Chain Reaction #147: The Forest Win

EditoR’ S not E

I had tears in my eyes when I heard of Victoria’s (mostly) end to native forest logging. This edition is a tribute to that emotion, and a tribute to the passion, devotion and sheer hard slog of campaigners throughout the decades. As many contributors highlight; without all of you - we wouldn’t be here celebrating. We begin by reflecting back on the forest movement’s history and hear the stories of campaigners past and present. But what next? What now? We take a deep dive into questioning how the forest movement can act in solidarity with First Nations people, and highlight forest campaigns that are still yet to be won.

If you’d like to contribute to CR, or get involved with our growing collective, get in touch!

chainreaction@foe.org.au

FoE Au S t RALi A nEWS

tAS WAt ER PFAS

dE t EC tion S 2017 - 2023

In October 2023, a Right to Information (RTI) request was sent to TasWater requesting data regarding PFAS detections by TasWater testing. The information was received from TasWater in less than two months.

TasWater provide drinking water and sewerage services to the Tasmanian community. TasWater operate 112 Sewerage Treatment Plants (STP’s) throughout the state, the RTI data shows that long term monitoring between 2020-2023 was conducted at 13 STP’s, with a further 16 STP’s tested over a shorter period of time. This means that TasWater currently have PFAS data for a quarter of their sewerage treatment plants. Extremely limited PFAS testing in water supplies was only carried out 4 times at Hobart. Water supplies don’t appear to be of major concern to TasWater in regards to PFAS contamination.

Some key findings include:

• Approximately 88.5% of all test regimes for sludge/biosolids were positive for at least one PFAS chemical and approximately 55% of test regimes in effluent/influent being positive for at least one PFAS chemical.

• Almost 2000 individual biosolid/ sludge samples tested positive for PFAS.

• Only four tests were conducted in a drinking water supply (Hobart) and all were negative.

• 45% of targeted Trade Waste tests detected PFAS chemicals, sometimes at very high levels.

Nine years ago the Tasmanian Government axed their decade-long pesticide testing program. Up until that time, it was the most comprehensive pesticide testing regime in Australia.

Any heavy rainfall events that occur after recent spraying can lead to offsite pollution events. This is particularly the case when many hectares of land in logged plantations for example are left exposed with limited vegetation to lessen soil and pesticide movement off site.

Read the full findings of the report: foe.org.au/taswater Or contact anthony.amis@foe.org.au for more information.

ViC toRi A to K iCK oFF

A uC tion S FoR 2 GiGAWAtt S oF oFFSHoRE W ind in 2024, E nouGH to P o WER 1.5

MiLL ion HoMES

Friends of the Earth welcomes the Allan government’s announcement it will kickstart offshore wind auctions in 2024, a big step forward for climate that will power 1.5 million homes with clean renewable energy.

Friends of the Earth also welcome the Allan government’s position that oil and gas style seismic blasting is not necessary for offshore wind, and the industry can instead use High Resolution Geophysical (HRG) surveys, a more sensitive way to map the seabed and other geological features.

Critically, the government says that bids for offshore wind contracts will be assessed on criteria including First Nations partnerships, community benefits, and local content and job creation, as well as price.

Friends of the Earth calls on the federal Albanese government to match Victoria’s ambition with its own offshore wind industry plan for securing good, union jobs, strong community benefits and protections for the environment.

Learn more, or get involved with Yes2Renewables: melbournefoe.org.au/energy

ESS o duMPS

‘RiGS to REEF ’ oP tion

Friends of the Earth Australia (FoEA) is congratulating Esso Australia for saying it has rejected the idea of dumping retired oil and gas platforms into the ocean to form fishing reefs.

Esso advised FoEA that they would now remove the platforms — including the long steel support structures or ‘jackets’ — from the ocean.

In doing so, Esso (a company owned by ExxonMobil) said it acknowledged the science that does not support the artificial reefs idea. Esso is planning to remove 13 retired oil and gas platforms from Bass Strait in coming years.

QuEE n SLA nd R EJEC t S

P RoP o SE d nEW Co AL FiRE d Po WER StAtion

The Queensland Department of Environment and Science quietly refused the Environmental Authority application on 2nd November 2023.

Billionaire Clive Palmer owned Waratah Coal’s 1400 MW coal fired power station proposed for the township of Alpha, Central West Queensland has failed at its first approval stage. At the same time the Department of State Development’s advice about the local environmental impacts, recommended approval with conditions.

Some of the environment department’s key considerations to refuse the application included such things as the irreversible climate change impacts, and the threat posed to Queensland’s renewable energy targets of 50% by 2030 and 70% by 2032.

FoEA Offshore Fossil Gas

Campaigner Jeff Waters said that the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of steel for the jackets could now be brought ashore for recycling.

“What we need now is a world’s best practice, state of the art oil platform recycling yard, which will trap all toxins as the platforms are broken down, cleaned and recycled. It’s a $60 billion national industry waiting to happen,” A site in Geelong is being considered for a recycling centre.

Read the full media release: foe.org.au/ esso_dumps_rigs_to_reef_option

CoP28 out CoME undERMinEd

By dA nGERouS diS t RACtionS A nd LACK oF Fin A nCE

The COP28 outcome fails key tests on the fast, fair, funded and full phaseout of fossil fuels that the world needs now to avert climate catastrophe.

“The COP28 deal has fallen short of delivering meaningful commitments on fossil fuel phaseout and urgently needed climate finance. The deal opens the door to dangerous distractions that will prevent a just and equitable energy transition– carbon capture utilisation and storage, hydrogen, nuclear, carbon removal technologies like geoengineering and schemes that commodify nature. And, there is nothing that would stop hundreds of millions of tonnes of offsets being considered as ‘abatement’,” explained Sara Shaw, FoEI.

The outcome is weak on equity as it does not properly differentiate between developed and developing countries’ role in the transition away from fossil fuels – despite their differing historical responsibility for emissions. It has a global renewable energy target, but no money to make it happen.

Read the full media release from FoE International: foe.org.au/foei_response_ to_cop_28

With this win, now is the time for Minister Steven Miles, Minister for State Development to reject the proposed climate wrecking dirty coal fired power station - Queensland does not need another coal fired power station.

Get involved: foe.org.au/queensland_ rejects_proposed_new_coal_fired_ power_station

1. Sign the petition

2. Become a supporter of FoE Brisbane

3. Share FoE Brisbane’s social media posts.

Still Standing, With All t hat Remains.

Goongerah Environment Centre

This year marks 30 years of the Goongerah Environment Centre (GECO) campaigning to protect East Gippsland’s unparalleled forests and biodiversity. East Gippsland covers 9% of the state, but is home to 34% of listed threatened species. It is the only place in the country that offers a continuous connection of natural ecosystems spanning from alpine to coastal landscapes.

GECO’s roots are in nonviolent direct action, and we’ve been blockading for forests since our inception. In November 1993, GECO formed off the back of the ‘Celebrate and Defend East Gippsland Forest Festival’ put on by The Wilderness Society, Friends of the Earth, and Concerned Residents of East Gippsland.

The end of this year also marks the end of clearfell logging in Victoria. While a major win, it has been a bittersweet victory for many. Fiona, our longest serving collective member, has been using this time to dive deep into reflection with all the generations of activists who have been part of GECO. These reflections will form part of a radio series on 3CR next year. Below are snippets of a couple of these conversations with original GECO activists present in the early 90’s. With such longevity of struggle, we have an important vantage point to learn, heal from, and also celebrate.

Fiona at GECO, 1995

t HE LEAR ninG

A nthony

The blockades were far from just symbolic – they were incredibly practical and relentless pressure upon the industry and had very real economic and political impacts on the industry at the time that was felt all the way up… There is no way that a city based population would have had the degree of ecological awareness of the importance of forests without people actually doing blockading, going out there and getting arrested. It just brought home to everybody just how critical and important these forests were…

Z eni

I learned my rights – I’m happy about that. I didn’t really know my rights until I went out there… I learned to cook for a lot of people on a fire and how to start a fire with soaking wet wood.

Imelda and Gavin, 1995

i meldA

It was such an important part of my life and laid the foundations of what was important for me including making lifelong friends. I learnt about who I was, what I can cope with, what are my strengths, and what are things that I can let go of.

m A deline

The structure of GECO was Anarchist, but we didn’t have any other models or experience. Learning how to be an anarchist was an enlightening experience as well because with total freedom comes total responsibility. It was a huge balance. There was a process to make sure everyone had a voice, but also there were natural leaders that emerged in an area…

Another experience was learning how to lash, and I lashed a little platform on a monopole for Serina to sit on, and I remember seeing Serina all the way up there like 20 or 30 metres up and I was like, her life depends on my lashing, and whether those clove hitches hold… Oh gosh you know it was an amazing experience. Thankfully, they held!

int ER Mo VEME nt P oL itiCS

A nthony

So there were a lot of group dynamics over those years that we’re played out on a day-to-day basis basically. The stress and tension between the blockaders actually doing the blockading and the city people doing the advocacy and putting out the media releases. I think GECO really filled a big hole in that field by being an organising hub in the region that hadn’t existed before.

GAvA n

There were tensions but also a lot of co-operation and good will. I never saw organisations pushed out of discussions, certainly not towards the Friends of the Earth Forest Network at the time, which seemed to be more of like an urban direct action hub to complement the forest direct action hub at GECO.

CoMMuniCAtion

GAvA n

The other road trips I remember in terms of negotiating at that time were the trips down to Lake Tyers to talk to the traditional owners, Robbie Thorpe and others, to seek consent, permission to do direct action which were incredible experiences.

A nthony

Consensus is based on trust and respect so we had to rely on the trust and respect that we had for each other. Also it’s so hard to have consensus between a remote blockade camp, a base camp, and GECO and the city. The communication tree was doing it without phones and radio and then travelling to share information.

Z eni

We had “tell a feral” - that’s how things got around. Or you would stay at someone’s place and then the messages would go from here to there. Remember the message books? Transferring messages from GECO out to the blockades and back. As well as people’s dole forms!

Sellars Rd blockade, 1993

t E n Sion S

A nthony

There was a boycott running in town. You would often get refused service if they spotted you as a greenie, or refused petrol. I remember there being shots fired from passing car windows at a few people on their way between Goongerah and Orbost.

m A ritA

There was a safe house in Orbost. They all had kids under two years old and I remember they were staying there when it got fully smashed.

GAvin

… We were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and we passed a loggers four-wheel drive and we got in a car chase. They rammed the car, smashed it while I was doing a three point turn, and then they pulled us out and beat us up. We finally got to Sellers Rd and you were one of the first people I saw Fiona. I was just so happy to see everyone. I don’t know how I even drove with a smashed car with no lights…

S oL idARity W it H WoRKERS

A nthony

… It was just this seemingly intractable battle. There were mills who were pissed off at Daishowa (logging company) who were seeing all these D and E grade logs being taken up to the chipmill where they could have been sawn locally. There were all these opportunities for good alliance building that could’ve happened, but there was also strategic differences between some of the groups. There was also the fact that we were all largely city-based greenies coming out for the first time and it was hard to find that common ground with local people.

t HE L o SSES

Z eni

…I think almost everywhere that I blockaded isn’t existing anymore. There’s other losses too, including people who aren’t here anymore like Danny, Adam, Nick, and Flinney.

Goolengook, 1997

l ouise

I always think we can identify the forests that were destroyed and we know which ones were lost in front of our very eyes. But there’s a hell of a lot of forests that are still standing that would not be still standing if it wasn’t for the work that so many people have done. I think we can point to some forests that are still standing which is the result of all of us. That is a huge win.

GAvin

The fact that we got huge forest outcomes in the Otways, in the Cobboboonees for the Red Gums, that would never have happened if it wasn’t for the forest protests building the strength of the movement. It also created political power which ricocheted into forest campaigns elsewhere. I mean it was heartbreaking to see what’s gone, and these are some of the most extraordinary forests found anywhere in the world. The movement that was created out of it did really have an impact though for successful forest campaigns across the country.

m A ritA

I feel really honoured to have been there and seen that forest, and I guess there are still some bits in NSW that I return to. I feel like that time of blockading was the most useful thing I’ve ever done in my life, but with that comes great grief, to have borne witness and seen what was lost in our lifetime, and that does my head in and why I don’t do it anymore.

FiRS t n Ation S S oL idARity

m ichelle

I know personally I went on a journey at that time learning about what happened in this country. At the same time Friends of the Earth had the Indigenous Solidarity Network and ran two gatherings, one in 1997 and one in 1998, which brought together Indigenous activists from across the country alongside environmental activists. It really helped build those connections across a whole lot of campaigns… That’s where I first met Uncle Robbie Thorpe, who became an important part of our campaign. It was our connection to him that connected us with the Gunnai Kurnai and the Bidwell, and it really brought our campaign to a new level. We were introduced to concepts of Treaty and No Jurisdiction and it became a big part of the campaign.

Josh

Working on this land, where sovereignty was never ceded, with Bidwell Traditional Owner Albert Hayes as well as Krautungalung man Robbie Thorpe, we came up with the idea that as environmental activists we would sign Treaties with the First Nations peoples for areas we were trying to protect, and we would serve evictions on the people who were trashing the forest.

It was really powerful. We marched into a logging coupe in solidarity with Indigenous elders with the intention of doing two things: signing the Treaties and serving the eviction notices. We were met with kind of a strong response. It was such a new concept then, maybe just for white fellas. I think everyone was shocked - and I think I can include myself in that!

To hear more about “GECO: 30 years fighting for forests” tune into 3cr.org.au.

GECO marked our 30 year celebration last December. Follow our social media to learn more.

Tuffy Morwitzer is a campaigner for the Goongerah Environment Centre, and compiled this article for GECO.

Robbie Thorpe serving an eviction notice, 2000

o tways Ranges Environment network

Simon Birrell

Since the early 1990’s Simon Birrell has been a member of the FoE Forest Collective. This collective has had a very significant positive influence over many historic forest campaigns in Victorian. In the 1990’s the FoE Forest Collective worked collaboratively to drive many important forest blockades that occurred in East Gippsland. From 1993-1995 this included the Sellers Road and Hensleigh Creek old growth forest blockades. Later, FoE Forest Collective supported the long running and successful Goolengook forest blockade campaigns (19972002). FoE Forest Collective also helped establish a renewed push to end clearfell logging in the Otway State Forest starting in 1996. In this article, Simon Birrell reflects on the recent policy announcement by the Victorian state Government to end logging across Eastern Victorian. In the past big environment policy announcements have been made only to be later reversed through the lobbying efforts of powerful pro-logging groups. The follow article reflects on one of the earliest fights over clearfell logging and woodchipping, a battle won and then lost but not forgotten

WinninG A nd t HE n L o SinG : tHE o t WAy S CLEARFELL A nd WoodCHiPPinG dEBAt E 1981-1990

The first time the political debate over clearfell logging and woodchipping native forests ever became a state election issue in Australia, it was associated with biodiverse native forests in the Otway Ranges, South-Western Victoria. Controversy first erupted into a major political issue when, on the 4th June 1981, the Victorian Premier Dick Hamer announced that a company called Smorgon Consolidated Industries was seeking to build an export woodchip mill in Geelong that would “export Otways pulp wood largely obtained from sawmill residue, logging residue and current saw logging operations …”.1 On the 20 June, the Forest Commission placed a tender for 70,000 tonnes of woodchip from the Otways, although denied any woodchip logs had been allocated to Smorgon Consolidated Industries at the time of the Premiers announcement.2 However, Smorgons had competition. By December 1981 a consortium of Colac sawmills also sought to establish an export woodchip mill in Geelong, to be named Midways Pty Ltd. The local Colac sawmills consortium proposal was strongly supported by the Liberal State Government Forestry Minister, local member for Polwarth, and several councillor’s on both the former Otway and Whichalsea local government councils. 3

The premier’s announcement triggered a fierce backlash from the President of the of Geelong Environment Council (GEC), Joan Lindros, who stated “We are absolutely horrified at the prospect. If they take out what we think they are going to take out, it will be an ecological disaster for the forests of the Otways”.4 The GEC announced a week later it would “wage a campaign of ‘total opposition’ to any proposal for a woodchipping industry in the Otway Rang”’ and called for an “environmental impact study”. 5

The campaign of opposition to Otway woodchipping, between 1981 and 1982, was predominately resourced through the efforts of volunteers grassroots groups that lived in South Western Victoria. They were up against the powerful predecessor to VicForests, the Forest Commission, who were preoccupied with the ongoing economic viability of native forest logging in State forests across Victoria. At this time, much of the Otways forest was made up of large hollow trees, many hundreds of year old, labelled by the logging industry as ‘over mature’. Those old trees that had been rejected,left standing, and leftalive, during the early selective logging days were now surrounded by smaller younger trees that had regrown due past major bushfire disturbances, such as the 1919 and 1939 fires. In 1981 the Forest Commissiondeveloped a ‘proposal’ that argued a woodchipping industry would make the clearfell logging in ‘over mature forests’ with low sawlog yields, economically viable:

A tree-sit as part of an early protest. Credit: Ottway Ranges Environment Network

“In the Otways over the next 25-30 years it will be difficult to sustain the present level of supply of sawlogs to local sawmillers. Some sawlogs, particularly in the over-mature mountain forests, are uneconomic to harvest in a sawIog-only operation. The proposal will make the harvesting of these logs economic by providing a market for log material that is unsuitable for sawlogs. By increasing the yield of sawlogs, the proposal will materially assist in sustaining the sawmilling industry.”6

From the moment the Liberal Premier announced support for Otway woochipping, those opposed were significantly bolstered by a number of South Western Victorian based ALP politicians. This included Victorian Legislative Council Member Rod Mackenzie, the Chairman of the ALP Conservation committee David Henshaw (who was also an ALP Legislative Council candidate for Geelong Provence), and Eric Young who was ALP candidate for South Barwon. These politicians featured prominently in the media.7 Speeches to State Parliament by the ALP opposition raised issue with the decision-making process used to justify woodchipping in the Otways.8 This helped steer the Victorian ALP opposition towards developing an anti-export woodchipping policy platform for all of Victoria which called for more public consultation and studies before any decision to formally establish woodchipping industries.

