Doom with a view: The chainsaw vandals killing trees for a better outlook

This story is part of the January 27 edition of Good Weekend.See all 16 stories.

One afternoon in July last year, two brothers were walking along Willowie Road, in the waterfront suburb of Castle Cove, on Sydney’s north shore, when they heard what sounded like a power tool in nearby bushland. You don’t often hear power tools in the bush around Castle Cove, a sleepy suburban idyll best known for its sylvan streets and spacious backyards. Fewer than 3000 people live here, many of them professional couples with young families, but also the retired and the semi-retired, avid golfers and the social tennis set. It’s an affluent area: houses with water views can fetch over $5 million. Most people are drawn by the safety, the quiet, and above all, the natural beauty.

Unlike many of Sydney’s bayside suburbs, Castle Cove has no deep waterfront properties; there are no jetties or marinas here, just pocket-sized beaches and rocky coves, lined with oysters. Separating the water from the houses, 200 metres above, is a belt of thick bushland, home to swamp wallabies and lyrebirds, as well as Aboriginal rock carvings and middens. It was among one such piece of bushland, called H. D. Robb Reserve, that the brothers heard the power tool.

“It was a drizzly day,” says David Forsyth, the father of the two brothers, who preferred that their dad speak to me. “When the boys heard the noise, they walked to the edge of the reserve and looked down, and saw someone cutting down a tree.” They also noticed some trees that looked to have been recently felled.

The men walked on for a short while before turning around. When they came back, they saw an SUV parked on the road. There was a man in the driver’s seat, with the door ajar. On the back seat was a Caterpillar bag, the kind you carry tools in. “My sons were pretty sure this guy had been doing the cutting, and so one of them took down the guy’s number plate and called Willoughby Council.”

He was put through to a customer service officer, who said he would contact the tree services team. “After the call, my sons came and got me, and the three of us walked back along the road,” says Forsyth. “The car was still there, but the driver had gone.” Over the coming days, Forsyth, who walks regularly, saw the car several times in Willowie Road, more or less in the same spot.

The brothers never heard back from the council, and Forsyth thought nothing more of it. Then, a month later, residents in Willowie Road awoke to find the street crawling with camera crews and reporters with microphones; there were drones in the air and satellite vans blocking driveways. It emerged that a huge swathe of the reserve, almost all the way down to the water, had been razed, leaving in its place a broad, unimpeded view of the beautiful bay below.

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Getting rid of an inconvenient tree is almost a national pastime in Australia, but the vandalism in Castle Cove was extraordinary. A 3600-square-metre area – the size of 14 tennis courts – had been eradicated. Two hundred and sixty-five trees had been killed, chopped down – some with a chainsaw, others by hand. Those too big for a saw had been drilled into and injected with poison. The toll included mature red gums, banksias, blueberry ashes, Christmas bushes, 71 black she-oaks, and a majestic, 21-metre-tall angophora, thought to be up to 100 years old. The understorey – ferns, creepers, native grasses – was brown and wizened, as if burnt by acid. A sign warning of previous tree vandalism in the area had been torn out of the ground and thrown down the embankment.

“It’s shocking,” says Tanya Taylor, the mayor of Willoughby Council, who I meet one morning at the site. “We can’t even replant yet because there’s still chemicals in the soil.”

Taylor, who has a background in event management, has short dark hair and the briskly cordial air of a woman with an unfeasibly busy schedule. In TV news reports shortly after the incident, she appeared by turns baffled and angry; now, weeks later, she is more matter-of-fact. “We need trees to survive,” she says. I ask who she thought was responsible, and she tilts her head toward the nearby houses. “It seems someone wanted a better view of the water. But to me, the trees are as much a part of the view as the water.”

Willoughby Council Mayor Tanya Taylor, who described the vandalism as “shocking”.Credit: Louie Douvis

Because of its scale, it’s thought that the vandalism took place over weeks, if not months, and most likely by more than one person. They left little behind as evidence, save for two green gloves and small bottle of poison, leaning against a tree trunk. Tests have shown the poison was a herbicide, similar to Roundup, a glyphosate-based substance that has been linked to cancer in humans and is banned in many countries. There is now concern that the poison could harm burrowing animals such as bandicoots and echidnas, as well as marine life, should it filter into the bay below.

In the days and weeks after the news broke, council officers door-knocked houses in Willowie Road, and also in Neerim Road, which runs parallel to it, further up the hill. “We’ve had a bit of feedback,” Taylor tells me, with an expression that suggests it’d been largely useless. The council also conducted letterbox drops, offering $10,000 for information that leads to a successful prosecution.

