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So it wasn't as if Detective Sergeant John Postma, officer in charge of Colac's already stretched blue line of criminal investigation, didn't have anything to worry about before last weekend. His patch extends from Skipton in the west to Birregurra in the east, an area the size of a small American state. And crime, as the saying goes, doesn't take a holiday.
There was the big heist of tools from a Colac tradesman ("Geelong druggies coming down here," grunts the sergeant disgustedly) and someone cracked a safe full of shearing combs - not cash or jewellery, maybe, but expensive hardware always saleable in the bush if the price is right.
Worse, a few months ago, there was a violent rape at Colac railway station that shocked the district and has tied up police in the painstaking task of eliminating suspects.
Then came last Saturday night.
As 4000 people gathered at Apollo Bay, on the other side of the Otways, for the biggest night of the eighth annual music festival being held there, someone else was making plans for the festival, too. They were planning to sabotage it.
Someone (or two, perhaps more) drove along the road that winds through the timbered hills south of Forrest, past the hamlet of Barramunga to a winding bit of road locals call Devil's Elbow. Here, they turned into a rough access track that cuts through the bush into a pine plantation.
He (or she or they) climbed out of the vehicle, took a chainsaw and walked along the rutted track through the whispering pines to the power line that runs across the Otways from Colac to Apollo Bay.
They started the saw and cut into the pole from one side, pulled the saw out before it jammed in the cut and cut from the other side. The result was two uneven cuts not quite meeting in the centre of the pole, an apparently amateurish attempt that a professional feller would, in workaday circumstances, consider not only clumsy but also dangerous.
The pole tottered for a moment as the last splinters of wood broke, then crashed into the pines, the high-voltage lines sparking spectacularly as they struck the green trees and shorted out, leaving scorch marks on the broken branches. One high-tension cable snapped and the frayed end sprang into the undergrowth far down a hill. What the saboteurs might not have known was that, for several seconds, the live wires could have electrified the ground with 22,000 volts, with the risk of electrocuting them through what power workers call "step potential".
When the pole fell, it tripped a circuit breaker, but a circuit re-closer on the line automatically attempted to reconnect the supply several times in case it was a temporary electrical short, such as caused by a branch falling across the line. But, after three or four failed attempts to reconnect, the system "locked out" the electricity. In this case, someone at a distant control room was able to switch the electricity feeding Apollo Bay to the western line, known as the Gellibrand line.
Which is what happened at exactly 6.37pm last Saturday. At Apollo Bay, the lights flickered for a few seconds, but didn't go off. The festival organisers gave a sigh of relief. The town used to be cursed with power blackouts, but since the extra "feeder" line was installed several years ago, it hasn't been a problem.
But whoever cut down the pole also knew that. As the headline performers, including Stephen Cummings, Tiddas, Neil Murray and Dianna Kiss, prepared to play their sets in the main marquee at Apollo Bay, the saboteurs were heading for the second leg of their Saturday-night double.
They drove back on to the bitumen and turned right to drive down to the Turton's Track turnoff, a gravel road branching west, towards Beech Forest. But before reaching the turnoff, they pulled up at a new road sign and, on the back of it, spray-painted a cryptic message: "OREN WAR". OREN, as anybody from the Otways knows, stands for the Otway Ranges Environmental Network, a coalition of green groups that opposes clearfelling of native forests. But was the "war" referred to against OREN... or for it? Intentionally or not, the message was brilliantly ambiguous.
The saboteurs then turned into Turton's Track, a gravel road that tacks precariously above tree-ferned gullies. Half an hour's driving doesn't cover much distance, and it took that long to reach the turn-off to Aire Valley, and another quarter of an hour or so down that road to reach another access track up a lonely ridge to the western feeder line from Beech Forest to Apollo Bay.
Here they approached a power pole and started work. But, this time, as Postma was to muse later, whoever had the chainsaw did a copybook job. To ensure the pole fell into the pine trees to the south, and not across the track, he cut a neat scarf - a big notch like an open mouth - in the south side of the pole. Then he cut "across the back" of the pole to make the pole's weight pull it towards the notch. The two bottom cuts were dead level and at ground level... exactly as professional fellers do it in pine plantations to allow machinery to drive across the stumps.
The pole hit the ground at 7.30pm. Instantly, Apollo Bay's music festival was unplugged.
Organisers set to work to rescue the festival from chaos - some performers played acoustic sets by candlelight, generators saved others, some didn't play at all.
Meanwhile, as police say, the offenders decamped. But not before they spray-painted another message on the fallen pole: "OREN WAR ZONE".
By the time they had fled the scene, telephone calls were calling in Powercor's emergency crews for a long night's work. Because both lines were dead, the breaks couldn't be isolated, and so the crews had to find the fallen poles by driving along the lines in the dark.
It took 15 hours to fit out two new poles, put them up and turn the supply back on. By then, the festival had survived the attack. There were a few hundred disgruntled fans, but most people had rallied to the cause of acoustic music by candlelight. It was, one organiser said later, "quite magical".