In the weeks before the 1982 State election the Liberal Forest Minister, Mr Austin, controversially decided to grant the consortium of Colac sawmillers an option to extract 70,000 tonnes of woodchip per annum from the Otways. In response, 11 regional water authorities collectively announced they wanted a two-year woodchip moratorium in place to give time to evaluate environmental impacts.9 GEC spokesperson Joan Lindros challenged the claim made by the Forest Minister that no more forests would be logged, arguing it would dramatically expand where clearfell logging could take place and that extra trees would be felled: “woodchipping in the area would allow sawmillers to move in on areas which otherwise would have been unprofitable. The remaining areas of mixed-aged forest will disappear very rapidly.”10

The controversy was finally resolved by a popular vote as part of the Victorian State election held on Saturday the 3rd of April 1982. The ALP won Government with a 17-seat swing, making John Cain the Victorian Premier and ending 27 years of consecutive Liberal dominated Government in Victoria. Although many other issues were of concern

to the electorate, the voting trends in South-Western Victoria appear to have been influenced by anti-Otway woodchipping movement.

Soon after the State election the new Government followed through with environmental policy commitments by announcing, on the 19th May 1982, a formal moratorium on Otway export woodchipping. The government also rescinded the 70,000 tonne woodchip option previously granted to the sawmill consortium.11 In justifying the decision, the new Forestry Minister Mackenzie sought to wait for the findings of an Interdepartmental Task Force into woodchipping and reiterated the governments non-conflict policy position stating that:

“lt is not a question of conservation versus development but of ensuring both the long-term viability of Victoria’s timber industry and the preservation of our forests for future generations”12

Although regional environmental groups of South-Western Victoria had won a major environmental political battle in 1982 resulting in the woodchip moratorium, it was not a decisive policy outcome and would only serve to kick the political issue down the road for later and larger conflicts. Certainly, the reaction from supporters of woodchipping was swift with the Colac Chamber of Commerce declaring “woodchipping was not a dead issue”.13 Over the next decade industry groups successfully undid the woodchip moratorium, which can be summarised in three steps.

Scuffle with police as part of an early protest.

Credit: Ottway Ranges Environment Network

The first step involved allowing sawmill sawlog offcuts, produced as a by-product of cutting up round logs into rectangular lengths of sawn timber, to be woodchipped and exported. In early 1985 George Bennett, owner of the Birregurra sawmill, went public over how his sawmill was woodchipping its offcuts and selling them to the Bendigo saleyards. However, the plan was to have these exported out of the Midway export woodchip mill based in Geelong.14 By August the same year, a consortium of Otway sawmills had the Midways woodchip mill up and running, with Bennett as a director. They were buying up sawmill offcuts from sawmills across the state and exporting them as woodchip to Japan out of the Port of Geelong, with the first shipment due in early 1986.15 The establishment of Midways was an important first step as the industry continued to publicly lobby for the right to export “logging residual on State forest floors”.16

The next step came with the release of the State Governments formal policy position on native forest logging, the Victorian Timber Industry Strategy (TIS).17

The TIS accepted the industry argument that logging in sawlog uneconomic forests needed to occur. The government and industry changed how it framed the

discourse associated with forest management planning from a discussion about economics to sustainability. So rather than just nominate a rate of logging for sawlogs, this was framed as the sawlog ‘sustainable yield’.18

The third step towards lifting the export woodchip moratorium was connected to how the government sought to accommodate the dual pressure from environment groups seeking a significant new National Park in East Gippsland while the timber industry wanted solutions to declining sawlog yield. The government approach was to give both sides their priority. Through participation in the Land Conservation Council (LCC) processes during the 1970s and 1980s, a great number of very significant forest nature conservation outcomes had been achieved. This was predominantly through the endeavours of the established formal environmental groups in Victoria, who had historically compromised by agreeing to allow ongoing logging in State Forest outside forest areas they prioritised for protection. Yet, a consequence of prioritising the protection of high sawlog yielding old growth National Estate forests in East Gippsland meant that the loggers were pushed into lower sawlog yielding forests, further

Riley’s Ridge van 1999. Credit: Ottway Ranges Environment Network

necessitating the need for a woodchip market to make logging these forest areas economically viable.

Although there is not the space here to outline all the politics of this time, in February 1990 a politically expedient decision was made to prioritise protection of National Estate Forest in East Gippsland while simultaneously lifting an export woodchipping moratorium in place across Victoria. The consequence for the Otways was the issuing, in 1991, of a 15-year residual log licence to woodchip 44,000 cubic metre of whole trees. This was granted to a domestic pulp and paper mill owned by Kimberly Clark in Millicent South Australia. Clearfell logging could now economically target most tall mountain forests across the Otway State Forest. Similar residual log woodchip licenses were also issued for State Forest areas across Victoria.

The fight for the Otways forests was significantly set back –but not lost. In 1996 a new politically active grassroot driven environmental social movement formed to oppose clearfell logging of biodiverse native forest in the Otway Ranges, in South-Western Victoria Australia. This movement, which broadly identified itself as the Otway Ranges Environment Network (OREN), was eventually successful at influencing environmental public policy. As part of its November 2002 Victorian State election campaign the ALP Victorian State Government, under then Premier Steve Bracks, was re-elected with a radical environmental public policy to terminate the Otway native forest logging industry. By September 2005, the Victorian State Parliament had passed a package of environmental legislation, with

References

1. “Outcry over woodchip plan”. Geelong Advertiser. 6 June 1981; Premier Press Release 4 June 1981.

2. “Otways deal is denied”. The Age , 8 July 1981.

3. “Chamber Backing Pulpwood”. Colac Herald . 19 December 1981.

4. “Outcry over woodchip plan”. Geelong Advertiser. 6 June 1981.

bi-partisan political support from the Liberal Party, that made it illegal to clearfell biodiverse native forest on Otway public land for sawlogs or woodchips. For the 157,000 hectares of public native forested land in the Otway Ranges, the legislation abolished the 92,000-hectares that made up the Otway State Forest land category, where clearfell logging was permitted, and incorporated much of this into a new greatly expanded 102,000-hectare Great Otway National Park. Additionally, for the first time, an Otway Forest Park public land category was created made up of approximately 40,000-hectares where clearfell logging for sawlogs and woodchip is prohibited.19 Clearfell logging was permitted in the Otway Forest Park until 2008, the date for which the last of the Otway sawmill sawlog licences expired.

From a forest conservation perspective, native forest on public land in the Otways has been made safe from logging due to laws passed back in 2005 that specifically make industrial logging illegal (extraction of sawlogs and woodchips unlawful) and stipulated this public land must be managed for nature conservation purposes. For the forests in Eastern Victoria, although a decision to end logging has occurred until legislative changes are made to guarantee that this public land will be managed for nature conservation, it will continue to be under threat from extractive industries seeking to regain access.

Simon is a PhD candidate researching grassroots environmental social movements within the Otways, and was part of the Otway Ranges Environment Network from 1996 to 2008.

5. “Campaign”. Geelong Advertiser. 18 June 1981; “Woodchip plan for Otways is opposed”. Colac Herald . 17 June 1981.

6. Preliminary Environmental Report on the Proposed Pulpwood Harvesting in the Otway State Forest . Forest Commission. August 1981.

7. “Minister hit over Otways” Coastal Telegraph . 19 June 1981.; “Mackenzie warns on woodchip report”. Geelong Advertiser. 12 August 1981.

8. Hansard 23 September 1981 pp 876-877; Hansard 22 December 1981 pp 5537-5638.

9. “Conservationist anger at minister’s decisions”. Geelong Advertiser. 13 March 1982.

10. Bolt, Andrew. “Ministers split on pulpwood policy”. The Age , 18 March 1982.

11. “Moratorium on the Otways: Woodchip study ordered”. Colac Herald . 21 May 1982.

12. “Woodchip moratorium”. Bellarine Echo , 26 May 1982.

13. “Chipping is not dead”. Colac Herald. 16 June 1982.

14. “Birregurra sawmill has big plans”. Colac Herald . 7 January 1985.

15. “Hardwood woodchip to Japan” Colac Herald . 21 August 1985.

16. “Birregurra sawmill has big plans”. Colac Herald . 7 January 1985

17. Victorian Timber Industry Strategy. Victorian Government. 1986.

18. Victorian Timber Industry Strategy, p 33

19. Victorian Government 2004

Forest network History

Anthony Amis

“Some of the most ignorant people in the world live in Australia and it’s reflected by what they’ve done to the environment”

Robbie

Thorpe

NFN Conference October 1994

The Forest Network (FN) was the FoE Forest collective from 1993 until 2005. It was certainly a wild ride.

The initial idea for FN came after the implosion of Rainforest Action Group (RAG) in 1992. RAG had conducted hundreds of direct actions between 1988 and 1992 protesting the importation of rainforest timber from Malaysia. RAG direct actions, including 32 ship actions on the Yarra River, managed to reduce imports of rainforest timber into Australia by 80% over a couple of years, costing timber importers hundreds of millions of dollars. RAG caused chaos within the timber industry.

By 1992 MRAG essentially folded due to burnout, ideological disagreements over NVA and a change of focus from Malaysia to local rainforest issues. A handful of RAG survivors morphed into the Forest Network (FN). FN was accepted by FoE as a collective in late 1993 and FN also joined the East Gippsland Forest Alliance helping coordinate direct actions over that summer. Hundreds of people were involved in those 1993/4 protests.

Goongerah Environment Centre Office (GECO) was also formed in late 1993 as a means of coordinating direct action campaigns in East Gippsland. FN largely became a vehicle for getting people involved in East Gippsland via GECO.

Our direct actions hit the media jackpot in February 1994 with the infamous pressure hold action outside the Department of Conservation and Environment in Melbourne. Police used death grips on protesters, and the protest made global media, even being screened in China. Images from the action won a Herald Sun photographer a Walkley Award and were reprinted in the very last 20 th century edition of the Herald Sun under Images of the 20 th Century. A number of protesters were injured and several eventually received compensation.

FN meetings were held each week in Melbourne, with a priority given to direct action planning in Melbourne. FN did not support a ban on native forest logging, working primarily on ending logging in old growth forests and high conservation value forests. A key strategy of FN was to get

ENGO decision making about forests out of Melbourne and into the regions. FN meetings averaged about 20 people each week for over a decade.

Between 1992-94, FoE was also involved in obtaining evidence for the first environmental legal case in Victorian history, regarding a logging company operating on private land. The company – STY Afforestation – was owned by the Minster for Industry Services, Roger Pescott. It operated in the domestic water supply of McCrae’s Creek near Mount Beenak. FoE won the subsequent VCAT case against the company in late 1994, but the company did not remediate the site for another few years.

FN was also making other forest alliances at this time, particularly with Wombat Forest Society. FN also had a close relationship with Native Forest Network and in 1994 organised the Australian Forest Conference in Melbourne over two days. A take home message from the conference was the largely dull presentations from forest campaigners, when compared with the observations of several indigenous speakers who were also invited to speak at the conference. Was this the first-time indigenous speakers in Victoria had spoken at a forest conservation conference? Inspiration from this conference led to the formation of FoE’s Indigenous Solidarity Group in 1996 which organised two indigenous right conferences in Melbourne in 1997 and 1998.

In 1993/94 concerns were also being aired about the use of pesticides in plantations. One of FoE Australia’s member groups at Lorinna in Tasmania reported the contamination of their drinking water with the herbicide Atrazine running off a recently sprayed plantation. These toxic concerns were at the forefront of much of FN’s campaigning during the nineties. The worst incident occurred between 1997-2000 where Adelaide’s drinking water supply was contaminated with forestry herbicides including Atrazine and Hexazinone for over 3 years. Arguably no environmental organisations were looking at plantation issues. Most ENGO’s saw plantations as the solution to native forest logging, so FN’s plantation criticisms were regarded very unfavourably by elites within the forest movement. FoE’s plantation concerns were amplified in 1996 when the Federal and State Governments announced a trebling of the nation’s plantation base.

A key target for FN forest protests during the early nineties was Midway Woodchip Mill in Geelong. A number of arrestable protests occurred at Midways during this

Participants at the First Indigenous Solidarity Strategy Session, held on Taungerong land at Common Ground in March 1997. Indigenous peoples from Australia, United States, Malaysia and New Zealand were present.

time, with most culminating with protesters occupying woodchip piles and hanging banners. The media lapped it up. Midways had profited through the clearfelling of the Otway Ranges and Wombat Forest, so FN was relieved and supportive in 1995 when the Otway Ranges Environment Network (OREN) formed to fight against Midways. OREN successfully campaigned for a shutdown of native forest logging in the Otways by 2008. The Great Otways National Park (103,000ha) and Otways Forest Park (39,000ha) were the end result of OREN’s campaigns.

During the mid to late nineties FN also worked closely with Kerrup Jmara Elder Aunty Betty King, in the forests of south west Victoria. Numerous visits to her campsite near Lake Condah Mission occurred during a number of years. These visits also included forest protests during 1999/2000 in Portland and the Cobbobonee State Forest. One protest concluded with several firefighting aircraft being employed to put out “cultural burns” in the Cobbobonee. In 2008 the 18,500ha Cobbobonee National Park and 8,700ha Forest Park were legislated by the Victorian Government. Aunty Betty passed away in 2006.

With active groups now operating in East Gippsland, Otways and Wombat Forest, FN turned its eyes to possibly the most difficult forest area in Victoria, the Strzelecki Ranges. In 1992 the Victorian Government privatised the Strzelecki’s with the creation of the Victorian Plantations Corporation (VPC). In 1996 Amcor, owner of Maryvale

Pulp Mill, applied to clear 2000ha of native forest on their private lands. A local organisation, Friends of Gippsland Bush (FoGB), was established to oppose the clearing. FN visited the area and was appalled to see logging operations worse than those of STY Afforestation.

A relationship was formed with FoGB, whose tenacity led to the protection of 85% of the forests that Amcor wanted to clear and the signing of an historic 8 Point Agreement with a further 10,000 hectares of forest protected. The VPC was sold to US Insurance giant John Hancock in 1998, leading to FN creating the website Hancock Watch, which was one of the world’s first internet based logging monitoring websites (Hancock labelled it, “The Hate Site”). The website helped pressure the company and State Government to legislate the 8,000ha Brataualung Forest Park in 2008, however the full extent of the reserve will not be reserved until 2027. FN and FoGB were also sucked into the forest certification vortex with Hancock being the first company in Australia to obtain the dubious Forest Stewardship Council label.

In terms of direct actions by FN there was over fifty during FN’s busiest year in 1996 with many organised against the Regional Forest Agreements which guaranteed the logging industry access to forests for 2 decades. FN was at the cutting edge of urban forest protests during this time. In terms of East Gippsland, FN and GECO also helped launch Australia’s longest ever forest blockade at Goolengook in East Gippsland. The blockade lasted for 7

years, with FN’s role largely logistical, and being a conduit for getting urban people down into the forests to support the blockade. Goolengook was eventually added to the states reserve system in 2006.

The late 1990’s saw FN protests getting personal, with visionary projects such as Corporate Scumbag tour visiting the residences of 12 corporate woodchippers and a huge pile of woodchips being dumped on the driveway to the house of the Chairman of the biggest woodchipping company in the world, North Ltd. Another “classic protest” was a Sunday morning doof party outside the residence of the same Chairman in Warrandyte. The party attracted a number of weathered, some would say very wasted, party goers with a couple of them even passing out on the Chairman’s driveway one with beer bottle in hand. As luck would have it, an early morning jogger ran past the event and contacted her mother who was a reporter for the Australian. We made page 5, much to the embarrassment of the chairman who was seen hitting the podium at the Annual General Meeting that yearsaying “we will not tolerate doof parties outside our homes”.

Perhaps peak FN actions occurred during the election campaign of John Howard in 1998 (or was it 2001?). Someone, somehow got the PM’s itinerary and we

managed to make a very big noise at every event that John Howard attended on one day in Melbourne. Not only was his campaign sidetracked by the media reporting on our activities, but we managed to blockade the Prime Minister’s limousine as he left a Christian College near Diamond Creek. The driveway out of the school was lined by hundreds of school kids waving at the PM. As the PM’s car left the school, he was greeted by FN members hiding behind a tree. A banner was unfurled. “John Howard Majick-Making Forests Disappear”. The PM was stuck with FN for 5 minutes. No police. No security, with hundreds of very excited and yelling school kids breaking ranks and blocking his limo from behind. Chaos ensued, with a very nervous looking PM and chauffeur having to sweat it out in the limo before the police arrived. Later in the morning an FN rep with a video camera actually got in the same lift in a hotel in Melbourne as the obviously rattled PM. Questions were asked by the FN “reporter” before security dragged him away with a severe spanking.

