Patriots : Defending Australia's Natural Heritage 9780702242205, 9780702235542

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PATRIOTS

PATRIOTS DEFENDING A U S T R A L I A’ S N AT U R A L H E R I TA G E

WILLIAM J. LINES

Photo: Andrew Wong

PATRIOTS William J. Lines spent much of his early life in the West Australian outdoors. After graduating with a degree in economics he backpacked around the world and later lived in Wales, Vermont and California. He worked as a waiter and builder and later started writing about Australian history and nature. Patriots is his sixth book.

Other Books by William J. Lines

Taming the Great South Land: A History of the Conquest of Nature in Australia An All Consuming Passion: Origins, Modernity, and the Australian Life of Georgiana Molloy False Economy: Australia in the Twentieth Century A Long Walk in the Australian Bush Open Air: Essays

PATRIOTS DEFENDING A U S T R A L I A’ S N AT U R A L H E R I TA G E

WILLIAM J. LINES

First published 2006 by University of Queensland Press PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia www.uqp.uq.edu.au © William J. Lines 2006

This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Typeset by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group Cataloguing in Publication Data National Library of Australia Lines, William J. Patriots: defending Australia’s natural heritage 1946–2004. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 0 7022 3554 7 ( pbk.) ISBN 978 0 7022 4220 5 ( ebook.) 1. Environmentalism – Australia – History. 2. Environmental policy – Australia – History. I. Title. 333.720994

For the life that belongs to this continent

Contents 1 STOrM

1

Speaking for nature conservation in post-war Australia

2 THIS GENTLE ArT OF BULLdOzING

20

Growing concerns: national parks, Australian Alps, Snowy river

3 HArMONy

37

Protecting beauty: Judith Wright and the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland

4 LEVEL-HEAdEd MEN

55

Fighting for Lake Pedder and the Great Barrier reef

5 ABySS OF FOLLy

72

reason and the Australian Conservation Foundation; defending the Colong Caves and the Little desert

6 GAdArENE SWINE

89

Challenging hubris, challenging mining

7 PEddErISEd

106

ripples from Lake Pedder, subversion from ecology

8 BOGUS LETTErS

124

Green Bans and greenies

9 rEVErIE

143

Whitlam dismissed, Bob Brown finds a Tasmanian home

10 COME IN PEACE ANd LOVE

161

The first blockades: Wagerup and Terania Creek

11 STrEAMS OF VILIFICATION Fudging population, saving rainforest

12 NO dAMS

197

rallying for the Franklin river

180

13 dIFFErENT rEALMS

214

Humans: victims or perpetrators?

14 VANITy FAIr

232

despoiling imagination at ACF; securing wilderness in NSW

15 dON’T yOU WOrry ABOUT THAT

249

Issues proliferate: Tasmanian forests, Wesley Vale, Moreton Island, Mount Etna, and the Very Fast Train

16 HOUSE OF THEOry

265

Seeking an intellectual frame – Greens share power in Tasmania

17 GrEEN SABOTEUr

283

dodgy venture into Ecologically Sustainable development

18 WOOdCHIPS ON STUMPS

301

recipe for a regional Forest Agreement

19 TrESPASS

318

Eating yellow cake for Jabiluka and dying in a ditch for the Fitzroy river

20 A FArT IN A CyCLONE

335

Patriots are everywhere: Cape york, Ningaloo, the Snowy river, even Canberra

Acknowledgments 356 Abbreviations 359 Select Bibliography 363 Notes 368 Index 397

Cause in history cannot be ascertained any better than motive in its human agents. Both must be represented as probable, and it is wiser to speak of conditions rather than causes and of influences rather than a force making for change, because what brings change about is the human will, which is distributed among all the living. – Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. – Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness

CHApTeR 1

Storm

Struck by light, Coral Sea molecules of air and water entwined in a thermal dance. Heat spiralled upwards. Vortices of incandescence and moisture grew and decayed. Cumulus clouds erupted and dissolved. Wind hummed across the ocean. Tiny capillary waves, centimetres in length and millimetres in height, wrinkled the sea, patterning diamond shapes of disturbance over tens of thousands of hectares of water. As draughts increased, capillaries grew and lengthened. Wavelets appeared. More inrushing wind superimposed new phrases and rhythms. Ripples merged into small waves, which combined and recombined into bigger waves. A corrugated symphony of energy radiated from the Coral Sea. On 21 March 1946, a tropical storm began moving slowly south and east towards Queensland. Bluish dark enveloped water and land. Squally southeast winds and jagged seas erupted along the State’s central coast. Within 24 hours, winds turned gale force and the storm-generated swell struck northern New South Wales. A day later, strong winds, pounding waves, and a surging swell lashed the Australian coast from Rockhampton to Newcastle. The following day, the storm’s centre lay over Fraser Island and

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heavy rain began falling all along the eastern seaboard. On Monday, the eye touched the mainland between Double Island point and Brisbane. Winds slammed against the land. Trees recoiled. Unceasing rain deluged central and southern Queensland. Rain saturated the Cooloola Sands and washed the seas, coral outcrops, and islands of the southern Great Barrier Reef. Rain fell in northern New South Wales and converged on the Mcpherson and Nightcap Ranges. Further west, over 600 millimetres of rain poured down on the ranges, valleys, and forests of the escarpment. Swollen creeks tumbled from abrupt cliffs into valleys tangled with vine and fern and flowed into the Clarence and Richmond Rivers. From Mount Killiekrankie trickles, rivulets, and streams rushed down forested slopes and filled the Bellingen River to its greatest recorded height. Floodwaters covered thousands of hectares of pasture from the Manning River to the Queensland border. Muddy waters washed eight kilometres out to sea. Down south, brisk westerlies raged through Bass Strait, rolling and scattering the cold waters. Rising seas battered the Victorian coast. Rain fell on the fire-dead mountain ash of the central highlands, trickled down the towering, tapering trunks, and drummed onto dense regrowth. Water soaked the paddocks of the wellfleshed country of western and central Gippsland. Rain fell too upon every one of hundreds of thousands of tree stumps. Rain collected on the deforested, steep slopes of the Strzelecki Ranges and swathed the eroded hill country of South Gippsland. Rain drenched the vast dripping forests of east Gippsland. Rain descended sturdily and boisterously upon all the living and the dead.1 In Bass Strait a pod of pilot whales slipped beneath the turbulent surface and, resurfacing east of Wilsons promontory, charged towards the coast. Large waves and strong onshore winds lifted them onto a sand island near the entrance to port Albert and dropped them above the high-tide level. Stranded, they slowly suffocated to death.

STORM



When news reached Melbourne, naturalist and journalist Crosbie Morrison rushed to investigate. From Manns Beach he took a boat across Shallow Inlet, climbed the sandhills on the leeward side of Clonmel Island and saw the whales, which he identified as Globiocephala malaena. He counted 141 carcasses, ranging in size from a baby at 1.5 metres to an adult at a little over 6 metres. Two months later he published a report in the magazine he edited, Wild Life.2 Born in 1900 at Hawthorn, Victoria, Morrison spent much of his boyhood outdoors, exploring the grassy ground and stormwater drains near his home. He liked insects, and took particular delight in grasshoppers. He adored their faces and learned to tell the difference between types. When he was 18, he joined the Field Naturalists’ Club of Victoria (FNCV), and a year later became secretary. At the University of Melbourne he studied science and gained a degree in zoology. Upon graduation he won a fellowship for a six-month appointment to a recently convened research organisation, the Great Barrier Reef Committee (GBRC), to study the formation of coral reefs. Later, as a journalist at the Melbourne Argus, his talent for photography, writing, and communication gained him rapid promotion. In 198, he became editor of a new magazine, Wild Life – founded by Keith Murdoch – and began a series of weekly radio broadcasts on natural history and conservation. The broadcasts proved immensely popular and were soon relayed throughout Australia and New Zealand. Morrison promoted conservation through patriotism. He believed that affection for Australian flora and fauna, and therefore the desire to protect them, could spring only from knowledge and understanding. Australians, he thought, should be proud to look upon their wildlife as a trust for which they were responsible. ‘We want Australians’, he explained in a Wild Life editorial, ‘as part of their national character, to protect all the things of the wild as though anything other than protection for such remarkably interesting creatures were unthinkable’.4

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To buttress patriotism, the magazine’s content, style, layout, and especially its copious pictures evoked an Australian identity. photos of numbats, barking geckoes, koalas and tree kangaroos, tawny frogmouths, boobook owls, dancing lyrebirds, displaying bowerbirds, emu families, turtles, mudskippers, and delicate portraits of wildflowers distilled the nature of Australia. Articles surveyed wildlife and habitats, offered practical advice on the care and conservation of Australian animals, and celebrated the wonder of the continent. Contributors shared Morrison’s conservationist concerns and his patriotism. In May 1946, Noel Roberts, a past president of the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales, warned, ‘We Must preserve Our Nature Heritage’ and asked: To what extent will all our post-war planning affect the welfare of the native fauna and flora? The reconstruction experts are considering ambitious schemes for the development of Australian industry and the spread of settlement and increase of population must absorb much territory that is now a sanctuary for wild life. Such development is inevitable. We must make the resources of this continent available to millions of new citizens. But we must recognise also that the promotion of economic prosperity may be detrimental to our Nature heritage; we must plan now to protect and preserve that heritage for future generations.5

In an accompanying editorial Morrison wrote, ‘. . . if we do not have a post-war New Deal for the fauna and flora, the birthright of the coming generations will have gone, and, once gone, it can be replaced by neither money nor toil nor tears’.6 No Wild Life contributor delved into the nature of birthrights, heritage, and patriotism. They took the language of the political community in which they lived for granted and treated prevailing

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institutions and assumptions as absolute, self-evident, and given. This was a delusion. powerful, stable, liberal political communities are relatively rare, and difficult to construct. Yet they are essential for any ambitious political agenda – especially conservation. To their members, nations feel like a community. Indeed, nations depend on people identifying with a national community. Although identification is a free choice, most people experience that choice as a destiny, transcending individuality. They regard their nation’s political institutions as a kind of extended family inheritance. Highly metaphorical, these kinship ties nevertheless appear as part of a natural order: they link individual and community, past and present, and bestow an aura of warm, intimate togetherness on cold institutional structures. people most commonly unite into a nation through shared ownership of something external to themselves, not by similarities inside each individual. United people share a common heritage. externalities uniting Australians in 1946 included the fact that their political community corresponded with a territorial state of defined, undisputed geographical boundaries. That territory contained a people with a collective identity, collective possessions, and collective obligations who had inherited their political institutions from Great Britain: representative government; the Westminster system, with its guarantee of a separation of powers; an independent Civil Service with its own sense of dedication to the public good; and the rule of law. The Westminster heritage came with a long and varied British and continental discourse about justice and freedom that argued and sustained the political institutions. Furthermore, Australians had fought in two global conflicts that had called on their sense of allegiance and long-term interests. In turn, both wars consolidated patriotism – especially World War II, where the direct and real threat to the country made Australians aware of the possibility of loss.

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Although stimulated by war, Australian patriotism remained moderate, arising from the social and emotional ties between individuals articulated through shared experience – shared occasions, ceremonies, and symbols. Of course, much of what people remembered, believed, and celebrated about their political and patriotic inheritance was myth, although nonetheless powerful for that. National myths fostered a strong collective identity, underpinned self-rule, and facilitated the democratic agenda.7 In 1946, after an exhausting war, Australian political goals were narrow and limited: employment, welfare, development, production, and prosperity. Regardless of party or background, Australia’s leading men – Labor, Liberal, Country party, lawyer, professional, businessman, unionist, or communist – shared the same vision: a conquered, thoroughly humanised continent, enriching an ever-increasing number of human beings. In the September 1946 Federal elections a marvelous symmetry fused the two competing parties. The newly-formed Liberal party, under the leadership of Robert Menzies, campaigned for more production – which, the party claimed, would lead to more jobs – while the governing Labor party, under the leadership of prime Minister Ben Chifley, campaigned for more jobs – which, the party claimed, would lead to more production.8 Labor won the election, but differences with the Liberals engendered no separate consequences. In practice, both Labor and Liberal pursued prosperity through a combination of State enterprises and business welfare. In practice, both sides of politics colluded to cast a spell of enchantment and construct a public lie – jointly contributing to the myths that held the nation together. Regardless of party, the task of leadership was the same: to cut through postwar chaos, impose a simplified definition on the situation, and persuade people to act as if the simplified picture was reality. post-war politics left little

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room for a patriotism based on love of land. But some few Australians were moved by affection for the natural life of the continent, and they sought a more embracing patriotism. elyne Mitchell ran a grazing property on the upper Murray, below the Snowy Mountains. Her life on the land inspired several books in praise of nature and the outdoor life, including Australian Alps (1942) and Speak to the Earth (1945). In Soil and Civilization (1946) she wrote about soil erosion. The soil, she believed, was ‘an integral part of the unity which is our bodies and our deeper selves, our thoughts and our inspiration’. Restoring the soil required a national awakening of vital awareness . . . Then we would not pass with unseeing eyes the once-covered ridges eaten bare throughout the summer, the ribbon gullies cutting into the hillsides, and the over-cropped ploughlands. We would not permit city legislators to make economic laws that force the farmers to exploit their land or leave it.9

But Mitchell had her doubts about the possibility of this new consciousness. ‘There has never been’, she wrote, ‘a civilisation that has consistently ordered its life within the wisdom of an ecological unity’. The lessons of history looked bleak and inescapable but the cause of conservation mandated hope, and Mitchell pleaded for the protection of the Snowy Mountains: The mountain country should remain in a state as close to the original natural balance as it is possible for us to achieve. We have already travelled far along the destructive course of changing the face of the country and killing most of the natural influences of the land itself. But we could try, before it is too late, to help some of the Australian soil to rebuild its own natural covering; try and

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absorb the influences of this earth, to accept them and to become the vital people that the land could make us.

This was no abstract notion. For Mitchell, as with other conservationists, conservation always related to specific places.10 In Victoria, conservationists focused on the condition of Wilsons promontory National park. During the war, bushfires had swept the promontory, destroying regrowth mountain ash. Further destruction followed the use of the park for army training. In 1946, Crosbie Morrison’s FNCV convened a conference of 21 natural history societies interested in rehabilitating the promontory. participants agreed that Wilsons promontory was in poor condition and that the rest of Victoria’s national parks were deteriorating. They appointed an investigating committee with Ros Garnet as secretary. The first published review of national parks undertaken in Australia, Garnet’s report – National Parks in Victoria – highlighted the shabby and destructive supervision of existing parks. Boards or trusts, usually responsible to a Minister for Lands, managed nearly all national parks and reserves in Australia. Garnet discovered that at Wilsons promontory the management committee’s primary source of income was a grazing lease around Darby River. At Wyperfield park, ‘The only source of the ridiculously small income of  pounds per annum, is the agistment of cattle, the right to which is granted to one individual who, in the interests of his cattle, visits the park from time to time’. At Kinglake there was only one part-time ranger in one section of the park. ‘The lack of regular supervision exposes the reserve to the illegal operations of tree fellers and common vandals.’ The Lakes park’s annual income of £20–0 came from the sale of blackwattle bark, the honorary ranger’s grazing lease, and the sale of firewood to fuel oil-boring machinery near Lake Victoria.11 In 1948 the FNCV reconvened the original conference, accepted

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Garnet’s report, and recommended that the government pass a National parks Act providing for an adequately-funded administrative authority with control over existing parks and with the right to recommend new parks. parks were not the only issue for conservationists. Some believed the whole matter of development should be reconsidered. ‘Let us remember’, wrote Noel Roberts, ‘that in building a nation we have destroyed much that Nature had achieved through countless centuries, and see, against the background of our gains, her many and increasing losses’. The country needed research, education, and Commonwealth control.12 planning, research, and management also preoccupied Judge Leonard Stretton, who, in 1946, conducted an inquiry into the grazing of forests and alpine regions in the Victorian Alps. He concluded that grazing accelerated soil erosion and damaged water catchments; he identified an inseparable trinity – Forests, Soil and Water. No one of them can stand alone. Destroy your forests and your water will destroy your soil. Destroy your soil and you destroy your forests and your water supply. Destroy the sources of your water storages and your forests and soil will vanish.

Stretton understood conservation as wise use. Using a resource prudently and rationally ensued its future availability and productivity.1 Not all conservationists shared Stretton’s emphasis on wise use. In New South Wales, Marie Byles questioned the assumption that human use and benefit should be the centre of conservation concerns. She argued for the conservation of nature for its own sake. Born in 1900 in england, Byles came to Australia with her Unitarian,

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Fabian socialist, vegetarian, and pacifist parents in 1912. The family settled in Sydney, where they enjoyed an active, outdoor life, frequently walking 0 or more kilometres a day in the Blue Mountains or along the coast. After becoming New South Wales’ first female solicitor, Byles continued her bushwalking and was elected secretary of the NSW Federation of Bushwalking Clubs. As the first editor of and regular contributor to Bushwalker magazine, she argued for wilderness (or ‘primitive areas’) and thought that walkers’ interests were secondary and subservient to those of the flora and fauna the wilderness harboured.14 Consistent and tenacious, Byles disagreed with primitive areas champion Myles Dunphy that primitive areas were primarily for recreation and enjoyment. Conservationists were often much too careless in their use of resource arguments, distorting and exaggerating them for short-term purposes and allowing them to confuse and dominate long-term thinking. She claimed that the vast majority of bushwalkers have ruled that a primitive area must be for the wild life, which shall flourish there, not for our pleasure, but for its own. After all, why should man in his arrogance say that primaeval lands are of value only in so far as they subserve his ends?15

The dispute focused on the purpose of primitive areas within Kosciuszko State park. In 195 Dunphy’s National park and primitive Areas Council (NppAC) – founded with Byles and others – had proposed an extensive primitive area in the heart of the Kosciuszko plateau. eight years later, Dunphy lodged a submission with the New South Wales Lands Department for a park in the Australian Alps. With sections in both NSW and Victoria, this was the country’s first trans-State park proposal.

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The proposal coincided with concern among State water agencies over upper-catchment protection. Nevertheless, the Kosciuszko State park Act, introduced in 1944, allowed grazing in the park, including areas covered by so-called snow leases in the upper catchment. And while Kosciuszko State park provided some protection to the New South Wales Alps, all of Victoria’s alpine region, apart from a reserve on Mount Buffalo, remained unprotected. Logging, mining, and grazing continued. The Kosciuszko Act provided no money to the Trust established to administer the park. Instead, grazing leases generated the bulk of the Trust’s income. This dependency ensured a vested interest in the continuation of grazing, and suited the Lands Department, whose officials formed a majority of the Trust’s members. A March 1945 conference between the Trustees and representatives of recreational and scientific bodies exposed differences of opinion on the public use of the proposed primitive area. For Byles, humans were not to be excluded from wilderness but it must not exist solely for human enjoyment. Nature had interests and rights of its own. Dunphy had a different emphasis. He viewed humans as part of nature who, in pursuing outdoor recreation, were simply returning to nature; he did not see a conflict – primitive areas benefited both bushland recreation and wildlife. Both agreed grazing had to be excluded. The Trust refused to take action. Byles’s belief that ‘wild life had rights of its own and should be allowed to live happily whether any human being saw it or not’ was a most uncommon view, even among conservationists, let alone among Australia’s leading men, who regarded the continent as passive, possessed only of exploitable wealth ‘waiting to be harnessed’. The land was an instrument for production. This confident mood demanded that the continent be populated, developed, and remade. There were no limits to human enterprise.

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This kind of thinking derived from the war; leading men often cast the country’s development in terms of war. War metaphors, for example, justified and explained the conquest of the land. George Sutton, a former West Australian director of agriculture, described the establishment of the State’s wheat belt as ‘a war against the wilderness and, in common with other wars, there have been some casualties which are greatly regretted. But it has been an achievement in statesmanship, in courage and energy comparable with anything of a like nature in history’.16 Sutton sought to simplify, to impose meaning and purpose on a series of events that were destructive, frequently chaotic, messy, complicated, and heartbreaking. The image of war cut through the disorder. War implied uncomplicated, clear, purposeful goals and outcomes. War led to victory. Likewise, war against the land would lead to victory. equally robust metaphors appeared in the justifications other leading men used to promote large-scale immigration. prime Minister Ben Chifley, for example, believed Australia should build its population with ‘virile’ immigrants ‘and exploit to the full its potentialities now and for decades to come’. An augmented population would demonstrate to the world that Australians were ‘prepared to do something’ with the continent and would ‘justify before the world our retention of such a great country’. Chifley perceived greatness in terms of potential, not of actuality. patriotism was enthusiasm for what could be, not for what was. Conquest would fulfill the country’s destiny.17 Conquest and destiny were pervasive ideas. Out of the Mist, a postwar Tasmanian social studies textbook, applauded human power and connected the conquest of nature to progress. Ideas about human power, it told teachers, must be at the forefront of pedagogy: Whether dealing with Australia, the shape of the earth, fire, mechanisation or writing we must keep before the pupil the central

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idea that man has, by using his wonderful powers, gradually made himself dominant on the earth and moulded the environment to his will. This is a truly wonderful thought and the full realisation of this great truth is a part of every child’s heritage which must not be denied to him.18

Not all schools taught the message that because humans were, at present, the most conspicuous creation of nature – at least according to many humans – then each of nature’s other myriad creatures and workings could be turned to human benefit. Through the annual booklet, The Junior Tree Warden, the New South Wales Department of education elaborated a different understanding of heritage. The aim, according to Australian Forest League secretary, S. T. Turner, was to assist teachers to train Australian children to a true understanding of their civic responsibilities by an appreciation of their own tree flora. In this way it is hoped that a new generation will arise, conscious of the beauty of nature around them and with a consequent desire to conserve what remains of the flora and to make a world lovelier to dwell in by the presence of more and still more trees.19

Unlike the author of Out of the Mist, who unequivocally celebrated humankind’s rising power over nature, contributors to The Junior Tree Warden expressed reservations. Increasing power portended dangers. The proper response was ‘a national approach to the problems of conservation’ and ‘intelligent understanding’.20 Could such an approach overcome the conflict between conservation and development? The antagonism was deep. Some conservationists identified a source. Marie Byles thought the problem lay in attitudes towards nature. ‘In modern times man has assumed that nature existed only for his use’, she wrote. The consequence was

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worldwide destruction: desertification, soil erosion, and deforestation. And ‘until our attitude towards nature basically alters, we shall continue to do these criminally foolish things, and we shall, moreover, do them on an increasingly larger scale the more potent becomes the energy – atomic or otherwise – we are able to employ’.21 Having located the problem’s source, Byles looked beyond the Western world for the solution, became disillusioned with Unitarianism, and developed an interest in eastern religions, particularly Buddhism. Her despair with the contemporary world and her seeker’s temperament predisposed her to viewing folk societies as more harmonious and better adapted than modern ones.22 Linguist Theodor Strehlow shared Byles’ belief in the harmonious adaptations of folk societies to nature. Born in 1908 at Hermannsburg, Central Australia, Strehlow grew up speaking Aranda and later studied classics and english literature at the University of Adelaide. All his life he believed there were fundamental differences between the way Australians of european descent and Aboriginal Australians thought about and related to the land: Aborigines understood the land and treated it kindly and prudently. After arriving in Australia, however, the British and their descendants ruined the continent’s pristine, unspoilt nature. ‘At present we are almost completely european in outlook and manner’, he explained, We have cut down and burned our Australian bush ruthlessly [and because] trees, animals, and native people [have] been abused merely to satisfy the materialistic and selfish greed of the new white immigrants . . . too few Australians regard the land of their birth as their spiritual home.2

Fortunately, there was a living example of a better way. ‘The best Australians’, Strehlow claimed, ‘are, of course, our own aboriginals’.

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They were natural conservationists and desired, above all, to live in harmony with nature. As he explained: They came to a continent in many parts poorly endowed by nature as regards food and water; and they adapted their whole mode of life to it in order to fit themselves in the country of their birth. Though they lived off the land, they did not ruthlessly devastate it . . . An Australian native consequently had an affection for, and a feeling of oneness with, Nature that few of the present generation of white Australians can even comprehend, let alone feel in their own hearts.24

Strehlow’s picture emphasised the rationality, vigour, and moral superiority of the nature-dwelling native. Although this stereotype simply reversed an opposite, equally false stereotype – the cannibalistic, inhuman primitive occupying the earliest and lowest rungs of human society – for Strehlow, the positive image offered a positive example. White Australians would not necessarily always be forsaken. Redemption was possible. With effort they could change their attitudes and their ways: It seems to me that we shall have to train ourselves to look upon the land of our birth with the eyes, not of conquerors overcoming an enemy, but of children who are looking at the face of their mother. Only then shall we truly be able to call Australia our home. Our native traditions can help us become finer and better Australians.25

Strehlow was not the first person to romanticise Aborigines. His uncritical praise of Aboriginal society reflected longstanding Western preconceptions and biases in favour of the indigenous. Many writers, philosophers, explorers, and travellers viewed the original

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inhabitants of newly discovered lands as remarkably free of Western vices and complexities. Wonderfully natural, they had much to teach by example. The Noble Savage was fearless, healthy in his unspoiled habitat, and devout in his spontaneous worship of the one god of nature. popular and scholarly discourse agreed that primitive societies were more congenial than modern ones, their members noble, and that life in the past was more idyllic and happier than contemporary life. Myth-making about Aboriginal Australia began with european discovery. In concluding his voyage along the east coast of Australia in August 1770, Captain James Cook wrote: From what I have said of the natives of New-Holland they may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we europeans; being wholly unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a Tranquillity which is not disturb’d by the Inequality of Condition: The earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life, they covet not Magnificent Houses, Household-stuff, they live in a warm and fine Climate and enjoy a very wholesome air, so that they have very little need of Clothing and this they seem to be fully sencible of, for many to whome we gave Cloth to, left it carelessly upon the Sea beach and in the woods as a thing they had no manner of use for. In short they seem’d to set no Value upon any thing we gave them, nor would they ever part with any thing of their own for any one article we cold offer them; this in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life and that they have no superfluities.26

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Cook’s version of Aboriginal life was based on superficial and fleeting contact: he failed to observe carefully and misunderstood what he saw. Whole areas of local life remained invisible and his fancy ran free. He believed he saw people leading simple, happy lives – wanting for nothing – in contrast to the fretful, complicated, burdened lives of the civilised travellers who visited them. His views were a fantasy, a fantasy perpetually alive in Western society. Like Strehlow’s observations, Cook’s imaginative reconstruction of the native world was hardly unique, nor undisputed. Both accounts belonged to a culture in which criticism was intrinsic. Unlike the Aranda society in which Strehlow grew up and later studied, Western society was not a solid, unanimous block of opinion and outlook, but an endless series of opposites – in religion, politics, art, morals, and manners. From Socrates and Jesus Christ through Jean Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Henry David Thoreau, and Aldo Leopold, half the business of Western life has been self-criticism. In fact, the West has never been a single, hegemonic society at all, but a debating ground; not a monolith but a fertile, confused corroboree of contending voices. During the past 500 years the peoples of the West have offered the world a set of ideas and institutions not found earlier or anywhere else. Common ideas and institutions formed a unity based on enormous diversity. Borrowing widely from other lands and thriving on dissent and originality, the West was a mongrel civilisation without compare.27 However, at particular times, certain views prevailed. In Australia after the war, ideas regarding development, progress, and the conquest of nature predominated. The prosecution of the most destructive war in history depended on science, power, and production, and generally affirmed faith in reason, power, and transformation. Conflict embedded the metaphor of war in everyday life and encouraged an

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aggressive attitude towards the land. But in Australia, as in the West in general, the moment a faith takes hold, dissenters and heretics emerge. In 1946, poet Judith Wright published her first book of poems, The Moving Image. Born in 1915 at Thalgarrah Station near Armidale, Wright was the descendant of several prominent Australian families active in pastoralism, business, and politics. Her poems reflected her background and depicted a wide range of Australian experience, including land clearance, the occupation of the Hunter River and New england regions, and the massacre and dispersal of Aborigines. Wright, who, after the war, lived at Tamborine in southern Queensland, wrote the poems against a backdrop of a conflict that deeply troubled her. She thought the massive displays of power, technology, and economic achievement signified a civilisation seriously awry. Something was wrong with a world where people sought to dominate nature and accumulate material things, and respected force as the ultimate arbiter of truth. In contrast, Wright praised the mythical, intuitive, and primitive areas of consciousness, which she believed pointed to a deeper and more abiding reality – but one that modern society ignored or dismissed. For post-war Australia, reality meant nation-building. A ubiquitous and deep consensus on development and immigration provoked politicians to extreme forms of hyperbole and exaggeration in order to highlight specious and superficial differences. After the 1946 Federal election, Menzies realised he needed to differentiate his Liberal party from Labor. When, in 1947, Chifley’s Labor government announced plans to nationalise the banks, Menzies found his cause. Opposition was immediate, vehement, and widespread. Able now to give substance to familiar Liberal rhetoric about ‘socialistic Labor versus individualist Liberal’, Menzies claimed the nationalisation

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plans ‘called [Australians] to a great battle to defend their freedoms against dictatorship at home’. Fond of declaring war, he now declared a ‘war on fascism in Australia’.28 Other 1949 election issues stemmed from the Chifley government’s attempts to continue wartime regulation and control, especially through petrol rationing. Australians disliked controls, and Menzies and the Liberals swept to power. The outcome made no difference to the prospect for conservation in Australia.

