THE TASMANIAN WILDERNESS WORLD HERITAGE AREA TURNS 40

Four decades ago, UNESCO declared Tasmania’s Southwest to be an area of global significance. Geoff Law looks at the history leading up to the declaration, and at the fights since then to further protect this stunning area.

On December 14, 1982, the Franklin blockade began. Fifty-three people were arrested on the banks of the Franklin and Gordon rivers, attempting to stop construction of a huge dam that threatened mile after mile of rainforests, limestone caves, gorges and Aboriginal heritage in Tasmania’s wilderness.

That night, the headquarters of the Tasmanian Wilderness Society (TWS) in Strahan was a hive of activity. Blockade organisers, volunteers and journalists milled around. Suddenly, an American accent boomed out above the hubbub. Norm Sanders, holding a phone in one hand, announced ‘south-west Tasmania is now World Heritage’. A mighty cheer broke out.

Seventeen thousand kilometres away, in Paris, the chair of UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee had just brought down the gavel on the committee’s decision to inscribe the Franklin River on the World Heritage List. It did so despite the protestations of the Tasmanian delegation, sent along by premier Robin Gray to thwart the listing at the last moment. The committee shrugged off these objections and, in an unusual move, also warned that the impacts of dam-building warranted consideration of an ‘in danger’ listing for the new World Heritage property.

The listing vindicated the stand taken by protesters in Southwest Tasmania. Forty years and several extensions later, the Tasmanian Wilderness WHA now occupies 1.58 million hectares, almost a quarter of the state. It is one of the world’s most diverse World Heritage properties, satisfying seven of the ten criteria for World Heritage value. (Only one other property matches this—Mt Taishan in China.)

World Heritage recognition indicates that the international community understands the value to the world of Tasmania’s landscapes—its jagged mountains, sculpted by glaciers; the pristine beaches, cliffs, islands and lagoons of the Southwest’s coast; and the ancient lineage of unique

Tasmanian life forms such as Huon pines, many of which are over 2,000 years old. Also affirmed is the importance of wilderness—large expanses of country remote from the disturbances of industrialised society. Indeed, the Tasmanian Wilderness WHA is the only World Heritage property with the word ‘wilderness’ in its official name.

The listing also recognises the property’s cultural heritage. The Tasmanian Aboriginal people inhabited caves along the Franklin and other rivers at the height of the last Ice Age, between 21,000 and 10,000 years ago, when they were the most southerly people on the face of the Earth. Artefacts, bones and rock art embody the Aboriginal inhabitation of what was then a very different landscape. Middens created by the heaping of countless shells along today’s coastline are a more recent manifestation of that occupation.

But that initial inscription, the one announced by Norm Sanders to his fellow blockaders that night in 1982, did not end the battle over the Franklin River. The Tasmanian Hydro-Electric Commission (HEC), cheered on by the Gray government, ignored the listing and continued its destructive works.

And so the blockade continued until March the following year, during which time 1,272 people were arrested. Night after night, the conflict between conservation and development was dramatised on TV screens across Australia, with the rainforests of the wild rivers as the backdrop. This coincided with a federal election that saw Labor’s Bob Hawke oust the coalition’s Malcolm Fraser as prime minister. Some of Hawke’s first words as prime minister-elect on March 5, 1983 were “the dam will not be built.”

When the Federal Government, true to Hawke’s promise, passed new legislation to stop the dam, it was challenged by Tasmania. A High Court hearing that debated abstruse constitutional issues was followed by a tense wait for the verdict. All the while, the machinery of the HEC was hard at work, flattening rainforests for a construction camp and forging a highway to the dam site. The bulldozers were finally brought to a halt on July 1, 1983 when the High Court ruled that the dam could not proceed.

A wild river had been saved.

But the significance of the High Court’s decision extended well beyond Tasmania. Its confirmation of the power of Australia’s national government to protect our heritage led to campaigns to achieve World Heritage protection of Australia’s other natural wonders. A whole generation of campaigners was empowered to tackle destructive projects. Enormous strides in conservation have subsequently been made using the government’s World Heritage powers, from Queensland’s Wet Tropics, Fraser Island and Lamington Plateau, to the Blue Mountains and Wollemi in NSW, to WA’s Shark Bay and Ningaloo, and all the way to the sub-Antarctic islands.