References

http://www.forestnetwork.net/ http://hancockwatch.nfshost.com/ http://www.vicrainforest.org/Gook/VEACgoolengook.php https://www.oren.org.au/

Kerrup Jmara Embassy June 1994. Main Street Portland. Aunty Betty King giving Portland a blast on the megaphone. Aunty Betty camped out for a month on the lawns of the church in winter on the main street over claims that Portland was the most racist town in Australia.

Wot CHing out for t hreatened Species

Hayley Forster

I have been volunteering regularly with WOTCH (Wildlife of the Central Highlands) for roughly 6 years now. WOTCH is a volunteer run organisation with the aim to gain protection of threatened species within areas scheduled to be logged, through the means of citizen science. During my time as a volunteer I have conducted regular surveys, mostly nocturnal, in the search for Leadbeaters Possums, Greater Gliders or other threatened species found in the state forests of Victoria. Many of these surveys have been successful in detecting threatened species but sadly not always resulting in protection.

Finding a critically endangered Leadbeater’s Possum scampering around the forest at night has to be one of the most magical and rewarding experiences I have been lucky enough to encounter on many occasions. To witness this extremely elusive and rare species running full pace across the tree tops or sitting upside down while feeding is enough reward and motivation to keep persisting. But, the real reward is the 12 hectares of forest that is protected from logging with each verified sighting of a Leadbeater’s Possum. Through this mandatory protection WOTCH has helped to implement over 2000ha of protected habitat across the central highlands.

Many of the other threatened species that we have recorded on surveys sadly do not receive the same, or any, protection from logging. Because of this, WOTCH have worked hard to advocate for better protection of threatened species and create awareness around the impacts of native forest logging on these species.

Following the Black Summer bushfires in 2020 we took on a court case against logging company VicForests. Our case was based on the premise that threatened species were largely impacted by the bushfires and VicForests should not be continuously logging in their remaining unburnt habitat. We knew when we took on the case that it would be lots of hard work – especially for a small group of volunteers! – but we knew it would be worth it. We also had the backing of the amazing Environmental Justice Australia legal team. Nothing could have prepared us for just how much work, time and effort we would have to put into this case. But we persisted, even through all the setbacks, and we finally had our 3 week long trial in March 2022. In the lead up to trial we managed to secure injunctions on 26 logging coupes and undertakings on many more, preventing logging in an extensive area of forest in the Central Highlands and East Gippsland. Although we are still waiting for a verdict, we are really proud of what we have been able to achieve

– especially now that, due to other successful court cases and the halting of native forest logging in 2024, these areas should ultimately be protected regardless of the verdict.

The announcement of the end of native forest logging in Victoria has been an incredible feat for us and all the groups and individuals that have been working tirelessly to protect these forests. I have experienced an incredible amount of mixed emotions over the past few months, trying to settle with the news and what it ultimately means for the forests, for WOTCH, and for me. We have always known that native forest logging in Victoria is far from sustainable and has been a major cause of many native species declines. So we are incredibly happy to see an end to this destructive industry. The question now is, what next? And what will be protected into the future? We want to continue to ensure our incredible and unique native species and forests are properly protected and have the chance to thrive once again. We also want to see the other states of Australia follow suit and end the native forest logging industry over all.

You can keep updated with what’s happening with WOTCH and learn about opportunities to get involved, by signing up on our website: wotch.org.au

Hayley Forster is an ecologist, conservationist and wildlife tour guide with a degree in environmental science. She has a massive passion for wildlife and conservation, and has been part of WOTCH for six years.

Credit: Justin Cally

Gliders V Government – How the Gliders Won… Sort of

GL idERS V Go VER nME nt

The amazing win in the recent Glider case (Environment East Gippsland V VicForests S ECI 2021 01527 / Kinglake Friends of the Forest V VicForests S ECI 2021 04204) had far reaching consequences for native forests in Victoria and for the species that rely on them – including us humans.

Greater Gliders and Yellow-Bellied Gliders were the subject of a Supreme Court case against VicForests. The case started in 2021, and the final decision was heard in November 2022. VicForests appeal was thrown out in May 2023.

On the side of the gliders were Environment East Gippsland, Kinglake Friends of the Forest, and Gippsland Environment Group, who all took separate cases against VicForests. The cases were heard together as the evidence was similar, so the cost of expert evidence and the time demands on the legal team were shared.

As a member of Kinglake Friends of the Forest, I was involved in the court case from when it commenced. The case effectively stopped logging in the east and was successful because of the decades-long work of forest campaigners: protestors, researchers, community groups, lawyers, and citizen scientists. For years citizen scientists have been locating Greater Gliders in forest stands slated for logging, only to have the trees they were recorded in, and those surrounding, torn down and sent off to make paper.

This case stopped that cycle of death and despair. It confirmed that the government was lying to us. The government said it was logging legally. It wasn’t. The government said it was logging sustainably. It wasn’t. The government said it was regulating logging. It wasn’t.

In court we claimed that VicForests was flouting two clauses of the Sustainable Forests Timber Act 2004. We won on both of these claims. The court judge, Justice Richards said;1

Sue McKinnon

“VicForests’ current approach to detecting greater gliders and yellow-bellied gliders is considerably less than s 2.2.2.2 of the Code requires.” and

“VicForests is not applying s 2.2.2.4 of the Code in the Central Highlands.”

So, Vic Forest had been logging illegally. Not in one stand, or in one instance, but in every area they logged over the entire Central Highlands. The Central Highlands is defined as the area from Noojee in the south to Eildon in the north, and from Wallan in the west to Baw Baw in the east.

The Environment East Gippsland case found that VicForests had been logging illegally over the entirety of East Gippsland as well.

This case also tells us that this 100% state government owned company was logging not just illegally but unsustainably.

Clause 2.2.2.2 of the logging code is known as the Precautionary Principle, or ‘PP’. Effectively the clause means that where there is a risk of serious or irreversible environmental damage you don’t need 100% scientific certainty that damage will occur before you must take measures to prevent that damage. The Precautionary Principle was included in many of Australia’s laws after we signed the United Nations Sustainable Development Treaty in Rio in 1992, and is one of the fundamental principles of sustainable development of the Rio Treaty. 2

Since VicForests was found to be noncompliant with the Precautionary Principle, its operations cannot be regarded as sustainable.

Yet VicForests claims, in its website, marketing, and media releases, that its operations and its products are sustainable. 3 Even after VicForests’ appeal has been heard and rejected, a quick five minute check of VicForests’ website reveals the word sustainable 50 times. Government websites such as these inform, or should I say mislead, purchasers and consumers, and can, if abused like this, provide unfair advantage in the market. They mislead retailers, students, teachers, media, and artificial intelligence systems now and into the future. They rewrite history. It’s very important that we stop the government’s lies from being published and force retraction of these lies. With the force of the Supreme Court decision on our side, we are now holding VicForests’ misleading marketing to account. To this end, we have written a submission to the Parliamentary Inquiry into Greenwashing, and submitted a complaint to the ACCC. We have yet to hear back from either body.

F RiE nd S oF L EA dBEAt ER’ S Po SS uM inC

A nd ViCFoRES t S ( no. V id 1228 oF

2017)

Prior to our Gilder case, the government and the supposed regulator (the Office of the Conservation Regulator within the Department of Energy, Environment, and Climate Action (DEECA)), had ignored the result of an earlier legal case; the Friends of Leadbeater’s Possum VicForests case. The Friends of the Leadbeater’s Possum case also found that VicForests was not abiding by the Precautionary Principle. But the Federal Court could not compel a state logging business to comply, as due to an agreement between States and the Federal Government, logging is the only industry exempt from Federal environment laws.4

A closer view of the Central Highlands logging showing all logged since 1940 – this is important if you are a glider as it takes 80 to 200 years for trees to form hollows that are critical to your survival.

VicForests’ data shows that they did not modify their operations after the Leadbeater’s Possum case. 5 At that point, the Office of the Conservation Regulator should have taken VicForests to account. Instead, we and other community groups had to take VicForests to the state court to get the law considered again and applied.

In the Glider case J Richards commented on this, she said that the findings of the Leadbeater’s case “might have been expected to prompt some reflection and adjustment of VicForests’ approach”.6

It is significant that instead of just handing down a declaration of how the law should be interpreted, J Richards made specific operational orders so that there was no wriggle room for VicForests. Any flouting of these orders would be contempt of court, and answerable to the court, rather than just the supposed regulator.

So finally, last November VicForests was forced to abide by the law… to survey properly for gliders before they log, and to protect them and their home ranges from destruction. It seems that VicForests isn’t able to do this, as it has stopped logging in the east of the state immediately after the orders were handed down.

In May this year the government announced the January 2024 end date for native forest logging. However, the announcement was not for an end to all native forest logging in Victoria, but an end to logging that is under the allocation order of the Sustainable Forests Timber Act –i.e. the white shapes in this “Current Logging Scheduled” map. The blue shapes indicate logging under the Forest Act 1958, and there has been no announcement about whether logging will end in these sections of forest.

The take home from the findings and result of the case is that the government cannot be relied upon to tell the truth – not just in election promises, but in concerted, continual barrages on glossy websites, and in social and print media.

What does this do for our democracy and for real responses to climate change? Can we believe government claims in regards to the environment, biodiversity, carbon, and fire management?

FiRE

Kinglake Friends of the Forests is now focussed on the government’s forest fire management.

Hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest are burnt every year in government planned burns.7 It claims it is making communities safer, yet wildfire records reveal that planned burns only reduce fire risk for a few years. After that time the flush of shrubs and understory growth which come after a planned burn make the area more of a fire risk than before the planned burn.8

The Federal Government Royal Commission into Natural Disasters Arrangements report claims that thinning forests has the potential to reduce fire intensity and rate of spread.9 Yet research also shows that thinning, in all but one category and age group of forest, either makes wildfires more severe or makes no difference.10 This research comes from assessing thousands of records of previous planned burns and thinned sites and records of severity of wildfire in these sites.

[insert broadscale planned burning by FFMV photo in here. Caption: Broadscale planned burning by Forest Fire Management Victoria]

Current logging scheduled

Right now the government, again through VicForests management, is planning to remove logs from trees that fell in storms in the Wombat State Forest. They claim this is to mitigate fire risk.11 This claim is obviously absurd. Logs do not burn in the fire front. The government’s own fire hazard rating system specifically excludes logs from what they call ‘fuel’.12 The absurd claim is also being repeated to justify logging operations in the Dandenong National Park.13

The claim is being tested in yet another court case against VicForests initiated this month by Wombat ForestCare.14 In this case, the judge gave “careful consideration to VicForests’ contention that it is important for the timber harvesting operation in Silver Queen to continue, in order to mitigate fire risk in the Wombat State Forest.” She found that “the evidence currently available to me does not support that contention.”15

Is the government making communities safer or putting us more at risk in their planned burns, thinning, log removal and ‘breaks’? Is the government still lying to us about its forest management?

The IPCC repeatedly points to improved sustainable forest management as an effective form of climate mitigation. We must insist on truth and science in forest management, not political expediency.

Summary

» t HE Go VER nME nt CA nnot BE REL iE d uP on to t ELL t HE t Rut H W it H REGAR d to FoRES t MA n AGEME nt, inCL udinG FiRE MA n AGEME nt. P LEASE ASK FoRES t GRouPS oR SCiE ntiS t S FoR EV idE nCE d BASE d inFoRMAtion – WE ARE HAPP y to SHARE oR HAVE you Join u S !

» FoRES t MA n AGEME nt inCL udinG FiRE MA n AGEME nt Mu S t BE inFoRME d By SCiE nCE

» CoMMunity GRouPS HAVE A RoLL to KEEP t HE BAS tAR d S HonES t

Kinglake Friends of the Forest provides a forum for people to learn about, discuss and advocate for the preservation of the native forests in Victoria.

1. Seci 2021 01527 Environment East Gippsland Inc. Plaintiff, V VicForests Defendant and SECI 2021 04204 Kinglake Friends of the Forest Plaintiff V VicForests Defendant Judge Richards, J Melbourne 9-13, 16 May 2022, 23 June https://www.austlii.edu.au/cgibin/viewdoc/au/cases/vic/VSC/2022/668.html?context=1;query=environment%20east%20gippsland%20v%20 vicforests;mask_path=

2. Report Of The United Nations Conference On Environment And Development. Rio de Janeiro, 3-14 June 1992. Annex I: Rio Declaration On Environment And Development https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/generalassembly/docs/globalcompact/A_CONF.151_26_Vol.I_Declaration.pdf,

3. VicForests. “VicForests”. 2023. .https://www.archive.vicforests.com.au/

4. Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. “Victorian Central Highlands Regional Forest Agreement”. 2023. https://www.agriculture.gov.au/agriculture-land/forestry/policies/rfa/regions/victoria/centralhighlands

5. VicForests’ Timber Release Plans 2014 – 2018.

6. Para 374(a) Judgement Environment East Gippsland V VicForests S ECI 2021 01527 / Kinglake Friends of the Forest V VicForests S ECI 2021 04204

7. Data Vic. “Planned Burns”. 2022. https://discover.data.vic.gov.au/dataset/planned-burns-2022-23-2024-25-now-called-joint-fuel-management-program-jfmp-includes-burns-and-

8. Zylstra, P., Wardell-Johnson, G., Falster, D., Howe, M., McQuoid, N., Neville, S. “Mechanisms by which growth and succession limit the impact of fire in a south-western Australian forested ecosystem.” Functional Ecology 37 no. 5 (2023): 1350-1365. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2435.14305

9. recommendation 17.3, Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements. Report. 28 October 2020. https://www.royalcommission.gov.au/system/files/2020-12/Royal%20 Commission%20into%20National%20Natural%20Disaster%20Arrangements%20-%20Report%20%20%5Baccessible%5D.pdf

10. Taylor, C., Blanchard, W., Lindenmayer, DB. “Does forest thinning reduce fire severity in Australian eucalypt forests?” Conservation Letters 14 no. 2 (2020). doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12766

11. VicForests. “Storm Timber Recovery - VicForests project plan”. 2024. https://www.vicforests.com.au/publications-media/latest-news/storm-recovery-update

12. Department of Sustainability and Environment, Victoria. Overall fuel hazard assessment guide. 4th edition. July 2010. https://www.ffm.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/21110/Report-82-overall-fuel-assess-guide-4th-ed.pdf

13. VicForests. “Storm Timber Recovery - VicForests project plan”. 2024. https://www.vicforests.com.au/publications-media/latest-news/storm-recovery-update

14. WOMBAT FORESTCARE INC (ABN 94 771 427 351) Plaintiff v VICFORESTS First Defendant and TILEY INDUSTRIES PTY LTD Second Defendant and GARY and COLLEEN KIRBY Third and Fourth Defendants.

15. para 85. S ECI 2023 04203 WOMBAT FORESTCARE INC (ABN 94 771 427 351) Plaintiff v VICFORESTS First Defendant and TILEY INDUSTRIES PTY LTD Second Defendant and GARY and COLLEEN KIRBY Third and Fourth Defendant. https://aucc.sirsidynix.net.au//Judgments/VSC/2023/T0582.pdf

My story of active outrage: 1960s to now

Jill Redwood

As a kid fund raising for the RSPCA in the 1960s, to multiple defeats of the forest exploiters in the Supreme Court, to the recent mortal blow, it’s been quite a journey.

Since Captain Cook planted the flag on the east coast, Australia’s natural wonderlands, wildlife and original people have suffered brutal treatment and often obliteration.

This wasn’t obvious as an 8 year old, but there were still shocking injustices and cruelty in the suburban environments. The neighborhood kids that destroyed a bird’s nest or hurt their pets seemed to have the same malicious streak and lack of empathy that I now see in many adults. The outrage hasn’t changed, just the confidence to act.

Moving out of the urban soup of discontent in the 1970s to a world of nature and animals among Gippsland’s forests was like moving into utopia. But where there are utopias there are those hell bent on exploiting them. It was impossible to keep the blinkers on, while enjoying animals and growing veggies.

In the following years there was a lot to learn about politics, campaigning, media, writing and messaging, strategy, tactics and even psychology.

East Gippsland has a lot of environmentally aware people, but most were unable to speak out without facing retribution via their job, business, family or pets. The industry was a brute force and confident in its support base within law enforcement and local and state authorities. I lived remotely and didn’t rely on the town for an income or had kids at school that might be beaten up for being a ‘greenie’. I also had a gun and two large dogs, so I began to speak out.

Being constantly in the media, I became a target for the logging ‘tribe’. They used death threats, property damage, violent property invasions with revving vehicles, character assassination (pffft) and also had my Clydesdale horse shot. Instead of silencing me, my resolve hardened.

Over the next 10-20 years the corruption and destruction was extreme. The 80s saw a cut-out-and-get-out logging policy without limits. There were unimaginable losses of magnificent old forests that supported endangered wildlife.

Several environment groups were working on forests both in Melbourne and regionally. Environment East Gippsland (EEG) had its beginnings in 1982, and the East Gippsland Coalition formed in 1984. In the early 90s another group became established, Goongerah Environment Centre (GECO). GECO’s specialty was blockading. This created media attention, but also community tensions. Industry

used these conflicts to concoct many fake incidents of machinery damage and tree spikes. ‘Eco-terrorism’ claims were used as recently as 2021.