CHApTeR 2

thiS Gentle Art of BulldozinG

With a ruthless efficiency unmatched in the world, Australians bulldozed their way across a fabulously rich continent. In the post-war years they talked expansively of ‘conquering’, ‘taming’, and ‘transforming’. And that is exactly what they did. As the scope and scale of the destruction became clear, as bulldozers pushed into the Snowy Mountains and rolled over millions of hectares of forest, woodland, and heath, conservationists grew alarmed. In January 1950, Crosbie Morrison told a Canberra audience that Australia was ‘a dying continent in which human activities and interference have accelerated the natural processes an hundredfold and more’. But Morrison had an answer: education. Australians must learn soil, water, and forest conservation at all school levels. Universities should establish Departments of ecology and there should be more general, informal conservation education through newspapers, magazines, and radio. Morrison further called for a biological survey of Australia and a greater spread of national parks.1 Australians, however, were distracted. politicians took advantage of the shadow of war to rekindle war anxieties and cultivate fear. According to prime Minister Robert Menzies, external and internal

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enemies beset the country. War with Russia loomed, while at home communists were a potential fifth column. In response, Menzies introduced the Communist party Dissolution Bill. After the High Court ruled the bill invalid, Menzies put the question of banning the Communist party to a referendum. In his campaign for a ‘Yes’ vote, Menzies employed overstatement and distortion, misrepresented his opponents, and exaggerated the strength and influence of communists in Australia and abroad. A small majority of Australians voted against the proposed ban and the referendum failed. The outcome reflected Australia’s British inheritance of moderation, tolerance, openness, and scepticism of authority. In rejecting Menzies’ hysterics, Australians, instead of endorsing magnificent abstractions such as communism, showed themselves distrustful of extreme positions. They favoured a sober, unemphatic, goodhumoured public vernacular that relegated extremism – the kind of extremism inherent in banning a political party and proscribing certain political beliefs, for example – outside acceptable public action. Flexible – not fixed or unconditional – Australian patriotism was experiential rather then essentialist and allowed for the possibility of change. Change might come in the meaning of patriotism and the object of loyalty. Australian patriotism might not be exclusively attached to the British heritage and war but embrace other Australian experiences, such as living and breathing on a continent brilliant with the sun and infused with the scent of eucalypt and wattle.2 Marie Byles did not doubt her patriotism. At the end of a journey that took her to Britain, Scandinavia, North America, and New Zealand, she wrote: I returned to the land where the blue ocean breaks in white waves on yellow beaches; where the sun shines, the flowers bloom, and the

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birds sing even in winter – the land of sapphire gorges, blue skies and golden sunlight; the land of a thousand beauties.

An immigrant, Byles saw Australia, not with the eyes of a newcomer or unsettled settler, but with eyes that had walked through the luminous bush and along the sparkling coast. She felt the land under her feet and gazed upon the sky above. Through lived experience, she saw Australia in the blazing sharpness of light that falls on this continent only. She was not alone: other Australians filled their being with life as revealed in their own country. Judith Wright believed that what mattered and what defined Australians was the history of their relationship with the land. Much less jaunty than Byles, Wright was serious, reflective, and critical. But, like Byles, she did not share in the celebration of development and conquest through which she felt most Australians defined themselves. Her compatriots, she thought, were ignorant of their own history of dealing with the continent. Furthermore, they were caught up in a modern science and rationalism that had degraded language, fragmented meaning, and alienated people from nature. A romantic, Wright believed that human beings had once enjoyed a direct, intuitive, and unmediated relationship with the natural world, a relationship expressed in language and myth. She sought to recover that sacred relationship in her poetry. Australia’s leaders saw the world differently. Bewitched by their own grand schemes and mesmerised by their own bombast, they showed no concern for the fate of the continent. Instead of problems there were opportunities; instead of destruction there was development, prosperity, and the promise of more of everything. Richard Casey, Federal Minister for National Development, believed Australians were living through an unceasing crescendo. Australia was entering ‘a New pioneering era’.4

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2

Casey’s bluster illustrated the one quality leaders share in heroic measure: audacity, a combination of impudence and shamelessness. Leaders, however, do not have infinite foresight or an infinite capacity to attend to detail. They must speak in generalities, articulate guidelines, outline tasks, and frame national goals. In the post-war years all Australian leaders advocated the conquest of nature and the transformation of the continent. Although governments directed a great deal of the transformation – electricity generation and supply, dam building, irrigation, ports, roads, and other infrastructure – they could not do everything. Nor did they have to. They led by example. Unfortunately for leaders, there always existed the danger that followers could become apathetic, even anarchic, and actually undermine the enterprise of conquest. Worse, followers, while remaining patriotic and loyal, might become oppositional and question the goal. Geologist William Browne, a pioneer of glaciation studies on the Kosciuszko plateau, told a Sydney audience in 1952 that grazing and dam-building were destroying the Snowy Mountains. He asked his audience to imagine visiting the Kosciuszko plateau in 200 or 00 years’ time. There is no soil erosion problem because ‘there is little soil left to erode’, and ‘The glory that was Kosciusko is a barren, stony desert; the spoliation of our heritage – man’s triumph over Nature – is complete’. Browne did not scruple in his defence of the Snowy Mountains or in his criticism of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Authority (SMA), which he called a ‘monster’ and its works a ‘desecration’.5 Browne was not the only objector to the wreckage of the Snowy Mountains scheme. In 1949 Orbost residents formed the Snowy River protection League. They believed the SMA’s proposed dam at Jindabyne would destroy the river and lead to silting, lowering of the ground-water table under the Orbost flats, closure of the river mouth, and penetration of saltwater upstream. They wrote to the

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prime Minister and said they intended to seek advice on the scheme’s legality and Orbost’s rights. The government assured them the river would be fine. It then legislatively absolved itself and the SMA of all responsibility for what happened to the waterway in Victoria. One of the League’s members, farmer Toby Nixon – unmollified by official guarantees – kept up a letter-writing campaign through the 1950s.6 Less blunt than Browne, and more trusting of authority than the Snowy River campaigners, Crosbie Morrison continued his advocacy for national parks. He described their contents as ‘treasures’ for which Australians were ‘trustees’.7 By 1950, despite his efforts, Morrison had still not secured a Victorian national parks authority. But his lobbying, together with that of Ros Garnet and Francis Corrigan, led to a parliamentary committee of inquiry. The committee’s report recommended both a national parks authority and a large alpine park. A recommendation, however, is not a bill. More lobbying was required. In November 1952, the FNCV and the Federation of Walking Clubs convened another meeting of the principal associations present at the 1946 conference and formed the Victorian National parks Association (VNpA) to press for a national parks authority. The steadfast Morrison became president and Ros Garnet secretary. elsewhere, Morrison stepped up his conservation advocacy. His Wild Life editorials became sharper and more specific. In July 1951 he protested the planned reduction of Flinders Chase National park (South Australia) ‘from its present noble area of 212 square miles to a mere 0 square miles’. He commented on current events and advocated courses of action. Moderate, not rebellious, he was careful never to challenge development or progress, and he never made proposals that could not proceed through the proper channels. passionately Australian, his patriotism nevertheless included strong feelings for england. He respected authority with an unfeigned, quietly-held

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belief in the rightness of existing leaders and institutions, yet spoke out against the indifference and inaction of leaders towards conservation. These contradictions meant his sentiments were not always the same as his opinions. He understood some things he did not yet know. Or rather, he understood some things he did not wish to think about even as he was capable of thinking about them. The problem was common: Australians had inadequately articulated their loyalty to the land.8 Horticulturalist and landscape designer edna Walling hoped to remedy that deficiency. In The Australian Roadside, a collection of bush and tree photographs published in 1952, Walling said she had set out to capture the beauty of the bush ‘but the continual scenes of unthinking devastation’ turned the chronicle into an ‘appeal for conservation’. ‘poor Australia!’ she continued, ‘We have not yet given up the national sport of burning off before we take up this gentle art of bulldozing’.9 In an article for Wild Life, ‘Flowers of our roadways’, Walling championed the beauty of native plants and scorned the idea that the Australian bush needed ‘cleaning up’. Morrison sympathised, warned about the destructive power of bulldozers, and suggested setting aside roadside reserves in mitigation. Nevertheless, he did not wish to oppose development: ‘Now it is as futile to try to stand in the way of progress and halt it for the sake of a wild violet as it is to try to stop the bulldozer itself by standing in the way. No one would want to do such a thing’.10 Of course, Morrison would never stand in front of a bulldozer. Inevitably, however, conservation involves conflict. preservation and development are incompatible. And some schemes and undertakings entail such obvious and massive destruction that opposition is imperative. In a July 1952 Wild Life editorial, Morrison joined naturalists Alec Chisholm and Dominic Serventy in protesting the certain

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destruction of fauna on the Monte Bello Islands, off the coast of Western Australia, by planned British nuclear tests. In September, he raised his concern at the Annual Congress of the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union. The meeting resolved to ask the prime Minister to order a biological survey, and consider alternative bomb sites. Morrison did not seek an end to the tests, only their postponement and relocation. His moderation predisposed him to compromise.11 prime Minister Menzies, however, was less accommodating. With no mind for conservation, he had come to power with an agenda of national improvement that meant tearing down, ripping up, paving over, bulldozing, damming, and blasting – regardless of the effect on indigenous life. Moreover, shaped by Australia’s British background, Menzies felt his British inheritance very strongly. An empire man, he supported an increased world role for a British empire that was already fading, and eagerly appeased the British government even if that meant blowing up and contaminating Australian territory. The first bomb exploded over the Monte Bello Islands in October 1952. Other blasts followed at emu Field and Maralinga in South Australia. Like the attempt to ban the Communist party, the atomic tests occurred against the backdrop of war and rumours of war. A hot war in Korea and a cold war in the West’s confrontation with the Soviet Union and China defined much of the Australian political imagination. War provided the impetus to pursue a much greater population and to accelerate development. The shadow of war reinforced the urge to conquer and subjugate, to extend the human domain. These were simple, general and, in effect, religious impulses, free of qualification, ambiguity, and alternatives. But doubt existed, or at least the possibility of doubt existed. Through their protests, actions, and questioning – although hesitant, qualified, and inchoate – conservationists were enlarging the public space. Through their attempts to

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save nature and articulate an Australian natural heritage, conservationists were expanding the meaning of patriotism. FNCV members, for example, were never solely focused on natural history. They were concerned that Australians learnt to know and love their country. perhaps Australians could identify with the continent through an appreciation of native plants. In 1945 the club’s president suggested a new objective: a native garden movement under the slogan ‘preservation through Cultivation’. Garnet helped convene a botany sub-group to study the horticultural potential of native plants, and in 1954 committee member Arthur Swaby began a column called ‘Know Your Natives’ for the magazine, Your Garden. Writing alongside Crosbie Morrison – who contributed a series, ‘Meet These Birds in Your Gardens’ – Swaby’s columns were largely botanical and horticultural; but he also introduced a conservation message and advised that, ‘In all States settlement encroaches on haunts of wildflowers. Readers are urged to support movements for adequate reservation’.12 Following an enthusiastic response from native plant gardeners, Swaby announced an inaugural meeting of Australian Growers of Australians. Over 180 people attended the first meeting in Melbourne in March 1957. Shortly after, the committee changed the name to the ‘Society for Growing Australian plants’ with the motto ‘preservation through Cultivation’. Swaby urged the creation of a network of groups across Australia, and it quickly formed.1 Conservation could be achieved indirectly or directly. Morrison’s advocacy was mainly direct. His VNpA spoke for all Victoria’s conservation societies in the matter of land reservation and national parks. In 1955 he headed a delegation to the new premier, Henry Bolte. Bolte asked for ideas for a national parks bill. A drafting committee submitted proposals in March 1956 and, shortly after, with Bolte’s personal support, the government introduced a national parks bill into State parliament.

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By November the National parks Act was law, the first specific statute for the control of national parks in Australia. The following May, the Victorian Cabinet announced the creation of the National parks Authority (NpA) with Morrison as chairman. He was an appropriate choice: Morrison knew Victoria’s national parks and the relevant State government authorities. But he filled the role for less than a year and died in March 1958. Victoria’s national park system was his legacy. Morrison had never explicitly questioned development, yet his activism and his arguments implicitly opposed the country’s commitment to development. With the establishment of the NpA, the VNpA turned to promoting a Victorian alpine national park. It was a formidable undertaking. The parks Act specifically precluded all commercial operations within national parks, specifically grazing and logging. even mining, one of the most sacrosanct Australian enterprises, faced restrictions. These stringent provisions, while protecting existing parks, actually worked to prevent the dedication of more parks. Victoria was developing: population was growing, industry expanding, and prosperity spreading. As far as the government was concerned, the whole State had to remain open to exploitation. In particular, the government wanted no interference with its plans for dams, pipelines, and powerlines across the Alps. There would be no restriction on logging the region’s great stands of alpine ash nor any restraint on the cattlemen who grazed their herds in the high country. even across the border in New South Wales, Kosciuszko State park remained a park in name only. The park Trust did not consider conservation a priority, refused to subordinate grazing to catchment protection, and was indifferent to the massive engineering onslaught of the Snowy Mountains Scheme. The Trust’s compromised stance and inactivity left conservation to natural scientists. plant ecologist Alec Costin graduated from the University of

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Sydney in 1947 and began his career in the Soil Conservation Service of NSW, specialising in high-catchment field work. After postgraduate work at the University of Sydney in 1950–52 he published The Ecosystems of the Monaro Region of New South Wales and outlined a utilitarian role for conservation: ‘The future progress of Australia is bound up with the conservation and development of our national resources. Of vital importance to our progress is water’.14 After some years with the Victorian Soil Conservation Service, Costin co-authored The Condition and Administration of the MurraySnowy-Murrumbidgee Catchment Area, which recommended the elimination of high-altitude snow leases, more conservation work, and further research. But the NSW Lands Department still favoured grazing and, through its majority on the Kosciuszko State park Trust, ensured that the snow leases continued. Meanwhile the SMA proposed more development for the mountains. These works, including aqueducts on both sides of the Main Range, were to take place in the highest parts of the Kosciuszko plateau, precisely where Myles Dunphy and others had argued for a primitive area. The Kosciuszko State park Trust raised no objection. The Australian Academy of Science, however, was less sanguine, and in 1957 published A Report on the Condition of the High Mountains Catchments of New South Wales and Victoria. The authors, including Costin, asserted that the value of the high mountains lay in their role as water catchments, the opportunities they offered for tourism and recreation, and as natural heritage. And there was another consideration: ‘An important minority, mainly scientists, regard [the high mountains] . . . as potential nature reserves in a country in which exploitation has been rapid and severe’. The report opposed snow leases, suggested the SMA re-examine its plans, and endorsed the proposal for a primitive area.15 By a majority of one the Kosciuszko State park Trust again voted

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in favour of snow leases and ignored the report’s recommendations. Trust member, barrister Garfield Barwick had voted to continue the leases but told forester Baldur Byles – Marie’s brother – that he would reconsider his position if Byles produced evidence for the destructive effects of grazing. In January 1958 Barwick, Byles, and Costin set out on a three-day walking tour of the high mountains. When the trip was over the Trust’s conservationist minority became a majority. Development was not yet a consideration in Tasmania’s southwest. In the years after the war, hardy bushwalkers began exploring the largely unmapped region. Its beauty impressed many and some became concerned for its preservation. In 1954 the Hobart Walking Club recommended the government gazette the remote and beautiful Lake pedder as a scenic reserve. The following year, the Scenery preservation Board proclaimed the 2 800 hectare Lake pedder National park. Lake pedder’s beauty and remoteness attracted the 5-year-old Olegas Truchanas. In February 1958 he flew to the lake with a homemade kayak of canvas over an aluminium frame. From the eastern beach he paddled across the water to the Serpentine River and followed its many meanders through a button grass plain. Heavy rain set in and swollen waters carried him to the junction of the Gordon River. Obstacles appeared. Turbulent water and large rapids buffeted and shook his kayak, and he capsized several times. elsewhere, waterfalls and huge rocks forced him to pull into the bank, unload and dismantle his kayak and carry his gear, sometimes along the river’s bank, sometimes hopping from rock to rock. At the Splits he climbed out of the gorge, followed the river overland, descended, and put in again. By the time he reached Macquarie Harbour and Strahan he had become the first person ever to navigate the Serpentine and Lower Gordon Rivers.16 Born in Lithuania, Truchanas arrived in Australia in 1949. Soon

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after settling in Tasmania he began to explore the country. On his own, on foot, and by canoe, he ventured into the island’s southwest. In 1952, again alone and without support, he climbed Federation peak. In 1954 he attempted his first journey down the Serpentine and Gordon Rivers but capsized early in the trip, lost his canoe and had to walk out. On most excursions he took a camera, and his photographs won prizes in Australia and overseas. Through his body, Truchanas sculpted a rugged, direct relationship with the country. He did not define Australia in negative terms – alienating, conformist, stifling, dull – but sought and found an all-consuming sensual engagement and beauty in the land. elsewhere in Tasmania, other, younger Australians were forming attachments to the natural world. peter Sims was born in Launceston in 198. When he was four years old, his mother carried him to the top of the saddle of the Hazards and onto Wineglass Bay on the Freycinet peninsula. At school a teacher told stories about her brother and Denny King then exploring and living the wonders of the remote southwest. peter’s aunt gave him nature books for birthdays and Christmas. During holidays he and his family camped on the east coast at Ansons Bay and Bicheno. They fished and wandered along the beach. peter loved climbing the headlands to gaze out to sea and along the hidden coastline. He filled his bedroom with posters of wild places and dreamed of visiting them: Himalayas, european Alps, Norway, and New Zealand. But first he explored Tasmania. When he was 14, peter and his brother climbed Cradle Mountain. The weather was fine and, elated by the view, peter experienced a great sense of discovery.17 Similarly, a climate as clear as crystal, full of sunshine and freshness imbued other young Australian lives. Bob Brown was born at Oberon, west of the Blue Mountains, but his family moved frequently, following his policeman father’s postings at stations around

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rural New South Wales. Bob started his schooling at the 26-student public school in the small town of Trunkey, 60 kilometres south of Bathurst. There, among rolling hills clothed in stringy bark and rent with creeks, he quickly developed a great fondness for the bush, content to be alone, observing and uncovering wildlife and, in winter, taking in the rain-washed air, scents of gum and wattle, and freshspringing grass. Moving water fascinated him, and he built dams and barriers to block any trickle of water: gutters, rivulets, even streams. His physical engagement with the world matched a moral engagement. At seven years old he worried whether it was right to cut down a sapling for its fork to make a slingshot. When the family moved to Armidale, Bob entered a more competitive school and learned to push himself. While not a reader, he nevertheless excelled academically. He remained physically active, but, unlike his peers, was not interested in competitive sports. He preferred the bush and especially looked forward to holiday visits to his aunt and uncle’s rural property near Glen Innes. Occasionally he took a gun in search of rabbits and snakes and, while he enjoyed the hunt, he regretted killing harmless creatures. Mostly, as he walked across the land he felt a growing love for the bush and sensed great beauty in the world.18 Beauty, for a growing number of Australians, meant an appreciation of Australian trees. In 1958, on the eastern rural fringe of Melbourne, a group of landscapers and designers formed the eltham Tree preservation Society. They urged tree preservation in the face of expanding suburbia. On one large stump members placed a placard: ‘This Tree, eltham’s Oldest, Rests in Anger, Slaughtered by S.e.C. [State electricity Commission] 1-7-58’. Next to it another placard gave two telephone numbers to call ‘If you see any attempted tree destruction’. Other Tree preservation Societies formed in nearby suburbs undergoing similar expansion and clearing.19

THIS GeNTLe ART OF BULLD OZING



Love of country stirred Australians everywhere. In 1959 wildflower illustrator Kathleen McArthur published Queensland Wildflowers. Her purpose, she wrote, was to encourage Australians to know their land and its life: The wildflowers of a nation play a big part in its culture. Indigenous culture grows as slowly to maturity as the long-living trees of the forest. Ours is still young and delicate and we must save the heritage of the land to nurture it. What is not recognisable will not be saved. So, with great urgency let us get to know our wildflowers and it will follow that we will love them and desire their preservation.20

McArthur’s plea appeared in a tightly bound political scene. public debate in Australia was restrained, overwhelmingly concerned with defence, economics, and redistributive justice. The anti-capitalist left dominated dissent. Their restricted outlook did not promote love of the land nor question development. On the contrary, people on the left shared an enormous confidence in the intrinsic good of empowering humans. They unreservedly believed, along with their opponents, that power over nature and power over the human condition would create a better world. The land and the indigenous life of Australia existed only to serve human purposes. Conflicts over how best to achieve those purposes might appear, at least to the disputants, of great moment and significance, but the disputes lacked any real difference. Common assumptions meant that debate only reinforced the development imperative. But political communities are never completely unitary. There is always some slippage. And, however contingent an individual’s life, there always remains some realm of choice. Australia’s political scene did not entirely stymie a growth of patriotism that included the land. More and more Australians sensed a heritage in their continent for

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which there was no testament and no guide. To express these inchoate loyalties, more and more people began writing to newspapers protesting the hunting of kangaroos and other native animals, the destruction of habitat, the bulldozing of trees, the ripping out of wildflowers, and spreading ugliness. In 1960 architect and critic Robin Boyd published The Australian Ugliness, a scathing, darkly witty indictment of the plastic veneers and unoriginality in design and construction – shallow, ugly, and unsatisfactory – that he felt characterised Australian cities and towns. Fellow architect Milo Dunphy, son of Myles Dunphy, was inspired. For some years, in addition to teaching and practising architecture, he had been giving lectures and talks to architects and church groups. His presentations were an adventurous interweaving of religion, architecture, and conservation. A powerful speaker, his enthusiasm, youthful energy, confidence, and charisma impressed his audiences. Most passionately he spoke out against the destruction of beauty. He told one church group: It is no good us gathering together on Sunday and thanking God for His wonderful natural creations – this glorious land, its trees and flowers – when we spend the other six days smashing it all up . . . We can’t thank God for the other creatures of this world when this century we will destroy 600 species of them . . . We can’t thank God for His bounteous earth and proceed through ignorance, greed and carelessness to strip it to the bone.21

After he read The Australian Ugliness Dunphy found a new focus. In one talk he claimed, ‘The Australian Ugliness is not something for mild concern or patient resignation . . . Brutalisation of our environment brutalises ourselves and our children. The Australian Ugliness is a reproach against our culture. It is the shame of our profession.’22

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Development, not beauty, drove Australian governments. In May 1961, the Victorian government announced that entrepreneur Rudy Unger planned to build a 21-hectare resort – with a 200-bed chalet and a 400-bed motel – in Wilsons promontory National park. The NpA objected and Director Len Smith told the Minister for State Development: ‘This is five times as large as the Melbourne Cricket Ground’. Arguments for and against the proposal ran in the letters columns of Melbourne’s newspapers for weeks. Opponents raised problems of sewage and water and stressed that a national park should give priority to conservation, not tourism; and that there should be access but not private enterprise. Grant Taylor of the VNpA observed: ‘The biggest danger to national parks is not vandalism as such; rather it is the entrepreneur, followed by the politician, followed by the bulldozer. Instead of getting more parks, we are fighting to keep what we have.’ Opposition continued for seven years until Unger, unable to raise the necessary capital, dropped the plans.2 Threats from development emboldened conservationists all around Australia. In September 1961, Robert endean, chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Committee (GBRC), and his colleague Owen Jones wrote to the Queensland Minister for Agriculture and Forestry to protest a proposal to convert parts of Great Barrier Reef island national parks to leasehold. They urged the government to sponsor an overall plan for the protection of the Reef, formulate plans for the conservation and controlled exploitation of its natural resources, including tourism, and undertake a survey to determine the suitability of additional areas of the Reef for proclamation as national parks.24 From the Great Barrier Reef to the Snowy Mountains scientists began speaking out. In 1958, scientists from Sydney and Canberra expressed alarm at the SMA’s plans for high-country hydro work. The Commonwealth Minister of Development, William Spooner,

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told them their protest had come too late. engineering work had already started. Regardless, an Academy of Science committee argued for conservation and recommended the complete exclusion of grazing, no ski development, and no extension of hydro-electric works.25 previously, the SMA’s chairman, William Hudson, had cooperated with the Academy, especially over moves to discontinue grazing – cattle ruined his water catchments. But when the Academy, and later the Trust, supported a primitive area that would exclude hydro-electric development in the heart of his empire he protested the conservation recommendations. Unused to opposition, he was querulously adamant that he needed the developments for hydroelectricity and irrigation. But he could not secure Federal backing. The government was split. Although Spooner ardently supported the SMA, Garfield Barwick – now Menzies’ Attorney-General – staunchly backed the Trust. Menzies decided to do nothing – as did the New South Wales government, which said the SMA lacked the power to proceed with the projected works. Without political support, Hudson reluctantly withdrew the SMA’s plans. Development had been checked. Not all Australians believed that dams, roads, pipes, aqueducts, and powerlines enhanced the beauty of the Snowy Mountains.