In the meantime, the council placed a large mobile billboard at the site, effectively blocking whatever view those responsible hoped to gain by removing the trees. The billboard featured an aerial shot of the vandalised area, and a plea for assistance. When I visit, however, the billboard is gone. “People in nearby homes complained that the lights from the sign were keeping them up at night,” Taylor says.

In lieu of the billboard, the council has strung up two large banners in the bush. They read TREES SHOULDN’T DIE FOR A VIEW and SELFISH ACTS OF DESTRUCTIVE VANDALISM HAVE OCCURRED IN THIS AREA. The banners are supposedly being monitored, 24/7, by a 360-degree security camera mounted nearby on what looks like a dune buggy. But one of them has partly come free and is hanging limply; the other has fallen into the bush below. “Obviously no one is checking the footage,” Taylor says, sighing.

Across the road, in one of the half-built houses, a labourer is sitting on a sandstone block eating a sandwich and staring out over the water, which glitters below, ruffled by a gentle breeze. He nods at me and smiles, and I think: what a lovely place for lunch.

One of the banners hung by the council in response to the environmental vandalism.Credit: Nick Moir

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Everyone loves trees, or at least they say they do, and with good reason. Trees are canonical beings. They provide oxygen, shade and homes for animals; they are noble and uncomplaining, stoic in the face of endless insults from nature and man alike. Recent research suggests they communicate with one another via their roots, and support sick trees of the same species by exchanging nutrients. “Trees have just as much character as humans,” Peter Wohlleben, author of The Hidden Life of Trees, told Yale Environment 360 in 2016, adding, “[But] nobody thinks about [their] inner life … the feelings of these wonderful living beings.”

In an urban environment, trees are often how we interface with nature; unfortunately for trees, they are also how we interact with our neighbours. Trees push over fences or block the sun. People get back at their neighbours by killing their trees. You’d think the fact that humans are hurtling into climate oblivion would make us more tolerant of trees, but it appears not: in 2022-23, trees were cited as an issue in almost 40 per cent of neighbourhood disputes in NSW, up from 32 per cent just two years before. Melbourne’s trees have it worse; by 2018, the city’s western suburbs had just 5.5 per cent canopy cover. Nobody, it seems, can agree what to do with trees. Western Sydney’s Blacktown City Council, the biggest council in NSW and the fourth largest in Australia, averages 50 calls a week about them, evenly split between residents who want to chop them down and residents who want to plant more of them.

Penalties for illegally killing trees on your land vary from the prohibitive to non-existent. Perth, for example, has no fines for the removal of trees on private property, unless the tree is registered with the council as significant. In Victoria, meanwhile, you can be fined anywhere between $2000 to $4000. In NSW, chopping down a tree on your property without approval can incur an on-the-spot fine of $3000, or $6000 for a business. If the matter goes to the Land and Environment Court, the amount can go up to $220,000 for an individual and $1.1 million for a corporation.

But such fines are virtually unheard of. As far as I can tell, the largest penalty for illegally removing trees in NSW is $93,500 in 2015, given to solicitor Paul O’Shanassy, who cleared an entire hillside on his Southern Highlands property, including 10,000 cubic metres of soil and a stand of old-growth eucalypts. He apparently wanted to extend his home and get a better view of the Sydney skyline, which would, he boasted, improve the value of his property by $1.5 million. (In addition to his fine, O’Shanassy had to pay the legal costs for Wingecarribee Council of more than $300,000.)

As O’Shanassy’s case attests, environmental vandalism often comes down to a cost-benefit analysis. A developer working on a $300 million project might regard a $1.1 million fine as the cost of doing business. And $3000 certainly isn’t going to stop anyone. Ryde Council, in Sydney’s north, received some 450 complaints about illegal clearing in 2022. (It didn’t prosecute any of them.) In Ku-ring-gai, in Sydney’s northern suburbs, the council issued 47 penalties and 43 cautions for illegal tree removal in 2020-21. “Every year we issue cautions and penalties, and it seems like, if anything, there’s a gradual increase,” Councillor Alec Taylor told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2022.

In 2020, the council had a rare victory when it won a conviction against David Chia, a 71-year-old man whose contractors removed 74 trees from his property and the nearby Roseville Golf Club in 2014. The trees – red gums, black sheoaks and casuarinas – were home to owls, frogs and cockatoos. The case was a monster: it took five years and referenced 41 other cases; the judgment alone ran to 534 paragraphs. Chia was fined $40,000, but in 2021 he appealed and won, and his conviction was overturned. The primary judge had not made a clear finding about whether or not Chia directed the contractors to comply with all relevant laws, which was central to his defence.

