Trivialised by Forestry Tasmania

THE LAST TIME I offered a paper to an international conference on Forest matters was in October 2000, when the subject was Forest Certification. I wanted to speak as a Stakeholder who was aiming to develop overseas markets for wooden boats built of Tasmanian Special timbers.

I expected that the conference would debate and evaluate the international certification options in terms of their reliability as customer guarantees of ecological sustainability, and so enhance our export capabilities.

But the Chief Executive of the Forest Industries Association of Tasmania rejected my proposal, and was kind enough to give his reasons. He said:

The conference has been planned with a very specific outcome in mind and all of our speakers have been personally invited with that in mind — I must therefore decline your offer.(1)

You will draw your own conclusions about the purpose of that conference, but it was interesting to learn, on 11 April this year, that the Government of Belgium has followed that of Britain, in rejecting its outcome, the Australian Forest Standard, as evidence of ecologically sustainable forest management, and other Governments are likely to follow.(2)

So I am grateful to the organisers of this conference for enabling me to say what I want to say to this distinguished and influential audience. I will present the views and experience of many Tasmanians whose business interests and related concerns have been either ignored, or opposed, or systematically trivialised by Forestry Tasmania, and the bodies that dominate the forest industry, including the Forest Industries Association of Tasmania, the Forest and Forest Industries Council, and Timber Communities Australia. In the past, we have been equally disappointed by the agenda of the Conservation Movement because it has monopolised public debate, and ensured that the media has discussed forestry only in terms of confrontation between “logging” native forests or “locking them up.”

High quality, job creating

I am here to represent the boatbuilders, furniture makers, craftspeople, and sawmillers who use special Timbers. Most of these timbers come from our old growth wet mixed forests with a eucalypt canopy and a rain forest understorey, We share the concerns of beekeepers and Tourist operators whose livelihoods, like ours, are diminished by the continued clearfelling of the remaining Old Growth forests in our timber production areas.

I am also glad to be included in a conference with an emphasis on the management of plantations rather than native forests, because for many Tasmanians on both sides of the Forest “Debate”, as we euphemistically call it, plantations can provide an alternative source of some wood products to native forests, and many people assume that the more our timber industries can come to depend on re-growth and plantation forestry, the less we will need to log Old Growth.

But this is a conference of professional foresters and we know that it is not as simple as that. As markets for industrial forest products increase, so will the pressure for those difficult to manage, wet, mixed, old growth forests to be replaced by short rotation re-growth and plantations, with their promise of easier management and quicker financial returns.

So the group I represent today, Timber Workers For Forests, Inc creates a problem for industrial forestry because we exemplify the high quality, job creating maximum value adding end of an industry dominated financially by its low value, job-shedding end, so for public relations purposes, and until all the old growth Forests outside the World Heritage area have been logged, we can be very useful.

On Sept 25th2004 for example, in the run–up to the last Federal election, Terry Edwards, Chief Executive of the Forest Industries Association of Tasmania took out a full-page advertisement in the Mercury. The heading was “Threatened and Endangered? Blame the Greens.”

There were six photographs, of a sawmill, a furniture workshop, a veneer mill, a timber floor, and to my horror, a boat I had built, in King Billy Pine and exported to a customer in Belgium. I don’t know about the others, but no-one had asked my permission to use my boat for political purposes. The advertisement implied that the industries illustrated were threatened by the Greens.

Not destroying our resources

The truth is that the Greens, whatever their faults, were not destroying our resources, forever, by clear-felling our old growth forests in the timber production areas. Forestry Tasmania is doing that, on behalf of the people represented by Terry Edwards. The result of these machinations is history. Howard got in, and, sadly, many of the contractors who followed the advice of their bosses and Union leaders when they cheered him to victory, have lost their jobs.