CHApTeR 

hArmony

Few people spoke for natural beauty in Australia. Only a small number of naturalists, poets, flower enthusiasts, and painters celebrated the continent’s magnificence – usually with the hope of fostering love and encouraging conservation. And they were frustrated. Nature bequeathed the country a unique, diverse, and wonderful heritage to which most citizens appeared hostile or indifferent. What could be done to arouse their patriotism? In July 1962, David Fleay, celebrity naturalist, platypus expert, and owner of Fleay’s Fauna Sanctuary at West Burleigh, Queensland, drafted a letter to the Brisbane Courier-Mail advocating the teaching of more natural history in schools. He deplored the ‘. . . lack of a true appreciation of things essentially Australian’ and claimed ‘that instruction on the matter of Australia’s natural wonders . . . scarcely exists’. His friends Judith Wright and Kathleen McArthur co-signed and their letter began: ‘We earnestly feel that the only effective check on widespread vandalism resulting in the destruction of native birds, animals, trees, and flowers lies in the growth of a true Australian sentiment in schools’.1 Brian Clouston of Brisbane’s Jacaranda press responded by

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offering to publish a nature magazine if the letter writers supplied the text and formed a supporting organisation. In September, Wright, McArthur, and Fleay called a public meeting in Brisbane to establish the Wildlife preservation Society of Queensland (WpSQ). ecologist Len Webb, then studying Queensland’s northern rainforests, offered his help. Wright, propelled by a keen sense of the urgency of things – much had to be done, and done immediately – recognised this quality in others, found Webb ‘a vital and urgent man’, and nominated him as a vice-president along with McArthur. Wright became president and Arthur Fenton secretary.2 Wright believed the WpSQ’s chief aim ‘was to start a magazine which would be a forum for conservation and would educate people in the value of wildlife’. Soon much more was involved. Her editorial work quickly brought her in contact with wildlife preservation societies in other States and with a great many natural scientists and conservationists: Jock Marshall, Alec Chisholm, Harry Frith, and Graham pizzey. As well, the WpSQ provided an outlet for people concerned for nature conservation but who felt isolated and inhibited. They believed – strangely, as far as many fellow Australians were concerned – that animals and plants had a right to exist and be left alone because they existed. existence was itself the present expression of a history of immense antiquity and majesty. Attracted to beauty and repelled by destruction, they wrote to Wright. She replied. Correspondence multiplied. Networks formed and Wright learned about what was happening to Australia, particularly Queensland. even before the WpSQ finalised its constitution, Wright involved herself in a range of issues including bushfires, roadside advertising hoardings, the use of insecticides in mosquito eradication, the commercial slaughter of kangaroos, and the inadequacy of existing reserves. She told McArthur she had learned to dislike the sound of two words: progress and development.4

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Indeed, development was sweeping Australia. Some Australians found the rush and frenzy senseless. They were alarmed at the continent’s transformation, the cost to wildlife, and the legacy for the future. In February 196, architect Garth Setchel wrote about coastal development. In the Bulletin of the National Trust of Australia he warned that ‘urgent and drastic action will be needed unless we are to lose much of our priceless national heritage forever’.5 Other Australians were also concerned for the bush and its protection. In Hobart, two months after the formation of the WpSQ in Queensland, representatives from walking clubs, the Youth Hostels Association, field naturalists and other conservationists met and ‘resolved to form an organisation to work for the conservation of [Tasmania’s southwest] and for the introduction of a rational plan for the development of its resources’. Chaired by Ron Brown, a member of parliament, the South-west Committee immediately began advocating a major reserve in the southwest.6 The following May, Sydney bushwalkers discovered a large prospecting camp near the head of Colong Swamp in the Blue Mountains. The area had been reserved for the preservation of the nearby caves in 1899. In 199, however, the Department of Mines considered granting mineral leases within the reserve for the extraction of limestone. Myles Dunphy’s National parks and primitive Areas Committee (NppAC) protested and the reserve was re-dedicated. Now, in 196, the Federation of Bushwalking Clubs protested to the Department of Mines, as did Loder and Dunphy, Milo Dunphy’s architecture firm. At the same time in Horsham, Victoria, a local government organisation, the Wimmera Regional Committee – in conjunction with Victoria’s Natural Resources Conservation League – held a convention to consider the Australian Mutual provident Society’s (AMp) proposal to subdivide and develop the Little Desert as farmland. Although sandy and semi-arid, the Little Desert, which lies along

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Victoria’s border with South Australia, supports dense vegetation. This hardly bothered the AMp, which had profited from land subdivisions for new settlements across the border in South Australia and hoped for similar financial success in Victoria. But the Wimmera Committee, concerned about development, decided on a second convention to seek local and expert opinion on the scheme. The following month, the first issue of the WpSQ’s Wildlife appeared. Its purpose, Wright stated, was to publicise the urgent need for conservation, for national parks and wildlife reserves, and for a new attitude towards the country. Zoologist Jock Marshall wrote about vanishing wildlife. He called professional kangaroo shooters ‘a group of near-peasants’ and lamented that, ‘In Australia, as far as I can gather, there is no politician who is interested in conservation of the native fauna’. Kathleen MacArthur, in ‘The Vanishing Dunes’, pointed out: ‘We have no more than eighty miles of protected mainland beaches in Queensland’. Largely through sand mining, ‘the most popular beaches have lost their sand dunes and all the others are threatened by “development”’. Wright profiled her neighbour and friend Romeo Lahey, who worked to save the forests of the Mcpherson Ranges. A review by David Stenhouse, ‘Survival of the Free’, called for a limiting of human population and action ‘to increase long-term efficiency of our utilisation of natural resources’. This was echoed in a short article on ‘What ecology has to do’, which declared that ‘One of the great tasks before ecology is to provide a scientific basis for the use of the world’s renewable resources for future generations and not just our own’. In another piece, John Calaby contributed a list of ‘Australia’s Threatened Mammals’, while an article from the United States warned about the dangers of DDT.7 Altogether, the new magazine differed markedly in tone and

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content from its namesake, Crosbie Morrison’s Wild Life. Wright’s Wildlife was more aggressive, confrontational, and political. Forthright and committed, the magazine argued an urgent and explicit case for conservation. In Wildlife’s second edition, Wright pressed one of her abiding concerns: Aborigines. When occupied solely by Aborigines, Australia was, she claimed, ‘a country in which the balance of nature was undisturbed’. Her assertion did not pass unchallenged. A dissenting letter from Thistle Stead, president of the Wild Life preservation Society of Australia, appeared in the next edition. She criticised Wright’s use of the term balance of nature. It was ‘misleading’, Stead said, ‘for there is no real “balance of nature” but perpetual change’.8 Change marked the course of conservation. The founding of the WpSQ and the publication of Wildlife revealed that conservationists’ preoccupations covered more than national parks and nature reserves. To help define those concerns, conservationists needed to think clearly about what they were trying to achieve. Derek Whitelock of the University extension at the University of New england, Armidale believed the cause needed rigour and knowledge. In February 1964, he convened a summer school on national parks and nature conservation. Wright found the gathering stimulating: ‘a hundred students, foresters and conservationists and various odd bods, and some excellent lectures and talks’.9 Across Australia bulldozers kept rolling. In February 1964, Gladys Atkinson, a resident of the Sydney suburb of Mosman, noticed a bulldozer tearing a track through Ashton park to HMAS Sydney on Bradleys Head. She wrote to the Daily Telegraph in protest: Can anyone find any reason for spoiling the lovely bush in Ashton park by running a new road there? It leads nowhere and will be a perfect place for all the litter, beer cans and such which the public

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scatters. So little natural beauty is left on the harbor front, and this seems a senseless mutilation. Can anyone help to stop the work before it is too late?10

Residents rallied, formed the Ashton park Association – later the Mosman parklands and Ashton park Association – called a public meeting at the Town Hall, and expressed dissatisfaction with the Ashton park Trust’s administration of Ashton park. But the Trust was unyielding and the bulldozer kept working.11 Mosman residents eileen Bradley, a dental nurse, and her sister, Joan Bradley, an industrial chemist, greatly loved the bush at Ashton park. They joined other residents in the fight to keep the park from developers and spent much time actually in the park studying its bird and plant communities. In the early Sixties they surveyed the superb blue wren population. Their idea of conservation included rehabilitation. Ashton park was full of weeds and they experimented with ways of removing them and encouraging the regrowth of native plants. preservation of existing native plants motivated the Wimmera Regional Committee to hold a second convention in Horsham in August 1964 to consider the AMp’s proposed settlement scheme for the Little Desert. Local representatives of the FNCV attended and the meeting recommended a national park for the Little Desert.12 A few days before the Wimmera meeting, over 80 people met in Canberra to launch a national conservation body. When prince philip visited Australia in February 196, he suggested the establishment of an Australian branch of the World Wildlife Fund, hoping it would raise money for conservation in Africa. Murray Tyrell, who assisted with the visit, asked Francis Ratcliffe, assistant chief of entomology at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), for advice. Ratcliffe consulted with colleagues and realised

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that not only was there no Australia-wide body concerned with conservation, but also that the threats to Australia’s own wildlife were so great as to require a major local effort in conservation. Rather than being able to help others, Australian needed to help itself. Born in India of english parents, Ratcliffe studied zoology at Oxford University. In 1929 CSIRO invited him to Australia to study flying foxes. He later researched soil erosion in South Australia and Queensland. His field studies and his great love of the bush formed the basis of his 198 book, Flying Fox and Drifting Sand. Well-connected, Ratcliffe drew on his network of friends, acquaintances in high places, and scientific colleagues to secure the people and funds he felt were necessary to form a national conservation organisation. CSIRO colleagues included the chairman, Frederick White, Alec Costin, chief of the Division of plant Industry, Harry Frith, Ratcliffe’s successor as chief of the Division of Wildlife Research, Len Webb, and Max Day in entomology. Day suggested that the aim was not just to establish a fund, nor to organise a society or committee but to establish a foundation. He recommended the name Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF).1 The August 1964 Canberra meeting included representatives from State government departments such as lands, fisheries and wildlife, and other conservation authorities as well as a contingent from CSIRO. Jock Marshall attended, along with Member of parliament Malcolm Fraser and Garfield Barwick, who had recently resigned as Attorney-General in the Menzies government to become Chief Justice of the High Court. As far as Ratcliffe was concerned, the ACF existed to give objective scientific advice to governments. Leading men acted rationally: presented with the facts, they would act responsibly. Because the Foundation was going to be sensible and practical and therefore nonpolitical, Ratcliffe assured Barwick he did not expect any really

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controversial matters to arise. Confident he would never have to become an advocate and compromise his judicial status of lofty neutrality, Barwick agreed to become the Foundation’s president. Ratcliffe became secretary and the inaugural meeting elected a working committee under ICI executive Donald Malcolmson to prepare a constitution and arrange for the first general meeting. With so much respectable establishment and corporate backing, Ratcliffe easily convinced the prime Minister’s Department to give an initial grant of £1000, sufficient to support the Foundation for the next 12 to 18 months. Barwick supported a restricted membership, which, he believed was the best way to operate the old boys’ network. Ratcliffe, however, insisted on general membership. Others in the Foundation agreed. But open membership and leadership by a self-elected elite were incompatible. Conflict was inevitable. Wright advocated a different strategy for conservation. Her politics were democratic. She advocated grass-roots involvement and called ‘for an active, intelligent conservation group in every community [as] there must be strong and resolute conservation forces to oppose and control the spoilers’. There could be no other way: ‘Our wildlife is interesting, beautiful, unique, and in danger. It rests with us whether, in fifty or a hundred years’ time, this land’s original inhabitants of trees and creatures live or die’.14 Wright practised what she recommended – engaging in local politics. In May 196, Cudgen Rutile pty. Ltd. had applied for two leases totalling 4050 hectares to mine mineral sands in the high dunes, forest reserves, and coastal heathland between the Noosa River and Double Island point. Residents objected to the possible destruction of so much wild beauty. By now Kathleen McArthur had formed a Caloundra branch of the WpSQ, which coincided with the founding of a Noosa parks Development Association (NpDA). The two

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organisations arranged protest meetings in Brisbane and Noosa. The company was stunned. except for isolated and individual objections, sand mining had never met organised opposition. Most local communities accepted mining, believing it generated jobs, boosted business, and improved the coast. Companies had been free to tear up beaches throughout northern New South Wales and southern Queensland so that by the early 1960s some 15 unimpeded mining operations were churning up dunes and extracting mineral sands. Cudgen Rutile hesitated, and Wright wrote to McArthur, ‘I see the rutile company is trying to get us to settle’, but, she added, ‘we are not going to compromise’.15 No compromise principles guided protest. In October 1964, the WpSQ, NpDA, and the Queensland National parks Association (QNpA) held another public meeting in Brisbane. Wright, Len Webb, and edgar Kemp from the QNpA addressed the audience of 120 people, which included mining company representatives. NpDA announced it had engaged a barrister to contest the lease applications in the Mining Warden’s Court. Other opponents talked of lying in front of bulldozers.16 A few days later the Courier-Mail published an editorial against mining: Let’s hope that some of our good citizens will not have to push their opposition to the mining of the Teewah sands to the point of lying down in front of bulldozers. The sands certainly should not be destroyed, but whether they would be worth retaining at the price of the mangled bodies of poetess Judith Wright and others is another question. The sandhills north of Noosa should be preserved, not only as one objector to mining them has said, because they could be a tourist asset. That itself seems to value them partly in terms of cash. They also should be preserved because they are an extraordinary example of the

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beauty and variety of nature, whether seen by an admiring few or by many.17

Cudgen subsequently withdrew its lease application – for the time being. The industry was consolidating. Once marked by many small and often local operators, sand miners were amalgamating and aligning with larger and sometimes foreign-owned corporations and in 1964 formed an industry promotion group, the Rutile and Zircon Development Association, to counter conservationists.18 As conservationists became more active and assertive, they began to talk more, especially among themselves. In January 1965, Derek Whitelock convened a second summer school on conservation: ‘Wildlife Conservation in eastern Australia’. Francis Ratcliffe spoke about the ACF. Its first task was ‘the setting up of an adequate series of reserves – national parks, wilderness areas, fauna reserves, vegetation reserves etc – throughout the continent’. He envisaged the ACF as a largely male domain: ‘all the men whom the Foundation will want to rope in to help it because of their special knowledge are extremely busy people doing demanding jobs’. There were some roles for women, however: ‘The Foundation might operate for a time with a secretary and a woman assistant filling the role of general factotum, typist and librarian’.19 Other speakers included Harry Frith and Max Day. Len Webb, excited by the idea of a national conservation foundation, perceived a change in Australia, the beginnings of a movement – a group of people with a common agenda – for the protection of the natural world: What was until recently the attitude of a kind of lunatic fringe of nature-lovers, backyard bird-watchers and penitent landholders is evolving into a social conscience and practice without which

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human progress can no longer be guaranteed. This practice is becoming known as conservation.20

Allen Strom, chief guardian of fauna from the New South Wales Fauna protection Board, spoke on ‘A Design for Wildlife Conservation’. Strom had already worked for a long time in conservation. A pastpresident of the Wildlife preservation Society of Australia, he had, in 1957 – under the auspices of the NSW Federation of Bushwalking Clubs, and with the support of Myles Dunphy – helped form the New South Wales National parks Association. The Association, in concert with the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS), pressed for legislation to bring NSW parks under the control of a single authority. Strom offered a number of utilitarian justifications for conservation but added: There is a strong case for the retention of life forms for their own sakes and although I do not propose to extend this metaphysical opinion at this time, I am not unmindful of the moral obligation man has towards the biota which has accompanied him in his civilising processes.21

Of that ‘civilising process’ Wright was severely critical. She thought the threats to the world so profound that ‘if man is to survive at all, a wholly new attitude in man’s notion of his relationship to his natural and his social world’ was called for. The new attitude must at least partly reflect the views of ‘primitive peoples’ who, she believed, ‘lived . . . in comparative harmony with a restricted environment’. For example, accord characterised the life of Australian Aborigines. They ‘directed a large part of their religious rites and their economic practices to what we might now call “conservation”’. Modern humans, in

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contrast, had overextended themselves: ‘. . . in the process of reaching the frontiers of the environment we had lost the sense of our belonging to that environment, and begun to believe that the environment belonged to us’. Furthermore, ‘We have become the enemies of the nature in which, and by which, we have lived, and in becoming so we have very greatly wasted and depleted its supplies’. The task was to change society ‘from one of waste and exploitation to one of care and responsibility’. To that end, ‘the whole concept of conservation is possibly the most important and far-reaching concept of our time’. 22 In her conclusion Wright introduced a religious, redemptive aspect to conservation: ‘If modern society is to be saved from the consequences of its own attitudes and actions over the past centuries, the conservation movement is certainly going to be one of the most important factors in its salvation’.2 This was powerful rhetoric. It appealed to one of the oldest stories in Western civilisation: the Garden of eden and original sin. Humans once lived in a state of grace and harmony but had sinned and their lives had become disordered, alienated, and maladjusted. The conservationist gloss on the story included a spiritual, sacred attitude towards the land and its creatures. The sin consisted of disenchantment through science, technology and exploitation. Salvation required a return to a spiritual, sacred attitude towards the land. In this, Aborigines were exemplars. They were, Wright claimed, among the first peoples ‘to practise wise conservation . . . They regarded themselves a part of nature, with responsibilities towards all that surrounded them’. She called this state of affairs a ‘primitive Garden of eden’. This was a potent image and a source of never-ending sentiment.24 Theodor Strehlow shared Wright’s view of Aborigines as people who understood the systemic consequences of their actions, felt deep sympathy with all living forms, and took steps to conserve so that the earth’s harmonies were never unbalanced and resources never in

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doubt. They had a ‘religion [that] gave them a feeling of oneness with nature that has rarely been equalled, and never surpassed in other parts of the world’.25 This image of original harmony was always coupled with its opposite: the non-ecological, rapacious White Man. For while the Australian Aborigines were seen as non-polluting, non-destructive conservationists, the white man was not. In Aboriginal Australia, Strehlow claimed, ‘the game animals and the food plants were protected against wanton destruction. Until the era of “white” settlement a perfect balance existed between population and food resources’. Wright argued the same point: We are beginning to realise that the primitive peoples we have overwhelmed in our exploitive adventure lived in a balance we have disturbed or destroyed, and from our own now so much more complex technological level, we have to attempt to re-establish some such kind of balance in order to survive.

In this racial fantasy it is white men, not black, who are barbarous and ignorant.26 Neither Wright nor Strehlow provided details as to what Aboriginal intimate knowledge of their environment comprised. Details did not suit their edenic story. Aborigines were a trope, a figure of speech used to illustrate and condemn the destructiveness of the modern world. The 1960s revealed industrial society’s devastating rapaciousness. This fact required a counterpoint. For the sake of a satisfying story, earlier times had to be less complex and less ecologically damaging. Wright and Strehlow’s picture of Aborigines dramatised that contrast. The reality was less magical and more prosaic. Like most humans in most societies, particularly hunter–gatherer societies, Australian Aborigines were flexible and opportunistic. They took advantage of

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the world as they encountered it. They did not recognise resources as finite or scarce. Rather, they considered scarcity merely a temporal and spatial inconvenience remedied simply by moving to another area where that scarcity did not exist. Instead of practising conscious conservation – which requires deliberate and self-conscious sacrifices of immediate self-interest to long-term preservation of endangered species and habitats – Aborigines limited their impact by limiting their population, employing a limited technology, and living within a limited understanding of need. Many young Australians, however, did not require the ennobling example of Aborigines as peaceful, carefree, unshackled, eloquent, wise people living innocent, naked lives in a golden world of nature, to form their own, original relationship with the continent. Boys and girls played outside and in the bush, which in the 1960s still inter-penetrated most Australian suburbs. With gusto and rumbustious activity – their senses engaged in action and live study – they learned from practical experience rather than formal instruction. Their outdoor existence shaped physical confidence and strength and formed loyalties to place. With growing understanding that each place was connected through soil and plants and animals and history to other places, their affiliations began to embrace the whole continent. It was an embodied life. Born in Junee of Greek-speaking parents, peter prineas grew up in a large house surrounded by a vegetable garden, fruit trees, and grape vines. He found life everywhere: spiders in the laundry, snakes in the toilet and, in the large block next door, a fowl yard with the occasional rat. Mooing cows, ready to be milked, gathered in nearby paddocks. Sulphur-crested cockatoos, wheeling flocks of galahs, and ravens swept through town. Bats swooped during summer evenings and plovers called at night. pepper trees shaded the schoolyard and kurrajong trees lined the sandy streets. Barefoot children felt the burning hot road surface in summer. Dust storms billowed in the west

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and sometimes locust plagues passed through town. When the rains came peter and his mates searched for mushrooms on the nearby hills where they played cowboys and Indians. With neighbours, he went rabbiting and yabbying in local dams. With his father, he duck hunted along the Murrumbidgee River. At school, peter enjoyed nature study and discovered maps and the worlds they revealed. Landforms fascinated him and he imagined himself crossing the plains, scaling the hills, and standing on the tops of the mountains pictured on the classroom walls. In the late 1950s, when he was nine, peter’s family moved to Sydney’s North Shore. Here he discovered new birds – bulbuls, doves, and currawongs – and different trees – brushbox and jacaranda. But the manmade smallness of suburban life never overcame the pull of the outdoors, and he sought wilder surroundings. He soon discovered the forests, mud flats, and mangroves around Middle Harbour and from his grandmother’s house at Sylvania, he explored the Georges River and Botany Bay. In 1962, when he was 14, peter joined his brother and a friend on a camping trip to the Blue Mountains. The night was wild: driving rain, swirling mists and cold. In the morning peter looked down from the camp on Narrowneck and watched the clouds floating above the Megalong Valley. Later he explored the southern Blue Mountains and Kanangra as well as the Warrumbungles and the Snowy Mountains. Later still, while at University studying law, he ventured to Tasmania’s southwest, including Lake pedder.27 As children played, explored, and absorbed Australia in their bones, adults made plans. In 196 the Tasmanian government received a Commonwealth grant to build a developmental road from Maydena, west of Hobart, 80 kilometres further west through untracked wilderness to the confluence of the Gordon and Serpentine Rivers. The purpose, the government said, was to facilitate a survey of the region’s hydro-electric potential.

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A year later, in August 1964, premier eric Reece ruled out further reserves in the southwest. Tasmania already had enough reserves. preservation, he said, prevented development: ‘We would not be fulfilling our responsibilities as a Government if we denied our people the opportunity of receiving the overall benefits from harnessing the Gordon River and its tributaries, the best remaining source of hydroelectricity in Australia’. However, to mitigate ‘gross and wanton destruction’, he announced the appointment of an interdepartmental committee ‘to handle arrangements and recommend reserves to protect the region against undue damage’.28 The South-West Committee sought representation on the interdepartmental committee but Reece restricted membership to the chairman, Allan Knight, chief commissioner of the Hydro-electric Commission (HeC), and representatives from government departments with an interest in southwest exploitation. In this way the HeC subsumed other government departments and became the decisive authority concerning reserves and national parks. In 1965 a nine-year-old Devonport girl wrote to the premier to say how sad she would be when the HeC’s Mersey–Forth power scheme flooded the Forth Falls. Reece released his reply to the press and said he shared the feeling of sadness that something of beauty must be lost. But there were different kinds of beauty and ‘the new dam would provide a spectacular 50ft. waterfall at flood time’. In any case, ‘change is inevitable as man wages his constant struggle to provide the material needs of the increasing millions’. He predicted that ‘When the HeC project in the Gordon River area was built there would be some modification of the Lake pedder National park area’. But here too there would be compensation and benefits: the scheme ‘would open up another huge area of scenic country as a popular tourist resort’.29 Francis Ratcliffe gave developments in southwest Tasmania little thought. preoccupied with the ACF, he gradually relinquished his

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CSIRO duties to concentrate on recruiting people, raising money, and advertising the Foundation. In July 1965 he wrote an article for Wildlife announcing the formation of the ACF, which, he explained, was going to be ‘a repository of information, and reference centre, on conservation matters – policy and progress – not only within Australia but overseas’. He did not mention advocacy or activism. Two months later the ACF’s working committee reported to the first provisional council meeting, outlined likely staffing needs, suggested membership targets, and proposed wide powers for the executive. Subsequently, the provisional executive met and set up subcommittees. Already, bureaucratic imperatives ruled the ACF – the Foundation became as preoccupied with its own organisation as with its purpose. The Foundation’s leading men began to think of the ACF not as an institution created out of and for conservation but as a miscellany of funds, properties, projects, and offices, all urgently requiring economic support.0 Other conservationists were interested in larger issues. Why were humans destroying the world and what could be done? In January and February of 1966, Derek Whitelock convened two more seminars on conservation at the University of New england. At the first, ‘Conservation in education’, Len Webb outlined ‘Some principles of Conservation ecology’ while Francis Ratcliffe spoke about language and the importance for conservationists ‘to make sure that their own ideas are clear and can be put into a form that is digestible and acceptable to others’. He admitted, however, he was often confused himself and ‘still in the process of clarifying my ideas and bringing the concept of “total conservation” into mental focus’.1 Allan Fox, education officer with the New South Wales Fauna protection panel, spoke about population and asked: ‘What validity do answers to questions of a quality-of-living or of the conservation of natural resources have, while this [population] problem continues

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unchecked and discussion is taboo?’ The pressure of population was not global or abstract but local and real.2 At the second seminar, ‘practical problems of National parks’, the audience heard from Geoff Mosley. Mosley had grown up in england’s peak District at the time it became Britain’s first national park. A keen walker, he trained as a geographer and wrote his masters thesis on the national park movement. After visiting national parks in Canada and New Zealand, he arrived in Australia in 1960 with a research scholarship at ANU. He continued walking and by foot explored many of Australia’s major reserves. He was an expert on parks and mapping wild areas. Also at the seminar, Allen Strom asked: ‘How can we limit the use of National parks for recreation so that they are truly a conservation measure?’ Given the increasing numbers and demands of population, ‘our responsibility to-day, is not to find ways and means to make the natural lands more available to the people, but how to keep the tide back from overwhelming a resource which does not belong to to-day’s people but rather to tomorrow’s’. Much of the seminar’s discourse was ephemeral, fleeting, and transient, without substance or interest. But the concern with language and the focus on population revealed conservationists articulating new ideas. previously, people thought of conservation as husbandry: the wise use of resources so as to permit continued, indefinite use. Conservation now also meant preserving what was unique and beautiful, preventing destruction, and controlling exploitation. Conservation was as much about saving the world from humans as it was about saving the world for humans. Advocates were needed for the life that belonged to this continent. Conservation required action, confrontation, and engagement in public affairs. Conservation was political and, as Marie Byles, Strom, and Wright argued, moral: humans had an obligation to the nonhuman world.

