How wife of Mona founder brought together combatants of Tasmania’s forest wars

It is not entirely clear that all those who have been summonsed (or cajoled) to a three-day forestry congress in Tasmania later this month understand entirely what they have signed up for.

It is clear that nothing quite like this has ever been tried before.

Kirsha Kaechele wants to bring together those entrenched in Tasmania’s war over forests.

The woman who has done the summonsing is the American curator and artist Kirsha Kaechele, who is married to David Walsh, the creator of Tasmania’s infamous Museum of Old and New Art, which will host the event.

The 120 guests include loggers and saw-millers, activists and academics, scientists and economists.

Greens founder and environmentalist Bob Brown, facing charges over a recent protest about destruction of swift parrot habitat, will be preparing for court the following week and will not attend in person. He explains he is discomfited at the thought of sitting down alongside some of those who would see him jailed. Brown will instead address the gathering as a 3D animation, I am assured by one of the organisers.

American curator and artist Kirsha Kaechele.

The formal title of the proceedings is “Forest Economics Congress: New A$$. Class”. Its goal is to bring together some of those entrenched in Tasmania’s political warfare over forests in an effort to breathe new life into a debate that Kaechele believes has brittled to the point of collapse.

“The definitions that you need to use to talk about logging alone are so contentious,” said Kaechele this week, citing dispute between pro- and anti-logging camps over basic terms such as “old-growth” “regenerated” and “primary” forest.

In an essay about the event on Mona’s website Kaechele describes how she once bought a “rundown piece of shit” house in an undesirable neighbourhood in New Orleans, that contained in its back garden a glorious and ancient oak tree. In her view, the tree was far more valuable than the house, but could not be assigned any value in mercantile terms.

Buying the house she felt like an arts vulture snagging a Bonnard at a garage sale from an unwitting retiree.

Greens founder Bob Brown will attend the event… as a 3D animation.Credit: Peter Mathew

In an odd sort of way, that old oak will be at the heart of the congress. Kaechele wants delegates to consider and discuss the basic value of Tasmania’s forests. That term, she expects, will mean many things to many people.

In a world whose gravest threat is rapidly increasing atmospheric carbon, protected forests are of vast value to us all as carbon sinks. They are of increasing monetary value to those who accelerate decarbonisation by fostering carbon trading. They are of value as refuges of what is left of our biodiversty; as drawcards for tourism; and they are of value as a source of wood and paper products.

Kaechele insists she has no fixed position here, but her guest list captures those who voice all those views. The chief executive of the free market think tank Blueprint Institute will attend with a report. In the past, Blueprint has called for native forest logging to be abandoned in NSW on cold-blooded economic grounds. According to Blueprint’s analysis, it costs more to log the trees than the trees are worth, and the industry is an unreasonable drain on the taxpayer. The left-leaning Australia Institute, which has published research sceptical of the use of forests as carbon credit banks, will also be present.

Andrew Macintosh, a law professor at the Australian National University who has argued that carbon offsets built into the Australian carbon market are a fraud against the environment, will attend, as will the Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel McFadden.

‘I don’t actually give a f--- about diamonds, I prefer my husband pay for my social projects.’

Kirsha Kaechele

Kaechele is well aware that her odd place in Tasmania’s cultural firmament is significant to the mission. Walsh famously made his pile as a lead member of what is often described as Australia’s largest gambling syndicate, before almost bankrupting himself building Mona, the idiosyncratic and determinedly transgressive museum whose collection reflects his own fascination with sex and death.

He once told the Australian Financial Review that the museum was his “hotted-up Torana”, a way to help him pull hot chicks. He presumed it would also attract significant opprobrium. Instead, the museum has boosted Tasmania’s cultural standing and economy and won him near-universal affection in his home state.

“I remember my business model being I’ll do a few controversial irreligious things and fundamentalist minorities will picket the streets and I’ll get free publicity and of course no one cared,” he lamented to the AFR.

Kaechele is happy to spend some of that coin and cultural capital in the service of her projects.

Kaechele with husband and Mona founder David Walsh.Credit: Amy Brown

“I once went to the wedding of an Indian diamond baron’s daughter,” she writes in her essay on the congress. “And I wore a champagne diamond of alluvial origin. It was expensive – relatively. I don’t actually give a f--- about diamonds, I prefer my husband pay for my social projects.”

Kaechele is known both in Tasmania and New Orleans for her projects which, over the years, have lived somewhere in the crossover between the creation of artistic spaces and events. An arts centre she created in a handful of New Orleans homes after Hurricane Katrina attracted some of the America’s leading artists, before becoming so rundown that the city’s leading newspaper the Times Picayune reported that residents were complaining.

She told the paper that the sites had “gone back to the way I found them. … It was always about the intersection of creativity and chaos”.

To draw attention to the devastation caused by feral species in 2019, Kaechele created an exhibition and cookbook with contributions by chefs such as Heston Blumenthal, Tetsuya Wakuda and Shannon Bennett, the performance artist Mike Parr as well as Germaine Greer.

A feast of feral animals was held over a vividly coloured 27-metre long musical sculpture that Kaechele described as the world’s largest glockenspiel. Kaechele wore a taxidermied and gilded brown tree snake (a destructive feral from northern Australia that is killing off birds on Guam, where she has also lived) and served, among other things, a cat consommé.

In her diplomatic effort to round delegates, Kaechele claims to have worn through three pairs of heels and five tubes of lipstick, but Steve Whitely, chief executive of Sustainable Timber Tasmania, the state’s leading forestry lobby, says he was quickly won over.

He reckons the general affection for Kaechele and Walsh, as well as the curiosity that Mona events inspire, attracted many who will attend. He was impressed that in her first meeting she carried with her a wooden clutch, signalling her love of the material his members felled and milled.

At the very least, Kaechele hopes that the congress will see a new and clear language about the issue. She hopes to see the “shedding of fear and discord around difficult words and uncomfortable conversations”.

At her most ambitious she hopes that at the congress, the seeds of a new model of sustainable forestry might take root; one that would somehow align the interests of those who would protect the forests for their intrinsic and environmental value with those who would continue to harvest them for monetary return.

This would be, she acknowledges, “a minor miracle”.

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