Part of the strategy employed by the Forest industry to discredit us has been to identify us in the media as a “Green Front Group”. The mistake probably arises because we came into existence in the wake of the creation of a list of “For Forests” groups, Doctors, Teachers, Lawyers, Vets and so on to whom the same label has been applied. In private however, even our opponents recognise our distinction by virtue of our occupations. As Terry Edwards himself once famously explained, “It’s like you’re pissing on our tent from the inside”(3)

Graham Green, our founding President was a member of Timber Communities Australia, but became disillusioned because the organisation he expected to represent his interests, as a shingle splitter, gave unqualified support to a system of forest management that was systematically depriving him of the mature timber he needed for his livelihood. Timber Communities Australia is certainly the champion of a community of interest, that of the major woodchip companies, but it does not champion those communities of place, the “timber towns” and villages which once prospered through the application of hard earned skills to add value to unique local timbers and to add meaning and pride to the lives of the people.

So Graham rang up a few of his friends one night, who earned their living by using local timber resources and invited them to what became our inaugural meeting at the Longley International Hotel, an establishment that despite its impressive name and considerable elegance, is a country pub at Longley, a hamlet of some 50 souls, half way between Hobart and the southern Forests. It was the beginning of what has become a mutual philosophical education as well as a plan of action.

We discovered common ground across generations as well as between regions and cultures. People who work with Tasmania’s unique special timbers are, whether consciously or not, the inheritors of a continuous minority tradition of forest practice that is as much a part of our history as the heroic vision of conquest that has inspired most of our governance since 1803.We find ourselves to be the inheritors of this tradition.

One of the points of difference that we have with many conservationists is that we have difficulty with the notion of wilderness as a “natural” area in which humans have no place. On the contrary, we share the indigenous Tasmanian view that

Forest and community health are interdependent

The Forest is not Trees. A Forest is the entwined lives of people, animals, birds, bees, microbes, wind, rain, sunshine and history. It is a source of food, shelter, enjoyment and stories.(4)

Like the Aborigines, we recognise that forest health and community health are interdependent. If you simplify and commodify one, you do the same to the other. We perceive that after a real forest has been clear-felled and burnt, it is not the forest that is re-planted, but trees, and it is only if a plantation or a re-generated area were to go through a long and repeated cycle of growth and decay for maybe 400 years that something like what was destroyed could exist again in the same place, with the same range of species and maturity that guarantees sustainability. Like our forebears, both Aboriginal and colonial, we seek to live on the interest annually available from our vanishing accessible areas of true forest, without damage to the natural capital they represent, or the generally un-costed ecological services that they provide.

We have experienced extremely wide public sympathy for our predicament and support for the solutions that we recommend, but not from the Government or the industry, so I have sought for an historical explanation.

In the Huon, where many of us live, whaling gangs and timber getters were the first colonists, followed by convict servants and settlers in the late 1830s.Some convicts fled, joined Aboriginal communities, and founded families that now identify as aboriginals, and some of them are saw-millers and forest workers. Like their often Irish ancestors as well as their maternal forebears, they had good reason for opposition to the dominant hierarchy of colonial Government.

Robyn Friend interviewed some of them for her book, We Who Are Not There, published in 1991. One of them said, “I suppose in a way we’re a whole new tribe of people, but we’re still living in the same place on the same ground as our very ancient forebears.” But outside our own community we don’t count, and we’re not black enough, or so they say.”(5)

Another, William Smith, like many aboriginal people in the Huon Valley, was a small sawmiller. “They did it well too, “he said, “they were careful in what they took and they were neat and tidy. They didn’t make a mess of the Bush.”(6)

Until the end of the 19th Century, the timber business stayed in the hands of small operators, but in 1898 the Crown Land Act was amended, while the office of Conservator of Forests was vacant. It stayed vacant for 27 years, a vacuum of responsibility that enabled state Governments to allow investors 21 year leases of timbered crown Land in return for a guarantee of large scale investment, thus establishing the present framework of Tasmanian forest management, and excluding local saw millers from consultation.(7) The southern forest region of Tasmania provides a good illustration of the long-term consequences for Tasmania as a whole.