ChAPTER 4

LeveL-Headed Men

In founding and joining civic organisations and acting collectively, citizen conservationists became more aware of themselves as loyal custodians of the Australian continent. Australia was the part of the Earth they felt most deeply connected to, the one place they were properly at home, the one place to which they were related in an interior way by daily experience, and the one place most requiring defence and preservation. As Australians they had inherited from their British founders a habit of mind that argued from example rather than principle. Pragmatists, who often feebly and imperfectly expressed their love of country, they were not always bold with suggestions about how best to secure the conservation of nature. Americans were less inhibited. In 1964, the Australian National Travel Association (ANTA) commissioned an American firm of tourism consultants to advise on Australian tourism development. Assisted by Dick Piesse, ANTA’s director of Travel Development, the Americans visited Australia in late 1964 and presented their 340-page report a year later. Much was audacious: Because of the Great Barrier Reef ’s unique and outstanding

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importance to Australia and the world, we make the following recommendation: The whole of the outer Great Barrier Reef and its inner littorals should be declared a Marine National Park in order to protect it for posterity.1

Nor were the consultants reticent about Tasmania’s southwest. They recommended a ‘wilderness type’ national park for ‘all south-western Tasmania’. Their rationale was straightforward. They recognised what many Australians could not: ‘nowhere else in Australia is there any region like this’.2 But if most Australian conservationists were too timid to call for such large-scale parks, some at least were forthright about the destructiveness of Australian development. Early in 1966, Jock Marshall published an edited collection of articles under the title The Great Extermination: A Guide to Anglo-Australian Cupidity, Wickedness & Waste. Marshall, professor of zoology at the University of Melbourne, contributed four of the nine chapters and The Great Extermination was very much his book; he set the tone. he was angry, irreverent, impassioned, and blunt. The country, he claimed, needed ‘a humane and sensible balance between legitimate development and conservation’. Unfortunately, Australians were a long way from achieving this ‘balance’. ‘We have been not only negligent, but criminally culpable.’ Marshall intended to lay charges and name names. The charge was ‘the despoliation of the Australian environment’. The initial fault lay with sheep, the ‘Sacred Cow of Australia’; sheep farmers were ‘almost entirely responsible’ for the Great Extermination. But there were other indictments: kangaroo shooting was ‘organised savagery’. The story for other mammals and birds was much the same: ‘The European came, he saw and he slaughtered’. Marshall did not discriminate: ‘Wherever there is Man there is rapacity’. The deadly

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aggressive response of many of his compatriots to wildlife and, by implication, to their continent left him troubled. There were, he lamented, ‘relatively few people in Australia today who have a deep care for the native fauna’. Even worse, ‘Unbelievably, no-one in Australia has any real idea how much damage we have done’.3 Eric Worrell wrote about reptiles, which, he said, ‘no less than other animals, are deserving of preservation’. David Pollard and Trevor Scott, in ‘River and Reef ’, cited American writer Aldo Leopold on the need for ‘an ecological conscience’ and stated that conservation was an ethical issue. They outlined threats to Australia’s rivers and reef, noted the decline of native fish in southeastern waterways, and protested about sugar mill wastes poisoning Queensland rivers. Ian hiscock, in ‘The Shore and the Shallows’, said Australia’s coasts were being plundered by ‘groups of idiots’. John Turner, in ‘The Decline of the Plants’, claimed that ‘the wholehearted destruction of the native vegetation is almost a national pastime’, raised an alarm over exotic species invasion, and warned that development was destroying native flora and fauna. The consequence was that ‘Civilised man . . . is certainly well on the way . . . to reducing the marvellous diversity of life to a dead level of uniformity’. Len Webb, in ‘The Rape of the Forests’, surveyed the history of settlement in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania, and Western Australia and the accompanying abuse and effacement of forests and woodlands. he condemned ‘Australian forestry, which functions solely as a production enterprise, [and] is perhaps unique in the civilised world, where the productive role of forestry is accepted as secondary to conservation’.4 In summing up, Marshall made the case for beauty: we ought to conserve the land not for use but for beauty’s sake. But there was also a utilitarian argument for conservation: people might find a use for Australia’s flora and fauna in the future. And, despite the book’s witness to Australia’s dire history of extinction and destruction, Marshall

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argued that economic progress and conservation were compatible. Although Marshall felt that few people cared about Australian wildlife or thought about the need for conservation, his book attracted attention. Not unexpectedly, Wildlife reviewed The Great Extermination and endorsed its arguments. A reviewer in Walkabout magazine – published by the Australian Tourism Commission – thought that although Marshall’s impulsive ‘j’accuse’ style detracted from his theme, there was no disputing the central argument: nature in Australia deserved a rightful and thriving place in the national conscience. The following month, Walkabout’s publisher announced that the magazine was adding ‘its voice to the swelling chorus for the conservation of Australian’s wildlife before it is too late’.5 Soon the refrain was heard in Tasmania. In August 1966, after taking note of the ANTA consultants’ recommendation for reserving the entire southwest as a national wilderness reserve, the South-West Committee released a master conservation plan for the area and sent copies to the Premier, members of Parliament, and interested individuals and organisations throughout Australia. The WPSQ quickly responded and president Judith Wright alerted members to the dangers facing Lake Pedder. She wrote to Premier Reece and to the hobart Mercury, expressing the WPSQ’s concerns.6 Reece was unmoved. he told Parliament he could never subscribe to the view that the southwest remain untouched. he was sure some of the interstate organisations that had contacted him had no experience and little knowledge of the State. Moreover, people who talked about natural heritage had no idea of the economic potential of the area, which contained only ‘a few badgers [wombats], kangaroos and wallabies, and some wild flowers that can be seen anywhere’. he maintained the massive projected Gordon River hydro-electric project would not bring devastation: ‘The Gordon River and its tributaries will continue to run in their beds’.7

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Such hostile, flippant remarks alarmed many Tasmanian conservationists, who thought the South-West Committee and the hobart Walking Club – far from being committed to saving Lake Pedder – were prepared to sacrifice the lake in exchange for loose assurances about general conservation of the southwest. Critics believed that because many members of the two organisations worked for the hEC, they were reluctant to confront the commission and the government. They proposed a new organisation to open debate and challenge the government’s decision to destroy a national park. At the end of March 1967, representatives from the Launceston and North West Walking Clubs formed the Save Lake Pedder National Park Committee (SLPNPC), with Peter Sims as secretary. More militant than the South-West Committee, the new group immediately began organising public meetings, slide shows, and publications, and sought the advice and assistance of mainland and overseas conservation bodies and individuals. Their urgency was justified. In May, Reece tabled the Hydro-Electric Commission Report on the Gordon River Power Development Stage One and Thermal Power Station. The hEC recommended dams that would inundate Lake Pedder to a depth of 15 metres. The new lake, the hEC asserted, would be larger and more attractive than the old. Objections were immediate and vehement. Letters, suggestions, and complaints swamped the local media; public protest meetings, exhibitions, and pamphlets followed. SLPNPC collected a 10 000-signature petition, personally contacted every Tasmanian parliamentarian and flew 15 of them to Lake Pedder, set up an information booth on the Gordon road, printed hundreds of ‘Save Lake Pedder National Park’ car stickers, gave lectures and talks to clubs, societies, and schools, and contacted every member of the ACF.8 Throughout May and June, letters, articles, stories, and editorials about Lake Pedder appeared virtually every day in every Tasmanian

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newspaper. Not everyone opposed the scheme: some people supported the hEC and claimed no beauty would be destroyed because there was no beauty to be destroyed. Lake Pedder was ordinary and the surrounding button-grass plains were of no interest. One correspondent said the surrounding bushland was of ‘poor quality’ and that ‘mud flats [were] preferable to the endless acres of button grass’. Another described the area as ‘desolate, treeless, boggy, inhospitable terrain’.9 Nevertheless the outcry prompted Tasmania’s non-party upper house, the Legislative Council, to appoint a select committee. During nine weeks over the winter the Committee met on 31 occasions, examined 44 witnesses, and received written evidence from a further six sources. A majority of witnesses opposed the hEC plans. Peter Sims gave evidence, as did Geoff Mosley, who, although now employed by the ACF, represented himself. The ACF was unrepresented. Thistle Stead and Vincent Serventy, visiting Tasmania giving lectures and presenting slide shows on behalf of the South-West Committee, appeared. Serventy told the legislators they were ‘on the verge of making a serious mistake in national park policy’ and urged them to consider the tourist potential of the region. Although disorganised and uncoordinated, conservationists mounted a vigorous campaign.10 It made little difference to Reece. he headed a brutal, thuggish government utterly constant in its destructive mission and contemptuous of opposition and civil process. No organisation had ever opposed a Tasmanian project before and Reece was unflinching. As far as he was concerned, the existing Lake Pedder was doomed and he had no intention of taking contrary advice. he took pride in the scheme, which he described as ‘big, imaginative, and nationally significant’.11 Even as the Select Committee began hearing evidence, Reece’s government introduced legislation authorising the hEC’s Gordon River plans. hope now rested with the Legislative Assembly’s Select Committee. But its report commended the hEC’s plans and viewpoint.

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The hobart Mercury approved and described the select Committee as ‘a group of level-headed men’ who had reached the ‘correct’ decision on a scheme that was ‘inevitable’. The Advocate believed the select committee ‘indicated its complete confidence in the hydro-Electric Commission’s ability to develop Tasmania’s water resources in the best possible way’. Construction work started almost immediately.12 But many conservationists would not give up. Peter Sims organised film and slide shows in Melbourne and addressed a public meeting, where he told the 250 people present, ‘If Lake Pedder goes, every Australian state is going to suffer’. he said the campaign should become a national concern. ‘It’s got too big for Tasmania to handle. It’s an Australian issue. The eyes of the world are on us.13 Two days later, Sims spoke in Canberra at the ACF’s first annual general meeting. he appealed for Foundation support. The executive, however, wavered. They did not want to confront a State government. Francis Ratcliffe, who felt it was his duty to win over ‘hot-shots’ and tolerate ‘small-time, emotional conservationists’, was unimpressed. he considered the matter closed. Ratcliffe proved equally dismissive and unhelpful when letters arrived from David Yencken and Ian Anderson asking the Foundation to use its influence to prevent development of a woodchip industry based at Eden, New South Wales. Ratcliffe actually endorsed woodchipping and told the correspondents: . . . there is no hope or justification for trying to prevent the establishment of an industry which would utilise certain areas of State Forest . . . It is not unlikely that the handling of these forests may necessitate something like clean-clearance [clearfelling] as a preparation for their replacement by a simpler but more valuable eucalypt community.14

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Despite Ratcliffe’s disobliging attitude, activists continued to solicit ACF support for local causes. Judith Wright had been a member of the ACF’s 1966 provisional council, which, she noted archly, included ‘only 4 women’. her formal election to council, along with that of five other women, including Thistle Stead, was announced at the first AGM. She was determined to make protection of the Great Barrier Reef the ACF’s main Queensland project.15 Indeed, as the WPSQ grew in members and branches it became increasingly preoccupied with reef preservation. In August 1966, artist John Büsst called a meeting at Innisfail. Twenty-five people attended, agreed to form a North Queensland branch of the WPSQ, and elected Büsst president. Originally from Melbourne, Büsst and his wife moved to Bedarra Island in 1940. They later built a tropical bungalow at Bingil Bay on the mainland near Innisfail. With Len Webb, Büsst formed the Tropical Rain Forest Preservation Committee to save Innisfail’s forest. Another Webb associate, Billie Gill, a local farmer’s wife and amateur ornithologist, became the new WPSQ branch’s secretary. In 1965 a number of young divers, amateur naturalists, and scientists at the University of Queensland formed the Queensland Littoral Society to conduct marine research and advocate marine conservation. When, in 1967, the Society resolved to support the declaration of the entire reef as a marine national park, Judith Wright contacted the group and suggested cooperating. Society members Des Connell and Eddie hegerl joined the WPSQ’s council. In June, Connell wrote for the WPSQ’s newsletter about marine national parks and of the multitude threats to the Reef, including mining. The reference to mining caught Büsst’s attention. his branch had recently lodged an objection to a limestone-mining application for the removal of coral from Ellison Reef, offshore from Innisfail. Büsst cited two dangers: to Ellison Reef itself from siltation and water

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pollution and the possibility of a legal precedent for mining that could lead to widespread commercial exploitation. Wright and the Littoral Society agreed to help. Next, Büsst approached the ACF and other organisations, including the University of Queensland and the GBRC, for support. The University replied that Ellison reef was ‘dead’, exploitation would not endanger living coral, and therefore the University would not oppose the granting of leases. Disappointed but undeterred, Büsst travelled to Canberra and Sydney, solicited marine scientists, collected their opinions and presented these at the Mining Warden’s hearing in September. The Mining Warden, however, would not accept written statements in evidence. Büsst successfully applied for an adjournment in order to secure scientific witnesses. Don McMichael, a marine biologist who had actually worked on Ellison Reef and was currently the ACF’s director, agreed to come. hegerl volunteered to send a scuba-diving team to Ellison Reef to conduct an underwater survey of marine fauna. Wright, meanwhile, together with botanist Raymond Specht and other Queensland ACF members, helped organise the ACF’s first public activity in Queensland – a symposium, ‘Caring for Queensland’, held at the University of Queensland in October. The Queensland governor opened the proceedings. Premier George Nicklin gave the introductory address. Garfield Barwick spoke, as did Ratcliffe. ‘The Symposium’, the ACF stated, was planned to illustrate that conservation is a broad and positive concept compatible with utilisation. To many people, conservation implies an unadventurous, somewhat thrifty holding on to what we possess. But applied to our natural resources, conservation is one of the greatest challenges to modern man.16

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McMichael spoke on ‘Underwater National Parks and the Great Barrier Reef ’. he nominated several areas of the Reef as suitable for conservation as marine parks but opposed dedicating the whole Reef as a park: It has been suggested that the reef as a whole should be made into one enormous marine park, but I personally do not consider this necessary or desirable. Provided adequate areas, properly selected and managed, are set aside for conservation, then I see no valid reason why other areas of the reef should not be utilised by man.17

To ensure publicity, Wright and Büsst visited the newly-opened Brisbane office of The Australian newspaper. They talked to a young reporter, Barry Wain, and told him Ellison Reef was going to be big news and the beginning of a major story about Reef conservation. The State government had already issued oil-drilling permits over the Reef, and these would cause even more controversy than limestone dredging. The outcome of the Ellison Reef case would have a great bearing on public concern for the Reef. The story went all over Australia. At the second hearing, in November, hegerl contested the ‘dead’ reef theory and argued for the importance of the algae that covered seemingly dead coral to fish-breeding and other marine life. McMichael stressed the particular scientific interest of Ellison Reef and its still unknown riches and argued for a moratorium on mining until the completion of a thorough scientific survey of the Reef. Another scientist, John Barnes, outlined the damage done by the crown-of-thorns starfish and suggested the outbreak was probably triggered by human interference.18 In December, the Mining Warden issued his ruling: he refused the mining application. Six months later the Queensland Minister for

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Mines, Ron Camm, confirmed the decision. Conservationists had set a precedent for not mining the Reef. Wright hoped the victory was bigger than that. Conservation was about more than blocking mining and gaining national parks; it concerned the way humans related to the planet. In November 1966, she had told an audience at Brisbane’s Kedron Park Teachers’ College that The idea of conservation, now so slowly gaining ground, can restore to the human race the sense of personal and human responsibility for the wellbeing of earth and its creatures, through enlightened self-interest, and put man in the picture again as part of nature, not as its enemy and exploiter.19

Kedron Park Teachers’ College next heard from Len Webb, who, like Wright, was interested in redefining conservation. When expressed as ‘wise use of our natural resources’, he said, conservation was ‘airyfairy’. The subject needed a sounder footing, which could be provided by ecology: Ecology is the science of relations between living things and the landscape, and deals with what is popularly called the balance of nature. We have come to understand that no organism lives alone, but that plants and animals live in organised ecological communities.

For Webb, conservation denoted ‘a concern that man in many ways runs the risk of spoiling the capacity of the environment to continue to satisfy his physical and spiritual needs’. One of the biggest dangers was from overpopulation. There was also an attitude problem: ‘It is a dangerous delusion to think that the environment belongs to us: the truth is that we belong to the environment. We must learn to live

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in responsible partnership with nature, instead of by irresponsible exploitation.’20 Wright returned to the issue in an article, ‘Conservation as a Concept’, she contributed to Quadrant magazine early in 1968. She claimed that general science had excluded value and meaning from its investigation of nature. Because these investigations had greatly empowered human beings and thus earned science enormous authority and respect, science’s exclusion of value and meaning had spilled over into human affairs. But there was hope in the science of ecology, which represented a groping movement towards a new kind of understanding which shall take into account actual living processes and interdependences, and can see man as part of a wider process and subordinate to its laws . . . The newly emerging concept we have called ‘conservation’, and its allied science of ecology . . . hold the possibility, at least, of a renewed humility and a revival of imaginative participation in a life-process which includes us, and to which we contribute our own conscious knowledge of it as part of it, not as separate from it.21

Of course, Wright was not the only person attributing moral and almost magical transformative possibilities to ecology. Ecology was beginning to play a central intellectual role in discussions about conservation. Ecology did not tell humans about nature, but it did reveal some of the workings of nature, and its study profoundly influenced the way people perceived nature. First coined in 1866, the term ecology remained outside the vernacular in Australia and elsewhere for nearly 100 years. But as natural scientists commented more and more on conservation, so the word seeped into the public realm.

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The term actually contained a history older than the word itself. The idea of ecology took root in the eighteenth century when thinkers sought a more comprehensive way of looking at the Earth’s fabric of life. They labelled this point of view, which described all living organisms as an interacting whole, as the ‘economy of nature’. Out of this rich set of ideas emerged the twentieth-century science of ecology. 22 But despite the common point of view suggested by the single term ‘economy of nature’, the ideas behind ecology were varied, contained many fragments from different sources, and led in thoroughly incompatible directions. Nineteenth-century field naturalists henry Thoreau and John Muir, for example, approached nature ecologically; they were concerned with relation and interdependence. But Thoreau and Muir were romantics. They thought all of nature was alive and believed that whatever was alive had a claim on man’s moral affections. They rejected the idea that humans had a licence to reshape the world to suit their own tastes and to appropriate resources for their exclusive use. Accordingly, humans must learn to accommodate themselves to the natural order rather than to seek to overwhelm and transform it. This biocentric ethic carried into modern ecological thought. Other people interested in natural history drew inspiration from other features of the Western tradition, in particular the spectacular idea that the world was purely physical, devoid of qualities and possessed only of quantities. Quantities could be measured and measurements compared, contrasted, and correlated. Relationships could be induced, causes inferred, consequences predicted, and the world understood. The manipulation of measurement created science. But scientific thinking appeared to split reality. The world consisted of scientific, measurable fact on the one hand and human experience on the other, no longer one and often contradictory. If the one was real, the other must be illusion. To overcome this contradiction, people began

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to regard humans as apart from and outside nature and to define the search for knowledge as the ‘conquest of nature’. This quest led to detachment and objectivity. Objectivity demanded a cosmos stripped clean of all the emotional and spiritual qualities men and women had supposedly previously found in the natural world. Like Romanticism, objectivity implied an ethic: nature was not God, hence not worthy of man’s piety. In practice, the two strands of ecology were not so clear-cut. Ecological investigators commonly combined both romantic and scientific sensibilities and overlooked the contradictions. Nevertheless, tensions remained and because differences were never fully articulated, they were never fully resolved. In the meantime, conservationists continued to draw from the world of theory as well as participate in the world of action. For sisters Eileen and Joan Bradley, conservation required rehabilitation as much as preservation. In May 1967 they released a pamphlet, Weeds and Their Control, which reflected experience gained while working to remove weeds and encourage regrowth of native plants in Mosman’s Ashton Park. Unfortunately, results so far were disappointing and the methods employed still experimental. Attempts to control weeds by slashing and clearing resulted in rampant regrowth. The sisters sought an alternative. They hand-weeded where they walked, doing less than an hour a day, and were careful to replace the bush litter, which, they believed, contained the seedbank for new growth. They noted that each weed required a different approach, warned against over-weeding, and suggested weeding only, no re-planting, and only so much at a time as to allow regrowth.23 Everywhere conservation required vigilance. Ever since bushwalkers had discovered a prospecting camp near the Colong Caves in the Blue Mountains in 1963, alert Sydney conservationists monitored relevant developments. In October 1966 they noted a government

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announcement foreshadowing the grant of a limestone-mining lease covering the area. Three months later the NSW Minister for Lands, Tom Lewis, granted the lease to the Australian Portland Cement Manufacturers (APCM), part of the British-based Blue Circle cement group, the largest in the world. Conservationists protested and the Federation of Bushwalking Clubs, the National Trust, and other societies and individuals sent letters to the press and politicians. Early in 1967 the NSW National Parks Association (NPA) issued a brochure entitled Quarry Valuable Scenery?. Largely written by Geoff Mosley, the six-page report contained photographs, maps, and an analysis of the cement industry. Mosley gave a history of mining interest in the area, cited precedents in refusing mining claims, suggested that alternative sources had not been considered, and argued for the value of wilderness conservation. The proposed mine, he said, was not compatible with wilderness: ‘To argue, as some have done, that the only area to be affected will be the actual work site, is rather like arguing that a public telephone booth would do not harm in the middle of a tennis court because it only occupies a few square feet’.24 The campaign continued to build and early in the following year the Daily Telegraph editorialised, ‘Government Must Check the Despoilers’, noting that ‘The grab for portions of our wild life areas still goes on despite the passing of the National Parks and Wild Life Act’. The paper cited a number of examples, including the granting of the mining lease in the Colong Caves Reserve ‘despite the heated protests of individuals and all the main conservation bodies’. It called for the lease to be revoked. Ten days later the paper editorialised again and, under the heading ‘Public Anger Can Save Our heritage’, called the mining decision ‘iniquitous’ and a ‘desecration’.25 Public anger soon came from Milo Dunphy, the NPA’s secretary. he wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald disputing the mining company’s claims that the Colong Reserve contained the State’s

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only useful reserves of limestone. he pointed out that ‘the overseascontrolled APCM’ already had access to alternative sources. ‘The Colong Caves Reserve’, however, ‘belongs to the people of N.S.W. It is integral to the Kanangra/Boyd National Park. It should not be sacrificed in some devious attempt to dominate the N.S.W. cement market’. he claimed the company would be ‘getting a gift’ and paying only token royalties.26 In May, the Sydney Morning Herald published an editorial entitled ‘Colong Caves’ which summarised the conservationists’ case. Since the government’s October 1966 announcement, over 50 letters and articles had appeared in the Sydney metropolitan press about the Colong Caves. More letters and articles followed, including a justification for mining from the Minister for Mines, Wal Fife: I need not dwell on the importance of the mining and quarrying industries to the State and the nation, and I would suggest that nature conservation and mining must be kept in proper perspective and sound judgement and a proper sense of proportion must be brought to bear in considering each case.27

In reply, the Sydney Morning Herald editorialised again, quoting Judith Wright’s Quadrant article: ‘It may be late in our history for man to recognise himself as the most destructive animal ever known, but the knowledge may enable us to take steps to save ourselves from the worst consequences of the past’. The paper unconditionally supported Colong’s preservation and disputed Fife’s economic arguments for mining: ‘It is precisely to protect areas from economic exploitation that we declare them natural reserves. Mr Fife’, the editorial continued, ‘has been at pains to tell us that the company’s lease lies outside the boundaries of the Kanangra–Boyd National Park. It lies outside them because the Government has lopped 5000 acres

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from the park in order to make way for it.’ The dispute, the paper concluded, belonged in a larger context: Already we can see in the dwindling fertility of the soil, the increasing destructiveness of floods, droughts, deforestation and the extinction of exploited species, the stripping of plant and forest cover from the land, the pollution of air, lakes and rivers by industrial and human waste, the consequences of centuries of uncontrolled exploitation. If the Government can be brought to see that the issue at Colong runs deeper than the price of cement, the dispute may not have been in vain.28

Not content with words, conservationists organised for action. A meeting at the Sydney University Union of representatives from the Nature Conservation Council of NSW, the Wild Life Preservation Society of Australia, the NPA, Men of the Land, and the Sydney University Conservation Society resolved that a Colong Committee be appointed. Milo Dunphy became secretary. Dunphy was a natural choice. his character singled him out. Serious and obsessive, often pedantic, opinionated, intolerant of other views, arrogant, and argumentative, he was also intelligent and intellectual – capable of great powers of concentration – as well as clever, inventive, and theatrical. And, most importantly for a conservation activist, he was both tenacious and creative, and had the quality of waking up every morning full of fight.

