The Sunday Age: In the Otways, hatchets are buried as the chainsaws fall silent. 24/5/08
Gary Tippet
May 25, 2008
TEN or 12 years ago, Roger Hardley wouldn’t have been sitting out on the verandah of the Forrest pub in the Otway Ranges. Wouldn’t have been game, he says: “They’d have lynched me.”
The ardent conservationist certainly wouldn’t have been sharing roll-yer-owns, coffee and yarns with John “Bluey” Andrew, a tree-faller who’d been cutting and hauling sawlogs in the area all his adult life and still has a passion for timber that he describes this way: “I just friggin’ love it.”
But today Roger is welcome at the pub and he and Bluey are firm, if unlikely, friends. “The relationship is a classic Australian mateship now,” he enthuses. “Bluey gives me a chop-out on different things, I help him with others. We’re just quintessential Aussie mates.”
Still, he admits, they are something of an anomaly in that neck of the woods. “I mean, I put him out of f—in’ business and now we’re the best of mates.”
Bluey hasn’t cut a tree this year and on Friday the last of the chainsaws, bulldozers and timber jinkers will fall silent as the final licence to log native forests in the Otways runs out. It is the end phase in a process started during the 2002 state election campaign when premier Steve Bracks did a U-turn on long-standing Labor forestry policy and announced he would end logging in the Otways and woodchipping in the Wombat Forest.
That, in turn, had followed years of bitter and often bloody confrontations between loggers and conservationists in the Otways, at places like Ciancio and Wild Dog Ridge, where Bluey and Roger first met and opposed each other across blockades and police lines.
The pair are the personification of the massive changes in the area and in community attitudes towards logging.
Roger was a former union official with the Merchant Service Guild when he retired to a small farm in the Otways in 1984 “for the quiet life”. When he learned of plans to log the nearby Wild Dog Ridge he quit the quiet life and he has been a leading activist with the Otway Ranges Environment Network, or OREN, ever since.
The flame-haired, laconic Bluey has been working the Otways bush for more than 30 years, arriving as a 20-year-old to cut tree ferns in the gullies for the nursery trade, then moving into tree-falling. He’d watch the older, bearded bloke with the other greenies blockading logging coupes and sometimes getting arrested. And in the quiet times between confrontations they gradually began sharing cups of tea and views.
“From the beginning OREN never took an anti-worker attitude,” insists Roger. “These blokes were there to do a job and we were there to ensure they didn’t … We were in separate camps but over the years, at arms length, a respect developed. I could understand where he was coming from and he could see where I was coming from.”
Bluey says his attitude towards his industry was already beginning to change. He’d watch young women protesters use a length of seatbelt to climb mountain ashes to ensure they couldn’t be cut down, with a sort of admiration for their dedication.
“I’ve got an inquisitive mind. I like to look around and say ‘Where are they coming from, what’s their beef?’ and then give it a bit of thought. It was a sort of meeting of minds.
“It used to surprise me about these greenies, when you got to talk to them. They were lawyers and doctors and the like, they weren’t bloody wood-ducks.”
And he found a commonality with his growing opposition to industrial-scale woodchipping. “The whole industry has been bastardised. All this wood that’s going up the chipper now could be sawn into timber. In order to get 20,000 tonnes of sawlogs there’s probably 120,000 tonnes of woodchip. A lot is bona fide woodchip, but the vast majority is not and the whole industry knows it.
“There’s a stack of woodchip logs over at the Birregurra football ground now. If you took a bipartisan saw miller over there and said ‘What could you cut out of that’, they’d say, ‘Suburbs’.”
It’s greed, says Roger. “There’s a sign up on every Victorian forest that reads ‘Money For Nothing Free Money Here’.”
There’s a last logging crew working a coupe up on Ridge Track, a few kilometres off the Forrest to Colac Road, having, as Roger’s colleague at OREN, Simon Birrell, says, “their last hurrah, getting out as much as they can before the deadline”.
Roger refers to such die-hards as “meatheads”, but says he regrets that jobs and even a way of life had to be lost. “In many respects it is a sad day, notwithstanding that the war’s been fought and won. To have an industry that’s non-sustainable is economic lunacy.”
“It’s a bloody sad day,” says Bluey. “One thing I want to make absolutely clear here, and Roger would agree with me: the timber industry didn’t have to close down here. If it had kept its right proportion and logged for maximum value-adding in smaller coupes, it could have gone on forever.”
He admits that some of his former colleagues see him as a convert to the dark side. “I’m not a friggin’ greenie by any means, I’m a conservationist,” he says. “And I’m still a timber man through and through.”
admin @ May 28, 2008