Among the first to take advantage of the opportunity was Robert Affleck Robinson, still remembered in Geeveston as “Flat Earth Robinson” because of his scientific beliefs. Mistaken as he was, he was an expert at booster politics and public relations, and succeeded in establishing the Huon Timber Co at Port Huon and turning Geeveston into a Company town.

Small sawmillers

But the company didn’t do well. To cut a long story short it was sold in 1911 for a third of its original value. Under new ownership it went down hill and never made a profit after 1920. It never ever paid a dividend and was wound up in 1929 with a loss of a quarter of a million pounds.

The only opponents of the whole scheme were a group of small saw millers who said, as we would have done in 1902, that they objected to big business “Taking over all the country” when their own requests for special reserves had always been refused.(8) They were ignored, but they went back into the depleted forest the company left behind, with their bullocks and wooden railways, and pit saws and broad axes, until the 1940s having beaten the over-capitalised competition in the struggle for survival.

The rise and fall of the Huon Timber Company established a pattern of repeated alliances between Tasmanian governments, regardless of ideology, and large investors. Hopes have been raised. There have sometimes been brief periods of prosperity, but they have been followed by disappointment, leaving behind a bitterly divided community, ripe for the next round of promised wealth and security, that never comes.

Forest management, as opposed to semi-regulated exploitation, began in 1920, when a Forestry Act created jobs for a Conservator and a small staff. They found life difficult. The Conservator reported that, “The regime of laissez-faire had become so firmly established that any mention of control or restriction was regarded as heresy of the most dangerous order”.(9) Credibility suffered in 1941 when the Minister of forests was found by a Royal Commission, to have accepted bribes from a mainland timber company in return for a favourable deal to establish a sawmill and plywood mill at Loongana in the North-west. The minister was rested for a while in New Zealand, but soon returned, and was re-elected to the Legislative Council, where he served as Government leader for the next 20 years.(10) As the late Mr Rouse said, “It’s not un-Tasmanian because it’s been done before.” We’re all human after all.

The D’Alton scandal was followed by the establishment of the Forestry Commission in 1947, but the emphasis on large investment and high volume extraction was now entrenched. In 1954 a bill was passed to allow the commission to sell logging rights within 105,000 hectares of southern forest, and after long delays and two false starts, the concession was granted to Australian Paper Manufacturers Ltd, or APM and they built a pulp mill at Port Huon.

Small sawmillers had been shut out of the planning process.(11) Some of them became contractors to the pulp mill. They kept many of their skills, but a detailed knowledge within the community of the relationships within whole ecosystems, the timbers they could produce, and their best use, was lost in one generation.

A pattern of raised hopes, anxiety and social tragedy was now clear

At its peak the mill employed 170 people, but the first retrenchments came in 1968, followed by a brief shut down in 1978. Workers voted to work shorter hours to avoid retrenchments, but in August 1982 the mill closed for 6 weeks, and then closed again on Christmas Eve with the verbal promise that it would open again in 1984. It re-opened briefly from 1986 to 1991, and then closed for good.(12)

A pattern of raised hopes, anxiety and social tragedy was now clear. As one resident of Geeveston explained ten years later:

Geeveston has had a lot of promises made to it and not too many of the have been fulfilled. Everyone hung their hat on A.P.M. re-opening for years, but that was never going to happen. There has been a combination of loss after loss after loss, creating an entrenched feeling of being losers, entrenched negativity. (13)

The next scheme was a plan by Australian Newsprint Mills to build a woodchip mill at Whale Point under the banner of Huon Forest Products, and Robin Gray approved construction in 1987.