ChAPTER 5

abyss of foLLy

Francis Ratcliffe foresaw a conflict between conservation and development. ‘Australia’, he wrote in March 1968, is infected with something like a boom-development fever, creating an atmosphere in which any suggestion of restraint, or request for second thoughts on some local development guaranteed to provide a quick and sure economic pay-off, is only too easily brushed aside as unrealistic or even unpatriotic.1

But the problems were not insurmountable. Development was necessary and inevitable. It should be encouraged. The proper response was compromise, especially from conservationists who must realise that the economic development of Australia will inevitably proceed, and with increasing intensity. Land with agricultural potential will be cleared for cultivation and lowyielding native forests made over to more productive stands, often by clean-felling and replanting – both changes will affect wildlife and landscape unavoidably.2

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A rational man, Ratcliffe believed knowledge, trained staff, appropriate departments, and wise policies solved problems. There was nothing political about conservation. Rather, it was ‘the application of scientific understanding, wisdom and foresight to the handling of the land and its resources’. On this point Ratcliffe envisaged a central role for the ACF. But the Foundation itself needed organisation, funds, and especially wise personnel. Such people were not always easy to find.3 In April 1968, Don McMichael resigned as ACF director to become chief of the new NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. As the Foundation’s executive began a search for a replacement, they coopted Maurice Mawby, chairman of Conzinc Riotinto of Australia (CRA) and a councillor on the Australian Mining Industry Council, to the ACF council. Ratcliffe welcomed the appointment. he could not imagine the ACF in conflict with business or industry. More politically astute councillors and members opposed the appointment. In July, Geoff Mosley, after a period as part-time assistant director, became full-time assistant director. The search for a director continued. Judith Wright was unimpressed. She told Kathleen McArthur: ‘Francis ought to realise the only hope for the ACF is to get somebody the pollies are frightened of, no matter how uncouth he may be, but F. is far too fastidious to do that’.4 Twenty-four candidates, including Mosley, applied for the director’s position. The executive rejected them all and appointed, by co-option, Dick Piesse. For the previous eight years Piesse had been director of the travel department of the Australian Tourist Commission and for a while was editor of Walkabout. Following his appointment, the ACF moved headquarters from Canberra to Melbourne. Piesse viewed the Foundation’s role as that of honest broker: non-partisan, scientific, and definitely not emotional. Fear of emotion oppressed many conservationists – but not all.

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In September 1968, the WPSQ organised a spring school at Binna Burra on ‘The Relation of Man and Nature’. When the keynote speaker warned against the ‘emotional response’, Kathleen McArthur rejoined: ‘Without “feeling” we would not be here today. Controlled emotion is essential to our mission. Emotion gives us the drive to wield the tool of knowledge’.5 McArthur endorsed Wright’s view that Australians would never develop a culture until they were at peace with the landscape. Unfortunately, Australians presently lacked sympathy and understanding of their own land: ‘We still look upon our country as a source of wealth rather than a heritage to appreciate, manage and hand on intact, or even enriched, to the next generation’. Wright, who also spoke, noted the predominance of scientists, and asked, what role for laypersons? She already had a forthright answer. The campaign for the Great Barrier Reef demonstrated the need for committed non-professionals.6 Indeed, the campaign opened a split between some scientists and activists. Timid and self-deludingly non-political, the Great Barrier Reef Committee (GBRC) favoured ‘planned’ or ‘controlled exploitation’ of the Reef. John Büsst detested the phrase. he thought they were the words of compromise, which he regarded, not as a scientific contribution to the argument but as a halfhearted sop to the exploiters, a not very courageous attempt to save some meagre portions of the whole reef from exploitation. I will have none of it . . . The control of exploitation, once it has begun, exists only as a myth in the minds of those who advocate it.7

Uncompromising and pragmatic, WPSQ activists understood that conservation was fundamentally political. Pragmatism enjoined scepticism towards governments, bureaucracies, and promises made by politicians. In contrast, GBRC scientists, appropriately cautious

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about scientific claims, were nevertheless politically gullible. They tended to accept assurances from politicians that they meant the Reef no harm. The WPSQ pragmatism quickly raised the disturbing question of jurisdiction. Who had legal control over the Reef? The answer was unclear. Many people believed Queensland’s boundaries ended at the low-water mark. Did Commonwealth jurisdiction apply beyond that point? Indeed, had Australia ever claimed ownership of the entire Reef ? Maybe it lay in international waters. The question had not been tested in court and the Commonwealth government showed little inclination to assert authority. In contrast, conservationists wanted a clear legal framework in which to operate. They needed to identify and put pressure on appropriate authorities. If such authorities did not already exist they must be created. Given Queensland’s ruthless commitment to development, conservationists preferred Commonwealth control. But, whatever the case, so long as political authority remained unclear, so would Reef conservation. Early in 1968, the Queensland government introduced legislation to open the entire Queensland coastline to prospecting. Despite their victory at Innisfail, conservationists realised they could not fight each new application, in each Mining Warden’s Court, in each country town. The campaign must become broader and international. Wright, in Europe at the time, contacted the World Wildlife Fund in Geneva. By now the WPSQ was clear: the Reef was not just an area of scattered, unconnected coral outcrops, but a biological whole to be kept undivided – despite what nervous scientists might recommend. The WPSQ’s adamant ecological stand and the growing controversy over the Reef attracted new members and WPSQ branches opened in Townsville and Ingham. In July, Federal Opposition leader Gough Whitlam visited Cairns

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on holiday. Büsst introduced himself and presented his case for Commonwealth jurisdiction over the Reef and for a GBR marine national park. When Prime Minister John Gorton holidayed in the north, Büsst interviewed him as well. he found both leaders sympathetic. The following month, the Littoral Society and the WPSQ printed ‘Save the Barrier Reef ’ bumper stickers. Soon they appeared on cars all over Australia. The Littoral Society next organised a petition asking the State government not to permit further oil and gas drilling on the Reef in the absence of plans to deal with oil spillages. It gained 13 000 signatures. At the end of August, Büsst wrote to Whitlam and Gorton urging ‘a complete moratorium on all mining activities for at least ten years until such time as our own, and international, scientists have had the opportunity to determine what is possible and what is definitely not possible’. he recommended that ‘the Commonwealth take full control of the area now’.8 Whitlam raised the matter in Parliament and the Australian Academy of Science released a report on national parks that included Don McMichael’s recommendations for several large GBR marine national parks. McMichael reiterated his earlier opinion that he did not consider it ‘necessary or desirable’ that ‘the reef as a whole should be made into one enormous marine park’.9 Meanwhile, the GBRC offered to conduct a biological survey of the Reef – provided they had funding. The government, however, distrusted biology, thought such an investigation might reach unacceptable conclusions and invited American harry Ladd, assistant geologist with the US Geological Survey, to conduct a brief study of the Reef and recommend on its exploitation. After just one month’s examination, consisting largely of aerial reconnaissance and brief visits to a number of islands, Ladd released

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his report, basically a blueprint for exploitation. ‘Petroleum’, he wrote, ‘is potentially the Reef ’s most valuable resource’. he believed if oil was discovered, ‘it would be possible to prevent damaging pollution’. he gave no details of preventive measures. As for mining, he suggested, ‘Dead coral could be developed for agricultural lime and cement’. Ladd had consulted with government departments and the GBRC, which he described as ‘broad-minded’. ‘They are well aware of the need for conservation’, he continued, ‘but they also believe that controlled exploitation is possible and, indeed, desirable’.10 Ladd’s claims prompted a vigorous and well-publicised rejoinder from fellow American scientist, zoologist Fred Grassle. Grassle, who was studying reef ecology at the University of Queensland, said Ladd’s report was based on meagre and limited evidence. Proponents of exploitation should not define the debate. ‘The words “controlled exploitation”’, he said, ‘are an idle and meaningless political phrase’.11 Nevertheless, the GBRC remained committed to ‘controlled exploitation’. Chairman Robert Endean told a press conference that to ‘leave the Reef alone’ would be impractical and unprogressive. The Reef could and must be exploited, and he expressed his belief in the good intentions of the Queensland government.12 Some people thought those good intentions confirmed when the new Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen gave a public assurance that the State government would protect the Reef against exploitation: ‘No mining based on harvesting dead coral was permitted on the Reef. This would not be changed unless overwhelming evidence was produced to suggest that limited exploitation would not affect the Reef in any way.’ he claimed the Ellison Reef case proved the government’s commitment.13 Wright and Büsst, meanwhile, had noticed that the ACF’s July 1968 newsletter called for a proper survey of the Reef and clarification of the legal ambiguity. They found this encouraging, but wanted

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a more forthright position. At the ACF’s October Council meeting Wright and Büsst moved a motion calling on the Commonwealth to act quickly to assert Australia’s claims to ownership of the land and waters of the GBR and to restrain any development until the completion of a proper scientific survey. With some amendment the motion was carried. The ACF now supported Australian control over the Reef and a moratorium. Language that would reconcile conservation and exploitation continued to preoccupy the GBRC. In November, the Committee’s AGM carried a convoluted motion that Wright generously interpreted to mean that the GBRC backed no mining or drilling, in line with the ACF’s October resolution. She believed that all scientific bodies in Australia with an interest in the Reef now concurred on the urgent need for a moratorium and a scientific survey.14 The government remained unconcerned. Nothing could deter the Premier or his Ministers from development. Early in January 1969, the State called for oil exploration tenders. Within two weeks, 40 oil-exploration companies, some backed by giant international corporations, applied for leases. Then disaster struck. A huge leak from an oil-drilling platform off the coast of Santa Barbara, California began making headlines around the world. Television and newspapers carried graphic accounts of damage that could become the Reef ’s fate should oil drilling proceed. People were aroused, wrote letters to the press; editorials drew connections; members asked questions in Parliament. Across the country conservation societies united against oil drilling.15 Still the government pushed on and announced that Japex, a Japanese oil exploration company, in partnership with Australian company Ampol planned to drill for oil. There was a furore. Commentary, some of it organised by the Littoral Society and the WPSQ and most of it adverse, appeared in newspapers, radio, and television

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all over the country. More and more organisations and people – museums, universities, and fishermen – joined the campaign for the Reef. All were more interested in the biological and aesthetic importance of the Reef than its geology. In contrast, the State government and other proponents of exploitation remained fixated on geology. An American geology professor, Rhodes Fairbridge, told the Royal Society in Brisbane that the Reef should be exploited ‘immediately and to the hilt’. Those who sought protection were no more than ‘sentimentalists who want to put a barbed-wire fence around everything’. Ninety-nine percent of coral reefs, he asserted, were ‘dead anyway’.16 In May the ACF prepared a symposium on the future of the GBR. To Wright, Büsst, and other Queensland conservationists the focus seemed excessively narrow and cautious, dominated by geologists and speakers representing companies interested in exploitation, including the exploration manager from CRA and the manager of government relations for Esso Standard Oil. The draft resolution contained no mention of the need for a moratorium or for a thorough scientific survey, despite the ACF resolution passed the year before. Worse, the conservationists responsible for getting the question of the Reef into the public arena in the first place were not represented. The first speaker, William Maxwell, outlined the Reef ’s geology and hydrology and concluded, ‘The possibility of excessive reef destruction by animals – human and non-human – would appear to be quite remote’. The enormous dimensions and viability of the Reef ‘should not be obscured in the hysteria of ignorance’. The Reef, he said, represented a ‘major natural asset’ that invited ‘thorough appraisal and responsible exploitation’.17 Lawyer Percy Spender, former president of the International Court of Justice, gave his opinion that State boundaries ended at the low-water mark. ‘Consequently the States have no rights over either

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territorial seas or the mineral and other natural resources of the seabed.’ Almost all the Barrier Reef, therefore, fell under the jurisdiction of the Commonwealth rather than Queensland. Spender confirmed the conservationists’ commonsense view that the Reef was a national responsibility. he suggested the issue be determined ‘with despatch’ by the Commonwealth instituting proceedings against a State, for example Queensland, before the high Court.18 Frank Talbot, director of the Australian Museum, Sydney, summarised the proceedings and noted a conflict between geologists and biologists. Geologists believed no harm could come to the Reef from any activity. Biologists were less confident because they were aware that living matter was more fragile and sensitive than geological matter. Because conservationists were more interested in the living things on the Reef, ‘we must rely on the biologist more than the geologist’. he quoted Fred Grassle: ‘The Great Barrier Reef is rich in large measure because it is large, and if it is sliced into segments this would drastically reduce its richness. We therefore have to think of the reef in its totality.’19 In conclusion, chairman Garfield Barwick asked for comments on the formal resolution but warned that the meeting had to close at 6 pm and it was now very late. Büsst and Vincent Serventy moved an amendment for a 10-year mining moratorium. Grassle sought another amendment further increasing reef protection. Barwick refused both requests and amidst uproar the unamended resolution passed and the meeting closed. Büsst described the meeting as a ‘bloody shambles’. The ACF’s executive had imposed a weak resolution, disallowed speakers who favoured a moratorium, and excluded open discussion. The Littoral Society and the Innisfail branch of the WPSQ wrote to the ACF in protest. The WPSQ dissociated itself from the symposium’s resolution. Subsequently, Barwick wrote to Gorton and Bjelke-Petersen

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advising them that the symposium recommended Commonwealth and State governments establish a joint advisory body or commission to examine and report on all proposals for development of the Reef.20 Barwick’s compromised letter, his mishandling of dissent, and the ACF leadership’s general timidity about the Reef exposed a split between conservationists and the ACF’s leadership. Different perceptions lay at the root of the dispute. The ACF’s leadership, committed to reason, objectivity, and impartiality, isolated itself from the reality of power and politics. Grassroots conservationists, however, understood conservation in political terms – as a struggle for power and influence. To Milo Dunphy, for instance, politics mattered. he took citizenship seriously. Like the great majority of conservationists, Dunphy had never, before his involvement in conservation, participated in the official business of the state. But, if nature was to survive the nation’s follies and desecrations, then people had to act in the public realm and build a vigorous civil society in opposition to governments and developers intent on exploitation and destruction. Fortunately, Australian liberal democracy gave citizens the chance to think, speak, and act as individuals on matters of concern to them. Once committed to politics, Dunphy planned his activism as if it were a military campaign. In three months the Colong Committee had held press conferences, written letters, placed advertisements, suggested how other conservationists could help, enlisted scientists, consulted geologists and engineers, noted that a NSW Young Liberals meeting had passed a resolution against mining, and urged a re-arousal of press interest in the matter. Dunphy approached individual politicians and early in September took Roy McCartney, the shadow Minister for Lands, to the Colong Caves area. McCartney later moved a motion in Parliament to revoke the leases. ACF director Dick Piesse told a meeting of Colong Committee

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supporters in March 1969 that the ACF regarded the issue of a mining lease in the Colong Caves reserve as a matter of national concern and had opposed it from the start. The Foundation, he said, was in correspondence with the Premier, Robert Askin. Of more significance was the Committee’s decision to undertake a corporate campaign. Sympathiser and stockbroker, Sam McMahon – brother of Federal Liberal government Minister, Billy McMahon – bought parcels of shares in Australian Portland Cement Manufacturers (APCM) and transferred them, at cost, to individual Colong supporters. Over 100 holders of single shares attended APCM’s April 1969 Sydney AGM. They spoke up, questioned directors, and moved amendments to other motions all drawing attention to the Colong Caves. Despite, or perhaps because of, the disruption, the company’s management agreed to meet with the Colong Committee. Executives said the company would consider alternative mine sites – providing they proved viable.21 Conservationists sensed the government favoured mining more than APCM did. Therefore, pressure on the government had to increase. In July, prompted by members who belonged to the Colong Committee, the State Council of the Liberal Party carried its third resolution opposing quarrying at Colong. In September, the annual convention of the NSW Liberal Party carried a resolution calling on the government to cancel the leases. A few days later Barwick and Mosley called on Wal Fife, the Minister for Mines, to discuss Colong. Meanwhile, 80 bushwalkers, speleologists, and conservationists took part in a televised cave-in at Church Creek. Many people wrote to the newspapers. One supporter characterised ‘The Colong affair’ as a question of loyalty, as a ‘struggle between patriotic Australians who are trying to preserve some part of our country in its natural state and the exploiters who are steadily destroying it’.22 No conservation issue ever stands alone. Other matters always

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intrude. Private and public schemes for development and exploitation never cease. Dunphy and the Colong Committee noted worrying related developments. In particular, the NSW government planned to revoke and excise several areas of national park land or potential national park land for other purposes. One plan suggested excising the Boyd Plateau, near the Colong Caves area, from the proposed Kanangra–Boyd national park, and clearing the native vegetation for pine plantations. Another involved the dedication of two major south coast forest areas – Deua-Tuross and Eden-Wonboyn – to woodchipping. A third proposed the leasing of northern coast lands for sandmining, especially the seafront and hind dunes of the Myall Lakes National Park. For the moment, conservationists focused on the first proposal – clearing the Boyd Plateau for pine plantations. In September, when the Minister for Lands, Tom Lewis attempted to introduce legislation excluding Colong and the Boyd Plateau from the proposed Kanangra–Boyd national park, 300 people demonstrated outside Parliament and two climbers descended on ropes 30 storeys down the State Office building.23 Demonstrations discomfited government. During the second reading of the bill, government member James Cameron attacked Dunphy, ‘who has prejudiced conservation . . . by his strident and unbalanced publicity’. Lewis seconded Cameron’s charges and accused Dunphy of ‘organising a campaign . . . on an emotional basis rather than a practical basis’.24 Lewis saw reason and emotion as opposites: the rise of one meant the fall of the other. he therefore sought to draw attention to his own rationality in contrast to Dunphy’s emotionalism. But Lewis was deceived. Reason and passion are not practical contraries, mutually exclusive, nor are they evenly balanced. Reason plays a small part in governing the world. Passion rules. To be human is to be emotional;

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to be human is to have a body regularly ransacked by emotion. Emotions are as real and as material as flesh and bone. Emotion is central. No one can sustain purposeful activity – whether in government or in conservation – without emotion. Purpose entails goals, and goals entail passion: goals are always cathected. Reason alone cannot move people: without passion, people remain inert, unmoved themselves, and unable to move others. No one can persuade by reason alone; persuasion aims towards goal-directed activity, and goal-directed activity implies a non-reasoning or emotional attachment to the goal. Even though they may deny the connection, successful politicians know – at least intuitively – that successful persuasion requires the presence of the passions. Conflicts between conservationists and government derived not, as Lewis pretended, from a sham contest between reason and emotion but between incompatible goals and incompatible attachments. Conservationists found beauty, wonder, and awe in nature in Australia. They cared more for the birds that soared through the air, the animals that slithered, burrowed, and hopped across the land, and the creatures that swam in the deep than for the human power that threatened destruction to all. They felt moved to protect and conserve. Governments and their allies in development found raw material in nature in Australia. They cared more about the country as a quarry and camping ground for profit than as the nidus of life. They felt moved to exploit and transform. In March 1967, the Australian Mutual Provident Society (AMP) abandoned its plan to exploit and transform Victoria’s Little Desert area for agriculture. Within months, Premier henry Bolte appointed farmer William McDonald Minister for Lands. An energetic, experienced developer with properties on both sides of the Victorian–South Australian border, one of which abutted the Little Desert, McDonald believed in production for production’s sake. Land existed to be

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exploited and used, not wasted. Previous failures in marginal country were irrelevant. Technology would overcome soil deficiencies. he saw the Little Desert as a last frontier. Shortly after his Ministerial appointment, he revised the Little Desert scheme and told a public meeting at Kaniva, ‘We can’t afford not to develop this land’. Early in 1968 he announced a government development scheme for the Little Desert.25 Economists, agricultural scientists, and even officials within the State Department of Agriculture questioned the proposal’s viability. The Age dismissed McDonald’s ‘homely and robust creed’ that ‘equates progress with the plough’ with the observation that ‘what used to be a philosophy of progress has become a rationalisation for destruction’.26 After conservationists pressed for a national park over the whole of the Little Desert, McDonald compromised, scaled back his original plan for 44 wheat farms to 12 sheep farms and offered to expand the existing small Little Desert National Park to include the areas least suitable for settlement. Conservationists argued that the new areas did not biologically represent the whole and insisted on flora and fauna surveys before the government consider any development. To fight the proposal, eight conservation groups, including the FNCV, the VNPA and the Natural Resources Conservation League (NRCL), formed the Save Our Bushlands Action Committee (SOBAC) and organised a public meeting at the Melbourne Town hall at the end of August. Over 1000 people attended. Ros Garnet, VNPA secretary, put the Little Desert dispute in a larger context and told the gathering: ‘We are utilising land, air and water as never before, partly because there are now more of us to do it than ever before. Yet the amount of air, land and water is going to remain exactly the same.’ The present pattern of land use, he continued, was ‘predominantly exploitive. In some respects the exploitation

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is little less than frank plundering – plundering in the name of progress’. he questioned the term progress and noted that ‘one can progress towards hell a lot faster than one can towards heaven’. The land, he said, ‘belongs not only to man . . . he shares it with countless other living things and although he rarely recognises it, he depends on them for his livelihood as much as they depend on him for their existence’. 27 Like Garnet, speaker Malcolm Calder, lecturer in botany at the University of Melbourne, thought conservation involved moral considerations: ‘The most compelling argument in favour of nature conservation is the maintenance of biological diversity, a diversity which has taken millions of years to evolve and which we have the power to destroy in minutes’.28 In September, SOBAC sponsored a deputation to Premier Bolte. George Thompson, from the NRCL, argued for a Conservation Council of Victoria to coordinate the many conservation organisations in the State. Dick Piesse advocated expanding the boundaries of the Lower Glenelg National Park, called for the reservation of the Kentbruck heath in southwestern Victoria, and expressed concern about increasing population. Persuasive possibilities, however, were limited. A farmer, Bolte believed life was a constant war against nature, which improved the character of those involved. his larger vision involved Australia becoming ‘the quarry for most of the world’. Accordingly, he supported the settlement scheme, defended McDonald, and dismissed conservation arguments for Little Desert’s preservation. No public demand would change the decision to proceed with the 12 farms. he said he was annoyed at the lack of appreciation of his government’s conservation achievements. It had followed a sound conservation policy but he would not accept the proposition that 5 percent of the State be set aside in reserves and parks.29 Apart from Bolte and McDonald, however, the scheme found

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few followers. Letters to the Age, the Sun, and the Herald continued to favour conservation. In October, SOBAC, supported by a sympathetic press, held another large public meeting in Melbourne. Participants later formed an umbrella conservation society, the Conservation Council of Victoria (CCV). Unlike natural history interest groups like FNCV and the VNPA, the CCV existed for advocacy – its sole purpose was political: to represent conservation concerns to government. Coincidentally, Victoria’s upper house, the Legislative Council, convened an inquiry into the Little Desert Settlement Scheme. Evidence quickly emerged that the only people who could afford to farm the Little Desert would be those who needed to make a tax loss. Those who believed there were limits to economic development found that the inquiry provided a forum for their views. Peter Attiwill, a forester and botanist at the University of Melbourne, presented a scientific argument for preserving the biological diversity of the Little Desert. In his conclusion, however, he appealed to wider issues: . . . recognition of the need for conservation is part of a worldwide movement which, in essence, appears to be related to the problem of over-population and greatly increased mobility. We now recognise that a finite world can support a finite population. The goal of ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’ is simply not possible – we cannot maximise two variables at the same time. I believe we must maximise ‘goodness’, or the quality of life. It is the desire to maximise the quality of life – to make the world a fit place in which to live – that has brought to our attention problems of pollution, of contamination, and of conservation. The need to control the quality of our environment is, I consider, part of a new morality which is now man’s urgent responsibility.30

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By the late 1960s these arguments appealed to many conservationists but they bypassed most politicians. Power and numbers mattered more. In December 1969, following a disastrous by-election result for the government in Dandenong, the Legislative Council voted to block money for Little Desert roadworks and the government shelved development plans. In May 1970 McDonald lost his seat at the State election. The new Minister for Lands, Bill Borthwick, began talks with the CCV on legislation to establish a Land Conservation Council to consult with the public and advise the government on the best use of public land.

ChAPTER 6

Gadarene swine

Like Francis Ratcliffe, Judith Wright saw a conflict between conservation and development. Unlike Ratcliffe, her understanding of the clash encompassed politics, philosophy, and history. her views were larger and more forceful. In April 1969 she told the ACT National Parks Association that conservation was difficult because the idea ran ‘counter to all precedent and to our acquisitive habits; and also, of course, to powerful interests vested in exploitive enterprises’. Therefore, conservationists had ‘to fight not only for the wilderness, but against the whole historical trend of which the dump-heap is a result. Otherwise, the dump-heap will go on growing’. Obdurate governments could only be swayed by ‘the pressure of public opinion’, which had to be mobilised, not through rational argument but by engaging feelings and emotions: Whether scientists like it or not, it is feeling that sways public opinion, far more than reason; and it is feeling that spurs us to protest and act. Conservationists, with the world’s most urgent battle on their hands, must begin to enlist not only rational recognition of the problem, but human concern, distress and love.