Postma's headaches were just beginning. Called in from home on Sunday
morning, he went to the scene of the crimes. There was, not surprisingly,
little left in the way of incriminating tyre marks or footprints after
the maintenance crews had trampled the scene. But he was able to rescue
the sawn sections of both poles and take them back to Colac police station
to examine them. There are
clues, he says carefully, that could help secure a conviction.
The detective, like a lot of other people, has his own opinions about which side of the logging debate is more likely to harbor the culprit. Balanced against the obvious assumption that it is a logger - or a logger sympathiser - is the possibility it was a deliberate attempt to discredit the timber industry in the final days before the controversial regional forests agreement was signed off yesterday.
Was it a stupid act by angry loggers who fear their livelihoods are under threat? Or a calculated conspiracy by lunatic-fringe green activists?
It's what Postma calls "a bit of a conundrum", a commendably cautious attitude that, none the less, has both sides chafing impatiently for a result.
Some things seem to stand out. One is that the people of the Colac Otway Shire are divided by more than the hills between them. Inland, the traditional farming and timber interests dominate, with feelings heightened by drought and increasing restrictions on the timber industry. On the coast around Apollo Bay, properties overlooking the ocean have been bought up by wealthy outsiders looking for views and real-estate investment, and tourism is booming. In the conservation movement there, fringe "greenies" and "ferals" are now outnumbered by a growing number of business people and residents who see their own long-term interests in tourists, not logging.
Gary McPike, president of the music festival and proprietor of the Sandy Feet cafe in the main street, epitomises the shifting loyalties in the debate. At bottom, he is a businessman with an interest in attracting free-spending tourists to Apollo Bay, but he doesn't have the knee-jerk reaction against the timber industry that some conservationists might. That's because he spent several years as a tree-feller in the Otways himself and knows that those who work in the bush are, like him, only trying to make an honest living.
It's a point that, to some extent, many people on the coast concede. One OREN member, a nurse, works closely with environmental activists who regularly clash with loggers in forest blockades. But she is anxious not to publish her address, in case of possible retaliation, and underlines that she is "not against loggers - only against logging".
A local nurseryman who sells thousands of tree seedlings to the "doctors and lawyers" buying up the coast points out that "people in suits" are now willing to be pictured blockading bulldozers. As green activism has became mainstream, the loggers have become marginalised. A decade ago, loggers tended to be seen as hard-working "locals" pitted against trouble-making "outsiders" in forest communities. Now, as population and attitudes shift, and the "rednecks" become greener and the "greens" get a haircut and a real job, it's not so easy to discern the dividing lines.
Among the thousands of retired couples who have moved to the west coast in recent years are Tom and Alison Prior. Tom, a crime and sport reporter on The Sun newspaper for almost 30 years, looks askance at the dreadlocked "ferals" he sees in Apollo Bay's main street. But Alison - mother of six, grandmother of many - is cheerfully against clearfelling in the Otways. "I have been careful about what I join because I don't want to be chained to a bulldozer," she laughs, "but there are people (in the conservation groups) who are very nice."
Three of her children came down to the festival, and were disappointed by the blackout. "I would say it's a terrorist act," she says. "Whoever did it has lost the sympathy of both the loggers and of the other people. It's terrorism for its own sake."
The outgoing mayor of the shire, Helen Paatsch, agrees. "It's criminal sabotage," she says. "It's like people who light bushfires - it could be someone with a twisted grudge against the rest of mankind."
Yes, but who?
That's the question facing Postma as he watches and waits for information to come his way.
Meanwhile, rumors swirl.
The obvious guess is that the saboteur was a local - though probably not from the Apollo Bay side of the ranges - whose sympathies lie with the timber industry. Against the theory that it was a logger is the amateurish way the first pole was cut. Then again, the second pole was skilfully cut. The saboteurs appeared to have used a small chainsaw - more like a backyarder's firewood saw than the high-powered machines professionals use.
Four days after the event, local workers crowd into the new Forrest pub for a counter tea and a few beers after work. Most are loggers or sawmill hands. A Department of Natural Resources and Environment man - not a local - eats alone.
People such as him, he says, are caught in the middle of the debate between greens and loggers, which he knows about from experiences elsewhere.
He ponders the mystery, then offers a story, rather than a theory. Some years ago, he says, in southern New South Wales, someone cut down several power poles near Eden, the centre of the local woodchip industry. The funny thing was, as he recalls, a radical greenie was eventually arrested for the offence. That's why he, for one, prefers to wait and see what happens rather than accusing anyone.
Postma, naturally, is professionally neutral. He says he is quietly confident that if the culprits are on the fringes of the logging industry, someone will start talking in a pub some time. And word will get back.
Meanwhile, there's a rumor about a Powercor truck "being borrowed" on the night in question. Could it be that it's neither loggers nor the greenies, but the joker in the pack... someone with a grudge against Powercor?
Postscript: By last Wednesday morning the OREN WAR graffiti on the road
sign had been painted out. Shot through the fresh paint were 11 new bullet
holes. Some country traditions still live.
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