But all this has been the result of literally decades of hard and often risky work on the part of conservationists all over

Australia and internationally. In fact, in many ways, the struggles that followed to expand the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area proved in many ways more difficult than gaining the area’s initial inscription. And what’s more, the fight for its integrity continues to this day.

BACK IN THE 1970S, THE CONCEPT of World Heritage was new and obscure. The Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Natural and Cultural Heritage was inaugurated by UNESCO in 1972. It grew out of global dismay at the carnage of two world wars and growing unease at the impact of modern humanity on the natural world.

This coincided with the inundation of Tasmania’s Lake Pedder for hydro-electric development. Australia’s new Federal Government, under Gough Whitlam, belatedly tried to save the lake but had been forcefully rebuffed by the Tasmanian Government. In the aftermath of this defeat, two progressive Labor politicians, Tom Uren and Moss Cass, came to Tasmania. They met with prominent Pedder campaigner, Kevin Kiernan, and canvassed the prospects of the federal government overturning Tasmania’s pro-dam policies using an international treaty—namely, the World Heritage Convention. The federal government would be bound to honour the treaty, which would bring into play constitutional powers enabling the wild rivers to be saved from new dams. Kiernan took up the idea and promoted it in his role as director of the newly formed Tasmanian Wilderness Society during the late 1970s.

The director of the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), Geoff Mosley, also recognised the potential of the World Heritage concept. By the time Australia had ratified the new treaty, in 1974, ACF was pressing for five areas to be nominated to the list, including Southwest Tasmania.

The concept of World Heritage for Southwest Tasmania struck a chord in the community, which had been sensitised to the beauty of the area by media coverage of Lake Pedder. Politicians on both sides took up the cause, creating formidable political momentum. The 1981 nomination of three Tasmanian national parks was made by a federal Coalition government under Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and supported by the Tasmanian Labor Government of Doug Lowe. This was the same year that

IMAGES - CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT

Parts of the Southern Forests as well as additional mountain country, including Lake Rhona in the Denison Range (pictured), were added to the TWWHA in the major 1989 extension. Credit: Grant Dixon

Front page of The Herald [Melbourne] on July 1, 1983

‘No Dams’ march in Sydney, as pictured in Wild Issue #7, 1983.

Kakadu and the Great Barrier Reef were inscribed as Australia’s first World Heritage properties.

Following the Franklin victory, conservationists looked to extend the Tasmanian World Heritage Area, whose boundaries excluded many important attributes. This was seen as the most powerful means of tackling the logging industry, whose new roads were pushing ever deeper into the primeval valleys of the Southwest, destroying majestic eucalypts towering over verdant rainforests. Conservationists didn’t know at the time that this long, bruising roller-coaster ride would last for decades.

An early breakthrough occurred in 1986, at a confrontation in the Picton valley, adjacent to the walking track to Federation Peak. Independent MP and hero of the Franklin campaign, Bob Brown, was brutally assaulted in front of the cameras of the media. The ensuing front-page coverage prompted a visit to the forests by ALP power-broker Senator Graham Richardson in April 1986. After helicoptering into Lake Sydney with conservationists, including Bob Brown and myself, Richardson mused aloud about “extending the World Heritage Area” while warning that “you won’t get everything you want.” Back at The Wilderness Society headquarters in Hobart, he rang Prime Minister Hawke and declared himself a “born-again greenie”.

The advent of such an influential government member led to a formal federal inquiry into the threatened forests, a process that didn’t go as initially expected. The inquiry’s majority report found that only a small proportion of the area in question would qualify for World Heritage listing (which nevertheless included the hotly contested Lemonthyme forest—the forested spurs and gullies that bushwalkers can admire from Pine Forest Moor lookout on the Overland Track).

An alternative was provided in the minority report by Peter Hitchcock, who recommended a substantial World Heritage extension from Cockle Creek in the far south to the Walls of Jerusalem National Park in the north. The battle lines were drawn. After an intense period of rallies, advertisements, media debate and feature articles, Richardson won the day with a World Heritage nomination incorporating major tracts of the tallest hardwood trees on Earth. Caves and rainforests in the winding valley of the Weld River were at the heart of the nomination.

