Charles Wooley: We’re so damn lucky in our slice of heaven
With Tasmania having so far been spared the worst of the fallout from the pandemic, Charles Wooley ponders whether we really are the chosen people.
Opinion
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For weeks now as Tasmanians have frolicked so freely in our island fortress – as if oblivious to the miseries across the water – I have been tempted to ask: “Do we think we are the Chosen People?”
The authorities have been long warning us “It is not if but when.” Yet somehow, as if by providential grace, we have been spared the plague.
I’m no believer and regard the Old Testament as an interesting apocryphal document melding more fiction than fact.
But can our delivery so far be put down to the wisdom of our rulers, good organisation and farsighted planning?
If a brief answer was ever required to a rhetorical question, it would be “No”.
So many mistakes have been made, so many people have behaved badly (and given inconsequential fines) yet it seems we have repeatedly dodged a bullet, until now.
I doubt there is an old bloke with a white beard up there in the sky looking after half a million Tasmanians while disregarding the fate of the rest of humanity.
It just looks that way.
Until it doesn’t.
Pray if you wish but also consider the infinite and profane wisdom of my former employer, the late Kerry Packer, who after resuscitation, declared: “Mate, I died and let me tell you, there’s f...... nothing there.”
I have spent a lot of time in unpleasant parts of the world reporting on the random cruelties of life.
Ten years ago, an earthquake struck the Haitian city of Port-au-Prince at the precise moment the medical school was holding a graduation ceremony for the latest cohort of much-needed nurses.
My film crew and I arrived two days later in time to see shocking scenes. In the tropical heat, legs and arms, decomposing parts of the nurse’s white-uniformed bodies, were being pulled from the heavy concrete wreckage of the medical school.
The images were too gruesome to broadcast but I have never forgotten them.
For some people it might have looked like the work of the Devil or even of a vengeful god.
But of course, geologically, in Haiti an earthquake is always on the cards. And this week, 10 years later, Haiti has suffered another.
The awful coincidence I observed back in 2010, in which all the nurses were congregated inside a large building at precisely the wrong time, was just bad luck.
Just as it has been mostly sublime good luck that our island – with its frail medical capacity – has been so far spared the plague.
So far, only our moat explains our fortune. As moats often do just as the Bard told us...
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war.
The Tassie tourism industry might prefer we were joined to the mainland but back in 1595 writing Richard II, Shakespeare knew better as he defined the benefits of England’s insularity:
This precious stone set in a silver sea,
Which serves in the office of a wall
Or as a Moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.
Yes, I know Shakespeare didn’t have Sustainable Timbers Tasmania nor Big Salmon to contend with, but he did know a thing or two about plague.
I started darkly, but as the picture below shows, there was a promise we might go somewhere nice.
The trout season is again upon me. In my case this isn’t such bad news for the fish. I scarcely bother them. My greater pleasure is to stalk the water margins of lakes and rivers and enjoy the trouty habitat. I love how in the mornings and late afternoons, the slanting light picks out the white gums, and brilliantly reflects them in the still waters.
And at day’s end I am exhilarated by how the swallows swoop and dive as they lace up the gathering darkness.
On the Central Plateau at the beginning of the week the air temperature was 4C and the water around zero. Snow was lying on the ground and every creek, puddle and pond was overflowing.
It was too early for bird song. But the air was alive with the sound of water on stone. For me that is the eternal sound of my island.
Dusty the dog loved this watery place and of course he fell into it, as I did frequently at his age in dog years. He is one and a half years old, so about 10 in human.
At that age I was captured by the wild world.
Wily old Mother Nature had shown me her secret places, where fish lie, where birds nest and where you can frighten yourself by finding snakes.
Before the environment became a political cause it was for many Tasmanians just a simple faith. Nothing has changed. I’m still a devout adherent.
Charles Darwin and David Attenborough are my prophets.
And I should add the name of Greg Beecroft, a professional trout guide and a permanent resident of the plateau.
Greg is a natural-born piscator: a fish hunter. (No need for bad puns. The piscator has been on a health kick recently and off the shiraz.)
He knows where the fish are before they know he knows. In the least promising conditions, the freezing days of the early season, he can still drop a fly on their nose and tempt them to take it.
I can spot them not too badly, but this early my casting is clumsy.
Dusty the dog, with a 25,000-year pedigree for hunting with humans, instinctively picked Greg as the one to stick with. His remote Eurasian wolf ancestry told him that Mr Beecroft was where the action would be.
Dusty had rightly picked me for the bloke who told tales around those ancient campfires and Greg for the one who brought home dinner.
All along the wooded shore the dog never left Greg’s side. He seemed indifferent to the cold and was not even distracted by the cheeky currawongs. When Greg hooked a nice 4lb brownie (trout never went metric) Dusty remained poised, focused and perhaps a little amazed. “Oh, that’s why Charlie comes up here. I get it now.”
That night my dog slept in Greg’s room, but I was not in the least jealous. Dusty had become a piscator.
Tassie’s salmon wars: Twiggy looms as saviour
August 14
At the beginning of the week, it looked like a fait accompli. The global Brazilian meat giant, JBS was to take over Huon Aquaculture.