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At this point Wright discerned ‘the chief split’ in conservation. Those who valued scientific respectability deplored emotion as a basis for action; they ‘repudiate public campaigns, discredit lay efforts at conservation education, and look at conservation problems as matters of policy rather than publicity’. But we did not live in a perfectly rational world and governments did not respond to reason: ‘governments are as much swayed by public opinion as by rational argument – in fact, in many cases far more so’. Of course, ‘feeling should not overcome the need for rational argument and the need to collect and marshal the relevant facts’, but ‘once we know that real damage is being done and have the facts necessary to back up the claim, to refuse to enlist public feeling on our side is just as stupid as to try to enlist it on poor grounds’. Wright was challenging Ratcliffe. She took issue with his reliance on reason and policy and his priorities. he did not regard conservation as the world’s number one problem; there was the possibility of atomic war. For Wright, however, the atomic threat was a manifestation of the same predatory, exploitive attitudes and behaviour responsible for the dying planet. Despite a creeping melancholy, Wright was cautiously optimistic. As an example of public opinion in action she cited the case of the Great Barrier Reef, which became an issue precisely because ‘public feeling is engaged’. The voluntary efforts of organisations and individuals had educated the public and governments.1 That education fell short of stopping development, however. In August 1969 the Queensland government announced final approval for the Japex oil rig to drill on the Reef. Prime Minister John Gorton, in Queensland to open the State Liberal Party’s annual conference, told delegates he ‘strongly opposed’ oil drilling and limestone mining. It was his ‘personal desire’ that the Reef be left the way it was. But, despite his avowed preference for preservation, he said he could do

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nothing to prevent Japex from drilling – for good reasons. The Gorton government was divided on the issue and in any case disinclined to challenge the States – which benefited from offshore mining and drilling royalties – over their legal justification for issuing permits. As well, mining and oil industries opposed Federal intervention. Nevertheless, Gorton repeated his personal views a week later in Parliament. The Courier-Mail commented approvingly that the Prime Minister’s instincts were right if he believed that the Reef issue was of great significance to the electorate: ‘Conservation and ecology have become the “in” words of the day. And so they should be.’2 ‘In’ words or not, they did not move Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Solidly attached to the idea of the Earth as a resource that could never be endangered or used up, and certainly not by human activities, he believed exploitation brought only benefits. Governments must highlight these and downplay the dangers. In September, he publicly dismissed a report on the danger to the Reef from the crown-of-thorns. ‘Expert advice’, he said, ‘is that there is no great plague of the crown-of-thorns Starfish. Recent publicity has presented an unduly alarming picture of the situation.’3 But people were alarmed. Dissatisfied with their party’s endorsement of oil drilling, dissident members of the coalition Liberal Party formed the Save the Reef Committee. Queensland Labor senator George Georges became president, while Wright became patron and advised on action. The Committee quickly got busy: it printed and distributed bumper stickers; sent a questionnaire to all Federal candidates seeking their attitude to oil drilling; and helped with a Littoral Society/WPSQ poll of Queenslanders’ opinion on oil drilling. The result showed overwhelming opposition. More conservation news followed. Early in January 1970, US President Richard Nixon signed a bill establishing an advisory council on pollution. ‘It is literally now or never’, he said. ‘The 1970s absolutely

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must be the years when America pays its debts to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters and our living environment.’ Nixon’s declaration focused editorial attention and newspapers ran articles on Australia’s own problems of smog and water and air pollution.4 With help from an Innisfail unionist, John Büsst appealed to the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) conference calling for a black ban on all mining and drilling. With further encouragement from George Georges, several unions responded and threatened to ban all goods and services needed for the Japex rig’s operation. The unprecedented action made front-page headlines throughout Australia. Few union decisions had ever been as popular. Within days, Japex’s partner Ampol telegrammed Gorton and Bjelke-Petersen announcing suspension of the drilling operation and seeking an inquiry into the possibility of reef damage from oil drilling.5 Gorton welcomed the suspension, told Ampol, ‘In my view the slightest danger is too much danger’, and suggested Queensland join a Commonwealth–State Reef inquiry. Bjelke-Petersen rejected the offer and insisted drilling proceed: ‘There could be no useful purpose to a further investigation. An expert survey [by harry Ladd] has been completed in a most competent way.’ The Australian commented: ‘it has become extremely difficult to see how [drilling] can be carried out against such overwhelming public opposition’.6 Suddenly Bjelke-Petersen agreed to an inquiry. Wright said it was a ‘gigantic piece of eyewash put on for the public’s benefit’, stacked in favour of the oil companies. There was only one real answer to the Reef ’s problems – a complete moratorium on drilling and a thorough and lengthy biological survey. No public inquiry would meet this need.7 In March, the oil tanker Oceanic Grandeur ran aground in Torres Strait. Oil leaked onto the Reef. More bad news for the oil industry followed: the Federal government signalled legislation assuming

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sovereign control over underwater resources of the continental shelf. It also announced that the proposed oil-drilling inquiry would be upgraded to a Royal Commission. Bjelke-Petersen vociferously opposed the sovereignty bill. Even with oil drilling the Reef would be safe, he declared; his government was ‘always the champion of conservation’.8 Proceedings of the Committee of Inquiry into Oil Drilling on the Great Barrier Reef began in May. The Commonwealth government agreed to meet the cost of legal representation for the WPSQ, the Littoral Society, the GBRC, and the ACF. As far as Wright was concerned, the ‘dump-heap’ trend seemed confirmed. By 1970 Australians were wealthier and more numerous than they had ever been. After two decades of unbroken prosperity the idea of unceasing growth and unlimited riches had become part of the country’s outlook. Massive optimism ruled public life. Politicians promised more of everything and boasted of the continent’s untapped riches. Exploitation focused on minerals. A boom in exploration, discovery, exports, and share prices imbued leaders with a sense of unending possibility and boundless power regarding the transformation of the continent. Only conservationists opposed their hubris. Since the early 1960s Arthur harrold, a medical practitioner and an active member of the Noosa Parks Development Association (NPDA), had been urging the declaration of a national park over the Cooloola Sands. In the expectation that the sandminers, who, in the face of local opposition in 1964, had withdrawn their lease applications over the area, would return, harrold sold his medical practice to devote himself full-time to campaigning. All the evidence pointed to an imminent assault on the coast. In 1967 Minister for Mines Ron Camm told a NPDA delegation that ‘Where there is mineral it is our duty to encourage its extraction’.

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Miners claimed ‘the freedom to mine’, which was, according to an October 1969 article in the Australian, based on ‘the need for a temperate and reasonable mind’, in contrast to the religious motivation of ‘extreme nature preservation groups’. Why else, the writer asked, would conservationists oppose an industry with so many ‘good works to its credit’?9 One company history specified those good works and detailed how ‘The people of Australia have benefited enormously’ from sandmining: Sand drift is checked, groynes are built, encroaching dunes removed from nearby houses and protective dunes established. Not only is beach erosion stopped. Swamp land which was previously snakeinfested and mosquito-ridden has been levelled, drained and planted with grass – not only reclaimed, in fact, but beautified into parkland. Extraction of minerals from beaches makes them whiter, and cleaner for sunbathers . . . Progress follows in their wake as they build roads, bridges, bring in power lines, telephones and other services. Shops, garages and other facilities spring up. Settlements grow . . . Nobody [could] legitimately charge [the industry] with despoiling the areas in which mining has taken place.10

In reality, many people found sandmining hideously destructive. It upheaved landscapes, effaced dunes, destroyed coastal vegetation, and displaced wildlife. Furthermore, sandmining symbolised the general assault on life heralded by the mining boom. Wright observed: Australians must heed the lessons of history and stop exploiting their country’s resources with the prodigality of a drunken sailor. Our country should be regarded as the mother of all life, and treated with reverence and respect, not tortured to yield a temporary prosperity.

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Communities and residents along Australia’s east coast rallied to the land’s defence.11 In January 1970, the American companies Cudgen Rutile and Queensland Titanium confidently reapplied for leases of 6400 hectares over the Cooloola Sands. They expected the Mining Warden’s Court to reaffirm their freedom to mine. The industry, however, underestimated the opposition. When hearings began in the local Mining Warden’s Court in May 1970, harrold led over 100 individuals and organisations, including the ACF, in objecting to the applications. The Mining Warden insisted the conservationists give evidence first, thus burdening them with the onus of proof to show why mining should not proceed. But conservationists did not expect to win in the Warden’s Court. hearings were a necessary step in publicising their case. Dick Piesse, Geoff Mosley, Kathleen McArthur, harrold and others argued that Cooloola should be a national park because of its 200-metre-high dunes, freshwater lakes, rainforest and proximity to Brisbane. In his summing up, counsel for the conservationists, Lew Wyvill, QC said that to allow mining would mean an ultimate benefit to America at the expense of a unique piece of Australia. In reply, the miners claimed that the $150 million worth of minerals in the sand would provide foreign currency, royalties, and employment. Mining would result in roads and open the area to use. Balance required using all the resources of the Cooloola. In any case, logging had already degraded the area, and the miners would rehabilitate the dunes. After the warden recommended the leases be granted, Camm said the conservationists had failed to show that Cooloola could not be rehabilitated. With cabinet about to approve the applications, a Country Party backbencher, Mike Ahern, whose electorate included Cooloola, persuaded Bjelke-Petersen that only the joint government parties could resolve so controversial an issue.

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Delay favoured the newly-formed Cooloola Committee. Its newspaper advertisements, radio and television interviews, and guided tours contrasting Cooloola with the mining-devastated Stradbroke Island turned public opinion against mining. Petitions in the seats of all Brisbane Liberal parliamentarians collected 24 000 signatures. Several Liberal backbenchers came out against mining. The Country Party’s State management committee acknowledged ‘grave political consequences’ if mining proceeded and called for a Cooloola national park. Brisbane newspapers and the major political parties now supported conservation. In July, the Queensland Trades and Labour Council announced a black ban on mining ventures in the Cooloola area. Camm continued to press for mining, but the joint parties voted not to grant the leases and the government announced a park for Cooloola. This was unprecedented, the first time an Australian government had rejected a major mining venture in favour of a national park. Bjelke-Petersen and Camm were determined there would not be a second time. These two men embodied the relentless, fundamentalist frenzy that drove miners, developers, and governments. Money was not the issue – money is never the issue. A felt imperative to dig up, transform, re-engineer, conquer, and control propelled the partisans of mining. Desire for power and status motivated them as well. In the herd mentality surrounding speculation, in the hysterical belief that the booming country had entered a new era of limitless prosperity based on limitless resources, these motivations received considerable encouragement. And there was fear – a deep, abiding fear of emotion. Mining and development advocates were also, of course, driven by feelings, but their authority rested on an enduring delusion: the conviction that they were men of reason and rationality, beyond the reach of base and crippling emotion. Like all delusions, this selfcomforting belief required constant reinforcement.

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Mining promoters boosted their sense of entitlement chiefly through contrasting their own sober realism with the murky emotionalism of conservationists. In a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald, K. M. horler, secretary of the Rutile and Zircon Development Association, condemned conservationists for ‘using emotion rather than reason’, predicted that government departments will discuss mining proposals ‘rationally and quietly’, advocated that ‘opinions’ that ‘are reasonable and factual and seek balanced progress should be given at least as much weight and attention as the opinions of those which are infuriated’ and warned of a community disaster if, under the duress of [conservationists’] powerful propaganda for the natural landscape the public, the miners, the councils, the regions, the private owners and the agencies of the Government were hurried and hurtled like the Gadarene swine, down the perilous steps of the economic landscape.12

The defence of real, not metaphorical, landscapes motivated Milo Dunphy and the Colong Committee. In particular, they confronted the possible defacement of Mt Armour in the Blue Mountains. In April 1970, Colong Committee members attended the Australian Portland Cement Manufacturers (APCM) Sydney AGM. They asked sharp questions, moved amendments to motions, and caused an uproar. The company’s managing director would give no undertaking not to mine Colong but insisted APCM would consider alternatives. Other Colong Committee concerns included the government’s refusal to reconsider the issue of clearing the Boyd Plateau for pine planting. Following a couple of demonstrations outside government offices, the Committee published a pamphlet, ‘The Boyd Plateau – Park or Pines’, which raised the objection: ‘Pine forest is

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a monoculture. It supports very few other forms of vegetation and compared to a eucalypt forest it is a biological desert.’ Copies went to all State parliamentarians, some of whom used the term ‘biological desert’ in debate. Other Committee pamphlets, titled ‘Colong Scandal’ and ‘Boyd Plateau Ecodisaster’, followed.13 Dunphy put a great deal of effort into soliciting support from other conservation groups and local government as well as the State’s political parties. In March, he took two members of the Labor Opposition to the Boyd Plateau. The ALP declared support for keeping the Plateau intact and promised to revoke the Colong Mining lease should it win the next election. Early in September, the Committee took 16 members of the Liberal Party committee, including John Winston howard, on a tour of the Colong area. The Colong Committee took heart from the news of the Queensland’s government rejection of sandmining leases at Coloolola, which, they thought, ‘reflects the growing public support for conservation’. To take advantage of that support the Committee entered the November Georges River by-election by distributing 10 000 copies of a pamphlet attacking government policy on Kanangra–Boyd, beach mining, the granting of mineral exploration licences in parks, and excisions from Kosciuszko and Blue Mountains parks. Committee representatives next met John Reiss, chairman of Blue Circle Cement, APCM’s parent company. Reiss told the conservationists he was ‘a lover of the countryside’ and that the company would not mine Mt Armour until it was sure ‘there is no alternative suitable source’. The leader of the Colong delegation, James Tierney, commented: ‘We were fighting every inch of the way – and we gained about three inches’.14 As with the Cooloola campaign, Colong participants and observers frequently saw conservation in nationalistic terms: as a battle to prevent British- and American-owned companies taking over

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Australian assets, a theme picked up by a journalist who commented: Whatever the outcome of this afternoon’s meeting between the conservationists and Sir John [Reiss], it represents a battle, no matter how civilised, between big business, whose responsibility is to its mainly U.K. based shareholders, and the conservationists, who believe their responsibility is to the people of Australia.15

The Colong Committee’s activism did not please everyone. Don McMichael, chief of the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service and former ACF director, described the Committee as ‘a group of impressionable people held captive by Milo Dunphy’s urge for personal power’. McMichael’s slur left Dunphy unfazed and the Committee began planning for the February 1971 State elections.16 During the campaign, the Committee distributed 50 000 conservation pamphlets, gathered petitions, held meetings, sent articles and letters to the local press, and took out a full-page advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘Your vote can save one of the finest national parks in NSW’. Three members of the Committee, including Dunphy, stood as candidates for the Australia Party – originally formed to contest the foreign and economic policies of the Federal government.17 Regardless of McMichael’s view, the Colong Committee continued to focus on conservation. Tierney, a Catholic priest, had been president since the Committee’s inception and editor of the Save Colong Bulletin. In 1969 he arranged for 150 Catholic priests to petition Parliament seeking the revocation of the Colong lease. In his annual report for 1970, he wrote: We are not only fighting to save Colong and the Boyd, we are fighting ThE TEST CASE for conservation in New South

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Wales . . . and victory is now in sight. Despite the powerful vested interests and Government support allied against us, Colong has not yet been mined, nor the Boyd bulldozed.18

Dunphy, in his secretary’s report, echoed the buoyant, partisan, combative theme: In this age of social helplessness, of ‘anomie’ . . . we have shown that a small group of determined people with a just cause can achieve a veto power over a harmful project, no matter how powerful a combination of politicians and private interests support that project. In a world which has surrendered to technology, there can be few more important tasks than to establish our last few wilderness areas intact. Such a task involves upsetting the essential concepts of half our Government departments and many of our biggest businesses. There isn’t a single group which is better equipped or more experienced in such work than The Colong Committee.19

Perhaps because of the disruptions of previous years, APCM decided to hold their April 1971 AGM in Melbourne. But they did not escape the protestors. Sydney activists travelled to Melbourne, while local activists Laurence Rentoul and harvey Cohen organised lectures, handouts, and an abseil down APCM’s Melbourne office. Over 300 people attended the AGM and their questions, objections, and motions of no confidence attracted extensive television, radio, and print coverage – most of it unfavourable to APCM. The Age described the company as ‘behaving as heavily as one of its bulldozers, and as relentlessly . . . It was the past trying to cope with the present. It never made it.’ The Sydney Sun reported the meeting as ‘the most theatrical gathering of its kind in Australia’. Cohen commented, ‘We may be outvoted but we won’t be out-talked’.20

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Talking spread the message and conversations about conservation started in suburbs all across Australia. The small Sydney suburb of hunters hill lies across a rocky sandstone finger of land jutting into Sydney harbour between the Parramatta and Lane Cove Rivers. In the late nineteenth century an industrialist, T. h. Kelly, developed part of the Parramatta River waterfront for a smelting works, while setting aside 4.9 hectares – Kelly’s Bush – for citizens to enjoy in perpetuity. By the middle of the twentieth century Kelly’s Bush was one of the last patches of bushland on the river. In 1967, with the encouragement of the local council, A. V. Jennings Company, Australia’s biggest land developer, obtained an option on Kelly’s Bush and unveiled plans for three eight-storey high-rises and 40 two-storey townhouses. Local objectors formed the hunters hill Trust and the following year endorsed a slate of local council candidates pledged to preserve the historic and natural features of the area. All nine candidates were elected. Supported by the State Planning Authority (SPA), Jennings submitted a new ‘balanced’ plan to council, dropping the high-rises but proposing 57 townhouses in place of the bush. Concerned at the calamitous consequences of development, local resident Betty James wrote an article in August 1970, ‘The Battle to Save Kelly’s Bush’, for the Sydney Morning Herald. She then convened a meeting of friends and neighbours and formed a committee of 13 women called ‘The Battlers for Kelly’s Bush’. James, Kath Lehany, and Chris Dawson became office bearers and the group started campaigning. In a letter to the local paper they wrote: It is remarkable to have twelve acres of ‘bush’ so close to the heart of Sydney; it contains aboriginal rock engravings and a pool; it is the nesting place of numerous bush birds and it is a living museum for natural-science students in botany, geology, archaeology and

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environmental study. It is also an area where families may walk and enjoy bush and harbour views; it is an ordinary piece of bushland where today’s youth can play as we did when young . . . Once this land is taken, it can never be returned. It will be useless saying, in twenty years time, – ‘we should have kept this land, let’s bulldoze down the houses’ – it will be too late.21

The Battlers wrote to all the councillors and all the members of the NSW Parliament, met the local Liberal member, compiled petitions, sent letters to the newspapers, produced publicity material, contacted conservation organisations, professional groups, and other residents groups and, in October, met the Premier. Robert Askin was polite, paternal, and unbending. he favoured development – absolutely. The Battlers approached the SPA, A. V. Jennings, and the leader of the Opposition. Early in November the Battlers called another meeting. Mary Campbell from the National Trust spoke and dismissed the idea of balance. The proper balance was to save all remaining bushland as against all that has gone: ‘Belatedly we are learning to live with the Australian bush – and so at last realising its truly exceptional beauty and infinite variety – realising that here is something to battle FOR’. She told the Battlers how earlier in the year threat of union bans had helped save the Great Barrier Reef from oil drilling.22 In mid-November, the Battlers held a Boil-the-Billy picnic to introduce residents to the bush and to raise money to assist the government in acquiring the land. A brochure distributed at the gathering included a foreword by novelist Kylie Tennant: The beaches are being ploughed up, the hills chewed out to make roads and the prospect of a gibbering concrete jungle advances. So that the struggle to preserve this place to unspoilt land becomes

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more significant. It is a confrontation of values. Kelly’s Bush is a symbol of our lost land. Take away Kelly’s Bush and you take away one more assurance that in man is left the possibility for the future. The unborn Australian will ask for his birthright and be handed a piece of concrete.23

A week later, the council, faced with a State veto, agreed to rezone Kelly’s Bush from Reserve Open Space to Recommended for Residential Development and approved Jennings’ modified plan. Residents felt betrayed. They wanted no development. The Battlers believed the scheme still violated both the bush and public access to the foreshore. Moreover, what rights did the people have if an unnecessary development proceeded despite opposition? ‘Kelly’s Bush Now – What Next?’ asked a Battlers’ brochure.24 Next came government duplicity. On the eve of the State election in February 1971, Askin sent the Battlers a telegram: ‘Very hopeful of a helpful decision on your problems and will advise within 24 hours. R. W. Askin, Premier.’ After the government won re-election, which involved a narrow win for the hunters hill Liberal member, development approval proceeded. The Battlers sent Askin a telegram: ‘Still awaiting your solution. Regards, The Battlers for Kelly’s Bush’.25 Like Askin, the local council remained unbending. The mayor confided to an acquaintance, ‘They’re just 13 bloody housewives – I’ve investigated’. he ordered the circulation of ugly photos of the Bush, called it a ‘tick-infected rubbish tip’, and warned of exorbitant rates and no town sewer without new development.26 People from all over Australia visited Kelly’s Bush and offered support. Dominic Serventy from Western Australia dropped by, as did his brother, Vincent. Joan and Eileen Bradley lent their support. The Bradleys were about to publish a booklet, Bush Regeneration, which outlined more than a decade of experiments with weed control and

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revegetation in Mosman Park bushland. While their methods and principles were still evolving, their underlying patriotic motivation was unambiguous: ‘We are working to preserve natural bush, which to our minds needs no “improvement”. We regard all local natives as good, and all exotics – whether from overseas or from other parts of Australia – as weeds in the natural areas.’ The sisters had learned about Australia in a visceral, physical way, discovering practical principles by which Australians might approach their country. At Kelly’s Bush they listed the native plants and advised on regeneration.27 In May 1971, hunters hill council signed an agreement with Jennings and in June the Minister for Local Government, Roy Morton gave final approval for the development. Surveyors moved in. Late one afternoon dozens of schoolchildren fanned out through the bush, pulled out the surveyor’s pegs and strings, and covered up paint marks. Meanwhile, the president of the local branch of the ALP called the Battlers and suggested they appeal to the trade unions. Although suspicious of left-wing unions, the middle-class Battlers, who included Liberal Party members, nevertheless contacted the Miscellaneous Workers Union and the Federated Engine Drivers and Fireman’s Association, which covered bulldozer drivers. The two unions agreed to support the Battlers and referred the matter to the full NSW Trades and Labour Council, which, on the night Morton signed the permission document, recommended opposition to any development at Kelly’s Bush. Shortly after, Bob Pringle, president of the Builders Labourers’ Federation (BLF), phoned the Battlers seeking information on Kelly’s Bush. They invited him to visit. Accompanied by the entire committee, he toured the bush and said the union could put a black ban on the development, providing the Battlers demonstrate public support. With the endorsement of local preservation societies, the hunter’s

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hill Trust, the ALP, and the Australia Party, they organised a meeting for 17 June 1971. More than 500 people attended and agreed that Kelly’s Bush must be saved. The subsequent BLF ban was unprecedented and, for the union movement, exceptional, chiefly because the BLF leadership – Pringle, secretary Jack Mundey, and organiser Joe Owens – constituted a unique triumvirate. Younger on average than other union leaders, they were brash, energetic, and competent. They came to power in 1969 having absorbed the New Left ideas – personal liberation, participatory democracy, anti-racism and anti-sexism, direct action, community decision making – that were fashionable at the time, and having read the seminal books of the period: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), and Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle (1971). Their well-articulated opposition to what they saw as a developing concrete jungle in Sydney, their outrage at collusion between the NSW government and often criminally-associated developers, and their dismay at the unresponsiveness of local and State governments to public demands made them unusually receptive to extra-union requests and diverse alliances. In response to the BLF’s action, A. V. Jennings announced it would use non-union labour on the Kelly’s Bush site. In that case, the BLF said, it would black ban all Jennings’ projects. Subsequently, Jennings publicly dropped the idea of developing Kelly’s Bush. Nevertheless, the council continued to favour development and the fate of the bush remained uncertain.

CHAPTeR 7

Pedderised

Publicity about the Great Barrier Reef, the Colong Caves, Lake Pedder, Cooloola, the Little Desert, and Kelly’s Bush inspired thousands of Australians. More and more citizens looked on their country as beautiful. Hundreds translated their affection into political action. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, newly active conservationists founded action groups, associations, committees, societies, and councils. They publicised local threats, called meetings, wrote letters, marched, lobbied governments, and joined other conservationists in the defence of nature in Australia. In 1970 the ACF published a Conservation Directory listing over 350 voluntary organisations that made up the conservation movement. The Directory was not exhaustive; many local groups were omitted. Nevertheless, the list included groups advocating clean air, rainforest preservation, and organic agriculture. Most groups sought the protection of flora and fauna. A large number focused on coastal conservation, particularly in southern Queensland, on the south coast of NSW, around Port Phillip Bay, and south of Perth. The great majority of organisations had formed in the previous five years.1 Some groups pursued philosophical and historical questions.

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Members believed that scientific enterprise caused much of the damage to the planet. Human behaviour had not changed; people’s drives and motives remained constant. Increasing knowledge, however, enabled humans to create an arsenal of power entirely without precedent. To debate the social consequences of scientific developments a number of scientists in Queensland, Victoria, and NSW founded Social Responsibility in Science (SRS). An ACT branch formed in 1970 and shortly after published a booklet, What can I do? Guidelines for citizen action on environmental problems, containing advice on recycling, waste reduction, energy efficiency, and water conservation.2 Media and books extended the conservation conversation and people became more informed. In the 1960s, schoolchildren and adults read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which, in exposing the indiscriminate use of pesticides, alerted people to the reckless way humans were living on the planet. Carson expounded the idea of ecology, a way of thinking about and linking the causes of degradation. The number of books on nature in Australia and on threats to Australian wildlife increased. In 1967, zoologist Barbara York Main published Between Wodjil and Tor, a lyrical and detailed study of a year in the life of one small area of bushland in the West Australian wheat belt. In 1969, eric Rolls offered an account of the devastating impact of rabbits in Australia in They All Ran Wild. That same year the Australian Academy of Science collated Arid Lands of Australia, highlighting the degradation and dangers threatening arid lands – the bulk of the continent – and Len Webb and Derek Whitelock helped edit The Last of Lands: Conservation in Australia, a collection of papers presented at the several University of New england symposiums on conservation held since 1964. Dedicated to the recently deceased Jock Marshall – whose ‘memory remains to animate all patriots and lovers of this land’ – the conservation message was unequivocal:

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Not another acre to be alienated, not another native habitat to be gutted, until we take stock. Modern man has already proved that he can create a physical, chemical or biological desert in anything from a day to a decade. What we don’t rescue now, we shall never possess.3

Other commentators offered philosophical analysis. In a 1970 lecture at the University of Sydney, Stephen Boyden, head of the Urban Biology Group at the Australian National University, outlined the perils facing Australia. He said two contrary and irreconcilable schools of thought contended for people’s loyalties: the growth gospel, the dominant doctrine of modern Western society; and the ecological viewpoint, based on an appreciation of a limit to the earth’s resources and a realisation that continuing growth in population and industry was incompatible with existence. Conservation required a complete change in outlook and values. Only ‘new thinking spreading rapidly through all sections of the community can possibly hope to save us from eco-catastrophe’: society must embrace again the ancient form of human wisdom that still persists among some so-called ‘primitive’ peoples of the world, namely a profound respect for the processes of nature on which life depends – and a sound appreciation of the fact that human welfare, on the level of the individual and of society, requires that we live in harmony with nature.4

Boyden’s idealisation of the primitive reflected a belief among many conservationists and social scientists that folk societies enjoyed greater concord than societies entangled in the modern world. These fortunate communities existed without suffering, fear, loneliness, pain, sickness, or premature death. This demonstrably false picture of

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human prehistory derived from the utopian notion that the malaise and mayhem of the modern world was not the natural human condition. On the contrary, human misery and imminent eco-catastrophe were the products of pervasive social disorganisation. The solution was obvious: restore humankind’s original and rightful state of harmony and, in one stroke, banish wretchedness and dissonance. Such nostalgia buoyed some conservationists – but not all. For many conservationists, ecological science, not romantic primitivism, provided the model for discussions about humans and nature. ecology provided both the facts and the frame conservationists employed when justifying their claims. Inevitably they adopted the language of ecology and terms such as population ecology, limits, carrying capacity, habitat, interdependence, and ecosystem became part of conservation’s vocabulary. But ecology’s influence did not end there. It served a patriotic purpose. Besides explaining the nature of the crisis facing Australia, ecology elucidated the continent’s great diversity while emphasising its unity and highlighting its beauty. With the aid of ecology, many Australians came to see the country undivided. Common features and a common natural history united sea, coast, coastal plain, forest, escarpment, plateau, and arid interior. eucalypts, wattles, casuarinas, galahs, cockatoos, magpies, and kangaroos bestowed continent-wide characteristics that gave the land the appearance of one place, one country, one home. ecology, some people believed, was a subversive science: subversive of the accepted notion of what science does; subversive of the values and institutions of expansionary capitalism; and subversive of the bias against nature in Western religion. ecological thinking challenged the anthropocentric view that the planet’s purpose was to produce humanity whose destiny was to control all life.5 The idea of ecology acquired so much authority that people formed groups with the word as part of their title. The most prominent,