The political effect of this was the forging of an alliance between the Labor party and the Greens, which was also supported in its formative months by small saw millers like Darryl Brown, Brian Burden, Max Helm, Trevor Booth and Cliff Hall who gave evidence of outrageous waste to the Helsham Commission, and gained influential support: The Advocate editorialised,

These men are not the smooth, articulate and media experienced protagonists from the opposed forest industry and conservation lobbies, so often seen on T.V. and quoted in the print media — At this time, when we are looking back on our beginnings, [This was in 1988] it is perhaps appropriate to remember that it was the pioneer timbermen, with their axes and cross cut saws, and — spot mills scattered in the forests of Tasmania, who laid the foundations of the present industry. Those days of course are gone, but there are still surely strong arguments for a fair go for the remaining small millers.(14)

Timber craftsman Tony DeLara addressed a meeting at Ranelagh in August 1988,and put a case for a value-based timber industry under local control rather than a volume based industry that destroyed ecological complexity and was out of control. He claimed that the craft industry, using special timbers employed 1000 workers, used 25,000 cubic metres a year to produce goods worth $100 million, adding value at a rate of $4000 per m3, while the woodchip industry employed 350 people, used two and a half million cubic metres a year, and still only earned 150 million, adding a value of only $60 to each cubic metre. The chip mill proposal was the sign of an industry going to fast, too far and being too greedy.(15)

Fledgling politician Paul Lennon

In May 1889 the Labor/Green accord was signed, with the condition that the woodchip mill would be stopped, resulting in something approaching civil war in the Huon. Some still hoped to find common ground, Athol Meyer, Liberal Legislative Councillor for the Huon persuaded fledgling politician Paul Lennon to join him in supporting a Wood Skills Centre, Promised by the Helsham Commission as compensation for loss of loggable forest to the World Heritage Area, but never taken seriously. Meyer said it would be based on a conjunction of Specialty timbers and local skills, “Teachers, Parents, those with jobs and those looking for work, craft workers, greenies and anti-Greenies, this is one idea that everyone should support”.(16)

It was a moment when, if the captains of industry had blinked, we might now have a forest industry we could all be proud of and Tasmania might be a world leader in adding value to globally unique timbers, but they were steadfast in their determination not to give ground, and they were aided by a new strategy borrowed from corporate America, the use of so-called “Grass roots movements” to push corporate agendas. Ron Arnold, champion of the “Wise Use” movement explained how it worked:

A local Citizen’s group can do things industry can’t. It can speak as a group of people who live close to nature and have more natural wisdom than city people. It can provide allies with something to join, some place to nurture that vital sense of belonging and common sense. It can build emotional commitment among your allies; it can build coalitions to build real political clout. It can evoke powerful archetypes like the sanctity of the family, the virtue of the close-knit community.(17)

In Australia, the quaintly named Forest Protection Society, founded in 1987, was already the very model of a grass roots industry front group, with 80% of its funding coming from industry. It’s now called Timber Communities Australia.(18) With this cleverly disguised backing, Industry saw no need to settle for a compromise with anyone.

The search for overseas investment continued and in February 1995 Premier Ray Groom told the media that, “after considerable effort, since the loss of Huon Forest Products during the term of the previous Government” his Government had gained the interest of Fibreform Wood Products Inc. of California in establishing a sawmill and wood panel plant at Whale Point, to employ 200 people.

Opposition came from the Southern Forests Community Group, perhaps our most effective predecessors. They were an alliance of woodworkers, bee-keepers and small saw millers who feared that a large industrial activity needing only eucalypt pulpwood would ensure the destruction of the remaining mixed forests in the south within a short period. They proposed as an alternative, a Community Forest. A board of management representing all interest groups, would take control of the 35,000 Hectares of Old growth Forest then remaining in the South, and would employ a variety of harvesting methods to ensure that each forest type would be sustained for ever.(19)

Southwood was next

Unpredictable market conditions, and perhaps rumours of Tasmanian opposition, were sufficient to put Fibreform off, but not to persuade the Government to consider an alternative. In May 1995 the Huon News carried the Headline, “Fibreform Pulls out.” Nothing daunted, the Premier promised that the century old search for a large downstream processing plant would continue, because “There has been a lot of disappointment, People’s hopes have been raised so much”(20)

Southwood was next, in 2002, by which time the area of Old Growth in the timber production forest in the Huon district had shrunk from 35,000 ha in 1995 to 15,000 Hectares. The announcement caused inevitable community division, followed by disappointment as the years have passed and the promised numbers of jobs have failed to materialise. It was soon after that that Timber Workers for Forests was formed. Some of us had been members of the Southern Forests community Group, but for most members it is the first experience of political activism.