Since the 80s, EEG tried almost every means to halt logging. We were the eyes on the ground and gathered evidence, produced media releases, exposed the lies and corruption, and did talk back radio and interviews. We took part in tokenistic stakeholder committees, public consultation processes and writing detailed submissions. These processes simply justified pre-determined government decisions.

We also tried every angle that might outrage voters –sympathy for the faces of the wildlife victims, drawing attention to the insane subsidies to destroy public property, carbon dating giant trees, and highlighting the impact on other local industries like nature-tourism. We met with state and federal ministers. We organized quirky events, like when Melbourne’s streets were decorated in festive Christmas attire. We walked paper mâché bare bums on sticks with placards ‘who’s kissing whose?’ – ‘let’s get to the bottom of this’ – ‘forests get the bum end of the deal’. The visuals made font page, despite only being a smallish event. Nothing changed.

It was clear that bad media didn’t cause the government to flinch.

In the late 1980s, the Australian Heritage Commission declared large areas of East Gippsland as National Estate.

But unlike National Parks, National Estate had no protection, and were handed to Victoria to manage. Shamelessly, they began to be managed with bulldozers and chainsaws. In response, the first major forest protests saw 300 people arrested at Brown Mountain’s old growth. But after a token pause, logging continued.

I decided to be trained in wildlife survey techniques by a NSW government team. Back then the best method was setting antiquated hair tubes. These hair tubes were bits of plumbing pipe, with bait secured in one end and double-sided tape inside the tube. The hairs we collected were analysed under microscope to determine the species – each species has a different cross-sectional pattern. This method was very hit-and-miss but when a Long-footed Potoroo entered the baited tube and left its tell-tale hairs we still secured many 500ha zones of protected forests. When we became too successful, the government weakened protection measures. Later, high-tech methods like cameras were available, and the GECO crew began surveying, providing detections and often protections of more species.

When more of Brown Mountain’s old growth was again earmarked for obliteration in 2009, the Government ignored its legal obligations to rare species, offering only a shoe-string creek buffer for the rich glider population. For this weak protection plan we are now thankful.

Such corruption forced us to try a new but risky and expensive campaign weapon; in 2009 we sued VicForests. It was a significant action for a small group to take the government to the Supreme Court. The landmark win in 2010 forced VicForests to carry out surveys before they logged. But they continued to under-resource their minimal survey efforts.

The $289 million VicForests’ debt to Victorians has been ignored. The loss of biodiversity, the cost to water catchments, bushfire impacts, our critically endangered state faunal emblem, forests as climate moderation … all ignored.

EEG and others continued to do battle in court.

It’s taken 40 plus years of huge community effort on all fronts to have finally crippled the corruption and collusion that has been the logging monster. The Gliders Case win in late 2022 was the clincher. The three regional group litigants covered most of eastern Victoria. It sets a strong precedent for other regions. The government recognised it was unable to keep changing the law to protect logging.

The losses over the decades have been immense, tragic, and likely permanent. But logging interests now want to keep it going under creative new names such as ‘fire management’.

After such nature carnage, the war against forests and wildlife must end. As with the rights of First Nations people, the rights of nature and wildlife and the need for healing and restoration must now be acknowledged.

Jill Redwood has lived in East Gippsland for over 40 years and maintains an organic property in the remote settlement of Goongerah. Jill runs an eco-accommodation B&B, is a cartoonist, writer and low-impact-living advocate.

Hair tubes were used to determine species present in the landscape.

Credit: Jill Redwood

Credit: Jill Redwood

A Purpose to Protect

I am standing on the shoulders of those who came before me. Our collective achievements and opportunities have been made possible by the efforts and advancements of earlier generations in this fight for the forests. The knowledge, wisdom, and experiences passed down to us through history has been invaluable. It has made it all possible to take this to the end of one of our longest battles to end clearfell logging in Victoria.

I never would have believed it if you had told my 20 year old self that I was about to embark on a journey that would be a third of my life time so far. That I would learn to climb trees and tie up machines and find a group of people as fiery and passionate about the environment as myself. That I would spend countless nights plunging my body through dense bush searching for threatened species, hiking up

ridgelines, sleeping in beautiful places where a chorus of night life surrounds. Bathing in freezing creeks, frolicking amongst wildflowers. That I would collect what feels like a lifetime of stories.

The forest campaign has been a long haul for many, and I am just another who has dedicated many years of my life to forest protection. But not all have made it through to bear witness to the moment that was the announcement of an early transition out of native forest logging. This has been a war, and there have been a lot of casualties. I know many who have burnt out along the way, going too hard, not regulating their nervous systems and tending to their emotional landscape. There have also been lives lost in this fight. It has not been an easy road at all, it has required many sleepless nights and an incredible amount of persistence to arrive where we are now.

Alana Mountain

Credit: Forest Conservation Victoria

At times it has been heart wrenching and I have definitely experienced my fair share of exhaustion, but I am kept here in my activism by my love of all things sacred in this human experience that need to be protected for future generations to come. By the first light of the sun, the dew found on gum leaves, the falling of feathers from the sky, and the endless horizons of forested landscapes. The vastness of the web of life, the secrets of creatures dwelling amongst the ferns, their unknown symbiotic relationships. The entanglement of all life. The Earth is an artist of the most profound beauty.

And so I have continued, making my way through adversity. The awakening of my inner fire which spurred me into forest activism and campaigning for the last 12 years of my life began in a place of complete destruction. My insides felt torn apart, like the bark shredded from the ancient gums, left to lay bare on the overturned soils of an ancient forest. A forest with songlines pre-dating colonisation. With spirit pre-dating homo sapiens. A forest with codes well before the anthropocene. No one is entitled to own this place, to extract and abuse. We belong to the soils, the lichen and lyrebirds.

I remember that moment vividly, where I felt my calling. I could feel my body absorb the shock my eyes could not unsee. A shaking of my human foundations, a cataclysm of understanding. A dawning of my privilege and a remembrance of who I am. A young strong woman, a creature of the Earth. Then came the acceptance of my role here in this lifetime. I felt it in my womb, the ache of the majesty of our collective mothers’ creation violated violently. There was no reverence in that scene of destruction. Only greed. In disbelief, in hatred, in rage, in love and in war, the fire was lit. And it continues to burn brightly. Incandescent.

There is a night that will always remain in my memory, where I sat up in a treesit high above the forest that had been reduced to debris. Perched in a single isolated grey gum, surrounded by a massacred forest. Across from me, a fair distance but clearly identifiable, was a Greater Glider. It looked back at me with its bright golden eyes and I knew in that moment, that I was there for every single creature that called the forests home. Before people and their needs of the

forest, it has always been to me about natures right to exist in its own right. The forest chose me, and so I will remain in my purpose to protect and restore it in this lifetime.

Being in service to the forests and the community is an incredible honour, and I have been blessed with many wonderful moments throughout my journey. I have been in the bellies of gullies, surrounded by ancient ferns, have drunk fresh trickling water from underneath tea tree springs, witnessed Powerful Owls swoop in over my head to perch on a branch above, have seen Gliders glide and mushrooms in all shapes and colours! There are so many wonderful gifts that the forest offers us when we choose to live a life of connection to it. I hope that the end of logging produces a cultural shift where we begin to recognise how fortunate we are to have such a treasure in close proximity that nourishes us so deeply.

Clearfell logging may end, come January 1 2024, but a myriad of other threats continue to exist and persist. Maybe the forests will never be completely safe…not in this rapidly changing climate we now live in. So I can continue on, with many others, advocating for a world beyond extractivism that leaves ecosystems devastated by capitalism. I continue to listen and learn how we can adjust and adapt in these times, and accommodate for a diversity of stewardship values.

Sometimes it is easy to be swept up in life and forget about the environment around us that nourishes and supports our lives, but it’s really important, now more than ever, that we do pay attention to what is happening in the world around us. We all have a part to play in protecting and caring for the planet. I found my place and it is amongst the fungi and eucalypts, the rushing rivers and chilly mountain mornings. It’s with the pollen that makes me sneeze as I brush past loaded plants in the springtime. It’s with the scarlett robins and the leeches even! My place is with the trees and I think it always will be. I believe that our souls choose to enter our bodies at a specific moment for a specific reason, it’s up to us to figure that out. We can all be the light in the dark, the bioluminescence in the night.

Kooooweee!

Alana Mountain is a forest campaigner and defender in so-called Victoria.

My Journey as a Forest Campaigner –and why i’m leaving the forest movement... for now

Native forest logging is (mostly) ending at the end of this year. When I found out, at 11pm the night before the official government media release, I obviously didn’t sleep. I’ve been around the forest movement for the last 6 years (a baby really, compared to forest war veterans who’ve been around for 30-40 years). But like a lot of folks, I’ve already developed an (un)healthy level of scepticism for government announcements. It was hard to believe. There were some not-so-good bits of course (logging in the West might still continue), but it’s mostly a huge cause to celebrate, and a staggering win, after a long fight.

My journey into forest protection started in 2017 with the Friends of the Earth Forest Collective. It was my first time getting involved in activism. Together, we painted banners and signs, wore animal costumes and handed out flyers, spoke to people at markets, train stations, on the streets of the CBD… anywhere we could. I visited the forest on tours and camps, and it became a place of rest, connection, and comfort for me. I went spotlighting for wildlife, seeing animals I’d never heard of before joining the collective. I rapidly built connections and friendships with people and the bush, and felt a sense of belonging and purpose I’d never felt before.

Through these connections, I quickly met people who, like me, were keen to put their bodies on the line to halt logging. I went to my first blockade in Kuark forest, and watched as activists and community members walked the destructive machines out of the forest, after the protest held up the logging while legal action and injunctions could be secured.

With a bunch of other ratbags, we started a roving blockade crew, to assist community groups facing logging in their local area, and stand in the way of logging machinery anywhere we could.

It was an exhilarating, exhausting, terrifying, and empowering time for me. These passionate, fearless people are now my family.

I was lucky enough to get a job with grassroots East Gippsland group, Goongerah Environment Centre (GECO). I actually couldn’t believe I was getting paid to do the very thing that had quickly become my life’s passion. It was a dream. Then, about two weeks into the job, the government made their first announcement to end logging… I was at a forest blockade, when the press release came out.

Chris Schuringer

Credit: Forest Conservation Victoria

The state government said they were going to end logging in 2030, over an 11 year transition. I remember huddling with fellow forest activists under a tree-sit and all agreeing the announcement meant nothing while logging continued to destroy that forest we were defending. Another decade of logging simply wasn’t good enough. It felt like that announcement sucked some of the life out of the forest movement – and there was fresh animosity between forest groups and people who had celebrated the announcement, versus those who were deeply unhappy. It felt like the public thought the issue was solved, and that all the pressure and momentum that had been building had been deflated.

But then the devastating 2019/2020 bushfires tore through eastern Victoria. Despite the devastating impacts on my friends in East Gippsland, it didn’t take long for the movement to re-group. Communities took on new legal challenges, we ramped up efforts, surveyed more, did more actions, built pressure on the government, dragged the logging companies reputation and social licence through mud… all through a global pandemic.

And HoLy CRAP. i t ALL PA id oFF.

Folks have fought tooth and nail the last few years. The announcement that the government is bringing forward the transition 6 years early to January 1 2024, can’t come soon enough. It’s honestly the biggest relief.

I know so many in our community have put in so much. The kind of love, fire, and commitment that so many people in this movement put in for decades helped save countless areas of forests from the bulldozers. We used our grit, our determination, sleepless nights stumbling in the dark, and endless hours on computers to take down an industrial scale logging agency, with endless government funds. That’s nothing short of amazing.

Over the years I let the forests, and the fight, consume me. It was work, my personal life, my friends, and my passion. Now that there’s an end in sight, and less immediate threats, I’ve been thinking a lot more, and reflecting on what we’ve achieved, and what we haven’t quite nailed yet.

I think about the personal relationships we’ve built, our close-knit community, and I wonder who’s been missing, or on the edge, after all this time. Were we able to bring people along? Was our campaign intersectional? Did we address colonialism, capitalism, and ongoing extractivism? Have we created a movement that can continue onto the next fight?

i HonES t Ly don’t K no W t HE A n SWERS , A nd i W iSH i HA d ASKE d t HESE QuES tion S A L onG tiME AGo.

For me, it feels like the end of my journey in the forest campaign for now. The forests themselves will always be a place of comfort and learning. And the deep connections, cherished friendships, and chosen family I’ve made along the way will stay with me forever. But I think I’m ready to step back. Not to find the next thing – the next issue, the next cause, whatever.

But to find the space to rest, reflect, and integrate some of the incredible learnings of this fight. The good, the bad, all of it. It’s a rare thing in the grind and urgency of our movements to get a chance to do that. But rest, and critical reflection shouldn’t be separate. It must be embedded. I think that’s what was missing for me since being involved in this campaign. Maybe. The answers to some of my questions could’ve been answered if we had made that a priority.

I’ll be here (but a step back), with so much gratitude for everyone working for what they’re passionate about. I know from experience it can be a slog. But thank goodness for our communities, our families, our collective care, our love, our dedication, our connection, that get us through it all.

I’ll be here, trying to cherish and nourish that, so we can hopefully keep winning.

Chris is currently the campaign coordinator for the Victorian Forest Alliance. She has been volunteering and working in the forest movement for over 6 years. She is passionate about community organising, grassroots campaigning and getting out into the forest. She’s volunteered and worked for a number of different groups from across so-called Victoria.

Credit: Forest Conservation Victoria

Biocultural climate resilience – bringing First nations & Environmentalists together

Oli Moraes

As an environmentalist, my assumptions, perspectives and values have been challenged over the last two years since working on Indigenous-forest management with Djaara Through difficult conversations, walking on Country with Traditional Owners, scientists, environmentalists, foresters, students, everyday people, MPs and representatives from all levels of government, I more deeply understand the breadth of perspectives, sometimes contradictory priorities, and unwavering endurance of positions when it comes to caring for and managing our forests.

I’m a settler from a multi-cultural family living on traditional land in so-called Australia. I was born in Brasil (another settler society) on the lands of the Tupi people, but I grew up on Wurundjeri Country in outer suburban Melbourne.

I have been an active part of the environment and climate movements for over 12 years as a student, volunteer, and staff member. I have been working on climate and environmental justice issues in Australia and the Pacific since 2015.

Through a Master of Environment at Melbourne Uni I focused my studies on community-based climate adaptation, coastal restoration in Fiji, and climate impacts on forests.

During this time, I started to more deeply understand the huge rifts that have developed between people and communities because of forestry and forest conservation. My supervisor was working with prominent forest campaigner Sarah Reese, and in 2017 I ran a tour of the proposed Great Forest National Park with Sarah and Chris Taylor.

At the same time, I was taking a subject on Forests, Carbon and Climate Change, when I fell into the polarized nature of forest politics. A fellow student (who was a former VicForests employee) and I had an argument in class one day. After the interaction, which was about the impacts of logging on Leadbeater’s possum, the teacher proclaimed to the class, this is what its like in forest politics. Two people yelling at each other, not listening, and not leaving space for other voices to be heard.

WoRK inG At dJAARA

I was initially hired to develop a climate change strategy for Dja Dja Wurrung Country, which we launched in May 2023 – titled Turning Wrong Way Climate Right Way.

However, through working closely with the Djaara authors of Galk-galk Dhelkunya I was immediately drawn

to Forest Gardening because I saw the opportunity that my unique life experience and professional interests had in building effective and transformative dialogue between Traditional Owners, environmentalists, and forest managers. When a role to lead the implementation of Galkgalk Dhelkunya became available at the end of 2022, I knew this was the journey I was meant to follow.

CuLtuRAL LA nd SCAPES

Galk-galk Dhelkunya is Dja Dja Wurrung’s philosophy and practice for cultural landscape management. In Djaara language it translates to ‘to care for/to heal many trees’.

Galk-galk is NOT about logging, exploiting forest ecosystems, chasing profit or contributing to climate change. It’s exactly the opposite.

All Djaara’s work is holistic, intergenerational, and focused on healing Country. Yet following the 2021 catastrophic storms that caused widespread impacts across Victoria, particularly on Dja Dja Wurrung Country in the Wombat State Forest and the associated storm recovery works conducted by VicForests, Djaara has been seen to being either misled by others or exploiting Country for profit itself.

Neither of these are true. But many in the environment movement and forest loving communities have leaned closer to believing these assumptions, even when we have proactively communicated the long-term vision for healing Djandak (Dja Dja Wurrung Country) through Galk-galk Dhelkunya. The fears being felt by some for forests and the Wombat being exploited are serious and part of the reason for this article.

CuLti VAtinG CoMMunity RESiL iE nCE

We need to find better ways of walking with others, talking with them openly and connecting to Country. The alternative is unacceptable and will only prevent First Nations self-determination and leave Country in a sick and unhealthy state.

It’s through this understanding that when the Friends of Earth team reached out in early 2023, I welcomed the opportunity to co-design ways of bringing Djaara and the movement together to develop understanding and a shared pathway forward.

We have been working closely with FoE, leading onCountry yarns with Wombat Forest Care, Wombat Action Group and others in the movement to do just that. In

addition, our team continues to engage widely with MPs, scientists from a cross section of academic institutions, government agencies, other environment groups and the broader community to build understanding of Galk-galk Dhelkunya and to find ways for others to walk with Djaara in healing Country.