It was a win for the Tasmanian Wilderness WHA, but a flawed one. Not only were critical forests left out; it also excluded a large central part of the wilderness that included the Gordon Splits, the Denison River and the Spires. Because it was completely encircled by the nomination, this area became known colloquially as the ‘hole in the doughnut’.

The Tasmanian election of May 1989 created an opportunity to rectify the situation. Robin Gray lost his majority, five independents led by Bob Brown were elected, and a minority government appeared to be in the offing. A nail-biting period ensued, with Gray (foreshadowing the efforts of Donald Trump 31 years later) desperately clinging to power by stirring up his support base. He was eventually ousted following revelations that a local media magnate, Edmund Rouse (who was also chairman of a company called Gunns), had tried to bribe a member of the Labor Party to cross the floor.

The government duly changed hands, with the foundation being the Labor-Green Accord. This document was negotiated by Bob Brown and his fellow MPs with the help of conservationists from TWS and ACF. The Accord extended the World Heritage nomination to include ‘the hole in the doughnut’ (Denison-Spires area), the Hartz Mountains and Walls of Jerusalem National Parks, most of the glacial lakes that adorn the Central Plateau, the remote and imposing Eldon Range, and scenic features such as Meander Falls, Liffey Falls, Marakoopa Cave and Drys Bluff. Negotiations between the forestry industry on one side and TWS and ACF on the other led to further extensions. In return for logging in some contested areas, industry and unions agreed to World Heritage status for more areas of threatened forest. The final say rested with Richardson, and just before the September 1989 deadline, he agreed to still more areas put forward by Brown to be added to the nomination.

It was a highly significant moment when the extended World Heritage property was listed in December 1989. The extent of the property had been increased by 78%. The number of attributes formally recognised had been increased to include the pristine cave systems of the Southwest (including Exit Cave near the walking track to Precipitous Bluff) and the area’s awe-inspiring giant eucalypts. The name of the property was simplified from its previously clunky one of ‘Western Tasmanian Wilderness National Parks WHA’ to the ‘Tasmanian Wilderness WHA’.

This was a high-water mark for World Heritage in Tasmania. The appetite of the Federal Government for new World Heritage battles was exhausted. The Hawke era was drawing to a close. In 1992, an anti-conservation Liberal government came to power in Tasmania. It was the beginning of a long and seemingly fruitless period of battling for the natural world.

Nevertheless, new World Heritage proposals were developed. The takayna/Tarkine contained Australia’s greatest tract of cool-temperate rainforest, as well as wild rivers and a coastline rich in Aboriginal heritage. Tasmanian Liberal MPs scoffed at the idea of a Tarkine World Heritage extension, but the concept gradually gained traction. And the forest battles went on, with the focus shifting from one threatened valley to another. Despite occasional moratoriums, new roads were built and the forests fell. The Liberals lost office in Tasmania and Labor took over, but both parties were dedicated to the logging and mining industries. Although this was a grim period for conservationists, the Tasmanian wilderness continually provided new inspiration. Exploratory weekend trips into the threatened forests revealed the presence of giant trees (including trees more than 90m tall in the Styx valley), caves, eagles’ nests, and Aboriginal heritage. Such discoveries frequently halted the chainsaws at the micro level, while work proceeded to achieve a larger scale breakthrough.

Ironically, it took the Tasmanian Government’s obsession with establishing a pulp mill to deliver that breakthrough. In 2004, the giant hardwood company, Gunns—hard on the heels of instigating a lawsuit against a group of conservationists who became known as the ‘Gunns 20’ (I happened to be one of them)—launched its proposal for a huge new pulp mill near Launceston. The twists and turns of the battle exposed a corrupt relationship between industry and government, leading to the downfall of key industry advocates. Gunns’ markets and share price collapsed.

This implosion of Tasmania’s biggest logging company led to negotiations between the industry and conservationists. With the Greens in power-sharing relationships at both the federal and state levels, the time was ripe for the World Heritage Area to be extended to include the most contentious forests. In 2011, Bob Brown devoted some of his senatorial resources into developing a World Heritage proposal that would fit within the constraints imposed by both politics and time. The result was a proposed ‘minor boundary modification’ to the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage property.