In the circumstances, it’s a minor miracle that the case made it to court. Even when they are reported, which they often aren’t, and even when a culprit can be identified, which they invariably can’t, cases of illegal tree removal often disappear into a bowl of regulatory spaghetti, where a range of government agencies have different and sometimes intersecting responsibilities and powers depending on what tree/shrub/plant was removed from what piece of land using what particular method. Councils are responsible for investigating vandalism on council reserves but may also look into offences on private property. The National Parks and Wildlife Service only looks after national parks and reserves. The NSW Environment Protection Authority usually only gets involved if the damage involves the use of pesticides, not herbicides, as was the case in Castle Cove.

The understorey of the denuded Castle Cove bushland was left brown and wizened.Credit: Nick Moir

And even though it’s nominally the police’s job to investigate any damage to property, public or private, whether it’s a red gum or a push bike, in reality they only get involved if one neighbour kills a tree on another neighbour’s property, and even then there’s very little they can do. (When I asked NSW police if they would perform any forensic testing on the gloves left behind at Castle Cove, they said no. “We wouldn’t be looking at charges,” a spokesman explained, “because the council is leading the investigation, and anyway it’s all under an environmental act or something.”) Then there is the Department of Planning and Environment, whose main job is to say how bad it is to kill trees.

Meanwhile, people keep killing trees. A row of Norfolk pines just north of Wollongong. Twenty-one newly planted native trees in Coburg, in Melbourne. In late November, some 300 trees and other plants were chopped down and poisoned in a harbourside reserve in Longueville, on Sydney’s lower north shore. The local mayor, Scott Bennison, said he would “throw the book” at the culprits, but no one has so far been prosecuted.

The lack of repercussions has birthed an industry of underground “arborists”, men with chainsaws who will show up at short notice, like hitmen, to liquidate troublesome trees. “They have been going around our area in trucks with the number plates taken off, so they’re untraceable,” says Kristyn Haywood, who lives in Pymble, in Sydney’s northern suburbs, and is the convenor of the Voices of Ku-ring-gai community group. “They usually turn up on a weekend, when the council isn’t available.”

One Saturday morning last November, a workman arrived at a property in West Pymble in an Isuzu truck with no number plates and began chainsawing several protected trees in the front yard. “The trees included an ancient angophora and a 20-metre-tall turpentine, which was once part of the Sydney Turpentine Ironbark Forest, which is listed as a critically endangered ecological community,” says Haywood. The man did not have approval to remove the turpentine. When confronted by a neighbour, he doubled down, insisting he was returning the next day to remove another tree.

“People who sign up to Tree Watch go on a WhatsApp group that alerts us of trees in the area that are at risk.”

Kristyn Haywood

The following day, a dozen residents showed up at the property to stop him, but the “arborist” never came back. When the local council became aware of the removals, it halted construction pending an investigation. The builders, a Sydney company called ARC Projects Group, which claims on its website to be “committed to incorporating ecologically sustainable design”, did not respond to a request for comment. The property’s owners have since been fined but the council was not prepared to tell me how much.

In September, Haywood and others launched Tree Watch, a community initiative akin to Neighbourhood Watch, only for trees. “People who sign up to Tree Watch go on a WhatsApp group that alerts us of trees in the area that are at risk,” she says. “When the chainsaw noises start, the WhatsApp group lights up.” Locals can also put a Tree Watch poster on their gate. “The poster has a QR code which goes straight to a page on the council website that allows you to check if properties in the area have approval to cut down their trees. If not, you can report it immediately.”

A big part of Tree Watch is education. “[Some people] are not lovers of trees,” says Haywood. “That’s just a fact. They don’t like the bugs they bring and the leaves they drop on the driveway and in the pool, and they might not appreciate the role that trees play in the environment. So Tree Watch members can knock on doors and say, for example, ‘Did you know that you have Angophora costata in your backyard?’ And they’ll explain how important that tree is to animal habitat and biodiversity.”

It’s all about awareness, says Haywood. “We’re trying to impress on people that protecting trees is in all of our best interests.”

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The vandalism in Castle Cove and Longueville is modest compared to the mass clearing that occurs in remote areas, where tens of thousands of hectares are bulldozed by farmers every year. But in the cities, where most Australians live, freelance lumberjacking is starting to have an impact. More than half of Sydney’s councils lost urban forest cover between 2013 and 2020. According to University of Melbourne arboricultural expert Greg Moore, Melbourne’s eastern suburbs have lost about 10 per cent of their canopy in the past decade.

