Not kicking goals: Footy club’s performance tied to forestry industry woes

As ever more Victorian forest is locked away, Royston Nettleton says the team’s football premiership performance mirrored the timber industry’s decline.

Forestry consultant and Orbost Chamber of Commerce member Garry Squires says uncertainty over job security is creating mental health problems. Picture: Laura Ferguson

Orbost s facing what locals call “death by a thousand cuts” as the native timber industry workers that sustain the town are locked out of the vast forests that surround the town.

Orbost Snowy Rovers Football and Netball Club president Royston Nettleton said the footy team’s premiership performance mirrored the timber industry’s decline.

“From 1970 to 2002 we had two clubs in a town of about 3000, Orbost FC and Snowy FC,” Mr Nettleton said. “In those 32 years between them the two clubs won 17 senior premierships.”

“From 2003 when both clubs merged, until the present day, we haven’t won one – the stats tell the story.”

East Gippsland had 10 timber mills in the early 1990s, now it’s down to two near Orbost, one of which stood down its workers last month due to sawlog shortages.

As young families leave to find work elsewhere Mr Nettleton said the club struggled.

“We’re just on the borderline of having sufficient numbers,” he said.

Orbost District Chamber of Commerce and Industry member and forestry consultant Garry Squires said there were about 115 people directly employed in the timber industry – in harvest and haulage contracting, mills, firewood production, VicForests and local Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning forestry staff.

Orbost Snowy Rovers Football and Netball Club president Royston Nettleton

Those 115 timber workers represent 25 per cent of Orbost’s 470 fulltime jobs, according to survey work conducted by Mr Squires for the East Gippsland Timber Industry Stakeholders group, which includes contractors, sawmills and the Chamber of Commerce.

“People in Melbourne are worried about the cost of living,”Mr Squires said. “But people down here are worried about whether they’ll have a living.

“It’s death by a thousand cuts.

“People are also dealing with a lot of uncertainty,” Mr Squires said. “There’s a lot of pent up mental health issues.”

But Orbost is not alone, with towns such as Warburton, Noojee, Violet Town, Powelltown, Heyfield, Corryong and Benalla feeling the impact of court imposed injunctions on harvesting state forests and the Andrews Government’s promising to phase out native forest harvesting by 2030.

Normally about 6000ha of coupes are harvested each year. But that area has now dropped to 3000ha, out of Victoria’s six million hectares of forests across parks, reserves state forests.

“It is immoral for a government in a first world country to ban harvesting of timber from its native forests, which are sustainably managed, and then import hardwood timber from third world countries where the forests are not sustainably managed and species like the orang-utan are threatened with extinction,” Mr Squires said.