The Battle for Terania Creek

In 1979, environmental history was made when blockaders, after five years of campaigning, were forced to engage in direct action to halt logging at Terania Creek. It was a campaign that has long lacked the recognition it deserved, despite changing the nature of environmental activism globally.

Forty years ago, on August 16, 1979, a motorbike rider negotiated a rough dirt track through lush, steep rainforest near Terania Creek in northern New South Wales, not far from the Queensland border. It was a ride that would change history. There was no direct precedence, at least in the Western world, for what was about to occur. He overtook a lumbering bulldozer crawling down the track and sped off to a field next to the forest where a couple of hundred people had gathered. They were expecting the rider. He’d been posted as a sentry, ready to warn the gathered crowd that loggers were bringing in machinery to commence destroying the forests surrounding Terania Creek.

The action was not unforeseen. Nearly five years earlier, Hugh Nicholson, who with his wife Nan owned the property on which the crowd had gathered, had heard a vehicle in the forest and went to investigate. Until that point, he hadn’t even realised a road was in there. The Victorian couple had only moved there some months earlier, after a year-long search to find a patch of land where they could grow their own food and become self-sufficient. They wanted somewhere warm, because it would allow them to grow the widest range of plants, and, ideally, they wanted to live next to a state forest or national park.

In the forest that day, Hugh found some workers clearing drains by the track’s side. “What are you doing?” he asked. “We’re keeping it open for when they come in to log,” they replied. Hugh contacted the local Forestry Commission office to find out exactly what its intentions were. The rainforest had been selectively logged back around