Through these on-Country walks we are starting to address the confusion and fear that has grown following the storm and salvage operation. We have dialogue between groups and communicate more regularly. We won’t always agree with each other, but it’s clear to me that there’s far more that we agree on than we disagree on.

We are more alike than the caricatures of environmentalists, traditional owners and foresters are portrayed, and by walking on Country together, sitting around a fire, yarning, and listening to Country we are better able to move forward. Even if it’s sometimes over rocky and overgrown terrain.

CuLtuRAL BE nEFit S oF HEAL inG Count Ry

Since working with Djaara and intimately connecting myself to Galk-galk Dhelkunya I have become incredibly hopeful for the future. I have seen what can be achieved when young Djaara people are leading cultural burning across Country, returning culturally important plants through Indigenous led revegetation efforts or planning the reintroduction of keystone species like Emu and Quoll.

I’ve seen what it means for Djaara and the broader Aboriginal community to be able to access Country, manage Country, harvest resources from Country, create scar trees on Country and heal Country. I’ve seen the incredible pride that comes when Djaara people can create cultural artifacts crafted from timber provided from Country, which their Ancestors looked after for over 65,000 years and the cultural and economic value that can be produced when timber resources are honored, valued and crafted into their highest potential – like the Djaara Guitar which was recently produced through DJAARA Timbers (Djaara’s not-for-profit specialty timbers project).

Music is a tool that can speak across worlds. The guitar is a European instrument but that many Aboriginal people connect with and play. The Djaara Guitar is an Indigenous designed, sourced and produced instrument gifted from Country to talk across worlds.

Like music, my role at Djaara is to find ways for two-way knowledge exchange, creating trust-based relationships grounded in respect and to work to heal the divide between Traditional Owners and environmentalists.

Environmentalists have always been great allies of First Peoples. The Wombat Forest storm and subsequent cleanup has resulted in a complex fracture between both communities.

R ESiL iE nt F utuRES

The climate and biodiversity crises require us to walk together to build resilience if we are to have any chance of securing a safe climate future for people and our planet.

Traditional Owner landscape management through Galkgalk Dhelkunya and similar cultural landscape practices provides tremendous opportunities to heal Country, heal rivers and waterways, reduce catastrophic fires, provide habitat, and enhance biodiversity.

The environment movement has a unique opportunity to prioritise and practice radical support for self-determination. Even if our priorities may differ from time to time, I can assure you having walked, worked and lived on both sides of this divide, Djaara’s vision for Country through Galkgalk Dhelkunya aligns with environmental protection, biodiversity, care for people and fostering resilience.

Galk-galk Dhelkunya is about returning healthy, functional, and diverse ecosystems where people, animals and plants can interact and work together to maintain resilience across landscapes and within communities as they did prior to European invasion.

It’s where catastrophic bushfires, even in a climate changed world are no longer possible because Djaara is regularly practicing cultural fire across Djandak, reducing fuel loads while enhancing biodiversity.

It’s where culturally important and large habitat trees are more prominent in the landscape because Djaara’s cultural thinning teams have returned mosaic structures to the landscape that mimic precolonial habitat and forest structure.

It’s where our Djaara crews are planting culturally important trees and plants across degraded land, healing upside Country and storing more carbon in the landscape to mitigate climate change.

And it’s where Djaara’s Gatjin (water) team is healing rivers and waterways, constructing chains of ponds that reduce flood risk, lower urban heat, store carbon in wetlands and enhance aquatic ecosystems. All of this by Djaara for Djaara and Djandak, but with benefits for everyone.

tHE oPP oR tunity FoR S oL idARity

I am committed to this work because as settlers living and benefiting off Aboriginal land, it is our obligation to do what we can to enable self-determination for our First Peoples. But I’m also committed because I can see that when Traditional Owners lead, collectively we are far more able to respond to grand challenges like pollution, biodiversity loss and climate change.

If you’re still unsure or confused then I encourage you to ask, listen, read and take in the rich breadth of First Nations authored literature, resources and cultural competence training that is available. It’s each of our responsibility to build our own awareness and stand in true solidarity and allyship. We are more alike than we sometimes like to admit – and our forests need us to walk together in practicing Galk-galk Dhelkunya for a healthy, sustainable and resilient future.

Oli lives and works between Boon Wurrung, Woi Wurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung Countries and has been working with the Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation (DJAARA) for two years on climate change, renewable energy, forest restoration and landscape management.

First nations solidarity and the fight for forests

Kim Croxford

We have arrived at an incredible moment in history. Native forest logging has ended in so-called Victoria,1 thanks to the tenacity of hundreds of dedicated forest activists and a variety of grassroots efforts – court cases, direct action, citizen science, and campaign advocacy.

I entered the fight for the forests 9 years ago, but my commitment to the campaign deepened significantly in 2020 when, urged by a Taungurung friend to “get up there on the ground and sort out the logging,” I returned to live in my hometown. Coming home and learning about this place has profoundly influenced me personally and politically. I’m grateful each time I’m able to call the places I’ve loved since childhood by their true names: Nanadhong (Cathedral Ranges ), Banyarmbite ( Snobs Ck Falls ), Nyaggeron (Acheron River) , Waring (Goulburn river ).

Many other forest activists also increased their involvement in the campaign thanks to the staunch leadership of frontline First Nations activists, who generously shared their stories and knowledge. Traditional Owner Corporations have also been working in a coordinated way over the past few years to assert the rights, interests, and Sovereignty of the Nations they represent. One important piece of work, released in 2021, is the Cultural Landscapes Strategy, which was developed by the Federation of Victorian Traditional Owner Corporations, 2 in dialogue with First Nations Elders, knowledge holders, and Traditional Owner corporation staff.

Cultural Landscapes Management, as a conceptual framework, is a strategic effort to decolonise land management. The strategy is a “progressive vision to restore First Nations management of Country… at a statewide level.”3 It’s designed to “support the broader process of reconciliation and sovereignty for Nations” and “effect transformational change in contemporary land and water management”.4 The strategy is both ambitiously radical and brilliantly pragmatic. However, some environmentalists have received it with concern. In this essay, I explore why I believe the environment movement should embrace this cultural landscapes approach.

This piece is also an invitation for us forest campaigners to pause and examine our theories of change in this postlogging world. In the absence of the urgent necessity to disrupt the relentless industrial logging machine, I believe our movement should no longer be primarily oriented toward guarding against threats, or lobbying politicians for top-down solutions. 5 While top-down intervention was necessary to end logging, perhaps now we can embody the cooperative societies we wish to see in our change-

making efforts. This is a moment to prefigure our politics,6 transform our modes of engagement, and assume relational ways of working to enable us to act in solidarity with the First Nations of so-called Victoria.

The announcement of the end of logging comes with a promise that 1.8 million hectares of land will be released from ‘timber harvesting allocation’. The state government has flagged that this area will be integrated into the reserve system, which has long been an ambition of conservationists. But the manner in which this change occurs, and what form these new reserves take, matters a great deal on stolen land. A media statement released by the Federation of Victorian Traditional Owner Corporations in May observed that:

“with the appropriation of [First Peoples] Country and the establishment of state forests and national parks, Traditional Owners have been locked out from these [biocultural] resources, whilst logging and resource removal has benefitted successive governments.”

Land justice outcomes must emerge from this transition process, not only to empower First Nations as a parallel process to Treaty, but as a means to address the root cause of all land degradation on this continent: colonisation.

To be clear: I broach this subject with humility, as a white settler activist who is still learning and grappling with this shifting context. I also want to express my great admiration for all my colleagues and movement comrades in the forest campaign. I write from my own perspective, not from that of my organisation or colleagues, and acknowledge the fact that many of us are currently interpreting the state of play, and experiencing this moment, differently. I certainly do not attempt to speak for First Nations organisations, however I do hope to amplify existing publicly available documents and communicate some feedback relayed verbally.

I write with the intention of continuing an internal dialogue within the forest movement. I hope to proceed, as we always do, by organising together – led by a mutual desire for social and ecological justice.

CuLtuRAL L A nd SCAPES AS A BRidGE to RECiPRoCAL LA nd Cu S todi A n SHiP A nd indiGE nou S Go VER n A nCE .

The Cultural Landscape Strategy (referred to throughout as “the strategy”) is an articulation of various pathways to enable Aboriginal self-determination. It explores how

participation in land management can build organisational and economic independence, as well as the overall resilience of individual First Nations, as part of a decolonising process that also delivers “significant environmental and social benefits for all Victorians” and re-asserts a reciprocal dynamic between people and the land.7

The strategy examines the variety of means by which First Nations can activate their inherent rights and interests and assert their unceded Sovereignty, while using the instruments currently available in our modern statecapitalist context.8 It outlines structural changes to enable the active restoration of Country, which would allow Traditional Custodians to fulfil their enduring obligations to Country.9 Cultural landscapes enables the healing of Country on a landscape scale, facilitating Cultural management across a variety of land tenure as opposed to restricting it to the access and management prescriptions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ colonial land categories, which fragment traditional landscapes: “western planning units end at the fence, but cultural obligations do not.”10

By leveraging existing mechanisms (law, policy, regulations, codes of practice, planning processes), navigating strategic partnerships with state agencies, reforming legislation, and, most importantly, co-designing governance structures, First Nations have designed a coordinated roadmap to “shift management perspectives in a culturally safe environment” and transform the current dynamic between land managers and ‘public land’ into something more recognisable to Indigenous Cultures.11

As described in the 2022 ‘technical report’, which outlines the development of strategy:

“whilst Traditional Owners take a holistic approach to management of Country, the State takes a discrete values driven approach… An appropriate way of bridging these different planning and management paradigms is for Traditional Owners to incorporate aspects of Indigenous knowledge.” 12

A key tenet of the strategy is to enable collaborative, equitable “two-way” knowledge sharing between Cultural knowledge holders and western empirical science,13 using this sharing as a foundation to inform active, adaptive land management practices that are place-specific and, therefore, responsive to the particular needs of specific areas of Country.

Many of us in the forest movement admire the work of Potawatomi botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer and view her proposed ‘braiding together’ of Traditional

Ecological Knowledge with western science in order to learn from and care for the natural world as a model way forward.14 Cultural Landscapes Management is literally a bridging term designed to signify this ‘braiding together’ of Cultural Knowledge and western land management. It is the embodiment of what Kimmerer is describing, articulated by Victorian Traditional Owners and strategically presented to an audience of state government departments.

One of the most exciting elements of cultural landscapes work is the Reading Country method, described in the technical report by Indigenous academic Tyson Yunkaporta (author of the celebrated Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World) as follows:

“The Reading Country method is a bridging tool which expresses a respectful integration of Indigenous oral cultural practice and Western applied research… It has two main components; firstly, cultural values are identified and recorded. These values may be tangible cultural heritage, intangible heritage – as song, dance, stories, places – and living biocultural values, such as culturally significant plants and animals. These values are examined through narrative and yarning with mentors, peers, knowledge keepers or Elders. The second component is interaction (data analysis, interpretation and sharing as knowledge) that then manifests as priorities and actions required to heal and maintain health of Country.” 15

Cultural Landscapes proposes First Nations-led research partnerships with “western scientist knowledge holders … willing to contribute to our knowledge healing” to aid the development of Cultural Knowledge Information Management Systems (e.g. Mapshare, ABC system, SMP).16 This would support a synthesis of knowledge systems, while protecting First Nations intellectual property. The most transformative aspect of this approach is that this on-the-ground information gathering will then guide decision making when it comes to land management. This demonstrates what an impressive power-move the Cultural Landscapes Strategy is in terms of Traditional Owners addressing the colonial state. Traditional Custodians are asserting they “need resources for data collection, then [we] will give the state the management objectives. The State and other [land management organisations] need to support our projects, not us supplementing theirs.”17

The strategy’s emphasis on co-governance – and the codesign of all decision making apparatus – is a powerful effort to re-create “perpetual, enduring institutions for decision

making that transcend western political and policy cycles.”18 By devolving power from centralised government agencies to localised, Aboriginal-controlled organisations, a cultural landscapes perspective moves land management away from bureaucratic decision making disconnected from a placebased context and towards Indigenous governance systems, place-specific collaborative decision making, and, ultimately, land management that centres the needs of Country: “Reading Country, Healing Country, Governing with Country.”19

A cultural landscape lens allows each Sovereign Nation to pursue their own pilot programs and research partnerships designed to gather holistic knowledge about Country on a “place-based scale.” 20 Place-specific management facilitates the re-establishment and “expression of biocultural relationships.” 21 Taungurung Land and Waters Council recently released a biocultural Diversity Strategic Plan , which positions Cultural practices, like ceremony, as a way of interacting intimately and holistically with Country: “Plants, people, animals, food, fibre, waterways, snow, seasons, languages, cultural heritage, ceremony, these and all things are related and we cannot approach one without approaching all.” 22

Both Taungurung and Dja Dja Wurrung have already piloted successful ‘cultural flow’ projects that revitalised culturally significant wetland sites. After long-term neglect and degradation due to colonisation, cultural management injected life back into these significant places, welcoming back turtles and water birds that hadn’t been witnessed there in generations. 23

This holistic approach should excite us environmentalists – after all, we have long been frustrated with the remote and reductive interface between state departments and diverse, living forest ecosystems. I’ve often heard volunteer citizen scientists, communicate their dismay regarding the state’s devaluing of the whole ecosystem in favour of creating small buffers to (inadequately) protect particular endangered species already pushed to the brink. In contrast, a cultural landscape lens re-introduces a mode of caring for the land that is antithetical to extractive paradigms and distant, abstracted, state-administered land management. Country, conceptualised as interconnected Cultural landscapes and viewed through a place-specific, biocultural lens, gives rise to ‘land management’ that is actively decolonial. It makes possible the re-establishment of embedded, reciprocal, kinship relationships with the more-than-human world.

Without industry dominating the discourse, this transition could be a catalyst for each Sovereign First Nation, local

settler communities, and scientists to build real consensus about how Victorian communities can strive to embed themselves within our local environments, live in greater balance with local ecosystems, and adapt alongside them as the climate changes. The “monitoring, evaluation and research to enable adaptive learning” that is central to cultural landscapes management presents a unique opportunity to build the resilience of ecosystems into the future, even in the face of climate change, by disrupting “colonial ‘doing without knowing’ and shifting to a style of management where ‘knowing and being determines doing’ on Country.” 24 A cultural landscape approach positions Country – rather than the state – as the “fundamental authority.” 25 As Taungurung Land & Waters Council asserts in their Biocultural Diversity strategy: “If we listen to Country, it will speak on behalf of all its entities and tell us what it needs.”

26

It’s critical that our movement embraces the transformative potential of this moment by supporting the kind of change that challenges the power dynamics inherent in our stateadministered land management system and empowers Traditional Custodians to lead the way toward something better. This is what a cultural landscape lens enables.

int ERRoGAtinG ouR ASS uMP tion S , MA n AGinG ouR FEARS .

Cultural Landscapes Strategy articulates the need for a deep paradigm shift. The development of the strategy involved a wide review of Indigenous Land Management around the world, examining challenges and enablers of success (see page 36 of the technical papers). It reaches beyond top-down, state administered solutions by investigating governance structures that actually address root causes of the problem – the corporate monopolies that drive land exploitation/resource misappropriation and the colonial states that enable them. The strategy has been informed by the direct experience of local Elders with knowledge of First Nations governance. In the technical report it’s evident that it has also been informed by Nobel prize winning economist, Elinor Olstrom, who examined Indigenous governance structures around the world in order to identify models for sustainable development which don’t rely on state control or corporate privatisation, but on collective cooperation instead. Furthermore, because of the way it is framed in formal, strategic documentation, Indigenous thinking remains translatable and palatable to

state policy makers, land management agencies, and funding institutions – making this return to Indigenous governance highly implementable and practical via partnerships with state-institutions and relatively short-term policy reforms. This is groundbreaking transformation work.

However, rather than echoing the call for a cultural landscapes approach, parts of the forest movement appear focused on lobbying the state to secure the ‘permanent protection’ of forests, using existing land categories, as quickly as possible. I can relate, to a large degree, to this desire to finally protect forests from harm. However, I am curious about this preference for state intervention and current legislative instruments, rather than other possible pathways that may be more transformative: after all, it was the state that exploited and neglected forests for so long. When the root cause of land mismanagement is capitalism and the colonial state, we cannot simply legislate our way out of this larger mess without structural change.

Before I explore this dynamic further, I want to acknowledge that the great majority of settler forest campaigners that I know are proactive and sincere in their solidarity efforts towards First Nations justice, both in their activism and personal lives. I have the deepest respect for all my colleagues and movement comrades, many of whom have several decades more experience than I in the forest campaign, and all of whom have taught me a great deal. It’s important to acknowledge that without these devoted activists (who commit hours of thankless, free labour, and often reshape their entire lives to defend forests) there would be no forests left to speak of.

However, just as it is important to acknowledge the huge contribution environmentalists have made – and extend compassion to ourselves and our comrades – it’s equally important to support one another to challenge unhelpful assumptions that may be explicitly or implicitly infiltrating our movement discussions and prohibiting us from being able to walk with Traditional Custodians as we move beyond logging.