Rather than engage in an emotive appeal to the public for change, we reasoned that if we could present evidence to Forestry Tasmania that the clear felling of the remaining Old growth forests was wasteful, was costing Tasmanian jobs, was causing irreversible damage to future supplies of the timbers on which we depended, and could be reversed without loss to industrial forestry, that they might be persuaded to change methods of harvesting in old growth forests while there is still some of them left outside the world Heritage area.

So we began by calling a press conference to announce the first of a series of research papers, an audit of a recently clear-felled coupe, E 74 D, in the southern forests, written by our President Graham Green who has a Ph.D. in science and lives partly from scientific research and partly from shingle splitting, making post and rail fences and the restoration of heritage buildings, using materials salvaged from clear-felled forests. Members of our group who have experience in identifying and using Tasmanian timbers, and some who have post graduate research and supervision experience provided assistance.

The paper(21) quantified the amount of timber left on the ground to be burnt, and the proportion of the species that would thus be wasted. It made recommendations for immediate waste reduction on the site in question, and both site specific and policy recommendations to avoid similar waste in the future.

Before publication, comment was invited from Forestry Tasmania, but none was received. When our work was given notice in the press, some uninformed scorn was poured on our research credentials and Paul Lennon, then Minister for Forests, identified us as, “The Usual Suspects”. Later, however, when Hans Dreilsma, was questioned by the panel convened for the five- year review of the Regional Forest Agreement, about the methods used and conclusions reached, he concurred with our quantitative findings.(22) This paper was followed by another in July 2002, detailing the jobs lost in the forest industry since 1990, and also since the Regional Forest Agreement of 1998-9. It contained recommendations for alternative job creation in the selective logging of specialty timbers using methods then being trialled in the Warra long term ecological research site by Forestry Tasmania, together with further development of training opportunities in alternative forest management and wood skill based industries such as furniture and wooden boat building.(23)

A third paper moved from criticism of current practice to a resolution of conflict in the Tasmanian community and the creation of a policy that would allow for the satisfactory pursuit of all competing interests, based on the best interests of the forests themselves. A consultation Draft was circulated to special timber sawmillers for comment. Our members conducted a series of public consultation meetings in Timber communities throughout Tasmania, and held draft discussion meetings with local foresters in the Huon district. No-one at Melville St responded to our requests for feedback. So in July 2002 it was published, with the title, Tasmania’s Specialty Timber Industry: A blueprint for sustainability, it too is available on our website.

High employment

The political reality of the lead-up to the 2004 Federal election was that whichever major party gained power in Canberra, the Tarkine rain forest would cease to be available for timber production. This was later confirmed by interviews we were able to arrange with those forming forest policy in both the Labour and Liberal Parties.(24)

The Blueprint anticipated that this would happen, thus halving the anticipated source of Special Timbers, and therefore suggested that the forests that should be set aside for the selective logging of mature Eucalypts and special species should be selected throughout Tasmania from 180,000 hectares that were identified within the Timber production areas as mixed forests in which special species were part of the forest inventory. Selection was restricted to areas that conformed to these criteria:
• Where rainfall is above 1,300 mm
• Sites below 600 mm
• Sites with a Eucalypt height potential greater than 34 mm

Data was obtained from Regional Forest Agreement maps and other sources in order to construct a domain including mixed forest and Blackwood sites sufficient to maintain a range of high employment and value adding industries without compromising either conservation values or the existing pulp industry.

