The Battle for the Southeast Forests
Late last year, as dusk fell, on a quiet Victorian mountain road high on the Errinundra Plateau, a road on which I had not seen another vehicle for hours, I pulled my car up in front of a stand of trees. The trees were straight and tall, and perhaps, at first glance, you might think this was a nice pocket of forest. Except that all the trees were of the same height, of the same thickness, and of the same species. A sign announced an act of vandalism had occurred here fifty years ago, in 1969.
But also fifty years ago, almost to the day I stood in front of those trees, an action was taken that would instigate Australia’s longest running environmental battle—the opening of the Eden chip mill. Few might have guessed when the mill opened in 1969 that the battle to save Australia’s southeast forests would still be waged to this day. The campaign has been long, complex and convoluted, and is the only one in Wild’s series on Australia’s environmental battles that has spread across states. It has also been widely misunderstood and underappreciated, even by many with otherwise green tendencies. I include myself in that reckoning.
Frequently, the battle for the southeast forests is seen as one waged in NSW primarily in the ‘80s and ‘90s, one that concluded with the creation of a 130,000ha national park system in the state’s southeast. This view has some justification. It was the period that saw the greatest media attention, the greatest number of arrests (indeed, the greatest number of arrests of any direct action in Australia, outnumbering those of Franklin), and it resulted in the protection of considerable amount of land.
But thinking of the campaign as confined to those decades, or to NSW alone, does not provide the complete picture. As important as the gazetting of the NSW’s South East Forests National Park in 1997 was, the battle to stop the ongoing devastation of the surrounding forests has never stopped. Nor did it stop at New South Wales’ southern border, despite the fact the very term southeast refers to its location within that state. Although some might regard it as NSW-centric to include under the ‘southeast forests’ banner the fight in Victoria to save East Gippsland’s magnificent forests—it’s a story worth telling in its own right—the campaigns are linked by their bioregional status and the fact that both areas of precious forest were, and still are, being pulped by the same chip mill at Eden. (Besides it was Bob Brown who suggested to me I include East Gippsland, and who am I to argue with Bob!)
It‘s not merely the inevitable changes over the course of five decades that makes this campaign so complex, creating a history in which pulling all the strands together is problematic. In fact, I’m happy to admit that I have neither the resources, nor the column-inches in the space of a single article, nor even the ability, to pull together anything that approaches the comprehensiveness this campaign deserves. I’m not even going to pretend to try. The history is too long, too complex, and too much has happened. And in both states, the campaigns have never been confined to any one area; multiple swathes of forest were at stake. In NSW, three catchments in particular—to the