Left unexamined, these assumptions could compromise generative relationships that would benefit ecosystems and biodiversity in the long-term. It’s also inconsistent with our stated commitment to First Nations justice. First Nations are currently pursuing a variety of means to assert their Sovereignty in so-called Victoria. 27 Now is the time for our movement to demonstrate that our solidarity is not performative, or conditional, and actively support the existing work of Aboriginal controlled organisations. 28

» FoRES t Ry indu S t Ry t HREAt S

Perhaps the most pervasive assumption to examine together is an undercurrent fear that Traditional Owner Corporations may be influenced, or put under ‘unfair pressure’, by the lobbyists, academics, or department staff that previously sustained the forestry industry and may still have commercially exploitative agendas. Of course, corporations are navigating complex state-bureaucratic structures that were originally designed to enable industrial resource extraction. Many of the same political actors who informed previous malpractice in the forests may still be part of various scientific or state-bureaucratic institutions. But white environmentalists, concerned that First Nations groups are being ‘manipulated’ by these dynamics, as opposed to skilfully navigating them, is harmful ‘deficit thinking’, which replicates a problematic tendency prevalent in mainstream dominant narratives to view Aboriginal people as ‘victims’. It also obscures the actual power of cultural landscapes work, which Traditional Owner Corporations have been deliberately undertaking through a strength-based lens (for more information on strength-based approaches to First Nation justice work, the First Nations-led messaging research Passing the Message Stick is a great resource).29

Traditional Owner Corporations are representative organisations accountable to the wider First Nations community. While no organisation is perfect (we all know this from navigating the eNGO world), white environmentalists scrutinising Traditional Owner organisations from the outside is highly inappropriate; Aboriginal people are entirely capable of advocating for Country within their own organisations and communities.

Granted, the root of this fear has little to do with Traditional Owner Corporations themselves. It’s driven by a suspicion toward a famously corrupt forestry industry, which over the years did continually and insidiously re-insert itself back into the state of play by extensive lobbying and the peddling

Photos @manicseedsmedia

misinformation to drive false media narratives. With VicForests yet to be thoroughly dismantled – a highly necessary step to restore public trust – things are still raw. However, while the tendency for campaigners to be constantly poised to poke holes in ‘bad forestry’ may be understandable after years of fighting, we cannot let this dynamic persist in our interactions with Traditional Custodians.

Ongoing vigilance about commercial threats and the influence of forestry industry actors is not only a habit forged out of strategic necessity, it’s also likely a consequence of trauma. But trauma sustained resisting logging, due to our interactions with proponents of industry or the system itself, is unfortunately part of the package when we choose to participate in activism as settlers. It is our trauma to process (and ideally work through together as a movement). It should not become an additional burden for Traditional Owners to bear.

The accusation that aspirational documents, produced through a cultural landscape lens, ‘may be a veil for extractivist forestry industry agendas’ has been levelled

toward DJAARA (the Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation) by environmentalists in articles, presentations, and reports. This prompted DJAARA to write a ‘right of reply’ statement to defend their Galk-galk Delkunya (Forest Gardening) Strategy in August 2022:

“There is no basis whatsoever to suggest that Traditional Owners will, of economic necessity, ‘construct a Western income stream from an under-threat conservation estate’. This is a gross misrepresentation of who we are.”

The statement continues:

“Aboriginal principles of only taking what Country provides apply today, as they have always applied here on Djandak (Dja Dja Wurrung Country). As the oldest continuous culture in the world, we intend to uphold our track record of sustainability…

“As for commercial initiatives, the Galk-galk (DJAARA Timbers) enterprise is deliberately cost-neutral / not-for-profit to avoid the distortions of economic imperatives… Forest gardening is

an expression of knowledge, obligation to Country, and a gift by us to all Victorians to restore long-term health, biodiversity and resilience across the landscape…”

“The principles and practices of forest gardening stand in stark contrast to the waves of land-management values and practices that have swept across Country since colonisation – including mining, clear felling, and land clearing… While we are not responsible for the damaged state of our forests, we remain responsible for this Country and will do what we can to clean up the mess left by others.” 30

It makes both logical and ethical sense that the Cultural Landscapes Strategy would propose that First Nations’ social and economic empowerment should be connected to efforts to restore Country to health; after all, this gestures toward the kind of reciprocity that informed pre-colonial societies. It makes little sense to suggest that the strategy may be subtly driven by the forestry industry, because it’s not just about forests. We must remember: it’s not only forested landscapes that First Nations people witness continually impacted by the colonial project: it is Country, community, and Culture as a whole. Development and urbanisation, a lack of control over major waterways – the list goes on when it comes to barriers to Traditional land management. We need to remain mindful of this broader context. The strategy is a much larger effort by First Nations to reestablish spiritual, cultural, and economic relationships with their own lands, despite the myriad of barriers that exist.

» ECoL oGiCAL CoLLAPSE

Forest movement anxieties about industrial activity resuming under another name are also fueled by legitimate concerns about the structural condition of surviving forests. Experts with extensive knowledge and longrunning research programs studying these heavily impacted ecosystems, are also rightly worried about irreversible extinction events and ecological collapse 32 , especially in ash forests vulnerable to repeated disturbance like bushfire. So-called Victoria’s forested landscapes are the most carbon dense forests in the world, as well as some of the last complex ecosystems to teach and inspire us in a dying and over-exploited natural world. We all want to see these forests recover and grow old. However, we must ensure we don’t project our fears about extinctions and ecological collapse onto Traditional Custodians. We certainly cannot let fear, of any kind, cause us to equate (be it consciously or

unconsciously) the sustainable use of biocultural resources, as a means to re-assert the independence of First Nations while caring for Country in a reciprocal dynamic, with the strain of industrial clear-felling.

As educated and diligent activists, forest campaigners know that ‘social justice’ vs. ‘benefits for nature’ is a false dichotomy. Despite how us ‘greenies’ are often perceived from the outside, and portrayed by conservative media, as someone participating in the movement I know that very few environmentalists subscribe to the “wilderness myth.”

32 We respect First Nations modification of the Australian environment since time immemorial. The great majority of us wish to see well-funded, pro-active human interventions in the forests to restore ecosystems and observe and complement their resilience systems. This kind of active management is also what Traditional Owners are proposing. Moreover, it has been consistently demonstrated around the continent – and around the world – that First Peoples managing Country is beneficial for biodiversity. Just as “practice is healing” for First Nations people, “when people and culture are strong, Country can heal.”33

Mo V inG to WAR d A RELAtion AL Mind SE t

As First Nations efforts to decolonise land management shifts decision making away from abstracted state-based prescriptions toward First People in deep relationship with Country, we must embrace the task of decolonising our own thinking and analyse our campaigning. This may look like transitioning from the defensive position we were forced to assume to stop logging, to organising in ways more aligned with how First Nations are approaching the forestry transition. As campaigners, we are used to scanning for threats and calling out corruption in the public sphere. However, as we move beyond logging, there presents a need for us to move away from this way of operating and instead adopt a relational mindset. As Traditional Custodians rightly assume control of land management, our mode of engagement must change, in order to contribute with respect.

The fact that some environmentalists have commented on First Nations aspirational documents in order to suggest that they may lead to adverse environmental outcomes is unacceptable. This is misrepresenting First Nations aspirations in the public sphere, before Traditional Owner groups have even had an opportunity to bring them to life. As DJAARA writes in their ‘right of reply’ statement: “ friends speak to each other before speaking about each other.”34

As settler activists at this critical juncture, we must first show allyship by using whatever power we possess to support the call for First Nations land management through a strength-based lens. The state has blundered forest management for years, but First Nations in so-called Victoria have not yet been given the chance to resume the management of their Country in an autonomous way. First Nations should be supported to assume management and granted the space to experiment and adapt management practices. After we have shown this basic level of solidarity, and ideally found other meaningful and material ways to support the people and organisations doing this work, dialogue is more likely to be possible. Any differences of opinion regarding specific management practices may be broached over time, hopefully with curiosity and respect, and within the container of genuine relationships built on trust and solidarity. These concerns should not be addressed in the public sphere, especially in the presence of misunderstanding and in the absence of relationship. 35

As we move into 2024, the forest campaign could focus our energies on relational work that centres deep listening to First Nations aspirations (and be prepared to honour what we hear with our actions). Relationships take time, which may not align with projected campaign timelines. But after such a long fight, our nervous systems could also benefit from slowing down to prioritise relationships over immediate outcomes. Of course, community organising and relational work has always been part of forest campaigning, but we could challenge ourselves to lean into this more deeply as we attempt to move beyond the fraught history of the forest campaign and unite transitioning communities in an effort to restore forests.

This relational work would be in service of the idea that over time transitioning communities, First Nations, and ecologists would be able to enter into respectful dialogue, as equals, in a culturally safe way, to build consensus on how to care for forested landscapes together. TLAWC states in their Biocultural Diversity Strategy that they “actively seek respectful partnerships with organisations that can commit to working with us.”36 Respectful partnerships can only ever be built on trust. Relationships – with anyone – are never built when we lead with suspicion, urgency, or fear. Consensus is impossible without relationship.

This work may involve shedding our previous conceptions of others, practising humility, and determinedly creating

space for mutual understanding, even among people with whom we have historically been in opposition (yes, including ex-foresters).

Striving towards more relational ways of working also disrupts the (impossible to obtain) ‘rational objectivity’ sought by ‘white,’ colonial cultures. It exists in contrast to the inevitably deliberative environments created by western scientific institutions. Something I learnt last year, while attempting to unite knowledge holders in a public forum, is that the atmosphere of debate created by academics addressing contested science (for example, the impacts of thinning previously logged forests) in the public sphere is difficult to render relational.

Our work going forward may involve learning how to bring knowledge holders together in a Culturally safe environment and discovering what generative knowledge exchange looks like. Settler communities may share their own knowledge about local ecology, and environmentalists and ecologists could communicate concerns about threatened species about broadscale ecosystem collapse in this way, thereby contributing to collective knowledge of the landscape. Imagine, for example, volunteer citizen scientists contributing to the integrated knowledge bases of First Nations and scientists, rather than these skills remaining a defensive tactic against state-mismanagement. Our efforts could become a means of solidarity (through lending our capacity) and a way to aid the long-term resilience of the places we love.

Relationships built on a patient, ongoing, local basis may be a more appropriate approach than debating management practices in the public sphere, or advocating to the government on behalf of interest-based organisations. While there may continue to be misunderstandings and disagreements due to contested science, different positionalities, and divergent lived experience, moving to a relational mindset creates the space to cultivate common ground.

When Traditional Custodians, scientists, and local communities walk together in the bush, rather than campaigning behind our screens or advocating in the public sphere, one thing becomes quickly and abundantly clear. United by our love for place: we all want Healthy Country. If we move forward from this position, there’s no telling how powerful this moment could prove, not only for forest ecosystems, but for Country as a whole.

MESSAGinG in S oL idARity

I’m not arguing that there is no role whatsoever for advocacy to government, after all eNGOs are built for this and have useful skills and connections. There are plenty of things that we can call for, on a state-wide level, that echo what the Federation of Victorian Traditional Owners are already calling for. The Cultural Landscape Strategy acknowledges that many First Nations are at different “stages in their pathway to Victorian government recognition,”37 so in order to implement the strategy on a state-wide scale, it must be “enabling of all Nation pathways and outcomes and lead to meeting the resourcing needs and co-capacity of each Nation.”

38 This means that the strategy could be leveraged state-wide by First Nations, regardless of Registered Aboriginal Party status.39 The presence of this unified approach and wellarticulated strategic direction means that the forest movement could easily amplify the below messaging, as a simple act of solidarity, rather than designing our own way forward:

» tRA dition AL oW nERS ARE dECiSion

MAKERS , not Ju S t S tAKEHoL dERS .

First Nations are no longer asking for ‘joint management’, but for equal power to ‘co-design and co-govern’ with the state, while moving towards self-determination wherein Country is governed nation by nation.

This includes the government committing to joint announcements and lending appropriate weight to cultural assessments. For example, the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council should not weigh up biocultural values alongside western conservation values and the interests of various user groups. Instead, government should allow time and resources for First Nations groups to conduct biocultural assessments in a self-determined way, within appropriate timelines that allow the “equitable participation”40 of First Nations communities.

The Cultural Landscape Strategy acknowledges that while the government has made some effort toward restoring First Nations rights and access to Country in recent years, “the overall framing continues to regard activities conducted by Traditional Owners on Country as impacts on the environment to be regulated.”41 The environment movement must not reinforce this dynamic by insisting that new land categories for areas released from logging be determined before First Nations have had the opportunity to engage in processes like biocultural assessments.

Conservationists and Traditional Custodians appear to be viewing land tenure as serving distinct purposes. Conservationists see tenure as a defensive instrument against threats and are acting on the belief that national parks are the ‘safest’ option in regards to preventing damaging industrial activity (for example, VEAC’s recently released interim report mentions gold prospects and the potential for other mineral extraction). First Nations organisations, however, view tenure as a ‘bundle of rights’ and for individual corporations “these matters go to the question of the willingness to accept the legitimacy of the current legal frameworks granting TOs rights to access, use, or control land.”42

It’s true that national parks, often hard-won by grassroots communities campaigning and blockading to protect the places they love, have been instrumental in ensuring the survival of threatened species. The aggressive smash-andgrab of industrial logging, particularly in recent years, has razed whole landscapes. We should be grateful for the role National Parks have played in guarding precious refuges of remnant and mature forests that we can all value and learn from into the future. But it’s also true that national parks arose in a particular global context, as part of violent enclosures that forced First Peoples off their land.

Co-managed or collaboratively managed National Parks may still be part of what emerges from this transition process. The Cultural Landscapes Strategy is ‘tenure blind’, meaning that First Nations intend to assert their right to access Country, practice ceremony, and conduct Cultural Land Management in a self-determined way, regardless of land category prescriptions. But rather than take up space by advocating for new national parks, we could use our voices and collective power to echo Traditional Owner calls for equal decision making power, so that the transformative processes recommended in the Cultural Landscapes Strategy can be implemented.

Traditional Owner Corporations are “operating at the interface of Aboriginal and western worldviews’’ and are much more keenly aware of the barriers various land

Illustration @sofiasabbagh

categories present for cultural activity. Therefore, they are better qualified to set the agenda in regards to tenure. As allies, we should seek to contribute to a First Nations led transition process in good faith.

Essentially, our hyper-focus on tenure is missing the point. For Traditional Owners navigating this transition consistent with the Cultural Landscapes Strategy, it is the process that matters – because that’s where the greatest potential for deep and transformative change lies. Ideally, if the government commits to the co-design and co-governance arrangements that are being advocated for as part of the strategy, then each Sovereign Nation should be able to navigate this process as an equal partner with the state, enabling the best tenure and governance arrangements for each Country and context, based on the data collected via biocultural assessments and Reading Country activities. That’s if other interest groups aren’t lobbying for something else over the top of these emergent processes: “when the government creates its panel of advisors on what to do with state forests post-logging, it must ensure First Peoples voices are strongly represented… we would be dismayed if these voices were not heard until after significant decisions such as new national parks had been made.”43

If campaigners were to surrender our long-held roles as political advocates for the forests, by refraining to weigh in on future tenure arrangements, this wouldn’t preclude our involvement entirely, or require us to stop acting in service of the places we love. It would simply mean letting go of a particular tactic that may not serve us in the current context. Perhaps, instead of recommending our preferred tenure to the government, we could share our knowledge of the places we’ve campaigned to protect in respectful dialogue with Traditional Owners, reinforcing their role as land managers in acknowledgment of the decision making power being sought as part of this transition.

The sense of urgency driving environmentalists’ desire for the immediate creation of new reserves is due to an understandable concern that a change of government, or even a shift in the political landscape, may undo this win. But this fear has given rise to a sentiment (expressed by a small minority but still critical to address) that we must ‘first permanently protect forests’ then ‘focus on rights for First Nations.’ This is backwards. While some forest defenders may have been fighting for forests for 40 years, First Nations communities have been fighting for access to their own land for over 200.

So, what if the Liberal government does get into power and the native forest logging ban is repealed? Well, I have

confidence that as activists we would re-organise to defend forests once again, hopefully in a deeper alliance with the Traditional Custodians. But what is more likely is that we will have time to accept that clear-felling is over and that our work will look markedly different from now on.

Proponents of industry and the forces of neoliberal capitalism will always try to obstruct or wind back real change. But we will not arrive at an ‘imagined future moment’ when forests are permanently ‘safe’ from the influence of these ideas, allowing us to finally begin justicecentred work. That time is now. While the fear that may rise within us when we imagine the forests left vulnerable to future exploitation is perfectly understandable – no one wants to fight this war again – I would argue that empowering Traditional Custodians to implement cultural landscapes activity is a vehicle for the creation of alternative governance systems that better honour this land in the longterm. If we rush this, we may risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

» L A nd MA n AGEME nt SHouL d BE

Count Ry-CE nt RE d, BoundARy LEVEL , A nd PLACE- SPECiFiC in SCALE

Another consideration in regards to lobbying for new national parks is that this may require Traditional Owners to speak across borders or for another Nation; a difficulty identified by FVTOC.44

Traditional Custodians are seeking to speak for their own Country at a boundary level, in a highly place-specific way: “Taungurung speak for Country… [we] need to walk through a process of strategic relationship building with the broader community, organisations and institutions. These relationships will express our culturally led values and objectives. Our relationships with the institutions of the Settler State need to reflect Taungurung understandings of cultural rights and responsibilities to Country.”45

It’s also noted in the technical papers of the Cultural Landscape Strategy that:

“policy development must encompass the specific cultural values Indigenous people attach to place, and cultural and natural resource management is more effective when driven by a local people, building on existing capacities and allowing on-going group learning and adaptation.”46

In order to respect the reasonable considerations outlined by FVTOC about boundary level governance, we may have to be flexible about the fact that new or expanded National Parks may not always be the most appropriate way to secure good outcomes for forests. My initial entrance into the forest campaign was fundraising for The Wilderness Society. I vividly recall stopping members of the public in the street to show them maps of the proposed Great Forest National Park. Because of this, I deeply respect and appreciate the extensive amount that was achieved (mapping, rigorous research, awareness raising, economic modelling, visioning) by this long-running campaign effort. GFNP campaigners and scientists were hugely responsible for developing the forest movement’s overall capacity and they contributed greatly to this magnificent win. I also want to recognise that GFNP campaigners did work closely with many First Nations leaders. The wonderful knowledge of Central Highlands ecosystems (including long term monitoring stretching back 30+ years) accrued, and the potential opportunities identified across the region during this time, is still relevant and should be embraced during this transition. However, this new context may necessitate moving beyond this specific proposal, while incorporating its best elements.