“I put it down to a general indifference to the environment and developer-friendly councils,” Ian Hundley, a local tree campaigner, who lives in Balwyn North, tells me. Hundley, a retired public servant, sports a thick head of
silvery hair and a mirthless, headmasterly demeanour. He’s lived in Balwyn North for 35 years. “After World War II, the pattern was that when you built a house you planted trees,” he says. “Back then the houses that were built were modest in size, first because there were restrictions on materials, and second because people didn’t have as much money as now. But in the past few decades we’ve seen people’s incomes increase at the same time as there’s been fairly complacent regulation, so now we are getting boundary-to-boundary McMansions.”

Tree campaigner Ian Hundley, from Balwyn North in Melbourne, attributes the loss of canopy to “a general indifference to the environment and developer-friendly councils”.Credit: Wayne Taylor

Balwyn North is stolidly middle-class: private schools, large blocks, nice cars. It’s leafy, which is part of its charm, but the area has long had a vexed relationship to its natural environment. For all intents and purposes, there were, historically speaking, no rules around removing trees. “It was pretty much open slather,” Hundley says. Then Boroondara Council flagged the introduction of a new law in late 2006 which imposed a $2000 fine for removing a tree with a circumference of more than 1.1 metres measured at 1.5 metres from ground level. In the months leading up to the law taking effect, fly-by-night arborists went knocking on doors. According to Hundley, “they’d point to trees in your backyard, and say ‘Would you like that whipped out? You’ve still got time.’ ” Plenty of people took them up.

The fine stayed at $2000 until late 2023 when the state government increased it to $3800. But illegal tree felling has continued apace. Hundley reckons there are five illegal removals for every legal one. The council is now requesting the state government increase it to $20,000.

Apart from the heresy of killing a tree in a world which has less and less of them, actions like those of Paul O’Shanassy demonstrate an astonishing sense of entitlement. Farmers in the Amazon clear bush to raise food. The government removes trees to build roads, but those roads will eventually benefit the community. Paul O’Shanassy killed trees to benefit Paul O’Shanassy.

The pain of such losses can be acute. When the famous Sycamore Gap tree in the UK was chopped down in September, it made world news. The tree, thought to be 300 years old, grew in a dramatic dip beside Hadrian’s Wall, in Northumberland, and was considered a national treasure. Melbourne similarly went into shock in 2015, when the 400-year-old Separation Tree died after having been ring-barked. The river red gum, beneath which locals celebrated Victoria’s separation from NSW in 1850, was one of the few trees left in Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens that pre-dated European settlement. (No one has been charged with its destruction.)

Trees embody an intrinsic good that is antagonistic not only to vandals but the nihilism of late-stage capitalism, which knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Assigning a dollar value to urban trees might be the best way to address this. As it happens, there are several systems, here and overseas, that aim to do just that. In Australia, many state governments and local councils use their own tree valuation systems, most of which are based on the Burnley Method, which was developed in 1988 by the Victorian College of Agriculture and Horticulture. The Burnley Method calculates the value of a tree based on its size, location, form, health (or “vigour”) and life expectancy. Other methods consider a tree’s cultural and heritage value, its aesthetic properties and significance to the local community. The dollar value of the trees can then be used in negotiations between state and local government and developers.

The UK’s Sycamore Gap tree, which was thought to be 300 years old, was killed in September 2023.Credit: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

“Let’s say a developer wants to build a 40-storey high-rise in the CBD, and they need to get some large cranes in,” says Stephen Livesley, a professor in urban horticulture at the University of Melbourne. “To do that, they have to remove six street trees. So they will request permission from the City of Melbourne, and the City of Melbourne says, ‘Okay, we value these trees at $80,000 each.’ And at that point, the developer usually goes, ‘In that case, we only need to remove three of those trees.’ And so in that way, the valuation method can lead to good environmental outcomes.”

The systems aren’t perfect. It can be difficult to value intangible assets. Some research suggests that hospital patients with leafy views recover faster than those without, reducing health costs. But it’s unclear how such benefits would be factored into the price of an individual tree.

In any case, such valuations usually only apply to public land. Some people, including Livesley, believe they should be used to calculate fines for people who illegally kill trees on private property. “If you kill a 120-year-old river red gum, that’s a serious offence. The penalty should be hundreds of thousands of dollars. That tree is a national asset, just like a heritage building. It means so much to our sense of place and connection to country, to biodiversity habitat, to the birds and mammals that are using that for food and for their life cycle. Trees are so rare in the urban landscape now, they have to be valued accurately, or else people will keep on killing them.”