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ecology Action, was formed in 1971 at a meeting of 13 people. Within a year it had over 1000 members, with branches in Melbourne and Sydney. The group’s activists aimed to publicise scientific findings, campaign against environmental degradation and waste, place issues in context, and encourage public debate through media coverage, public inquiries, and meetings. ecology Action believed burgeoning population and wasteful and extravagant lifestyles running up against limits to growth lay behind environmental problems. Worse, the extent of those problems was inadequately understood. Whatever their rationale, most people came into conservation not as a result of an intellectual conversion based on the study of ecology and not through deliberate, cerebral ratiocination but because they experienced the concern they felt for the country as a necessity. Feelings compelled them to act. Inevitably they became political. Conservationists created a new public realm in which citizens took action and influenced the type of society in which they lived. United by a common patriotic goal – saving Australia’s natural heritage – activists shared certain character traits: stubbornness, tenacity, and persistence. They would not give up. even as they sustained existing struggles, new causes engaged their attention. In 1970, Clutha Development Corporation, a mining company owned by American shipping magnate Daniel Ludwig, announced plans to bring coal from mines in the Burragorang Valley in the southern Blue Mountains via a private railway to a clifftop dump at Madden’s Plains, above a stretch of coast between the Royal National Park and Wollongong. From the 600 000-tonne stockpile, a conveyer would carry the coal down the face of the Illawarra escarpment to a 1.6-kilometre-long pier and into Ludwig’s bulk carriers. Coastal residents formed the South Coast Organisation Opposing Pollution (SCOOP) and started asking questions. What would happen to the dust from the coal dump? What would the construction

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of the loader do to the local coastline? Would the beaches turn black? Would there be any beaches left at all? Despite the uncertainties, the Askin government provided Clutha with special legislative dispensation, extending extraordinary concessions to the company, including permission to acquire, cross, survey, and peg any land in the path of the railway or conveyor and exemption from stamp duties and planning controls. This blatant favouritism violated civil liberties and ignited controversy. Rarely had a State government so nakedly backed foreign enterprise. early in 1971, Sydney residents formed the Anti-Clutha Action Committee (ACAC). In April, the National Trust produced an antiClutha pamphlet: ‘Illawarra Coastline – Green or Black’ and Social Responsibility in Science organised a public meeting at Sydney University and established a research group to inquire into the possible ecological effects of Clutha’s dump and loader. The NSW Council for Civil Liberties protested to the Minister. The growing opposition moved a Clutha spokesman to defend the development as beautiful: ‘In one respect our project will certainly add to the scenic beauty of the area’, he said. To have one of the world’s great ships berthed only 4000 feet out in the ocean will be a tremendous sight from the top of the escarpment and from the road below. I can assure the public that this sight will not be shrouded in a cloud of coal dust or any other form of pollution.6

Such assurances did not quell opposition. A committee of the NSW Labour Council condemned the Clutha Development Act. SCOOP organised meetings at Camden and at Gymea in May. The Australia Party called a meeting at Lane Cove in June and a few days later the National Trust, SRS, and ecology Action co-sponsored a public

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meeting at Sydney Town Hall. Milo Dunphy helped propel the campaign, spoke at meetings, appeared on the radio, and wrote to and was written about in the press. In September, Clutha opponents contested NSW local government elections. Unimpressed by the fact that for the first time conservationists had entered electoral politics as conservationists, journalist Maximilian Walsh wrote that their failure showed that ‘the issue of the environment remains the concern of a minority of eco-nuts’.7 Then Garfield Barwick, on behalf of the ACF, entered the Clutha controversy with a letter to the newspapers. Barwick highlighted the development’s risks, drew attention to the shortcomings of the enabling legislation, decried the lack of environmental safeguards, and concluded: ‘The executive of the foundation has reached the conclusion that the government of New South Wales has created a situation in which it ought now to have a full public inquiry’.8 Barwick understood the politics involved in attacking the NSW government. However, he no longer felt constrained by his position as Chief Justice. He believed he was right, the issue was urgent, and the times and occasion demanded the suspension of etiquette and formal constraints of office. Indeed, he was becoming publicly involved in more and more contentious issues. Barwick was changing. He campaigned for decentralisation, and limits to industrial and population growth. He questioned the absoluteness of private land ownership because ‘whoever controls land controls a vital share of our environmental heritage’. He sought something beyond ‘the mad scramble for material growth’, called for ‘a worldwide ethic to replace the materialistic get-rich-quick system in which we seem on all hands to be enmeshed’, and believed ‘we stand to lose more by worshipping the growth god than we can gain’.9 Growing familiarity with the power of developers led Barwick to doubt the ACF’s faith in reason and the old-boy network: ‘Men in

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government, though susceptible to argument and reason’, he wrote in the ACF’s 1970–71 annual report, ‘are finally persuaded by their own estimate of the likely result of the ballot box’.10 Judges are always political but usually promote their views discreetly, conveying them obliquely and muffling them in generalities. Barwick’s explicit conservation advocacy opened him to attack. He had already realised this and in October 1970 had announced his resignation as ACF president. He explained that his judicial duties might restrain him from vigorously pursuing the Foundation’s aims. Clutha pursued its development and boldly announced that it would seek mining leases to exploit coal deposits over an area of 17 000 hectares in the Blue Mountains. Already, Clutha’s Illawarra plans disturbed many people within the Liberal Party. This new, impudent claim provoked further reaction. Branches of the Liberal Party in the Blue Mountains registered their objections. So did other branches and in October the annual convention of the Liberal Party resolved that no further mining or industrial development should take place in the Blue Mountains. In February 1972, Clutha announced that rising costs and the uncertainty of Japanese demand made its plans uneconomical – and abandoned them. A year earlier, with the flooding of Lake Pedder imminent, new people entered that campaign while veterans increased their efforts. Dick Jones, a botanist at the University of Tasmania described by fellow activist Kevin Kiernan as ‘not a patient man when it came to bureaucratic intransigence, political obfuscation, pious pomposity and environmental hooliganism’, helped found the Lake Pedder Action Committee (LPAC). To stop the flooding, LPAC commenced an all-out campaign and opened offices in Hobart and Launceston as well as in Melbourne and Adelaide. In Sydney, the Colong Committee represented LPAC; in Queensland, the Conservation Movement; and

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in the ACT, SRS. During September–October 1971 conservationists presented 47 petitions to the Federal House of Representatives calling on the government to preserve Lake Pedder in its natural state.11 Pressed for action, the ACF again demurred but when, at its October 1971 AGM, the Foundation announced that Prince Philip would replace Barwick as president, members began reporting to him on the need for action over Lake Pedder and complained about the unresponsive executive. Philip said he supported further action. The following month the ACF, the Tasmanian Conservation Trust, and LPAC sponsored a symposium on Pedder in Hobart. Milo Dunphy spoke. He was uncompromising: ‘If your strategy is not to have a dam in the southwest wilderness – and it definitely ought to be that – your immediate objective is to kick the Hydro-electric Commission and all its works out of there’. Few people had so openly and damningly criticised the HeC. Dunphy, however, was fearless. He said the Commission was ‘callous in its treatment of the environment and arrogant towards the public’. He galvanised the audience and told them they had to overcome their ‘inbred Australian aversion to politics’ and run conservation candidates in Federal, State, and local elections. ‘These are honourable and patriotic tasks without which Tasmania will be ruined’, he said.12 Dunphy’s advice proved well timed. The current minority Tasmanian government rested on the support of an Independent who, in March 1972, resigned, forcing a State election. LPAC saw the possibility of seizing the balance of power and called a public meeting in Hobart, which, despite heckling from pro-dam supporters, resolved that ‘there be formed a single Independent coalition of primarily conservation-oriented candidates and their supporters’.13 Activists then formed the United Tasmania Group (UTG), with Dick Jones as president. With only three weeks to go before the election, Jones invited Dunphy to help with the campaign. Together they chose

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UTG candidates, wrote a newsletter, devised speeches, gave interviews, and opened a street-front office in Hobart. They ran 12 candidates in four electorates in the hope of winning enough seats to gain the balance of power and thus exert sufficient pressure to save Lake Pedder. LPAC stepped up its program of public meetings, slide shows, pamphlet distributions, and money-raising for the UTG. The Australian Union of Students donated money and much support came from Melbourne, where LPAC held rallies and demonstrations. An early April meeting at Dallas Brooks Hall attracted over 1300 people. Geoff Mosley addressed the crowd alongside Ian Bayley, a reader in zoology at Monash University involved in the Pedder campaign since 1965. Bayley was especially busy. He wrote to all ACF councillors urging the ACF’s public endorsement of the need to save Lake Pedder. A number replied that they were only prepared to make general statements. Clifford Christian, chairman of the ACF’s scientific committee, thought the flooding would improve the lake, while Dunbavin Butcher thought the ACF had already gone too far in opposition. The executive did what it always did best: nothing. Tasmania’s contesting Liberal and Labor parties agreed that Lake Pedder was not an issue and remained silent on its fate. Not so the HeC, which, using public money, opposed LPAC and the UTG with a series of advertisements in Tasmanian and mainland newspapers. The HeC warned voters that the conservationists’ proposals were irresponsible. The day before the election – when there was no possibility of reply – the HeC announced that if the UTG were elected and Lake Pedder saved, electricity charges would have to rise. On election day, the UTG polled more than 7 percent of the vote in two electorates. In another, UTG candidate Ron Brown, former president of the South-West Committee, failed by only 150 votes. But Labor won the election and eric Reece remained Premier. Conservationists continued the struggle. Two days after the election, the UTG

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placed an advertisement in the Mercury calling for a Royal Commission to investigate the impropriety of the HeC – a public statutory body – engaging in election activities. ‘Our democratic process has been outraged’, it claimed. The way to ensure democracy was to maintain protest. LPAC opened an office at the Lake itself where a group of people maintained a vigil against the rising waters. In July, conservationists presented Reece with a ‘Save Lake Pedder’ petition containing 17 500 signatures, the largest petition ever presented in Tasmania.14 Armed with legal advice questioning the legality of HeC works, LPAC attempted a court challenge. But the government refused to give the conservationists standing. State Attorney-General Merv everett resigned in protest. Reece, however, was less fastidious about due process. Like Queensland’s Bjelke-Petersen and other Australian government leaders, he would not allow the law to obstruct development. He quickly pushed legislation through Parliament to remove any doubts about the legality of the HeC’s operations and the Pedder scheme. Pressure on the ACF increased. In March 1972, Ian Bayley, colleague Sam Lake, and four other biologists wrote to Prince Philip outlining the biological significance of Lake Pedder’s flora and fauna and deploring the Foundation’s lack of action. Philip suggested the scientists ‘prepare a short paper, in layman’s language, on the scientific importance of Lake Pedder, [and] I am sure the ACF will undertake to see that it gets a proper distribution’.15 Philip thought the finished manuscript ‘lucid and fair’ and sent it, together with an amended foreword, to Piesse. Piesse and the executive procrastinated. The ACF’s scientific committee redrafted Philip’s proposed foreword and Piesse advised the president that the ACF wished ‘to disassociate [itself] from appearing to agree with the author’s conclusions’.16 At the end of June, Piesse advised Bayley of the changes decided

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on by the executive but did not allow him to see the revised foreword. The authors withdrew permission to publish. Dissatisfaction with the ACF spread. Staff members became scathing of Piesse’s performance, his manner, bad decisions, and dealings with the press. Dissenters contacted journalists and wrote letters to the papers. One of the Pedder activists, under the pseudonym Jan Bodley, wrote an article, ‘The Conservation Infiltrators’, for Nation Review outlining the ACF’s lack of action on Lake Pedder and said the Foundation was preoccupied ‘with assessing the case for development’ rather than pressing the case for conservation to which it had made ‘a paltry contribution’. Bodley revealed ‘talk of a democratic house clean’ but suggested ‘the real answer might be the creation of a new national conservation body avoiding, through its constitution, the mistakes of the old one’.17 Piesse responded with a letter to the editor defending the ACF’s Pedder record, accusing Bodley of only putting one side of the story, and concluded: May I just add that ‘Jan Bodley’ appears not to understand that conservation basically is concerned with identifying the best or highest use of a resource: a responsible conservation body must therefore, be concerned to examine alternatives, i.e. the case for development (whether it be development for hydroelectric power, or mining, or tourism etc) just as it should be with the nation’s needs for national parks, the preservation of wilderness values and the opportunity for scientific studies.18

Conservationists naturally disagreed with Piesse’s definition of conservation and more letters followed. Jan Bodley wrote other articles. The issue would not go away and at the end of July, the ACF’s executive decided to publish the papers on Lake Pedder. The Foundation’s vice-president, Geoff Downes, launched The Pedder Papers at a press

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conference in Melbourne in October 1972. Barwick wrote an addendum and declared ‘that the destruction of Lake Pedder was unnecessary and avoidable’. The problem was that ‘The State of Tasmania decided to do something it could not afford to do properly, or, put another way, . . . this generation decided to do something cheaply in terms of money expenditure at the expense of future generations in terms of natural resources’. He concluded: ‘I . . . hope that no other part of Australia will be pedderised – i.e., unnecessarily damaged as a result of inadequate consideration of all the values concerned and without adequate disclosure to the public of the contemplated use’. The ACF invited none of the Papers’ key authors, including Bayley, to the launch.19 Bayley’s frustrations made him determined to change the ACF. With Mosley’s help, he gathered documentation to present to councillors. Many staff joined the work to condemn the director and executive. Barwick, now a vice-president, chaired the ACF’s sixth AGM in November 1972. Imperial in attitude and controlling by inclination, Barwick was unused to dissent and awkward in democratic forums. The reformers ignored him and moved three motions. One proposed changes to the constitution giving increased powers to the members and limiting those of the executive, another condemned the executive for lack of action on Lake Pedder, and the third proposed reconstituting the Scientific Committee. Dick Jones spoke fervently and at length, outlining the Foundation’s failures over Lake Pedder, even when it had become the biggest, best-known conservation issue in Australia. He said that if the Foundation continued to fumble, then grassroots conservationists would be better off without it. Bayley said the Scientific Committee’s shortcoming contributed to the Foundation’s tragically inadequate efforts to save Lake Pedder. One observer described the AGM as a scene of ‘verbal pyrotechnics’. After a heated debate in which Dick Piesse came under attack,

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the censure motion passed without a show of hands. Members then directed the executive to immediately mount a press campaign to restore the lake to its natural state. Next day the council overruled the censure motion and decided not to act on Lake Pedder nor to reform the Scientific Committee.20 Dissidents had other grounds for complaint. They deplored the executive’s earlier decision to appoint John Blanch to the new position of executive vice-president. Blanch, they pointed out, had no conservation background. Under ‘Conservation qualifications’ in his curriculum vitae he cited the fact that he had won a school essay prize on conservation and that he had visited many newsprint mills. Otherwise he had worked for the Herald & Weekly Times, was a former Shell executive, had served other companies with textile and timber interests, was a member of the Melbourne Club, the Australian Club and the Naval & Military Club, and on the council of Scotch College. At his first press conference he advised caution: ‘I think we have to be very sober in our approach. If we try to do everything too fast, we will upset people’. He said the ACF could not ‘afford’ to become ‘emotional’ and while ‘there is an urgency to environmental issues . . . you can’t go overboard’.21 Urgency drove Milo Dunphy. When he returned to Sydney after the UTG campaign, he resumed his position of director of the newly formed the Total environment Centre (TeC). The TeC was largely the initiative of Bob Walshe, a publisher who had observed Dunphy during the Clutha campaign and ‘was very impressed. His strong voice, his absolute conviction, his abilities as a writer and organiser – all qualities that would make him an environmentalist one was ready to follow. I thought he was marvellous.’ Walshe contacted Dunphy and suggested an organisation that might employ him as a full-time conservationist. Dunphy agreed and Walshe assembled a committee

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of people with money and conservation commitment to back the new body. John Rutherford, a professor of geography at the University of Sydney, suggested the new organisation focus equally on the natural and the urban environment, or what he referred to as the ‘total environment’.22 The TeC opened in February 1972 and shared an Argyle Centre office in Sydney’s Rocks with Dunphy’s architecture firm and the Colong Committee. Dunphy envisaged the TeC as a facilitating body for campaigns that would, through its many contacts within the academic world, assemble teams of experts to study and report on specific problems. Volunteers quickly came forward and the TeC prepared an assessment of the effect on sandmining in the area proposed for a national park at Myall Lakes and investigated plans for a steelworks, a nuclear power station, and two new towns for the Jervis Bay area. The phone rang incessantly. People reported on conservation vandalism throughout the State: bush clearing, wetland reclamation, mining, high-rise development. Dunphy – at first employed for three days a week – responded enthusiastically and personally. He frequently visited the places under assault, extended his contacts among concerned people, and as new conservation groups formed, sometimes at his initiative, often sat on their committees. With a clear understanding of the threats facing life in Australia, Dunphy knew what conservation activists must do. He thought that, ‘except where dollars are concerned, the exploiters of Australia are an unimaginative lot’. Likewise politicians, whose views, Dunphy believed, largely reflected those of the exploiters. As for campaigning, Dunphy advocated no compromise and no concessions. It was the government’s job to offer compromise, not the conservationists’. Moreover, it was ‘never too late to win’, the public was onside, and ‘properly wooed or bludgeoned if necessary, the politician is your

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best friend’, especially when the public was aroused. He believed conservationists should ‘adopt a guerilla attitude’, ‘press the situation from all possible angles’, ‘be flexible and imaginative’, ‘set up full-time offices’, ‘do everything better than your opponents’, and never give up.23 Dunphy’s doggedness and clarity of purpose, however, appeared against a background of compromise and confusion. New language and new posturing muddied conservation arguments and activism. Rutherford’s emphasis on the ‘total environment’, for example, reflected the pretentiousness of learned experts. Instead of talking about the world of nature, professors and professionals preferred to speak about the environment – a pose that distanced them from living Creation. The word environment came from the French environ, meaning that which surrounds or encircles and entered english out of the need to explain evolution by natural selection – organisms require a setting, an environment, in which they live, struggle, and reproduce. Scientific association lent the word great credibility but the word’s meaning reinforced a deep prejudice: the belief that the world was separate from and outside humans but with humans at the centre. Indeed, environment came to refer to any arena for human action, whether an office environment, home environment, business environment, or a natural environment. In each case the word implied a right and a responsibility to be in charge, control, and dominate. Nature, in contrast, is an altogether different utterance. One of the least ambiguous words in english, its meaning is very clear and ancient. The original word, the root, was the Indo-european gen, meaning to give birth, to beget, to do all things associated with procreation and with the setting up of lineages. Language grows from life, and Greek and Latin variants blossomed into a collection of gen words. Greek stems include genos, for race or family and gignesthai,

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to be born, the root of gestation. These unfurled into Old Latin as gnatus, which gave rise to natal, nativity, native, and innate. Perhaps the most powerful cognate is nature, meaning the living and nonliving world that came into being without the help of humans. This independent power of nature became a source of alarm. After humans built civilisations further and further removed from unmodified nature, they began to fear that their control might be limited. When they thought of nature, civilised people imagined an entity that might one day turn on them and do them in. The word environment pacified those fears because people controlled environments. Polluted farmlands and rivers might worry some because of the consequences for food and water supplies but those anxieties did not extend to nature at large. For as long as farmlands and rivers, and even the seas and the atmosphere, were part of the environment, just a little bit more human cunning could overcome problems and bypass untidy, chaotic nature. environments promised the possibility of conquest and control and helped foster the modern delusion that life depended on language. The word’s origins offered an illusion of objectivity as well as academic respectability. Pretentious and clinical, environment had none of the nature’s rich associations and called for no emotional attachment. Above all, the word was safe. everyone and anyone could be an environmentalist – even the Queen, who in her broadcast to the nation in April 1970 said, ‘Development for its own sake is not enough. We must also care for the environment we live in.’24 Judith Wright might have approved of this message but she wanted more. For the sake of conservation she advocated a new kind of thinking that opposed the whole force and current of existing thinking. This was a tall order, particularly when few people had any idea of what that new thinking might consist. Most attempts at outlining new thinking were conceptually confused and not actually new. The

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romantic primitivism that some advocated lodged deep in Western thought. Likewise, ecology grew out of a long line of Western scientific inquiry fused with romantic traditions equally Western in their origins. The scientific framework propping up the term environment represented yet another strain of multifarious Western thought. Neither the proffered concepts nor the accompanying language were truly separate from what Wright had identified as an historical trend of which the dump heap was the result. The difficulty of explaining, let alone charting, a new way was compounded by the fact that many contributions to conservation, such as Rutherford’s idea of ‘total environment’, came from academics who lived by and championed abstractions. Abstracting led to uniform rules and laws based on the premise that the world was fungible, everywhere the same and everywhere subject to the same progress and development. Conservationists, in contrast, were moved by difference and diversity. Their affiliations leaned to the individual and the specific. Accordingly, they sought to save matchless suites of organisms alive in particular places. A conflict arose, pitting particulars of life and location against abstractions. But neither the conflict nor the perplexity of dealing with the human assault on the earth in terms of thought outside existing conceptual frameworks hindered Australians, who grew to love their country. They founded their relationship on direct bodily awareness. Fortunately uninformed by superstitions about the organic wholeness of primitive life, they experienced the country viscerally and physically. While conservationists debated the shape and content of the needed new thinking, scores of younger Australians continued to acquire loyalties to place and the living world. .

CHAPTeR 8

Bogus Letters

Most conservationists worried about population. The already large and increasing number of human beings and their growing demands drove destruction everywhere on the planet. In 1960, Walter Murdoch, a professor of english and a widely syndicated newspaper columnist, warned of the ‘menace of the birth-rate’ and urged family planning. economists quickly corrected him: the problem was not numbers but the development of food supplies. Australian economist Colin Clark confidently declared that with proper management the earth could support 45 billion people on a North American diet.1 Paul ehrlich, an American professor of biology, argued otherwise, and his best-selling 1968 book The Population Bomb made population topical. Australian scientists took up the issue. In 1970, the Australian Academy of Science’s newly-formed committee on the environment proposed a joint symposium with the Social Sciences Research Council to investigate population in Australia. Members included professors Frank Fenner and Wilfred Borrie. Borrie, a demographer and director of the Research School of Social Sciences at the ANU who was bewitched by Australia’s mineral boom, supported a larger population to help exploit the continent. ‘We cannot

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have major resources lying idle’, he told the Sydney Morning Herald. ‘We have a responsibility to develop within the world situation as well as for our own benefit.’2 Fenner, a biologist and director of medical research at ANU, assessed the country differently: on the nature of the land, not economic prescriptions. With ideas more connected to reality than Borrie’s, he argued that Australia was even more vulnerable than America to the damaging effects of large numbers of people, for it is by far the driest continent, its arid land ecosystems are far more limited, and its climate less dependable. Yet we are set upon much the same course of population increase as was the U.S. a little over a century ago, at a time when technology is vastly more destructive than it has ever been before.3

Other bodies took up the issue. In January 1971 the Australian Institute of Political Science held a summer school in Canberra to consider the question, ‘How Many Australians? Immigration and Growth’. Borrie dismissed any link between population and pollution and claimed that ‘Pollution is essentially the product of industrialisation and not of population growth’. The demands of economics and nation-building overrode ecological arguments about limits. Land, water, air, climate, and other elements of the living earth did not matter because humans could and would overcome them all. They were not limitations in any sense, simply challenges.4 Fenner criticised economists’ use of gross national product (GNP) on the grounds that it excluded externalities. ‘Two major “externals” . . . will soon have to be internalised if the highly desirable marriage between economy and ecology is to be consummated’: the cost of cleaning pollution and the cost of preventing pollution.5 During discussions, John Coulter, a medical researcher, tackled

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speakers for their insistence on responding to the topic in terms of economics alone. They ignored fundamental questions, which concerned not the best method of achieving economic growth but whether economic growth itself was sustainable. The real issue was population: ‘It seems a peculiarly anachronistic Australian attitude to attempt to increase our population when we are aware that the world is grossly over-populated’. ‘Increasing population’, he added, ‘can never improve the quality of the environment’. He identified two limits: the absolute limit to specific resources and a limit to the ability of the environment to cope with waste. Therefore, the world’s developed countries, using and abusing a disproportionate amount of the planet’s resources, had a major population problem.6 To tackle that problem and to ensure population was of central concern to conservationists, Coulter, who had been active in conservation in South Australia for 20 years, helped found an Adelaide branch of Zero Population Growth (ZPG) in 1971. Other branches opened in Armidale, Brisbane, Canberra, Coonabarabran, Hobart, Melbourne, Newcastle, Perth, Rockhampton, Taree, and Townsville. Derek Llewellyn-Jones, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at the University of Sydney, helped found a Sydney branch. He later co-authored a book with economist Colin Clark that argued the pros and cons of zero population growth. ZPG argued that no environmental problem ‘can be permanently solved as long as our population continues to grow. People make pollution. More people make more pollution.’7 To discuss this assertion, the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS) held an August 1971 symposium in Adelaide on the subject, ‘Population – The Main Polluter?’ Glen Broomhill, South Australian Minister for environment and Conservation, opened the proceedings. Growth, he said, ‘has been one of the great unchallengeable assumptions in Australia’s post-war story’, along with slogans like ‘Populate or Perish’.