An early example of a positive Taungurung-led process in the Strathbogies can be viewed in a report produced to determine the future of an ‘Immediate Protection Area’ released from logging.47 A detailed community consultation, amenable to TLAWC and inclusive of the broader community – including local forest groups – informed collectively agreed upon ‘uses and activities’ in this area of forest. This included the prohibition of timber harvesting. The process recommended the creation of a new ‘Cultural Reserve’ land category, which would better correspond with IUCN categories V & VI and may be integrated into the national reserve systems as an Indigenous Protected Area. The creation of new land categories to remove barriers to First Nations self-determination is consistent with the broader Cultural Landscapes Strategy. These kinds of reforms may better allow the sustainable use of biocultural resources but are not designed to accommodate large-scale industrial harvest. The process resulted in an exciting commitment to pilot the active, collaborative management of this area by Taungurung and the local community.

» L A nd MA n AGEME nt PRoGRAMS SHouL d BE Con SiS t E nt W it H A CuLtuRAL LA nd SCAPES FRAMEWoRK .

New or retained state-administered land management programs (e.g. seed collection, restoration, weed management) must be tenure blind, so that Country may be managed holistically as a collection of interconnected Cultural landscapes (rather than segregated by different land categories). Land management programs should also seek to create ‘Healing Country partnerships’48 between Traditional Owner groups and other agencies providing co-capacity (for example DEECA and Parks Vic) and allow First Nations co-design. Programs must facilitate two-way knowledge exchange in a Culturally safe environment.49 Government should seek to build the capacity of Aboriginal organisations to carry out land management programs, as opposed to relying on state agencies or contractors, in order to embrace ‘natural resource management’ as a means to strengthen the resilience of First Nations.

» tHE Go VER nME nt Mu S t ‘RES ouRCE FoR S uCCESS ’ to S uPP oR t CuLtuRAL L A nd M A n AGEME nt.

By assuming their “contemporary role”50 as land managers, First Nations will be less reliant on the short-term funding cycles of government in the long-term.51 But initially, Traditional Owner groups require significant, secure, multiyear funding from the government to ensure the full potential of cultural landscape management can be realised. Funding to support long-term research partnerships, monitoring, evaluation, and intergenerational knowledge sharing, as well as to facilitate the most effective and ecologically sensitive forms of active restoration,52 is something the forest movement could be lobbying for in solidarity.

Of course, it may be necessary for all land managers to explore various funding streams in order to meet the enormous task of restoring forested Country to health. The ‘forest resilience bond’, a funding model mentioned in the technical report of the Cultural Landscape Strategy, has sparked some concern within the forest movement. As an anticapitalist, I understand the movement’s general wariness about the ‘financialisation of nature’. 53 I agree that we should look to fund forest restoration in a way that doesn’t re-create the root problem, or displace harm elsewhere by fuelling climate change. But I’m comfortable admitting that I do not know enough about this topic to speak confidently to it just yet, like many others in the environment movement. Designing funding models that can adequately fund such extensive restoration, without propping up new extractive and commodifying markets – all the while

living under global capitalism – is not a problem exclusive to Traditional Owner Corporations. It’s a challenge for us all. How do we make sure ecosystem integrity is valued in carbon accounting, rather than creating monoculture moonscapes to satisfy a flawed offset market? 54 How should we interact with state government proposals for ‘nature based solutions’ like Biodiversity 2037? 55 It’s clear in the technical report that Federation of Victorian Traditional Owner Corporations have done more work on the failings and successes of financial models around the world than the environment movement has yet had capacity to undertake (see pages 27-28 of the technical report). Hopefully we can explore these questions further, together.

For now, we could begin our advocacy by calling on the government to strengthen their funding models and place secure, long-term funding for forest restoration and monitoring in the hands of Traditional Owner groups.

BE yond L oGGinG

This transition away from industrial logging, with resource extraction no longer dictating forest management, presents an unprecedented opportunity to “re-imagine” the way we relate to land.56 I believe forests will only be ‘safe’ from the poor decision making of state governance, the profitdriven markets of neoliberal capitalism, and philosophies of dominion and control, when local communities are willing to assume collective responsibility for the health of the land and restore ties between people and place.

What better way to contribute to this deeper change than to act in solidarity with Traditional Custodians, whose embedded relationship with Country sustains the oldest cultures in the world, and whose current strategy outlines practical pathways toward collaborative management in service of deep transformation? The forest movement should publicly support a cultural landscapes approach and commit ourselves to learning what culturally safe ‘healing country partnerships’ (which could enable community participation in care-taking of forests) may look like.

By organising in a way that addresses root causes, centres relationship, and nurtures the emergence of collective decision making structures, we could move beyond logging and toward a radically different future together.

As TLAWC’s Matt Shanks wrote in an article published in The Conversation following the announcement, the future of Forest Country should be “shaped by the thoughtful stewardship of Victorians, with First Peoples cultural knowledge and practice at the fore.”57

As activists, we must challenge oppressive systems and protect precious ecosystems. Thankfully, these aims do not exist in opposition – they are highly interrelated and entwined. Forest campaigners have achieved an unbelievable victory. Together, we have liberated land from industrial logging. Now, we must work in solidarity to return it to its rightful custodians.

Kim Croxford is a FoEM Forests Collective member and a settler activist living on Taungurung Country.

Photos @manicseedsmedia

1. Some complexity remains here: other forms of timber extraction are still happening in the West of the state and there are concerns that commercial activity will continue under instruments such as Forest Product licences may continue.

2. Federation of Victorian Traditional Owner Corporations (FVTOC). “Landscapes.” 2024. fvtoc.com.au/sections/landscapes/

3. FVTOC, Victorian Traditional Owner Cultural Landscapes Strategy, 2021, p. 8

4. FVTOC, Victorian Traditional Owner Cultural Landscapes Strategy, 2021, p. 7

5. I use the word ‘primarily’ because monitoring threats like climate impacts, inappropriate prescribed burning regimes by state-agencies (distinct from Cultural burning programs) and industrial salvage logging with large machinery continue to be part of the work for forest campaigners. See “Decolonising Fire Science – Dr Philip Zylstra with Uncle David Wandin”, The Royal Society of Victoria . YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahilyWGPd1c

6. Prefigurative politics means striving to address the root cause of problems and embodying our values and goals in our means of action.

7. FVTOC, Victorian Traditional Owner Cultural Landscapes Strategy, 2021, p. 9

8. FVTOC, Victorian Traditional Owner Cultural Landscapes Strategy, 2021.

9. FVTOC, Victorian Traditional Owner Cultural Landscapes Strategy, 2021.

10. FVTOC, Cultural Landscapes Strategy Technical Report , 2020, p. 31

11. FVTOC, Victorian Traditional Owner Cultural Landscapes Strategy, 2021; FVTOC, Cultural Landscapes Strategy Technical Report, 2020. See, for example, the recent review of the Public Land Act and current ‘modernisation’ of the National Parks Act.

12. FVTOC, Cultural Landscapes Strategy Technical Report , 2020,

28. Advocacy in support of Indigenous Land Management in Victoria is critical: “VEAC has been requested to identify typical land use categories commensurate with the identified values, and is using currently recognised categories. The Council acknowledges that some Traditional Owners have different approaches to managing public land, and that the current public land legislation reforms may consider these” – Victorian Environmental Assessment Council. Assessment of the values of state forests in the Central Highlands Interim report . 2023.

29. Passing the Message Stick Report , 2020: https://passingthemessagestick.org/

30. DJAARA’s Right of Reply Statement, August 2022, viewed via email correspondence.

31. Lindenmayer, D., Taylor, C., Bowd, E., Ashman, K. “It’s not just Victoria’s iconic mountain ash trees at risk – it’s every species in their community”. The Conversation. October 6, 2023.

32. Marris, E. “Why the myth of ‘wilderness’ harms both nature and humanity.” New Scientist, 1 December 2021.

33. FVTOC. Victorian Traditional Owner Cultural Landscapes Strategy, 2021, p. 54.

34. DJAARA’s Right of Reply Statement, August 2022, viewed via email correspondence.

35. I note the irony inherent in publishing this article, given that I am a settler activist commenting on this issue. However, this piece is intended as a contribution to internal movement dialogue and is not intended as a comment on the aspirations or activities of Traditional Owners in the broader public sphere.

36. TLAWC.Taungurung Biocultural-Diversity Strategy 2023-2026, p. 13

37. FVTOC, Victorian Traditional Owner Cultural Landscapes Strategy, 2021, p. 23

38. FVTOC, Victorian Traditional Owner Cultural Landscapes Strategy, 2021, p. 23

39. Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Council. “About Registered Aboriginal Parties”. 2024. www.aboriginalheritagecouncil.vic.gov.au/about-victorias-registered-aboriginal-parties

40. FVTOC. Cultural Landscapes Strategy Technical Report , 2020, pg. 20 & 21.

41. FVTOC, Victorian Traditional Owner Cultural Landscapes Strategy, 2021, p. 37.

42. FVTOC, Cultural Landscapes Strategy Technical Report , 2020, p. 19.

43. What should happen to native forests when logging ends? Ask Victoria’s First Peoples: https://theconversation.com/what-should-happen-to-native-forests-when-logging-ends-askvictorias-first-peoples-206412

44. Verbal conversation, December 2023.

45. TLAWC.Taungurung Biocultural-Diversity Strategy 2023-2026, p. 10.

46. FVTOC, Cultural Landscapes Strategy Technical Report , 2020, p. 21.

47. Victoria State Government. Future Use And Management Of Mirboo North And Strathbogie Ranges Immediate Protection Areas: Recommendations from the eminent panel – Final Report. 2022.

48. Described by FVTOC Dec 2023 and referenced in all formal Cultural Landscapes documentation.

49. FVTOC, Victorian Traditional Owner Cultural Landscapes Strategy, 2021.

50.FVTOC, Victorian Traditional Owner Cultural Landscapes Strategy, 2021, pg. 23.

51. FVTOC, Victorian Traditional Owner Cultural Landscapes Strategy, 2021.

52. Verbal communications with DJAARA.

53. FoEI. “Financialisation of Nature.” 2024. www.foei.org/what-we-do/forests-and-biodiversity/financialisation-of-nature/#:~:text=Under%20the%20logic%20of%20financialisation,to%20 continue%20business%20as%20usual

54. “Enhancing Carbon Values in Public Forests” The Royal Society of Victoria . 2022. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9O5p5s2Yb3o

55. TLAWC already has some thoughts on this: TLAWC.Taungurung Biocultural-Diversity Strategy 2023-2026, pg. 11.

56. “re-imagine”: language used by FVTOC December 2023.

57. Pascoe, J., Shanks, M., Fletcher, MS. “What should happen to native forests when logging ends? Ask Victoria’s First Peoples”. The Conversation . May 30 2023. /theconversation.com/whatshould-happen-to-native-forests-when-logging-ends-ask-victorias-first-peoples-206412

FoE Forests Collective Reflections

Movements are made up of people. Here are some reflections on the Forests Collective from its current members.

dAV id S A nELL i

My time at foe has been fun and eye opening. I feel like I have developed a newfound appreciation for our precious native forests and a deep respect for the forest defenders in FoE and other organisations that spend so much of their free time protecting them. The people at FoE are amazing and their enthusiasm and tenacity is something that I admire very much. A highlight for me would definitely be the Victorian alpine forest trip. I learnt so much about the area and threats it faces going forward. The trip also reinvigorated me and my love of nature, which I am truly grateful for.

dAV id tHoR n

Ranging from passionate stalwart forest campaigners to curious and enthusiastic first timers, the collective provides an enriching and empowering environment to engage and amplify individuals effective activism. I’ll always be grateful for the times we’ve spent surveying for Greater Gliders before it was announced that state forest logging would be phased out in 2024. The practical boost in boots on the ground was awesome – increasing the area covered and threatened species found provided a timely contribution to a community led court case that would go on to be a significant driver of systematic change in Victorian forest policy. Furthermore the boost to morale of sharing people’s first encounter with surveying and realising some of the possibilities of networking with an entire collective was inspiring. Thanks FoE!

S A ndRA GEitz

Friends of the Earth Forest Collective (FoEF) is a welcoming and wonderful bunch of humans! You can deeply immerse yourself in gorgeous natural environments. I’ve bush-walked and camped under majestic mountain ash forest or sinewy snow gums of the alpine high-plain on FoEF road-trips. And you get to learn, see and appreciate these special, endangered environments anew. What makes them so precious? What’s their natural and human history? And you get to touch, feel and see threats to our native forests, all peoples and habitats, for yourself.

Then there are the awesome and passionate souls that make Friends of the Earth Forests what it is. You can easily find your place and your own purposeful action to protect and restore native forests of Victoria. Taking action for and within our forests, whatever form that takes, is so restorative and rewarding. I’ve got involved in hard-core citizen science, also research, engagement and protests this last year. I’m sure you’ll find your spot in our native forest network and join some great humans.

S A n JA

In these times of global despair, both environmentally and socially; being part of the FoE Forest Collective has provided me with a sense of purpose. The Forest Collective is a melting pot of action and ideas, support and positivity. By volunteering, even in a small way, I feel that I am helping make a small but potentially powerful difference to our world and natural environment.

Being an active part of the collective has introduced me to so many wonderful, likeminded and committed people who have shared their skills and knowledge with me. I have visited forest areas I didn’t even know existed and taken part in activities that have taken me out of my comfort zone, in a good way. I have also been pleased to contribute some of my skills and knowledge.

RoBin

I heard about the forest collective, which was in its infancy when I joined, as I have had past experience in environmental movement working groups and knew this experience would fit well with the group. I have attended many zoom meetings. My other involvements include volunteering with the transition of the Murrindindi region where I helped with the organising of the transition forum in Alexandra in November 2022. I also volunteer with the local transition working group. Overall, the experience has been invaluable, I have learnt so much and met so many like minded great people who are working towards similar goals.

KiM CRoXFoR d

I joined the Forests Collective because it became clear to me that Friends of the Earth are uniquely placed to embrace multiple theories of change while remaining grounded in radical, justice-centred politics and embodying solutions through their ways of working (e.g. anti-hierarchy and consensus). FoE extends radical trust to their people and supports the grassroots. Defending and learning about the forests on Taungurung Country where I grew up over the past few years has been the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done in my life. I’ve never felt so connected to purpose. I’ve also felt so held by this amazing organisation and the broader network of activists it supports. The Forest Collective has enabled me to develop meaningful relationships in my local community through our organising work. These have transformative potential well beyond the end native forest logging. FOE’s way of working enables radical possibilities to grow.

A LA n A MountA in

I found the forests collective back in 2018, and what I found is an irreplaceable sense of community and connection. FoEM is a wonderful place filled with many smiling faces and interesting people! It became obvious to me that it was a place I could be myself, and express my passion for forest conservation. I haven’t looked back. You learn so much, experience so much and meet truly wonderful people in the process. The forest collective will always have a special place in my heart and I feel truly honoured to be the current campaign coordinator, in deep service to the forests and the people showing up to defend them.

Fragmented We Fall

Alice Hardinge

Since colonisation, over 60% of so called Australia’s forests have been axed, sawn, bulldozed, chainsawed, burnt, logged and chipped. What hasn’t been turned into suburbia or farmland, is highly fragmented. A patchwork of forest age classes crisscross once green landscapes, exposing the pervasive erosion of ecological connectivity and catapulting collapse. Invisible human induced geographies can disconnect and disintegrate at an alarming and increasing rate. Yet this madness also sparks resistance, and inspires thousands upon thousands to act against apathy, and towards an alternative forest future.

Through the state owned and poorly regulated state owned logging industries, vast interconnected ecosystems have been reduced to lines on screens – drawn up by government logging bureaucrats in air conditioned offices under fluorescent lights. Complex forest systems like the critically endangered Mountain Ash forests are dissected into arbitrary shapes, created for the sole purpose of maximum resource extraction. These geographical falsehoods are completely disconnected from reality, purposefully ignoring First Nation’s cultural rights, preexisting ecological vegetation classes, hydrological systems, and critical habitat for flora and fauna. Indigenous peoples have bravely stood up for Country since invasion, and the settler conservation movement has existed since the 1900’s. The announcement of the cessation of native forest logging in WA and VIC in 2024 didn’t just fall out of the sky. In other areas of so called Australia, the battle continues. When late stage capitalism ignores the intrinsic values of intact ecosystems, infinite growth economic imperatives drive us further and further away from a liveable future.

