a no-nonsense sort of bloke."
Nixon opened her house up to some dreadlocked young protesters last year, so they could have a hot shower. She decided they might make more impact than her years of futile letters and fruitless debates. A fellow campaigner told her he felt "the best thing now is to use my wallet and rent a 'greenie'. Why should I put in all my time trying to persuade, when I can fund someone to latch themselves to a bulldozer and get more people paying attention?"
But Nixon says she feels for her constituents who depend on the timber industry. "It doesn't pay very well, and here are city slickers and Mick Malthouse in his well-paid job, coming down and telling them they're doing terrible things and they should lose their jobs." Months after Malthouse's public plea, the Eagles failed to make the AFL semifinals. A few timber workers observed he should have kept his eye on the ball, not the forest. But Malthouse was - and is utterly unrepentant. He's kept every one of the hundreds of letters of support he received on the forest issue, "more than all the letters I got from [winning] two premierships combined - there's no hope of ever replying to them".
He was surprised by where the letters came from. "They were from ex-CALM scientists, former loggers, transport workers, people in country towns who said they were too afraid to speak up, whole classes of kids." His stand was "purely a personal decision - nobody lobbied me". He says he's a realist, and thinks "a fairly strong [timber] lobby group" will win. "But nothing will change my mind. The old growth forest must remain."
On the cleared forest floor, the wide stump of Malthouse's log has sprouted small green shoots. Like so much in the forest debate, you can look at it two ways. The pro-loggers will see vindication in these signs of new life and the "greenies will lament the loss of the massive tree that once stood there.
*** End of article ***
PULP FRICTION? - Box on Page 26
When Judy Clark addressed a seminar in Perth a few months ago, she was drawn to the massive wooden doors at the hall entrance. "They're made of wood-based panels, from plantations in WA. They would have been made of native forest timber, but they're not. So it can be replaced." An economist from the Australian National University, Clark in 1995 produced a major report on Australian plantations. Regional wealth and new jobs can grow in timber regions, she says, but only if a determined switch is made to growing and locally processing plantation wood.
Clark says the timber industry should get out of WA's native forests. Sawn wood and woodchips for paper pulp can all be harvested from plantations, she says. "More than 80 per cent of production from native forests is competing directly with the plantation product."
She has made projections of WA's current tree crops (many owned by CALM) and says the switch from forest to plantation wood could be made now. A demand for decorative native woods would remain, with craftsmen using small amounts for furniture and flooring. As for woodchips, Japanese buyers rate WA's karri and marri a lowly seventh in preference, and the Japanese Government has instructed its own paper industry to reduce dependence on pulpwood sourced from native forests.
Yet "not one of the RFA options factors in the plantation resource ... There are only two companies that process plantation wood in WA, and their livelihoods also depend on native timber - and CALM.
But Bob Pearce, executive director of the WA Forests Federation, says
WA is a small net importer of timber and paper products. "What's our moral
justification for using other people's forests? That's a compelling issue
to me." It's an argument that has already been echoed by Federal Forests
Minister Wilson Tuckey. VL