How a fight to save the bush became a battlefield

A sudden burst of violence three years ago on a bush road in a state forest on the Dorrigo Plateau, rainforest country inland from Coffs Harbour, sparked an ordeal that has left two men found guilty of assault, one man shattered, and many of the region’s forest activists mistrustful of state government agencies charged with protecting the forests and the people who live and work in and around them.

Mark Graham and his friend Andre Johnston were driving along Moses Rock Road near Wild Cattle Creek state forest. Graham lives in Coffs Harbour but has bought three bush blocks in the area in order to protect the bush, and the two men were out for a drive and a bushwalk.

Graham at the Ellis State Forest, south-west of Grafton.Credit: Dean Sewell

Graham is a well-known ecologist and former Coffs Harbour councillor for the Greens. He once came close to winning the mayoralty. He has worked for years for state and federal government agencies. He has an intense manner of speech that flicks easily from delight when he talks about the animals and plants of the forests to anger when speaks of their loss through logging and fire.

His friend and lawyer, the NSW Greens MP Sue Higginson, says she first met him in 2007 and later hired him to run environmental workshops for community groups and farmers. “I found him outstanding at his job, his knowledge, his professionalism, his gentle ways of dealing with the community.”

That afternoon in 2020 Graham and Johnston stopped and inspected the forest not far from a logging operation being conducted by contractors to the state government-owned forestry arm, Forestry Corporation NSW, and walked a short way into the forest.

They were breaking no law. Roads in state forests are public, though entry is forbidden if they have been closed for logging. It is also forbidden to approach active logging operations.

When they came back to their car it was parked in by a vehicle owned by Greensill Brothers Logging, a forestry corporation contractor, and by a second vehicle, belonging to the corporation. What happened next was caught on video recorded by the FCNSW officer in that vehicle.

The two loggers immediately confronted Graham and Johnson. Graham, who was recording the incident on his phone was grabbed around the neck by one of the loggers and pushed up against the car. He passed his phone to Johnston, who was quickly forced to his back on the ground.

“You don’t have to film this,” said the corporation employee, who was filming the incident herself. She did nothing to stop the contractors action.

“Give me the f---ing phone c---,” the contractor standing over Johnston said. “Get the f---ing phone out now. Get the phone out now, c---.”

Finally, he was allowed up and the two men fled. As Higginson later explained, the contractors had no right to demand anything of Graham and Johnston, let alone assault them.

Two days later Graham wrote a complaint to the corporation and later again, at Higginson’s urging, he visited the local police station to report the incident.

The way he recalls it, he was laughed out of the Coffs Harbour Police Station by an officer, who told him to stop wasting his time and to “get a job”.

It was then the story turned murky and, at least to Higginson, sinister.

Over the coming months Higginson and Graham lobbied to have the police investigate the incident. The investigating police officer refused to give them access to the recording of the assault and a freedom-of-information battle began.

Graham continued his protest and monitoring activities of logging operations. His reports to the NSW Environment Protection Agency resulted in actions against logging contractors for breaking regulations and his advocacy in the media focused attention on logging operations in key habitat areas within the boundaries of what the government has promised will become the Great Koala National Park.

On one occasion he walked a reporter and photographer from the Herald into a state forest. Ordered to leave, he forcefully made his case against native forest logging, but he used no abusive or threatening language, nor did he disobey instructions to leave. “Peaceful. Peaceful, always peaceful,” he said of his protest actions this week.

Graham and Forestry Corporation employees face off during a visit to the north coast forests with the Herald.Credit: SMH

Finally, in December Graham learnt the result of the investigation. The two contractors were acting in self-defence and would face no charges. Instead, Graham was issued an infringement notice under section 14 of the forestry regulation – approach within 100 metres of logging machinery.

At this stage, neither Graham nor his lawyers had seen the tape held by police that appeared to clearly show him being assaulted. Higginson intervened with a subpoena, finally extracting the recording and correspondence between the police officer, the contractors and the forestry corporation.

In her view, what she found was evidence not only of an injustice, but of the officer working with the accused (the contractors) to find a reason to charge the victim of the crime he had reported. “It is a complete violation of process,” she says.

Analysing the email chain she noticed a single exchange was missing in violation of the magistrate’s order, and when she finally extracted it from the police she was shocked at its content. On November 29, the officer wrote to the forestry corporation’s regional manager, Tom Halliday, requesting further details about the incident: “I have many dozens of reasons for this matter not to proceed, but need to make sure to cross my t’s and dot my i’s.”

A still from the video taken by FCNSW of the encounter between Graham and logging contractors in 2020 that turned violent.

Finally, a judge ordered that Graham and Higginson be allowed to view the recording in the company of a police officer. Higginson claims the officer who showed them the tape was himself shocked by it. “There is no self-defence there,” she recalled him saying.

In May 2022, the charge against Graham for approaching a logging operation was dropped.

What Graham did not yet know was that more was to come; that soon he would be cast as potentially violent threat in a warning emailed to all the staff of a major state government agency that operated around his home and land, nor that his family would be drawn into the mess.

“It is all so bizarre, so unfair,” said Higginson this week as she helped piece together the events for this story.

