Heart of the Nation: Denison Forest, Tasmania

Matthew Newton’s image of activist Anna Brozek standing on the giant stump of a felled 80m mountain ash speaks volumes.

“I feel a pain in the heart”: Anna Brozek. Picture: Matthew Newton

This is one of those times when a picture really is worth a thousand words. The image from Matthew Newton’s Forest Wars series, exhibiting at the Head On festival in Sydney, shows activist Anna Brozek standing on the stump of a native mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans) in the Denison Forest of southern Tasmania. This mighty tree stood around 80m tall before loggers moved in to begin clear-felling the area, ­rendering it all into sawlogs and woodchips. What was ­Brozek feeling as she struck this defiant pose? “A pain in the heart, and a sense of deep confusion, because it’s just so wrong,” she muses. “And then anger.”

Tasmanian photographer Matthew Newton. Picture: Chris Kidd

Brozek, 26, was working as a chef in a swanky Merivale restaurant in Sydney until four years ago, when she visited Tasmania and fell in with a crowd of forest activists. She never went back to her old life. She embraced, instead, a life of higher purpose, working for the Bob Brown Foundation, joining blockades against the encroachment of mining and logging interests in the vast Takayna/Tarkine wilderness area and campaigning for an end to the logging of native forests across the state. Newton, who has documented the battle over Tasmania’s forests for two decades, has seen a notable change in activist ranks in recent years. “A new wave of young women have been arriving on the scene and taking on leadership roles,” he says. “Anna is one of the fierce new voices around the fight for the forests.”

For Brozek, the past four years have been “completely transformational in terms of my worldview, and having faith in my own power, my own voice, my own will to do something”, she explains. “Before, my attitude had been ‘I can’t change anything, I can’t influence anything, so I’ll just worry about surviving.’ Now, I truly believe I can make a difference. I believe that with every cell in my body.”