A drive around Tasmania is breathtaking. And heartbreaking. Surrounded by cathedral-like forests, the visitor feels inspired and humbled. Then suddenly the sight sharpens. 'Managed by Forestry Tasmania'. It’s easy to miss those signs. Managed. A tricky word. Particularly in Tasmania, where the stunning trees that peer down on the visitor are often just a façade, forestry rarely means looking after forests. The façade cheers and appeases the tourist. But behind lies a battlefield.
'Look carefully behind the tree line', the bus driver advised me. A field of ruins just a few metres from the glorious canopy on the side of the road. Logging roads pierced the forest, and it was then that I also noticed the logging trucks. One, two, three of them. 'Sixty, seventy of them, every day!', the driver was outraged. Yes, they were taking the forest away.
'They normally don’t touch the trees close to the highways', an officer explained at a visitors’ centre, with a smile that was half embarrassment and half revelation. 'Yes', confirmed a parks officer, 'In the Styx Valley you see 400 year-old trees, up to 80 metres high, being felled. It’s heartbreaking'.
'And what about the Northern forests, those that are threatened by the pulp mill in the Tamar Valley?' I ask him. 'The Northern forests are stunning … so much beauty,' he sighed. Tasmania’s forests are being eaten away.
A thought started to haunt me. Tasmania is like Soviet Siberia. The comparison might prompt a smile. And yet there is a deep and utterly disturbing truth about it. For Tasmania today is a land without politics. No real left or right, no Liberal or Labor parties. What one finds in Tasmania is a powerful economic bureaucracy that lives off the destruction of unique and priceless natural treasures. Apparatchiks are called politicians. A careless administration with no vision and no mission is engaged in politics. Short-sighted greed can be called public interest.
And so we are told Tasmania needs a huge pulp mill. A timber giant has been pushing for it. The Government has hastily approved it. The apparatchiks know best. And those who disagree are enemies of the people. 'A bunch of millionaires' — that’s how the Premier of Tasmania dismissed the organisers of a campaign in Sydney to pressure the Federal Minister for the Environment, Malcolm Turnbull, to seriously assess the pulp mill, before bowing to economic pressures. How disgraceful