A few days later after the charge was dropped Graham was among 20-odd protesters at a logging site. It was an unremarkable and peaceful event. The protesters were ordered to leave, but as they did, Graham was singled out and seized. When an officer thrust his hand into Graham’s back pocket in an effort to grab his phone, Graham pulled back.

They told his companions that they could pick up Graham in Coffs Harbour, and then they drove him in the back of a police van to Grafton.

Later that night he was charged with resisting arrest and a raft of other offences relating to protest activities. They included trespass but also a stalking charge relating to a time he was driving on a bush road behind the forestry corporation officer who recorded the original assault.

A still from a vidoe of Graham being arrested at a protest.

He was given strict bail conditions, including an order not to enter forests and to remain at his home in Coffs Harbour at night. Some of these conditions were soon scrapped after a bail variation hearing, though the message apparently failed to reach Coffs police.

At 10pm one night in March last year while his wife and 10-year-old son were asleep, and he was working at his computer, he saw torches moving in the garden of his Coffs Harbour home. Three officers from the riot squad, dispatched from their Sydney headquarters, beat first on his bathroom window and then on his son’s window. They were there, they said, checking that he was home in accordance with the now non-existent bail conditions.

A police spokesman said riot squad officers were in town that night assisting local police with a series of bail checks; and that the officer who led the investigation had left the NSW Police force several months before a complaint was received.

Around that time, the EPA issued a warning to all of its staff via email. “Security Alert” it said above a photograph of Graham. It said that the EPA had received complaints about forestry corporation activities, suggesting that he had knowledge of staff movements.

“The tone of his correspondence suggests Mr Graham was attempting to use his language in an intimidating manner.” It warned that he was facing charges relating to stalking and intimating forestry workers and that he had access to firearms.

Technically, this was correct. Graham did have .22 rifle and an airgun – both used for small pest control – and he was aware of movements in state forests, not only from his protest action, but because his properties adjoin the forests.

Either way, says Higginson, the characterisation of Graham was unfair and totally unrealistic.

“Seeing that was heartbreaking. It was just so unjust. There was no procedural fairness. No one spoke to him. Who got to judge that he was a threat? This began with him going to police to complain that he had been assaulted.

“This is how the cold mechanics of bureaucracies can get it so wrong. Everything he has done has been in the interests of the living planet. He has never been violent. It goes against everything he stands for.”

Facing the new set of charges Graham’s legal team opted to use his mental health as a defence. As Graham tells the Herald, he had been under increasing pressure since fighting the fires of 2019, which in turn led him to begin his work defending what was left of the forests, and into dispute with loggers.

Graham was passionate but never violent, says his lawyer Sue Higginson.Credit: SMH

The legal battle and stress has had a profound impact on his life and destroyed his financial security, he says. He is receiving mental health treatment.

He agreed to surrender the .22 and the air rifle and abide by an apprehended violence order and the charges against him were dropped.

Finally, on Monday this week Graham received some vindication in relation to the incident that began the ordeal.

In Coffs Harbour Local Court the forestry contractors Michael Luigi Vitali and Rodney James Hearfield were found guilty of assaulting Graham and his companion Andre Johnston that afternoon on the road on the Dorrigo Plateaux three and a half years ago.

No conviction was recorded.

Graham is satisfied. “I don’t hold any grudges, I didn’t want them punished. I just wanted the truth of it to be acknowledged.”

Higginson is still appalled by what happened. Antagonism between loggers and protesters was neither rare nor new, she told the Herald, but there was no place for violence. What she still believes to have been collusion between police, loggers and the FCNSW reflected a dangerous culture in which protesters are perceived by the government to be suspect automatically, while those who profit from resource extraction were above suspicion.

Greensill Brothers Logging declined to comment on the incident this week, while a spokesman for Agriculture Minister Tara Moriarty, who is responsible for FCNSW, said there was no place for violence from any staff or contractors, but referred further questions to the corporation itself.

In as statement FCNSW said it expected all staff and contractors to behave to the “highest standards of ethical behaviour, integrity and professional conduct in the course of their work” . That day at Wild Cattle Creek, the statement said, the contractors’ behaviour was completely unacceptable, though its own staff member behaved appropriately and reported the matter to police.

Even as the court proceedings wound to a close, Graham found himself at odds with loggers again.

In December Forestry Corp surveyors appeared at one of his bush properties, 400 hectares of old-growth rainforest that adjoins the Clouds Creek State Forest, and which contains habitat trees for endangered greater gliders. They carefully marked the border with stakes.

Then, a week before Monday’s hearing, a bulldozer crossed the border, gouged out a path 15 metres onto his land and toppled a New England Blackbutt that four nights earlier Graham had recorded greater gliders feeding in.

They left the tree lying across his access road.

By way of apology a FCNSW regional manager has since written to Graham to say that contractors had “identified a hazardous tree” which needed to “be removed to ensure safety in the vicinity”.

“It was determined that the only safe way to remove the tree and the safety hazard was to enter the small distance into the neighbouring property to push the base of the tree with a dozer, thereby allowing the head to come down out of the trees, within the forest, in a relatively slow and safe manner.

“On reflection, Forestry Corporation and the contractor should have sought to make contact with the landholder prior to entering the property and undertaking the work.”

Graham reads it differently.

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