IMAGES - LEFT TO RIGHT, TOP TO BOTTOM

View across Southwest NP from the Western Arthurs. Credit: James McCormack

Senator Graham Richardson visiting Tasmania’s Southwest in April 1986.

Credit: David Heatley

Rally for the Tasmanian forests in Melbourne in 2004. Credit: Eli Greig

A protest against the ‘gagging’ of conservationists by Gunns’ lawsuit, December 2004. Geoff Law, one of the defendants, at left.

Credit: The Wilderness Society Collection

Image taken by Mercury photographer Fred Kohl of Bob Brown being assaulted that ran on the front pages of newspapers in 1986. The image, and the controversy that ensued, prompted a visit to the area by Senator Graham Richardson (see image to left) that later proved instrumental in expanding the TWWHA boundaries

The areas concerned were relatively small, but they included the most densely forested valleys—places where the most intense battles had been fought; places such as the Styx valley, with its giant trees, and the Weld and Florentine valleys, with their primeval forests, caves and tannin-stained rivers.

In November 2012, an agreement between conservationists and industry was finally hammered out. It included the ‘minor modification’ as proposed by Brown. Because the forest areas had been approved in this industry/conservation ‘peace deal’, the World Heritage listing of what had previously been Tasmania’s most contested forests was no longer opposed by the forestry unions and companies. The proposal was duly submitted to UNESCO by the government of Julia Gillard in January 2013.

Nevertheless, things seemed precarious. There was a feeling that the Gillard government was living on borrowed time. The Liberals at the state level, under the command of Will Hodgman and Peter Gutwein, were doing all they could to wreck the forest agreement. All was not plain sailing at the international level either. One of UNESCO’s advisory bodies wanted more time to assess the proposal. UNESCO’s draft advice to the World Heritage Committee called for a one-year delay in the process so that this assessment could be carried out.

But the Tasmanian wilderness could not afford one year. It was clear that the Coalition under Tony Abbott would win the forthcoming election. If the World Heritage Committee didn’t approve the modification at its June 2013 meeting in Cambodia, the proposal would be torpedoed and logging would resume.

A major effort was undertaken by conservation groups, experts and the Australian Government to win over the World Heritage Committee. Critically, an Indigenous representative attended the meeting in Phnom Penh, speaking in favour of the minor modification. Committee members realised that this was a last-gasp opportunity to resolve what had been a long-running, intractable dispute over forests of obvious World Heritage value.

On 26 June 2013, the World Heritage Committee unanimously approved the modification. And not a minute too soon; within three months, Tony Abbott was prime minister. In 2014, his government attempted to have part of the World Heritage Area rescinded. The World Heritage Committee took less than seven minutes to consign this proposal to the dustbin of history. The following year, the state government of Will Hodgman attempted to remove the word ‘wilderness’ from the name of the property (as a prelude to more exploitation) but public outcry forced him to back down.

THE TASMANIAN WILDERNESS WORLD HERITAGE AREA PROTECTS a place that, even amongst World Heritage properties, is exceedingly special. But the area is still not fully protected. Proposals for helicopter-serviced tourist accommodation (such as the plans for Lake Malbena and the South Coast Track) threaten its wilderness values and cultural heritage. The management plan for the property is flawed. The area’s Aboriginal heritage is yet to be fully documented. Fires, whose impacts have intensified due to climate change, constitute an existential threat to the property’s ancient life forms. The arguments for restoring Lake Pedder, in the submerged heart of the World Heritage Area, are compelling. And many areas that exemplify the attributes of the Tasmanian Wilderness WHA have yet to be incorporated into the property, including takayna/Tarkine, the Tyndall Range, Reynolds Falls, and the sprawling moorlands, rainforests and coastline south of Macquarie Harbour.

Organisations such as the Bob Brown Foundation and the Wilderness Society are taking on these challenges. Their work is aided by the thousands of people all over Australia who feel inspired to take action by the haunting beauty of the Tasmanian wilderness. W