They weren’t hippies, but Hugh and Nan started Australia’s first anti-logging protest

This story is part of the September 21 edition of Good Weekend.See all 15 stories.

Hugh Nicholson’s ears pricked when he heard a truck in the nearby subtropical rainforest. It was a strange sound. No trucks had been in this forest. Nicholson decided to investigate.

It was 1974, in February, the hottest and most humid month in the Byron Bay hinterland. Nicholson, all two metres of him, was in his short shorts, work boots and grey T-shirt. Little did he know that this day was to change the rest of his life, and the lives of thousands of others. Forest giants – figs, red cedars, white booyongs, carabeens, black beans, quangdongs and hoop pine – some hundreds of years old, soared into the sky above him. Bangalow palms, ferns, orchids, climbing epiphytes and lilies comprised the understorey. Birdsong and cascading water in Terania Creek provided the music. It was a magic world, untouched for ­millions of years.

Nicholson came across the truck and three workers. They were clearing drains with pick and shovels. At the time, the area was state forest. The workers told Nicholson that they were preparing the place for logging.

This meant the harvesting of any valuable rainforest trees, then clearing and burning off the rest. The plan was to replant the area with eucalypts, which the Forestry Commission of NSW regarded as more valuable timber than the original “scrub”.

Local activists and forest saviours Hugh and Nan Nicholson.Credit: Lorrie Graham Photographer

Nicholson and his wife Nan were horrified. They were not hippies. They were rather ­conservative. Far from moving into the Byron hinterland to smoke dope, eat magic mushies and dance naked round a fire, the young couple had left Melbourne in 1972 to start a life closer to nature on their newly purchased small farm at the end of Terania Creek Road near The Channon, not far from Lismore and Nimbin.

They knew something had to be done to stop this destruction and got the news out, rallying others in the valley and in Nimbin, many from the newly created communes. A movement was underway to save the rainforest.

Australia’s first ever anti-logging protest was seeded. And it was a fight that raised ­passions because it was a fight to preserve rare, ancient, Antarctic, Gondwanan subtropical rainforest. This rainforest was called the “Big Scrub” – a common name for a very ­uncommon rainforest. No one then actually knew just how rare and valuable this rainforest was. Some lineages can be dated back 250 million years.

But locals did know how beautiful it was, and they also knew that this “Big Scrub” had been decimated over the ­previous 145 years. In 1830, the “Big Scrub” spanned more than 75,000 hectares. By 1970, it had been reduced to just 1000 hectares, first by the “cedar cutters” – the loggers – and then cleared and burnt by incoming farmers.

Protesters confront a bulldozer at Terania Creek, in the Byron Bay hinterland, 1979. After a four-week blockade, the NSW government halted logging in the area.Credit: David Kemp

The Nicholsons and the hippies in the nearby valleys never gave up the fight to preserve the pristine rainforest, creating a turning point in Australia’s environmental history. They lobbied the government for five years, but the NSW Forestry Commission was still determined to log. In August 1979, the bulldozers came down the hill but were met by a hundred or so ragged demonstrators. They were just standing on the road, blocking the advance of loggers and machinery. No one knew what to do – the loggers, the police and demonstrators were all confused. There was an initial retreat but then, a few days later, a hundred police arrived with the loggers.

The fight was really on. The activists had to invent a whole range of tactics. Non-violent activism was stressed on the basis that the police were a lot better at violence than the activists. But roads were destroyed, cars used to block dozers and machinery damaged.

Nan and Hugh Nicholson, with their children, at the time of the blockade.Credit: David Kemp

These tactics were exported to other environmental demonstrations – to the Franklin River in Tasmania, then the Daintree Rainforest in Northern Queensland and ­internationally. The NSW government halted the logging after the four-week forest war at Terania, but there was no guarantee it would be completely stopped.

A second campaign against logging was needed; this occurred in 1982 at nearby Mount Nardi. The government knew that the activists were not going away. But also, after the 1981 election, the then NSW premier, Neville Wran, rejigged his cabinet, removing the pro-logging politicians, whom he called the “plug uglies”. He now had the power to act.

The NSW government created the 8080-­hectare Nightcap National Park, which ­included the area that was going to be logged at Terania. The government also created national parks right down the spine of NSW.

The activists couldn’t believe their success. Suddenly, there was a realisation that activism was worth it; that voices could be raised and change could be won. Terania injected the spirit of activism into the region, which remains alive and well today.

Terania Creek demonstrators in 1979.Credit: David Kemp

In May 1983, Wran told the NSW State Labor Conference that saving the rainforests was the most significant contribution of the state Labor government in the 20th century. Bob Carr, premier of NSW between 1995 and 2005, later observed that these blockades turned Labor green.

All this could never have occurred without the surge in the counter-culture in the Northern Rivers area of NSW in the 1970s. This was a very radical decade, with demonstrations against the Vietnam War and ­apartheid, as well as rebellion against post-war conservatism and rigid social expectations.

The Aquarius Festival in 1973 in Nimbin was a watershed event that celebrated the new ­politics of the era. The counter-culture moved into northern NSW; it couldn’t go to Queensland. Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the state’s hard-right then premier, and his ­corrupt police force did not welcome hippies. There was suddenly a critical mass in the Northern Rivers that changed the politics from National Party to Green environmentalism. For the first time, forests and nature were not seen as simply a resource to be exploited. Instead, they were seen as a living body that needed protection.

And this counter-culture created a new relationship with the Indigenous people of the region – the people of the Bundjalung Nation. Pastor Frank Roberts, an Indigenous elder, said that the hippies were the first people to listen to the Bundjalung, that they stood side-by-side with them.

At the Aquarius Festival, the first-ever Welcome to Country was offered by Indigenous Australians to the new white Australians. As it turned out, the hippies were on the right side of history.

This is an edited extract from Rainforest Warriors: The Hippies Were Right by Stephen Wyatt, with photography by Lorrie Graham (Macaranga, $60), out now.

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