The company, controlled by the controversial Batista brothers, Joesley and Wesley had made a takeover bid to Huon Aquaculture’s Peter and Frances Bender who wanted to exit their salmon farming business. It was an offer too good to resist.
Peter and Frances were to cash in their chips (and fish) and retire with a swag of cash to their magnificent multimillion-dollar coastal mansion.
But it might have been a better deal for the Benders than for some of the Huon shareholders that bought in when the company was first publicly listed (at $4.75 a share) about seven years ago and held their shares.
JBS’s offer of $3.85 a share was 90c less than cost if you bought in at the beginning.
While the Benders might not have recently won many popularity contests, this week Tasmanians were suddenly inclined to recall that old aphorism: “Better the devil you know …”
On July 16, 2021, Brazil’s Rio Times reported: “Just under four years ago, brothers Joesley and Wesley were in prison cells with concrete bunks, their multibillion-dollar meat empire at risk in one of the world’s biggest corruption scandals. “Today they are free and JBS the world’s largest meat processing company, is back in the global takeover game [and] buying assets worldwide …”
In May 2017, Joesley Batista, the chairman of JBS, admitted to paying at total of $123 million in bribes to Brazilian politicians, among them the nation’s President Temer.
The JBS chief executive, Wesley Batista and his younger brother Joesley agreed to pay US$3.2 billion in fines in exchange for leniency from the Brazilian government. Thus, they avoided lengthy jail time and were soon back in business.
In Tasmania in 1989 Edmund Rouse, the chairman of Gunns Ltd, was convicted and jailed for attempting to bribe a Tasmanian Labor politician. The bribe was a paltry $110,000 (I once briefly worked for Edmund and can confirm he was a tightwad).
In 2013 John Gay, chief executive of Gunns, unloaded about $3m in company shares without telling the punters that the company was going down the tube. He was fined a modest $50,000 but got no jail time for the serious crime of insider trading, which in effect was a defrauding of his shareholders.
I rattle these skeletons for no other reason than to remind us that Tasmanians should be no strangers to corrupt business practices and that perhaps our politicians have short memories as well as an apparent naive ignorance of the ways of the world.
Extraordinarily Tasmanian Premier Peter Gutwein this week described JBS as “a very generous corporate citizen.”
Perhaps the Premier was using “generous” in an ironic sense.
Speaking early in the week for the Australian government, the former Jonathon Duniam (now also known as ‘Jonno’) was excited about JBS’s offer.
As the Assistant Federal Fisheries Minister Jonno appeared so keen on the Brazilian deal, it would be little surprise to see our Tasmanian Senator changing his name yet another time, to ‘Juan’.
Tasmanians have every right to expect that our political leaders awake from their sesta.
And in this case, they should at least know as much about the boys from Brazil as does Richard Flanagan, who is a busy man with lots of other things to do.
Between the stock market and the Foreign Investment Review Board a decision will be made irrespective of Tasmanian desires.
Ultimately Pedro and Juan are probably as powerless in this matter as the rest of us.
But we should expect our representatives to keep their eyes and ears open and to protect the interest and wellbeing of Tasmania.
They should at least look like they know what’s going on.
By week’s end, with mining tycoon Andrew Forrest’s intervention, the sale to JBS seemed by no means a done deal.
Twiggy didn’t mention the Batista brothers when interviewed. But he was very heavy on environmental protection and animal welfare, which suggested he thought those considerations hadn’t always been part of the Big Salmon core business.
Or had he just read “Toxic”?
Dr Forrest who made his billions selling iron ore to China has had something of a ‘sea-change’ since he attained his PhD in Marine Science. The WA mining magnate has become an environmental warrior for the oceans of the world.
By Thursday this week the Mercury was editorialising that Twiggy Forrest, “could be the saving grace of the industry and for Tasmanians.”
I don’t want to jinx the deal by appearing to sing from the same song book, but perhaps Dr Forrest and his Australian company Tattarang do appear the best opportunity we have of ending Tasmania’s salmon wars.
While given their history on the environment, labour relations and political bribery, the Batista bros could be the best option we have of intensifying the war.
Twiggy pointed out in JBS’s 138-page ‘scheme of implementation’ statement the company never once mentioned animal welfare nor the environment.
“I think that was a very serious omission for a company which makes its bread and butter off the environment and in animal husbandry,” Dr Forrest said.
In last week’s column I listed the Heazlewood Four Point Peace Plan as drawn up by the former executive director of Brand Tasmania Robert Heazlewood.
I reprise it today just in case Twiggy is reading.
1. The government’s Salmon Growth Plan, calling for a doubling of the industry, be scrapped.
2. No new leases or currently unused sites are allowed, including the Petuna licence in Storm Bay.
3. The industry commits to a phased-in acceptance of paying local government rates and taxes, like all other industries, over the next five years.
4. The regulator is made independent of government and is tasked to regulate.
Meanwhile Twiggy Forrest this week affirmed his animal husbandry philosophy which has as its guiding principle: “No pain, no fear.”
That’s good for the fish.
Let’s hope it also applies to our coastal communities and to all Tasmanians who treasure our waterways.
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