We have continued to work politically through staging demonstrations, getting our opinions into the Mercury letters whenever we could, building alliances with other pressure groups like the beekeepers, documenting continued malpractice in the forests and talking to politicians. Before the 2002 State election we saw Bob Cheek, then leader of the Liberals. He remembered our visit when he wrote his political autobiography, and paid us the compliment of letting us know that he appreciated the common sense of our position.(25) He was even more frank with us at the time than he is with his readers, and explained that he supported the end of clear felling of mixed old growth forests and thought the Tasmanian electorate would as well but the problem was that a major contributor to the electoral funds of both major parties, which it might now be legally risky to name, wouldn’t like it, and so he was unlikely to get the agreement of his party.

Before the recent State election we prepared a statement about our aims and sought interviews with the forest spokespeople for the three main parties. Peg Putt had decided to broaden the Greens forest policy to include our concerns, and was prepared to take advice from our “Blueprint” on areas to be set aside for special timber production throughout the state. She would not consider including the Weld valley, however, in the timber production area, to the disappointment of some of our members, but we are prepared to compromise.

Will Hodgman was the only one who agreed to see us

Bryan Green, for the Labor party was sympathetic and diplomatic, but made no commitment. Will Hodgman was the only member of the Liberal party who agreed to see us, and said that he would personally support us, but he said that we should seek a meeting with Mr Hidding. We tried, but were told he was too busy to see us. We left an identical document with each of these representatives and it can be seen on our website. At the time of writing this I am seeking further interviews in the light of the Labor victory, with both Liberal and Labor forest spokes people. [Six months is a very long time in politics and I hope to have something further to say in October.]

Tasmania is still in an excellent position to develop a small-scale wood industry based on the traditional skills of the people and the qualities of its unique range of special timbers. They are unique because they grow so slowly, making them close grained and therefore stable and durable, as well as light and beautiful in the case of Huon and King Billy, and beautiful and heavy in the case of Celery Top Pine, Myrtle, Blackwood and Sassafrass, Native Olive, Cheesewood and Mountain Ti-Tree.

Timber Workers for Forests has been accused by the Minister for Forests of being greedy, but it is asking merely for a fair share of the remnant of a once plentiful resource. It has no objection to a sustainable re-growth industry, or to pulp production. It would support a genuinely “World’s Best Practice” paper mill, but it sees no reason for these goals to be achieved at the expense of a range of industries that provide creative interesting work and that contribute to the ability of Tasmanians to believe in themselves, and the image of intelligence and talent that they attempt to present to the world.

From the point of view of private foresters it is worth considering the story of Eco-Forest, a company in New South Wales that was established some years ago to re-convert cleared land, not to a single species plantation but to a replica of a pre 1788 natural forest. The idea was that the first profits would flow from early thinnings of what would eventually form the eucalypt canopy and consist of timbers such as Ironbark, Tallow wood and Spotted Gum. Some early income was anticipated from the rent of cabins where people could enjoy a restful holiday and participate in the re-birth of their heritage. Future wealth was anticipated from the eucalypts that would be selectively logged, starting with pulp logs in around 40years, and continuing, in step with replacement, to eventually include trees up to 400 years old. By then the really valuable stuff, the New South Wales Cedar, would be an increasing part of the annual mix, and command prices commensurate with its scarcity and quality. Craftsmen and women would be able to make the finest furniture and the most beautiful boats in the world from the wood produced. And all the time, the value of the visitor experience and of the land itself would accelerate as world sources of high quality timber and spiritual solace continue to diminish.

In Tasmania we don’t have to wait 400 years to reap these benefits. We still have mature production forests, and they can achieve a real marriage of Forestry and Tourism. We are 400 years ahead if we choose to be. All it needs is economic wisdom and good political leadership.

This paper was written for the Forests Growers conference to be held in October, “because they had a section on policy and planning. They accepted my abstract, and so I was surprised they rejected the paper with some alacrity when I sent it to them a couple of weeks ago.