“The logic of modernity has been to create artificial boundaries that separate us from each other and from the natural world”

- Arturo Escobar

The cumulative impact of 50+ years of industrial logging cannot be underestimated. I grew up in Big Pats Creek, surrounded by the ethereal forests of Wurundjeri Country in the Upper Yarra Valley. Driving along forest roads in places such as Toolangi, Warburton, and Erica, evokes a great sense of sadness to the trained eye. The commons here have been exploited to near extinction. It was here, amongst the mountains that I experienced my incendiary moment. A 120 hectare area of clearfell logging coupes scarring the landscape, and evoking such primal rage and disbelief. It broke me, but also led me to find others of like mind. As the menacing patchwork of forest destruction infringes on human communities, dedicated and creative campaigns to protect evolve. Grassroot community groups, often geographically bound, fight forest fragmentation through litigation. Injunction by injunction, logging coupe by logging coupe, dissolving those lines on screens back to connecting corridors of ecological resistance. Communities from near and afar come together, they re-member, they connect, and create mycorrhizal networks of defiance.

The human induced doom spiral of ecosystem and societal collapse is a terrifying concept to behold. To suggest a return to simplicity would be a disservice to the entropically complex issue at hand. However, in order to survive the coming decades, radical reconnection with wild earth and with each other is now essential. End native forest logging and land clearing now. Everywhere. For everyone. Why? Because fragmented we fall.

Alice Hardinge now lives in lutruwita / Tasmania on Palawa Country, and works for The Wilderness Society on forest campaigns.

Strzelecki Ranges and the SKAt Campaign

Anthony Amis

During the late 1990’s I became involved in campaigning in the Strzelecki Ranges. A Wilderness Society member said at the time “Why are you interested in the Strzelecki’s? There’s nothing there”. Hmmm!

Talking to a couple of local campaigners, Theo Morsink and Susie Zent, they were well aware of the significance of the Strzelecki’s including one of the icon species found there, the Strzelecki Koala.

This had been confirmed in the 1990’s by Dr Barbara Houlden, who determined that the population of Strzelecki koalas had not been impacted by Victoria’s translocation program. They were a relic population, possibly the only one remaining in Victoria and South Australia.

All hell broke loose, when most of the Strzelecki’s were flogged off the John Hancock Insurance Company in 1998. One of our first actions was to send hundreds of Strzelecki koala postcards to Hancock’s CEO in Boston.1

Around this time, Susie met Dr Steve Phillips, who suggested to Susie that she should keep tissue samples for any future studies on the unique genetics of the animal. This led Susie embarking on a career of cutting off the ears of dead koalas and putting them in her freezer.

The work paid off when PhD candidate Tristan Lee used the samples to further extrapolate the genetics of the animal in his study published in 2011. 2

In 2013 a team of NSW based scat finders came to the Strzelecki’s, in the hope that they might be able to translocate Strzelecki koalas back to southern NSW where the koala situation there was dire. They used a method called RGB-SAT where 30 trees were surveyed for scats across hundreds of sites across the landscape. 3 Susie and myself joined the survey team and learnt the technique.

From their work the first estimates of habitat utilisation, population and feed preferences were published regarding the Strzelecki koala. Unfortunately for the NSW team no animals were sent to NSW due to chlamydia.

Another ground breaking study occurred in 2017 by Faye Wedrowicz from Federation University based on DNA samples from scats.4

1. Hancock Watch http://hancockwatch.nfshost.com/docs/koala.htm#content_top

Since 2014 I have surveyed many sites throughout South Gippsland to get further information on the Strzelecki koala. This has included three years of survey data at Mullungdung State Forest where surveys have just finished. All this data is added to the Strzelecki koala map. 5 We also have established a facebook group, Friends of the Strzelecki Koala which currently has 1150 members who send information through to be added to the koala map.

The tragedy of the Strzelecki koala is that the major threat to the animal’s future is bushfire and plantations. The Strzelecki’s are currently being converted to pine plantations by Hancock. The wider forest movement are barely concerned, given they have long backed plantations as the solution to stopping native forest logging. But the plantations are having a devastating impact on koalas.

The problem is compounded significantly when one looks at the explosion of koala numbers in south-west Victoria since the trebling of the hardwood plantation base in the late 1990’s. Literally tens of thousands of koalas have been and will continue to be impacted by the bluegum industry in the south-west.

Get involved: Join the Strezlecki Koala Action Team (SKAT), melbournefoe.org.au/koalas

2. Lee T., Zenger K.R., Close R.L., Phalen D.N. “Genetic analysis reveals a distinct and highly diverse koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) population in South Gippsland, Victoria, Australia.” Australian Mammalogy. 34 (2012): 68-74.

3. Philips, S and Callaghan, J (2011). “The Spot Assessment Technique: a tool for determining localised levels of habitat use by Koalas Phascolarctos cinereus.” Australian Zoologist 35 no. 3 (2011): 774–780.https://doi.org/10.7882/AZ.2011.029

4. Wedrowicz, F., Wright, W. , Schlagloth, R., Santamaria, F., and Cahir, F. “Landscape, koalas and people: A historical account of koala populations and their environment in South Gippsland.” Australian Zoologist 38 , no. 4 (2017): 518-536.

5. Strzelecki Koala Map. https://strzkoala.australianmap.net/

Credit: David Abbott

Working for Forests in the High Country

Cam Walker

The Victorian high country – that section of the Great Dividing Range that starts in the mountain ash forests near Healesville and stretches up to the Snowy Mountains on the Victorian /NSW border – is a beautiful and diverse part of the state. Rich in biodiversity and dramatic landscapes, the high country is also the starting point for many of our most important rivers.

From the mixed species forests of the foothills into the alpine ash, then snow gum, to the true alpine zones above treeline, there are multiple threats to the high country, including invasive species, climate change and logging. There has been a gap in forests campaigning in the north east in recent years. With strong campaigns in western Victoria, the Central Highlands and East Gippsland, the north east has in contrast seen little campaign activity. A number of key groups like Friends of Bats and Habitat have been tracking logging in the region but no larger groups were campaigning there. FoE decided to work on protecting significant areas of the Victorian high country that were at risk from logging. We have also been highlighting the need for the state government to act to reduce the threats posed to these forests by climate change driven bush fires.

Much of the high country is protected in the Alpine National Park. However the park tends to include the

higher areas which don’t contain commercially useful species like alpine ash. When the park was created, much of the boundary was created according to the location of commercially viable forests, which were then excluded from the park. Some areas were even subject to ‘once only logging’ then included in the park.

FoE looked at the unprotected areas and identified a number of really important and high conservation areas that were scheduled for logging. The values we looked for included high species diversity, the presence of older forests and intact unroaded catchments, their physical connection to existing national parks, and importance for tourism. Three key areas were identified, and we set about gaining protection for them. The areas were around Mt Stirling, between Mt Wills and Mt Bogong (Warkwoolowler), the state’s highest mountain, and the headwaters of the Little Dargo River. We organised free guided walks to these areas, carried out citizen science surveys to find threatened species, generated media, lobbied ministers and other MPs and raised the profile of these forests through mobilising outdoors groups with an interest in each area.

Thankfully these areas are now protected from logging. Our vigilance in guarding these areas helped secure their survival.

Another key threat to the high country comes from climate change driven fires, which pose an existential threat

to both the alpine ash forests and snow gum woodlands. The massive bushfires in 1998, 2003, 2006, 2009, 2013, 2014 and 2019/20 burnt more than 97% of alpine ash distribution. Many of these forests are now facing ecological collapse. In the case of alpine ash, it is estimated that there is about 140,000 ha of vulnerable (young) ash regrowth that will not self-regenerate if burnt again. In response to these threats, the state government has initiated an ash seeding program which seeks to keep the ash community viable into the future.

The snow gums face a similar threat and there is, at present, no targeted program to ensure the survival of the Snow Gum woodlands. FoE has been campaigning to gain a state government intervention to protect these at threat communities. We know that snow gums can recover from fire, provided we are able to exclude wildfire while they are growing back. The state government needs to assess the threats to this species and provide commitments to protect the forests from fire even in bad fire seasons like the Black Summer of 2019/20.

Cam Walker is a campaign’s co-ordinator for Friends of the Earth Melbourne.

FuR t HER inFoRMAtion:

FoE’s work in the high country: melbournefoe.org.au/foe_s_work_in_the_vic_high_country

The alpine ash seeding program: melbournefoe.org.au/the_ash_forest_restoration_project

Read our report An Icon at Risk, which details the many threats to the Victorian high country: melbournefoe.org.au/an_icon_at_risk

Wombat Forestcare

Gayle Osborne

The Wombat State Forest and the adjoining Lerderderg State Park form a significant area of largely intact native vegetation in mainly cleared farmland. Six river systems rise in the forest: the Loddon, Coliban and Campaspe rivers flowing north and the Lerderderg, Werribee and Moorabool running south. The vegetation changes throughout the forest with patches of heathy dry forest on the higher points surrounded by shrubby foothill forest in the southern section. The Coliban and Campaspe originate in sedgy riparian woodlands, where the water slowly filters through sphagnum moss beds. The forests to the north are drier and more open.

The Wombat Forest has been terribly damaged. It was once part of a vast forest that stretched from Mount Macedon all the way to Ballarat. By 1898 the forest had been extensively logged and mined for gold and its massive trees harvested for building in Ballarat and Melbourne or to prop up mines. The forest regrew and was yet again logged extensively from the 1970s through to 2005, with much of the timber going to Japan for woodchip.

The gullies and waterways were protected during this second wave of logging, and this has been critical for some species, particularly Greater Gliders. I am always amazed that so much habitat could be destroyed and yet they have survived and not only survived but exist in densities not seen in the east of the state anymore. The Wombat Forest is the western edge of their range.

Some of the gullies in the Wombat Forest are dominated by tall gum species with a thick understory of musk daisy bushes and blackwoods and this is where many birds come in spring to breed. We have Satin Flycatchers, Rufous Fantails, Rose and Pink Robins. Other birds arrive to breed in a variety of habitats; Sacred Kingfishers, Blue-winged Parrots and a number of cuckoo species. Some Gang-gangs arrive, but many remain here year-round.

Our local environment group, Wombat Forestcare, grew out of a protest movement. In 2005 with the end of sawlog harvesting we were already working on a research project in collaboration with scientist from the Arthur Rylah Institute for Environmental Research. This was to examine the relationship between mature forest and arboreal mammals. It was a citizen science project before we called such ventures citizen science and involved over 100 community members. When motion-sensing cameras became available and affordable we quickly acquired one, and then more, and started surveying for mammals. As we entered the sightings from

the cameras onto the Victorian Biodiversity Atlas database it became apparent that there was very little data about what species inhabited our forest. Even wombats and echidnas were noted as either a new species for the area or the region.

The camera surveys have been very successful, we have established new locations for threatened species such as Brush-tailed Phascogales and found species that were not recorded for the Wombat Forest, such as Eastern Pygmy Possums.

We have been constantly surveying in the forest. A specimen of a leafless bossiaea had been lodged with the herbarium and when it was established that it was a new species and only known from one location in the Wombat Forest, we were asked to search for other locations. After extensive searches we found four more plants and Bossiaea vombata is now listed as Critically Endangered. The plants are rhizomal, so each plant spreads over an area but they do not set viable seed. It is very exciting that the only known locations of this plant on the planet are in the Wombat Forest.

The Wombat Forest is considered a fungi ‘hot spot’ with over 400 species. On one of our community walks a

The Barking Owls had disappeared from their usual group of trees in the northern Wombat Forest during the 2023 breeding season, and Wombat Forestcare assumed that they may not have bred this year. But they have returned to their usual trees with a chick! Credit: Trevor.

scientist discovered a toothed fungi, which he lodged with the Royal Botanic Gardens Herbarium and is now known to be a new species.

We have also searched for Powerful Owls and established about five breeding sites as well as a Barking Owl breeding site in the northern section of the forest.

All this has shown that the Wombat Forest is not just a regrowth forest but has so many important species that need protecting. We have helped educate the local community as well as educating ourselves. Our survey work has had an impact on some management activities; a planned burn covered an area that contained two Bossiaea vombata plants and due to knowing of its existence, this section was excluded from the burn.

When the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council (VEAC) carried out their investigation into the Wombat Forest we could see the value of our survey work; the very many threatened species we had recorded helped establish that sections of the forest had conservation values making it worthy of being granted national park status.

New technology has made the survey work we do possible. A bat detector has enabled us to locate a population of critically endangered Eastern Bent-wing Bats and the

song meter was critical for the discovery of the endangered Barking Owls.

For all the time we have spent in the forest, it is quite shocking that we had never paid much attention to the skinks. A few years ago, some herpetologists saw a family of Mountain Skinks basking on rocks near the Lerderderg River. They were not known to exist west of the Kilmore Gap and at such a low altitude. Since then, other populations have been established and genetic samples from across their range are being analysed. The preliminary results show that the Wombat Forest individuals are unique.

All the known locations of the Mountain Skinks appear to be in areas that have not been disturbed for many years, with none of the sites seem to have had planned burns for at least 40 years. We are looking into the logging and burning history of all the known sites, as it is possible that they need undisturbed vegetation for their persistence.

We need to understand why some species have persisted and others are no longer found in the Wombat State Forest. We need to understand where we need to intervene and where we need to leave it to nature.

For more information, or to get involved, follow Wombat Forestcare on social media, or visit our website: http://www.wombatforestcare.org.au/.

Over 100 people walked into a logged area of the Wombat State Forest to express their opposition to a destructive salvage operation. Credit: Sandy Scheltema

t he Great tree Project: Connecting community and nature

Karena Goldfinch

In 2005 Bill McKibben wrote, What the Warming World Needs Now Is Art, Sweet Art that argued that “an intellectual understanding of the scientific facts was not enough – if we wanted to move forward and effect meaningful change, we needed to engage the other side of our brains. We needed to approach the problem with our imagination.” And the people best suited to help us do that, he believed, were the artists. Professional artists such as Ai Weiwei, Andy Goldsworthy, Janet Laurence, John Wolseley and many other contemporary artists immediately spring to mind. Community art/craft projects have a place here as we seek to share our passion for protecting Australian native forests.

The forest campaign is a perfect example. Before it was somewhat curtailed by a decision in the Supreme Court brought by Kinglake Friends of the Forest late last year, and upheld under appeal, Victoria’s native forest logging industry was emitting 3 million tonnes of carbon annually, as much as 700,000 medium sized cars. The science is solid, yet governments stick doggedly to their tired ideology.

There was a cool breeze in Toolangi as we stood at the base of a towering mountain ash looking up in amazement at the small white flowers that were falling gently from the tree. I wondered how we could support others to connect with the exquisite beauty that we had witnessed. Mountin ash are the tallest flowering plant in the world, home to thousands of species, catchers of rain and mitigators of climate change that we must protect at all costs.

Knitting Nannas of Toolangi formed in 2013 and decided to put our knitting skills to good use by undertaking to knit a scarf 150 metres long. Timber harvesting safety zones had been increased from 100 to 150 metres. Black Saturday was still fresh in everyone’s minds and much of Toolangi hadn’t burned in that tragic fire. Knitters responded by sending us parcels of beautiful knitting and we soon exceeded our goal of 150 metres. People got involved and although it didn’t

change the law it helped to change community perceptions. Pieces of our scarf have since been transformed into banners, streamers or simply used as forest ‘yarn bombing’.

The Great Tree Project (GTP) started as an extension of the scarf and is intended to be a vehicle for starting conversations about the importance of protecting large old trees. Mountain Ash trees need to be at least 120 years old to develop hollows for threatened species such as Leadbeater’s Possums and Greater Gliders.

GTP is a full-size Mountain Ash tree with ecoprinted upcycled woollen blankets. The printed strips of blanket are hand sewn into sections and laid on the ground to form the shape of the tree. Our dedicated team have been working diligently since 2018 and we expect it to be completed early next year.

There is great power when people come together for a shared purpose and The Great Tree Project is a perfect example, a labour of love that endured through Covid and has been a way of sharing knowledge, solidarity and support. We trust that our tree will touch hearts, stir the imagination and awaken minds to the importance of protecting native forest for this generation and for generations to come.

Karena was a founding member of the Knitting Nannas of Toolangi and is the lead artist of the Great Tree Project. She is a compulsive bird photographer and textile artist.

W HiSPER

Watching longingly the grey clouds above I lay numb, in soft beds of gentle grass, Pulled downward by a green tendril glove, The earth, welcoming me back home at last.

As I teetered on the edge of sweet sleep,

Clouds parted revealing a waxing moon

Lighting the woods as I entered the deep

A Sound caught my ear, familiar in tune.

It was soft, muffled by the silent song

Sung by the woods; ruffling leaves, flowing streams

It grew in strength, breaking free from the throng

As the soft whistle grew to a whisper

Riding and gliding swiftly, through the trees,

Stroking my hair, leading me to shiver

With delight. In mass the autumn leaves fell,

Leaving the trees naked, their branches bare.

Forming a blanket, they covered me well.

And all the time I waited, lying there, I heard the wind whisper to me.

Lachlan White

Friends of the Earth Australia Contacts

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