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MARCH 25-31, 2021 | LOCALLY OWNED & INDEPENDENT | FREE!
FESTIVAL OF
COLOURS
COLOUR your mind with positivism and happiness. This is a typical greeting between people celebrating Holi, a religious festival celebrated by Hindus all over the world.
Dubbo-ites, Usha Vineesh, Romesh Sharma, Hemant, Hema and Mahi Jadhav, Reena and Jagdishwar Ram, Nil Jadhav and Shalini Sinha, are members of Orana Residents of Indian Sub-Continental
Heritage (ORISCON) group who celebrated the Holi Festival at Southlakes this past weekend, bringing a colourful cultural experience to the neighbourhood enjoyed by all. PHOTO: DUBBO PHOTO NEWS/EMY LOU
TIMBER TROUBLES By JOHN RYAN
GREG KILBY lived at Coonamble for 35 years on two sides of the Pilliga Forest, now he’s calling for logging of that woodland to resume. Mr Kilby contacted Dubbo Photo News after our reports two weeks ago which showed local construction figures estimating a quarter of Dubbo’s workforces could lose their jobs if the timber supply chain collapsed. “There’s a possibility it could get burnt like a lot of other timber. There’s no timber now so if we lose the Pilliga Forest, it’d be a terrible loss,” he said. “When these forests aren’t being logged they’re losing their fire trails, those trails are becom-
ing overgrown with suckers and they won’t be able to get in there to fight a fire. “The timber people who need to be in there can put a fire out while it’s small, but the problem with the fires today is they get too big before they try to put them out and then they lose thousands of hectares.” Mr Kilby said logging was a major industry with around five B-Doubles of timber a week going out on the roads adjoining his properties. He said as well as becoming a fire trap, the Pilliga in particular is a great natural resource that keeps regenerating. “We don’t want to lose the pine in the Pilliga Forest, it’s a self-replacing pine forest and it’s there
to be milled – all these people building houses want pine and there it is, ready to mill,” he said. “They had a big contract to supply cypress pine to Japan for flooring because termites don’t eat it, white ants don’t eat it, and they had a big contract with Japan and (former NSW Premier) Bob Carr shut it down; they lost that contract. “I’ve pulled old buildings down, 60 or 80 years old, and if they don’t get wet they’re still as good as the day that timber was milled, that’s white cypress with no treatment, even with no treatment, white ants will not eat it.” Dubbo builder Peter Fuller said he worked for a lady who’d lived on a block in the Pilliga. “They were soldier settlements
given to them after World War I and she lived on one of the farms out there. She said during the drought of the 1920s farmers just walked off the farm. “She said they’d just get in their horse and cart and go, they’d even leave furniture behind and the country just got neglected and no-one touched it. The regrowth happened and for years it was called the Pilliga Scrub, not Pilliga Forest, it was ex-farmland, not natural forest,” Mr Fuller told Dubbo Photo News. He said prior to the farmers arriving the area was lightly wooded, open rangeland. “I’ve been with farmers when they’ve knocked down 200 acres of regrowth and you’re absolutely amazed how thick it comes back
and there are trees there that are only 20 years old and I would have thought they would have been there for all of my life.” He said a reborn western timber industry could create jobs to not only revitalise small towns such as Baradine and Gulargambone, but also ensure continuity of supply to the construction industry in the state’s west. “It’d be crucial. It killed a lot of the little towns around the Pilliga when Bob Carr closed it off and he did it to win Green votes in Sydney. Country people are used to being sacrificed for the sake of a vote in Sydney, but yeah, he just destroyed country towns,” he said. Continued page 4
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