This paper was written for presentation at the International Forest Grower’s conference to be held in Launceston this coming October.Those whose abstracts were accepted were asked to send copies of complete papers for pre-publication by the end of April, but this resulted in more papers being written than there was room for in the conference, so this is one of those that will not be presented after all.

The author, Dr John Young, thought that it might nevertheless be of general interest to both conference delegates and a wider readership and offered it to Tasmanian Times.

John is former Chairman of the History Department of the University of Adelaide, and was Director of the Mawson Graduate Centre for Environmental Studies from 1988 to 1990. He and his wife, Ruth came to Tasmania in 1991 and founded Shipwright’s Point School of Wooden Boatbuilding at Franklin, (now the Wooden Boat Centre). John is now somewhat retired and teaches sailing and boatbuilding as a volunteer for the Living Boat Trust Inc. His publications include various works on Pacific Island history,and Post Environmentalism, (Belhaven, London 1990) also published as Sustaining The Earth, (Harvard University Press 1991)

He is an Honorary Research Associate of the School of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Tasmania.

Footnotes:
1 Ian Whyte, Chief Executive, Forest Industries Association of Tasmania to the Author, 9th October 2000.
2 Guide des achats durables, “Conclusion concernant les systèmes de certification PEFC entrant en considération dans le cadre de la circulaire P&O/DD/2”, www.gidsvoorduurzameaakopen.be/bs_mb/compromis%20def_FR.doc
3 In conversation with Graham Green, 2004
4 Southern Traditional Aboriginal Elder’s Council, for the Lai Pootah Community Elders, Aborigines For Forests: Our View. n.d.
5 Cit. Robyn Friend, We Who are not Here: Aboriginal people of the Huon and Channel Today. Huon Municipal Association and South-East Tasmanian Council, Huonville, 1992, p. iii.
6 Friend, p.53
7 Row, Margaret, The Tasmanian Timber Trade 1830-1890, B.Sc. Honours thesis, University of Tasmania, Hobart 1983, p. 54-58.
8 Dargavel, J.B. The Development of the Tasmanian Wood Industries: A Radical Analysis, PhD Thesis, Canberra, 1983, pp.54-58.
9 Dargavel, Op.Cit., p.177
10 Ibid. P 209. See also P. Hay, “Factors Conducive to Political Corruption: The Tasmanian Experience”, Political Science, (Wellington, N.Z.) Vol. 29, No. 2, 1977, pp. 115-130
11 Ibid. P.209.
12 Taylor A.J., “Plant Closure: The Economic, Social and Environmental consequences of a closure of a pulp mill”. B.A. Hons Thesis, University of Tasmania, 1983 and Huon Valley News, 6th June 1991.
13 Cit. Armstrong, D, “Narratives of Community and Sustainability: the case of Cygnet and Geeveston in Tasmania’s Huon Valley”. B.A. Hons thesis, University of Tasmania, 2000, pp 88-89.
14 The Advocate, 27th January 1988
15 Huon News 10 November 1988.
16 Huon News 13 October 1988
17 Cit. Echeveria, J. & Eby, R.B., Let The People Judge: Wise Use and the Property Rights Movement, Island Press, Washington D.C. p.4.
18 Bader, Sharon, Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism, Revised edition, Scribe Publications, Melbourne, Melbourne, 2000, p.54.
19 Southern Forests Community Group, The Regional Forest Concept, A Discussion Paper to address community concerns and to inform the Southern Forests land use strategy, Published by Rex Direen, Nicholls Rivulet, June 1995
20 Huon Valley News, 25th May 1995.
21 Graham Green, Esperance 74D(EPO74D), Logging Coupe Inventory, Timber Workers For Forests April 2002
22 John Maddock.
23 Graham Green Tasmanian Timber Industry Jobs Volume 1 July 2002
24 Graham Green, report to TWFF Committee meeting, September 21, 2004. ?
25 Cheek Bob, Cheeky; Confessions of a Ferret Salesman, Pipeclay Publishing, Sandy Bay 2005, P.329-330