SEVENTY-ODD years ago in my early teens I made my first visit to Burnie. I had boarded the train at the then Spreyton station which was a couple of kilometres from where I lived with Mum and the younger of my siblings. Mum had become a widow some 7 or 8 years earlier. The 50 K. trip along the then only minimally polluted North West Coast was a very pleasant experience, if slow by today’s standards. I was going for a short holiday to stay with my eldest sister Gladys who was more than a decade and a half my senior.
Glad’s husband Les was at that time working in the Emu Bay Railway workshop, later he was one of the early employees of the new paper mill at Burnie. They were living in South Burnie, close to to the South Burnie beach that I was to spend some time on or in the then clean seawaters that lapped its sands. I actually swam in seawater that then covered the areas that are now reclaimed land on parts of which the mountain of unsold woodchips now resides. There was no wood chip pile dominating the Burnie waterfront then.
I recall some years later, after Les and Glad had bought land and built a house, on the hills that surrounded the then much smaller town of Burnie, having admired the magnificent view of a whole area of the coast line. To a country boy who had grown up in a house built on the flat and surrounded by hills and in some parts untouched, or only selectively logged, forest areas viewing the lights of the then country town of Burnie from the hill was also a real novelty. The house, a pleasant weatherboard structure cost around 600 pounds to build. For those who can only remember$ currency – a pound was equal to $2.
Closer to my childhood home the creek in which we used to catch what we called tiddlies and also mountain trout and an occasional fresh water eel, all on a bent pin at the end of a piece of string, still runs but there are no fish in it any longer
The price of what we call progress, in terms of our negative effects on the landscape and natural beauty and resources, has been considerable. I recall the time when it was possible to catch a variety of good sized and very eatable fish, in substantial quantities, in the Rubicon River at Port Sorell. We spent many camping holidays at Port Sorell in my childhood. Before my father died the family could afford to rent a house built for the purpose of holiday rental.
One of my father’s sisters, Emily, and her husband Harold Williams owned both the shop and some such small houses. We were on holidays stopping in one of those houses when Dad died. It was after a swim, and as I remember he was helping me dry and dress when something apparently happened outside the change enclosure. My memory is of him looking over the wall of the unroofed enclosure and then falling back on to the ground. He had suffered a fatal heart attack.
This was less than three months after my 4th birthday. Dad had owned and managed a farm and a small coal mine, and worked very hard. I can remember four horses in the stable. He had employed over a dozen men. He always voted Labour, as it was spelt at that time, and according to my eldest sister Gladys he believed in paying proper wages.
More about Port Sorell, uncle Harold also built boats. I can remember two of his boats about 8 metres long, one with a motor, that he would sometimes use to carry and tow quite a lot of people from Port Sorell across the Rubicon to the eastern shore. We would walk the short distance to what was then called seven mile beach. The area on the Eastern shore of the Rubicon is now part of a National Park.
An incident that for some reason also sticks in my mind, probably because like the day my father died it frightened me, was when one of my cousins, over a decade my senior in years, was moving from one boat to the other he fell in the water fully clothed. We were at that time very close to the eastern shore of the Rubicon and no great danger was involved and no real damage was incurred.
Another memory that has survived over the decades is set from a few years after the above related incidents at Port Sorell. I can still picture in my mind’s eye the long stacks of timber that were to be seen in what was then the above mentioned Spreyton Railway Station Yard. The station yard was situated just to South-South East of Devonport. These stacks were of pieces of wood about 1.2 metres long and ranged, as I remember from around 100 to 200 millimetres in diameter. It was of course before the days of the chain saw. It was the axe and the crosscut saw we used to cut our firewood and that were used to fell and cut timber for the saw mills.
The timber in the stacks was destined for the Burnie mill. The pieces of timber were obviously cut from the limbs and heads of trees. Rather different from what we see on log trucks today with their loads of tree trunks headed for the chipper. At that time one argument for pulping some eucalypts for paper manufacture was that only limbs and heads of trees would be used. That unfortunately is far from being how it has all turned out. To-day these parts of the trees get burnt along with other potentially valuable timber as the madness called clear felling proceeds on its environment destroying course.
Forest destruction is accelerating climate change, and Global warming. The chemically dependent monoculture plantations, that now exist on what was either forested or agricultural land, contribute heavily to wild life decline. Other negative effects of monoculture, as distinct from multi species plantations of native trees and shrubbery, include fertility loss in soil and decline in availability of clean water. Recent studies are now revealing that the chemical sprays used to sustain monoculture plantations are causing serious human health problems.
The need for new approaches to forestry practices, that will contribute to environmental sustainability, rather than merely create new and in some respects equally environmentally destructive plus human health problems, is a real and immediate issue for us in Tasmania.
This is all part of the broader problem of becoming serious about climate change and beginning to do something real in terms of tackling climate change problems.
Professor Ian Lowe opened his address to a seminar, on Global Warming and climate change, organised by NWTP Tas in Hobart in February 2007 with the following question and answers.“What would a rogue government do to increase global warming?
1. Encourage population growth
2. Increase energy use per person
3. Subsidise activities that release carbon dioxide
4. No serious renewables target
5. Run down public transport
6. Talk up fantasy technologies [nuclear power, geosequestration]
7. Export coal, gas, uranium…”
Sound familiar? They should – these are exactly the Howard Government’s policies.
Lowe added, “The Howard Government policy supports population growth, each individual using more energy. It is assumed that coal and gas exports can continue indefinitely, with CO2 sequestration as a magic bullet. These policies hide the huge task ahead, which include reducing CO2 emissions from the projected 60% increase under “business as usual” to a 60-90% reduction, by 2050.”
What’s changed with the electoral success of Rudd? Koyoto has been ratified but Rudd still favours population growth, still uses public money to subsidise activities that release carbon dioxide, has no serious renewable target, spends heavily on Road transport assistance at the expense of rail transport. The Rudd Government also exports coal, gas and uranium and supports geo-sequestration. Some prominent figures in the ALP still talk up nuclear power; perhaps not quite as strongly as does Liberal leader Abbott.
We now live in an era in which both major Political Parties are very largely controlled by the wishes and demands of a rich and powerful few. What, in my youth, was widely seen as progress has turned out to be something quite different in a number of respects. We can do much better and need to think seriously about HOW— NOW while much of our planet is still habitable. Change might be difficult but it is not impossible .
This last week in January 2010 I watched the ABC television programs on population growth that included some reactions of our Prime Ministers on climate change issues. I am more now than ever convinced that our various Governments are failing dismally as regards any realistic approach to resolving climate change problems. And further that our Prime Minister makes the people assembled by the late Jim Bacon and others to play the spin doctor role in Tasmania appear as rank amateurs in that field as compared to Kevin Rudd. I of course still retain my view that Tony Abbott, as Prime Minister, would be even worse.
There can be other ways —- Peace and equity between and within nations underpinned with economic and social structures that allow social harmony and ecological sustainability need to be a key goal. Those of us with concerns need NOW to discuss, formulate and further ideas on how we might act to encourage and pressure Governments to begin to implement change towards achieving these positive directions.
Difficult as it is proving to be to change the current tragic situation we none-the-less owe it to our children, their and their children’s children, to find ways to be more effective in our efforts. Without hope and actions that include considerable creative mental efforts as well as collective practical actions the human future is at best uncertain.