Melbourne’s 400-year-old Separation Tree died in 2015 after being ring barked. Those responsible have not been charged.Credit: Penny Stephens

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In early 2018, Emma Nicholas and her family returned from their Christmas holidays to their home in Artarmon, on Sydney’s north shore, to find that three newly planted pear trees and a 25-metre-tall eucalypt in their backyard had died. The trees, which ran along her side of the fence with a neighbour, had been perfectly healthy when they left a month earlier. “I suspected straight away that our neighbour had killed them because he had complained about the pear trees, which he said would shade his house if they got any bigger.”

Nicholas, who teaches English to migrants, still lives in the same property with her husband and two young daughters. They are all nature lovers: Emma volunteers for WIRES, the animal rescue group, and her girls, who were nine and five in 2018, would sit and watch, rapt, as their eucalypt in the backyard filled with birds every day. “The trees gave us so much joy,” Nicholas says.

After the poisonings, Nicholas paid $2000 to have the soil tested with SESL Australia, the environmental consultancy. The test came back positive for glyphosate. The eucalypt had most likely been injected but the smaller trees had been sprayed. “They died from [the neighbour’s] side first, so it’s pretty clear where the poison came from.” One morning shortly after the incident, Nicholas walked out to her car and saw her neighbour standing in his driveway with two young labourers. “They were looking up at the dead gum tree and laughing.”

She letterboxed the neighbourhood asking for information but to no avail. She then took the soil test to the police who, after some nagging, came out and questioned the neighbour, who denied any involvement. There was no CCTV footage, no witnesses. Nicholas’ sense of powerlessness was compounded by the remediation costs: removing the dead trees cost $4000; replacing them with new trees cost thousands more. “But the most upsetting thing was the sense of being violated,” she says. “It’s enough to make us want to move, but we aren’t able to at the moment.”

The animus unleashed by such incidents can poison a whole neighbourhood. In the weeks following the mass kill in Castle Cove, the local community Facebook page, Willoughby Living, which now has 39,000 members, all but erupted. People demanded that police “interrogate” nearby homeowners. One person suggested starting a GoFundMe page to hire private investigators. Members posted satellite images of the affected area, made calls for dashcam footage, and researched the sales history of local properties. “Was it overseas money?” someone asked. “Or local born and bred?” Perhaps the council “had approved the destruction”, one member wrote, “to make room for development?”

Angry locals called for the government to compulsorily acquire the nearby properties “and knock them down”. That nobody heard chainsaws “beggars belief”, one man wrote. “It’s almost as if there has been a conspiracy of that cluster of homeowners to keep silent.”

One of those homeowners is a man called Steve. Steve, who for obvious reasons didn’t want to provide his surname, lives in one of the nearby homes. “It’s been terrible,” he tells me, when we speak out the front of his house. “We were brutally vilified. People would walk past, look at the council signs, and then turn around and look at our house, and we were hiding inside.” Steve and his family have lived in the same property for 21 years. “It’s a tight neighbourhood, and the seeds of doubt were sown. My wife would say hello to people in the street – people we pass regularly – and they would look the other way.” Eventually, he contacted all their close friends. “I said, ‘Look, if you’ve got any doubts, please drop them. If we wanted to do this, we would have done it 20 years ago.’ ”

I ask how he hadn’t heard anything. “People always ask that,” he says. “They say, ‘Surely you must have heard something – surely!’ But we didn’t. I’m convinced they didn’t use chainsaws because we definitely would have heard that. People also say, ‘Oh, it would have increased the value of our properties.’ But we rarely think of the value of our property because we intend to die here.”

Steve has his own ideas about who is responsible. He says they appeared to be perfectly nice. Indeed, he helped store some of their equipment in his garage. Once the vandalism occurred, they stopped talking. and Steve removed their equipment. “What else can you do? It certainly makes moving forward harder because we all like to get along with our neighbours.”

Steve, like Emma Nicholas, is resigned to the likelihood that no one will be held accountable. But unlike Steve, Nicholas has found her own form of redress. The pear trees that were poisoned in her backyard had been deciduous. “That’s part of the reason I planted them,” she told me. “So my neighbour on that side could get some winter sun.”

But when it came to replacing them, she opted for blueberry ashes. Blueberry ashes, which have pretty pink flowers, grow much taller than a pear tree. They also happen to be evergreen, which means that they will, when fully grown, block out more sun than a pear tree ever would have. “But given everything that’s happened,” Nicholas says, “I’m not particularly worried about that.”

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