Talking Point: Savaging a priceless landscape

BOB BROWN details the destruction that the environmental movement has fought to resist over the past five or so decades.

Logged forest looking towards Mt Field. Picture: KEVIN KIERNAN

KEVIN Kiernan named The Wilderness Society — or the Tasmanian Wilderness Society as it was called until the Franklin River was saved — in 1976 and is its ostensible founder and first director.

He has a singular sense of humour. However, reading his book, Eroding the Edges of Nature, left me quite unhumoured with facts uglier than fiction.

These are for starters:

■Tasmania was the last state of Australia to declare a national park: Mt Field.

■The government then dammed the most glorious and popular lake in the park.

■It excised the renowned forests from the park for logging.

■The logging company said it would enhance the park’s appearance.

■A Royal Commission found that the forestry minister and his officials had taken bribes but no criminal offence was recorded.

■The loggers’ fires later also burnt back into the park’s remaining forests.

■So the government let the loggers ‘salvage’ the burnt forests in the park.

■ All this damaged vegetation, soils, limestone caves and glacial moraines.

Through this saga rides park-defending hero and bushwoman extraordinaire Jessie Luckman on her way to being almost entirely forgotten, and environmental brigand Electric Eric Reece, well on his way to becoming Tasmania’s most popular premier.

Kiernan recounts how the flooding of Lake Pedder and its national park was illegal but was legitimised when Reece, as Labor premier, pushed retrospective legalisation through a compliant parliament.

Earlier, the original Lake St Clair (“the most beautiful place in Australia”) was dammed for hydro-electricity. As well, Labor Premier Ogilvie assured the electorate: “Hobart would have a water supply large enough to supply a city the size of London.” Hobart neither grew to London’s size nor received a drop of water from the scheme.

The dam’s flooding resulted in erosion of the foreshore and death of much lakeside forest, and the sand dunes and beaches were quarried for sand, despite the Hydro-Electric Commission head assuring Tasmania that “the scenic beauties at the southern end of Lake St Clair will not be affected”. These days the system is abandoned and obsolete and the River Derwent’s waters flow from the restored natural level of the lake, but the rotting trunks of giant fallen trees where once there had been dunes speak of those past iniquities.

The island state has had more excised from its national parks, largely for logging, than all other states put together.

In recording forgotten conservation battles going back as far as the 19th century the focus of the book is not merely on what happened, but also on why so many of Tasmania’s greatest natural treasures have been lost. Local social and political circumstances have provided fertile ground for persistently deficient governance and excessively cosy relationships in the small Tasmanian community to endure. But tactics familiar to environmentalists everywhere have included unconscionable political and corporate behaviour and deliberate corruptions of proper process. Tasmanian conservationists haven’t so much fought separate battles over the years but rather the same battle over and over again.

Tourism now plays a larger role in the Tasmanian economy than the forest industry that achieved revocation of the forests from Mt Field park ever did. Eyeing the Hodgman Government’s genuflection before utilitarian profiteers by giving open slather for top-end resorts in the wilderness, Kiernan writes “there would appear to be little difference between the noxious anti-social tactics that have been employed by previous advocates of dams, quarries and logging in the wilderness and the level to which some proponents of more recent tourism developments have shown themselves ready to stoop in a bid to further their own ambitions”.

There are bids for private resorts as fostered by Premier Hodgman at Frenchmans Cap, the Walls of Jerusalem, on the shoulder of Cradle Mountain, Federation Peak, Bruny Island Lighthouse and along the wild South Cape Track. Kiernan contends that dressing up such inappropriate developments as ecotourism is a greenwashing exercise that not only misleads clients who want the real thing, but also commercially disadvantages those tourism operators who genuinely seek to provide it.

These new proposals come on top of the Three Capes Walk tourist development, financed by taxpayers through the sale of a Bass Strait ferry for $35 million, with its top-end resort option given over to a single lucky operator. The uglier parts of its history remain unseen by visitors, such as the resulting financial neglect of the decaying track system in some other parks. (In a similar way, the interpretative signage at Three Capes omits the Royal Australian Navy’s destruction of a majestic spine of dolerite pillars at Cape Raoul when it decided they could serve no better purpose than target practice.)

The Mercury, on October 15, 1917, came to the defence of the new Mt Field National Park with a lead article proclaiming that “The only creature to be driven out of the park and kept out is the utilitarian, who would indiscriminately chop trees, spoil waterfalls, dig up rare plants, kill live things and spoil and ravage and destroy everything for a money profit … if ever there comes to exist legislators who cannot see the value of such a place we hope it will become a recognised custom to shoot them on sight whenever seen within three miles of the park.”

Oh well.

Opening the last first national park in Australia at Mt Field that year, the Governor, Sir Francis Newdegate declared: “By this reservation a typical example of Tasmanian forest will be retained in its natural state, in order that generations yet unborn may see for themselves what virgin Tasmania was like … it may truly be said that the park will be a thing of beauty and a joy forever.” Truly.

The photo on this page shows how the loggers downed that forest and “enhanced the park’s appearance” within a few short, corrupt decades.

Premier Hodgman has recently exceeded his predecessors’ strategies with laws to have peaceful forest defenders jailed. Minister for Resources Guy Barnett says that will be for up to 21 years. Welcome to Tasmania.

Kevin Kiernan’s Eroding the Edges of Nature is a fine book of 488 pages with a brilliant array of photographs. It is the definitive account of the natural history of Mt Field which, in 2013, was included in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area.

Former Tasmanian senator and Greens leader, Dr Bob Brown, is founder of Bob Brown Foundation