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Both required questioning. There was ‘a good case for slowing down migration’ as well as limiting natural increase. More people meant more contamination. There were limits to human activity and these applied in South Australia, Australia, and the world at large.8 Discussion continued. In his 1971 book A Dirty Story: Pollution in Australia, Derek Whitelock stressed the link between pollution and population: ‘Technology and medical science have encouraged the human species to overcrowd the habitable areas of the earth’, he wrote and ‘Men can no longer orate as they once did about endless opportunities for Development’. Yet, migrants ‘are still encouraged to come in droves to Australia’. The result was disaster: ‘Australia’s pollution problems have grown in direct proportion to its population increase. The dirt and waste, the fouled water, disrupted ecology, decimated flora and fauna and abused soil and air are all by blows of the Great Immigration Obsession.’9 Talk of population restraint disturbed champions of Australia unlimited. They argued that while the world might be overpopulated, Australia was different: Australia was big; Australia was empty. Under the heading, ‘Perish the population argument’, the Australian Financial Review argued for a ‘maximum population’. ‘It would be safe to say Australia needs a lot of people yet’, the paper continued, and speculated, ‘The population required for fulfilling our national destiny . . . would be of the order of 50 million at least’.10 elsewhere, boosters vigorously attacked conservationists. In Meanjin Quarterly, Geoffrey Leeper, recently retired from the chair of Agricultural Chemistry at the University of Melbourne, referred to population-control advocates as ‘nature-worshippers . . . people for whom nature is our good mother and who believe we have sinned in departing from her and now face a just punishment’. Without naming anyone who actually held this view he nevertheless confidently concluded that ‘thorough-going nature worship would mean the death

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by starvation of 999 out of every thousand on the earth’. Journalist Peter Samuel in Quadrant, again without being specific, described conservation claims as exaggerated and elitist. He reserved special scorn for unnamed scientists who stepped outside their field of competency. Their criticisms of economics and growth were misplaced, foolish, and uninformed.11 Caricature, misrepresentation, reductio ad absurdum arguments, and derision typified the response of conservation’s opponents and illustrated the difficulty of making a case for conservation. Conservationists found no natural allies on either the political left or right. Both resisted sympathetic identification with life in Australia. Nevertheless, conservationists generally appealed to what they considered an ‘enlightened’ audience on the left. For two years to 1971, Vincent Serventy wrote a semi-regular column, ‘Conservation’, for the leftliberal newsweekly Sunday Review (later Sunday– The Review then The Review, and finally Nation Review). He discussed the need for reserves, the protection of rivers and estuaries, destruction of wetlands, crocodile hunting, the Colong Caves, air pollution in Sydney, and the dangers from industrial development to Cockburn Sound in Western Australia. After Serventy dropped his column, Nation Review continued to carry occasional articles on conservation – but not always compatibly. An emphasis on saving nature from human depredation sat awkwardly in a publication devoted to championing human welfare and to charting the change from old left concerns with wages and economic conditions for workers to new left concerns with liberation and self-improvement for the middle class. Conservation clashed with the paper’s humanism. Humanists cultivated a sense of humanity’s transcendent value – especially the superiority of human reason over mere animal instinct – and stressed qualities that set humans apart, not those that embedded humans in nature. Nation Review readers believed that

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humans were perfectible and that through science humanity was about to take charge of its own destiny. In this light, conservation appeared retrograde and many humanists regarded it suspiciously. Some were antagonistic. One letter writer complained the paper ‘was giving too much space to ecology fanatics’. economic development answered human needs, pollution was due not to technology but to its inadequacies, and new discoveries would overcome limits.12 Despite the underlying antagonism between the left and conservation, many conservationists placed their hopes, at least nationally, in the Australian Labor Party, out of office since 1949. The party’s 1969 conference resolved to protect the Great Barrier Reef, implement reforestation programs, ban DDT and other pesticides, and encourage landholders to protect land against drought, overstocking, and erosion. The 1971 conference passed similar resolutions. New leader Gough Whitlam indicated sympathy for environmental causes, under an umbrella he called the ‘national estate’.13 Other ALP members seemed even more sympathetic to conservation, especially the shadow Minister for the environment, Tom Uren, who told Parliament in February 1972 that the gates of Serpentine Dam should be re-opened pending a re-assessment of Lake Pedder’s flooding. He said House members should admit they had been wrong in the past, lacked information, and had given little thought to making grants to Tasmania for the Gordon River development. Uren’s views extended to the state of the planet. With reference to the Club of Rome’s recently published The Limits to Growth, he told a ZPG seminar at the University of Sydney that present trends indicated a future of more pollution, more destruction, more extinction, crowding, congestion, plunder, and a run-down in non-renewable resources.14 Uren, however, did not become Federal Minister for the environment when the Whitlam government won election in December 1972.

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Moss Cass, a former medical practitioner and researcher, assumed the portfolio. Cass had been Labor’s spokesman on health and social welfare and was known for his left-libertarian views. He supported zero population growth, abortion, homosexual law reform, and the legalisation of marijuana. The environment seemed to fit his swag of causes. He said he took up his portfolio prepared to challenge the idea of full-ahead economic growth, replace GNP with a human welfare index, conduct a national biological survey, introduce environmental impact statements, compile an endangered species list, institute an inquiry into the woodchip industry, and promote nationwide recycling. Two weeks after winning election, Whitlam wrote to Tasmanian Premier eric Reece suggesting a committee of inquiry to investigate alternatives to flooding Lake Pedder. Subsequently, Whitlam warned Cass to ‘stay out of Tassie. A letter’s been sent’. But while Whitlam put great faith in the persuasive power of his own written word, he did not impress Reece, who procrastinated, refused to cooperate, then agreed, and later – after public hearings began in Hobart on 1 April – changed his mind again and withdrew State cooperation.15 With the Pedder inquiry underway, Uren, now Minister for Urban and Regional Development, and Cass appointed a Committee of Inquiry on the National estate. Under the chairmanship of Robert Hope, a justice of the NSW Supreme Court, members included Judith Wright, Milo Dunphy, Len Webb, and David Yencken. They appointed Geoff Mosley as a consultant. Uren and Cass asked the committee ‘to examine the nature and state of the National estate and what should be done about it’.16 Members sent out query letters, contacted relevant authorities, toured the country, received submissions, and consulted conservationists everywhere. And they spoke out on current issues. In July, after the Pedder inquiry recommended draining the Serpentine

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impoundment and a three- to five-year moratorium to assess the feasibility of restoring Lake Pedder, Hope wrote to Cass: The Committee considers Lake Pedder to be the focal point of the unique South West Tasmanian wilderness region. Both the lake and the region are national monuments of importance equal to that of Kosciuszko National Park or Ayers Rock . . . We can find no other site of more urgent importance in Australia, except the Great Barrier Reef.17

This last-minute plea failed. Reece remained defiant. To the rousing cheers of both sides of the Tasmanian Parliament he rejected the moratorium. Nothing excites politicians so much as the prospect of conquest. Pedder’s loss completely disheartened some conservationists, who withdrew from activism. Others responded with a sturdy resolve to prevent similar destruction in the future. They believed the Pedder campaign failed because there had been insufficient time to mobilise support from the mainland and because the ACF old guard served its own interests rather than those of conservation. They believed that a small number of dedicated activists could command public attention and sympathy through the media. These insights suggested an organisation entirely devoted to conservation. In 1974, with Pedder’s fate sealed, activists from the Lake Pedder Action Committee (LPAC) and the United Tasmania Group (UTG) formed the South West Action Committee (SWAC). Kevin Kiernan, secretary of LPAC, became chairman and Hugh Dell, UTG secretary, became a key SWAC organiser. SWAC activists worked full-time, often seven days a week, campaigning uncompromisingly for the whole of the southwest as a national park. They concentrated on forming branches rather than recruiting members and opened a branch in Melbourne.

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Pedder’s drowning aside, many conservationists drew hope from current events. Conservation might become an Australian priority: government was responsive, the community engaged, and unions sympathetic, particularly the Sydney-based Builders Labourers Federation (BLF). Some months after the BLF’s June 1971 ban on development at Kelly’s Bush, residents of eastlakes, a housing development in Sydney’s inner southeastern suburbs, appealed to the union to ban any further work on the estate after the developer reneged on a promised 3.5-hectare park. The union informed the developer that any attempt to build in eastlakes would incur a ban on all the company’s projects. At the same time, Nita McRae, a lifelong resident of the Rocks area in Sydney Cove and a founder of the Rocks Resident Action Group (Rocks RAG), approached the BLF for support against the development plans of the Sydney Cove Redevelopment Authority (SCRA). The BLF declared there would be no demolition of buildings or construction of new ones without resident approval. Nonetheless, SCRA sent in non-union bulldozer drivers and the resulting sit-ins, protests, and demonstrations attracted nationwide publicity and controversy. More and more Sydney residents sought the BLF’s aid. Accommodating them, secretary Jack Mundey realised, required new language. All previous strikes and boycotts over nonwork-related union matters had been called ‘black bans’, which, for many people, connoted images of strikes for radical and communist purposes. In mid-1973, Mundey coined the term ‘green ban’ to distinguish it from the traditional black ban. All existing black bans, including the still-unresolved dispute at Kelly’s Bush, immediately became green. Henceforth, according to Mundey, the imposition of a green ban had ‘much more positive social and political implications’.18 The new label generated new bans, fortified opposition to development, and reinforced conservation vocabulary. For some years

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conservationists and the media had used the term green to describe conservation activity. extensions of the word followed. Greenie, an appellation for people who supported green causes, appeared on placards at UTG rallies in Hobart in March 1972. The same month, The Review used the word in a headline: ‘SST report angers greenies’. In September, Judith Wright employed the term in a Nation Review article. Thereafter Nation Review occasionally used the term in headlines: ‘Hardhats stomp greenies’; ‘Greenies out for trouble’; and ‘Greenies unhappy over Redcliff ’. In November 1973 Melbourne’s Age described supporters of green bans as greenies and the words green and greenie entered the Australian vernacular.19 Mundey believed he was living in revolutionary times. He told the Communist Party magazine, Australian Left Review: I am particularly happy about the success we have had in the ecological area. I think we have really started something there and my main interest will be in that area. I think it is potentially very revolutionary and that the Communist Party has a real responsibility to become involved there.20

He hoped ‘to link up with the Total environment Centre and ecology Action’. He believed the struggle for the built environment and the natural environment were the same struggle. But the links were imaginary, based on a linguistic delusion. The only connection was in the word environment, which reduced the natural world to an arena for human action. The TeC, despite its name, and ecology Action, despite its pretensions, were largely concerned with nature conservation. In contrast, and contrary to Mundey’s self-declared success ‘in the ecological area’, few green bans involved nature conservation. Primarily urban and mostly initiated in response to people’s concerns with their city surroundings – neighbourhoods threatened by redevelopment

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and roadworks – green bans saved only small amounts of bushland. They commonly preserved amenity and promoted quality of life. These were hardly revolutionary outcomes. Human welfare, not nonhuman nature, remained paramount. Indirectly, however, the bans and accompanying community activism helped conservation by building civil society. Only a lively civil society can generate and maintain the diverse set of non-governmental institutions strong enough to counterbalance the state and ensure it remains liberal and democratic and responsive to citizens’ demands. And only the liberal democratic state, sustained by a cohesive, selfidentifying political community of patriots, can provide the guarantees, maintain the stability, and offer the security that gives nature conservation any chance. Directly, green bans made little contribution to conservation. Disregarding the claim of at least one hopeful commentator that ‘The green ban movement signifies the refusal of workers to build socially or environmentally destructive projects’, the majority of workers in destructive occupations continued their destructive pursuits.21 Since the 1950s, sandminers had prospected the dunes between the sea and the Myall Lakes in New South Wales. Conservationists argued for a national park over the area. Fearing conflict, NSW Minister for Mines Tom Lewis established a committee headed by Ian Sim, chairman of the State Planning Authority (SPA), to inquire into and advise about sandmining on the State’s north coast. The report, completed in January 1966, recommended a national park over parts of the Myall Lakes but endorsed mining in the area between the lakes and the sea.22 Disturbed by the prospect of beach and dune destruction, Milo Dunphy and others formed the Myall Lakes Committee in December 1968. Dunphy became secretary. The Committee prepared a Myall Lakes national park proposal and over the next several years enlisted

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the support of the NPA and the National Trust, wrote letters, produced a newsletter, printed car stickers, held street demonstrations, made deputations to government Ministers, conducted tours of the area, held public meetings, and met with Prince Philip. The miners persisted and in March 1971 Mineral Deposits applied to mine the high dunes on the eastern side of the lakes. Although the local council approved the application, the State Planning Authority (SPA) disapproved and declared the Myall Lakes landscape ‘an outstanding asset to the State’. In March 1972, the company appealed the ruling.23 For conservationists, however, Mineral Deposits was only one of a number of opponents of conservation. Local landowners and developers formed the Myall Lakes Personal Rights and Park Preservation Association. They accepted a small park but opposed any resumption of private land. In addition, the Australian Workers Union (AWU) strongly supported the miners. Pro-miners organised a nuisance campaign against Myall Lakes Committee members, who received unsolicited goods, abusive phone calls, and had bogus letters sent out under their names. A month after Mineral Deposits lodged its appeal, the government gazetted part of the Myall Lakes area as a national park, and in July the SPA appointed Walter Bunning, a town planner, architect, and founding member of SCRA – whose disastrous plans were thwarted by the BLF – to consider the appeal. Following the election of the Whitlam government, conservationists sought Federal help and prepared a Myall Lakes submission for the Committee of Inquiry into the National estate. But conservationists were not the only people appealing to the Federal government. Two days before the Bunning inquiry opened in Sydney in March 1973, the AWU called a meeting in Newcastle to discuss the ‘conservationist menace’. Five hundred workers attended and heard the secretary of the Mineral Sands

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Committee read a telegram sent to politicians: ‘How come Labor government suddenly in favour of radical conservationists? Ready to march to Canberra to protect our jobs.’24 Bunning heard evidence from Mineral Deposits’ consulting engineers, who maintained mining and rehabilitation would not create environmental or ecological damage and that, in some respects, there would be substantial benefits. In any case, the company claimed a right to mine. The local member, the shire, and the AWU supported the company’s case. Conservationists said the company had misled shareholders, was under foreign control, and had previously exported rutile and zircon at below market prices to avoid Australian taxes. Tourism would benefit the local community more than sandmining. Tom Hughes, QC, representing Mineral Deposits, said conservationists had made ‘subjective, and at times emotional, assertions . . . based on unsubstantiated assumptions’, which had ‘been disproved by the evidence called in support of the appeal’. His own observations were, of course, ‘objective’.25 Dunphy appeared for the TeC, while Murray Wilcox, a bushwalker and barrister, appeared for the National Trust, the ACF, and the Myall Lakes Committee. Wilcox pointed out that the loss of trees and vegetation was ‘lifelong’ and asked, ‘Why should this be suffered and have we not the right to be angry about the proposal?’26 Bunning compromised and recommended that mining be allowed to proceed in two of the disputed areas. The NSW government accepted the recommendation and in June 1974 approved mining. Company bulldozers moved in three days later. Bulldozers also threatened Fraser Island, lying off Maryborough in south Queensland. One hundred and seventy thousand hectares in area and the largest island off Australia’s east coast, Fraser Island is the largest purely sand island in the world. Tracts of hardwood and

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rainforest thrive on the annual 1500 millimetres of rain and humusrich sands. Forest grows over most of the high dunes, some up to 250 metres above sea level. More than 40 freshwater lakes lie among the high dunes. During the 1960s several sandmining companies including Queensland Titanium, Murphyores and its American partner, Dillingham Construction applied for sandmining leases over large areas of the island. In January 1971, Dillingham Murphyores (DM Minerals) applied for additional Fraser Island leases. But now there was opposition. In February, conservationists who had fought for the nearby Cooloola Sands formed the Fraser Island Defence Organisation or FIDO, ‘the watchdog of Fraser Island’. Maryborough adult education officer John Sinclair became president. Sinclair knew Fraser Island. His parents had honeymooned there and later returned for holidays with their children. After spending much of his childhood outdoors, Sinclair helped found the Maryborough Field Naturalists’ Club in 1967. When he realised he was more interested in protecting the bush than studying it, he turned the group into a branch of the WPSQ. Subsequently, he became involved in the Cooloola campaign. Two weeks before he became FIDO’s president he quit the Country Party in which he had served as a member of its State management committee and president of its Maryborough branch. With FIDO, Sinclair began campaigning immediately. He wrote to the Courier-Mail and his letter, published under the heading ‘Fraser Island could become the world’s largest sand quarry’, attracted support and members to FIDO. Next, he turned to the courts. To obtain a mining lease on Crown land in Queensland, miners had to apply to the mining warden with jurisdiction over the area involved. The warden, who was required to consider the public interest, then made a recommendation to the Minister for Mines, who

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had final discretion. When the hearings on DM Minerals’ application began in March 1971, Sinclair had gathered more than 1300 objections from around Australia. Lew Wyvill represented the objectors. An economist appearing on FIDO’s behalf argued that the benefits to Australia from the largely foreign-owned DM Minerals were negligible. Other witnesses, including Ian Bayley and Dick Piesse, supported FIDO’s argument for no more leases on Fraser Island until a comprehensive survey was done. But even before the warden reported, Premier Bjelke-Petersen told Sinclair the government would grant the leases while making a national park of 24 800 hectares, consisting of land the mining companies had already rejected as not worth mining, and constituting less than one-sixth of the island – and entirely omitting the east coast. At the end of the year, Queensland Titanium began mining its leases over the beach and foredunes in the island’s southeast. DM Minerals continued to defer mining. every time the company sought a lease extension, Sinclair opposed it in court. Just as regularly the warden approved the lease extensions. Sinclair’s defence of Fraser Island did not stop in the courts. He confronted Bjelke-Petersen, issued press releases, wrote letters and produced a regular newsletter, Moonbi – after an Aboriginal name for the central part of the island – which he sent to State and Federal politicians and to conservation groups throughout Australia. every weekend he conducted tours of Fraser Island, seeking to introduce more and more Australians to its beauty and its wonder. Along with other conservationists, Sinclair welcomed the election of the Whitlam government. He thought ‘a new era had dawned’ and saw new campaign possibilities. Labor might intervene over Fraser Island by refusing to issue export permits to the sandminers. Subsequently, Sinclair sent Federal cabinet a barrage of telegrams, and in February 1973 visited Canberra on his first lobbying trip and made

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a submission to the national estate inquiry. In July, inquiry members Wright, Dunphy, and Keith Vallance visited Fraser Island. They condemned sandmining and recommended the Australian government use its foreign trade powers to withhold export licences from sandminers.27 In Melbourne, Sinclair linked FIDO to a nationwide network of conservationists and sought to involve the ACF in Fraser Island’s defence. This was no longer so difficult. The ACF was changing. Open membership led the Foundation beyond what founder Ratcliffe had envisaged. Members demanded the ACF be committed, involved, and active, not a neutral broker. More and more activists were elected councillors: Milo Dunphy and Sam Lake in 1969–71 and, in 1971–73, Arthur Harrold and eddie Hegerl from Queensland; Ron Caldicott, South Australia; Olegas Truchanas, Tasmania; and Bill Walsh, Northern Territory. Throughout 1973 members continued to criticise executive vicepresident, John Blanch. In March ‘Jan Bodley’ cited Blanch’s lack of background in conservation and raised more general problems: It has now become obvious that the Australian Conservation Foundation is no more than an old boys establishment, social club, doing no more towards the cause of conservation than the local grocery store . . . The present setup within the ACF will not work. The executive doesn’t know how to make it work because they are each too busy with their own affairs and are insensitive to criticism.28

Criticism increased. Moss Cass expressed doubts about the Foundation’s continued viability, said it gave little or no support to local conservation groups, and claimed the executive was out of touch with the general conservation movement. An editorial in the Age criticised the Foundation and NSW councillors called on executive members

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to resign. A newspaper advertisement, signed by Guy Boyd, Keith Tarrant – president of the Port Phillip Conservation Council – Ros Garnet, and Ronald Taylor urged Victorian ACF members to vote for reform candidates. Other States put together reform tickets for the council elections.29 When the ballot for councillors closed on 15 September, reformers claimed at least half the council positions. The most active councillors – Dick Jones, Lake, Bayley, Dunphy, and Mosley – agreed that they should seek control of the executive and that Mosley should head the secretariat as director. At the October AGM the reformers duly passed their motions and elected Mosley. Several people resigned, including Blanch, Dick Piesse, Malcolmson, Ballieu Myer, and Frank Fenner. The revolt did not trouble president Prince Philip. ‘That’s democracy’, he remarked.30 Under Mosley, the ACF become more activist and self-consciously radical. The new council called for an end to whaling, no uranium exports, a resource tax on petroleum for solar energy research, controls on offshore dumping of wastes, and opposition to supersonic flights. In April 1974 council unanimously voted for a national park over the whole of Fraser Island, and urged World Heritage listing. This went further than FIDO’s own position, which accepted some mining and selective logging. In June, Queensland Titanium applied for four new Fraser Island leases. Mosley visited the island and joined Sinclair in challenging the application. When the warden ruled in favour of the miner and rejected FIDO’s evidence because it represented ‘the views of a section of the public’, not ‘the public interest as a whole’, Sinclair appealed to the Queensland Supreme Court, which unanimously upheld the warden’s ruling. Apart from an appeal to the High Court of Australia, conservationists thought they had only two options: a green ban or Federal government intervention.31

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National publicity increased. In August, a National Times colour supplement, ‘Paradise in Peril’, raised Fraser Island’s profile throughout Australia. In October, the ACF devoted the entire issue of the Foundation’s new magazine, Habitat – launched by Whitlam in June 1973 – to Fraser Island. Copies went to all Queensland members of Parliament and to members of the ALP’s caucus committee on the environment. Appeals to beauty had little effect on the ALP’s leaders. In November, Whitlam and his wife Margaret visited Fraser Island in the company of developers and sandmining advocates. The Whitlams found the island unimpressive. Margaret described Fraser Island for the Australian Women’s Weekly: ‘For the most part it is a barren wasteland’.32 The reaction was common, especially among people on the cosmopolitan left. Whitlam fitted the profile. More interested in the conceits and artifice of human civilisation than the living reality of Australia, he shared his urbane manner, internationalism, and facile cleverness with many left intellectuals. They admired him as indeed they admired themselves. Impressed by arrogance and overt intellectuality, by glamour over substance, they disdained the crass, barren wastelands of the Australian continent. They found beauty, not in the land itself, but in the possibility of its transformation. To aid that transformation Whitlam promised export approval to DM Minerals. But he had to move quickly. By December two bills, the National Parks and Wildlife Service Bill and the environmental Protection Bill, both of which would require environmental impact statements on projects needing export approval, were about to become law. Just before the Governor-General signed them, Whitlam and Minister for Minerals and energy Rex Connor formally approved export contracts for minerals extracted from Fraser Island. A devious and deceitful Minister, Connor had always supported sandmining, and

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lobbied on behalf of the industry even as he assured conservationists he sympathised with their cause. DM Minerals began roading.33 Conservationists cried foul. Wright called Cass. She was, Cass noted, ‘very upset and angry’. Meanwhile, the ACF accused Whitlam of ‘betraying the national heritage’ and Cass worked to convince the party to reverse the decision. He flew to Fraser Island, met Sinclair, and vowed to stop the sandminers. At the April 1975 caucus meeting he secured a vote favouring suspension of export permits pending an environmental inquiry under the provisions of the act that Whitlam and Connor had tried to circumvent.34 Connor had been absent for the vote but he quickly threatened cabinet with his resignation. He said he would not ‘be dictated to by the lunatic fringe of a pack of conservationists’. Caucus reversed itself and voted to grant the export permits.35

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In the early 1970s, State forest services became major destroyers of Australian forest. Foresters contemplated the task with relish. They had always disdained Australian forests, which they regarded as full of useless eucalypts; and when, in the 1960s, the Japanese economy boomed and the demand for pulp and paper increased and eucalyptus fibre in the form of woodchips – produced by chipping the trees cut from large clearfells – became exportable, they were ecstatic. One said: ‘Through the medium of [woodchipping] we can see ourselves realising the dream of all foresters – complete utilisation’.1 Within a few years woodchipping plans covered one-quarter of Australia’s forest and one half of all publicly owned coastal forests. Processing mills rapidly followed. The first opened at eden, New South Wales in 1970, the second in Tasmania in 1972, and construction of a third began in Western Australia in 1973. Forest services additionally undertook the razing of existing woodlands and forests to make way for pine plantations. The States agreed to replace over a million hectares of native forest a year with pines and foresters justified the destruction with historical precedent. Max Jacobs, Director-General of Forests and former principal of ANU’s

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School of Forestry, observed that Australians had long endeavoured ‘to make the Australian forest resource better suited to a european civilisation’. Again, conservationists opposed this anti-patriotic program of transformation.2 Milo Dunphy and the Colong Committee began campaigning against the conversion of the Boyd Plateau to pine plantation in 1969 and objected to the clearfelling of NSW’s southeast forests to feed the eden mill. And although the ACF’s Ratcliffe had dismissed members’ worries about woodchip-driven clearfelling and dissociated the Foundation from campaigning on the issue, other conservationists remained concerned. In 1972 ecology Action formed the Campaign to Save Native Forests (CSNF), with Judith Wright as president. Moss Cass subsequently assured the group: ‘Be certain that no new exports for wood chipping will be granted unless the Government is completely convinced that the project is in the national interest both economically and environmentally’.3 Government promises did not mollify Richard and Val Routley, two young ANU philosophers who began researching and writing about Australian forestry and woodchipping. Methodical scholars and committed conservationists, they published their critique, The Fight for the Forests: The Takeover of Australian Forests for Pines, Wood Chips and Intensive Forestry, in 1973. Dense, detailed, and technical, this startling document examined the disastrous consequences of industrial forestry and analysed the ‘wood production ideology’ that dominated Australian forest services, which the Routleys found were paternalistic, secretive, dominated by the logging industries, ignorant of ecology, and incapable of appreciating values other than wood production. Photographs of raw logging sites and of appalling devastation interleaved the text.4 Nothing like it had been published in Australia before. Conservationists often argued that saving the country’s natural heritage

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depended on challenging the philosophical underpinnings of modern society but none had parsed the disputed philosophy as thoroughly as the Routleys. No previous work had ever applied such analytical skill to a specific agency of conquest. No Australian author or authors had ever combined philosophical, demographic, economic, and ecological analysis in one volume as part of one connected argument. The Routleys were unique. They challenged conventional academic boundaries as barriers to understanding and dismissed claims of objectivity as spurious attempts to protect vested interests. They exposed both woodchipping and plantation forestry as uneconomic, dependent on massive taxpayer subsidies, and driven largely by a ‘rampant development ideology’.5 Fight for the Forests sold out within a few months and two further revised and updated editions sold out shortly after printing. Foresters reacted as the Routleys expected: with bitterness and offence. They thought of themselves as the first conservators and understood their commitment to wood production not as a value but as a rational, objective response to a resource. The Routleys challenged all these certainties, changed the terms of debate, and helped turn the fate of the forests into a public issue. The 1974 Report of the National Estate – written largely by Judith Wright and Len Webb – picked up the issue and condemned woodchipping as ‘ecologically and economically disastrous’ and recommended ‘that wood-chipping operations or other operations involving clear-felling of large areas be discontinued until the environmental effects are better known and properly assessed’. The following year the ACF published a pamphlet, The Great Forest Sell-Out, while Dick Jones at the University of Tasmania edited The Vanishing Forests?: Woodchip Production and the Public Interest in Tasmania and the CSNF Western Australia submitted The Threat to the Forests to the Senate Standing Committee on the Social environment.6

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expanding circles of destruction rippling from the woodchip industry did not entirely diminish conservationists’ faith in the Whitlam government. ‘It has certainly shown much more than goodwill’, Wright wrote in 1974. She discerned ‘the beginnings of hope’ and observed: In spite of some obvious failures, this Government has set up a ministry of the environment and Conservation, has taken steps towards an environmental policy with real teeth in it, and has now announced its acceptance in principle of the report on the National estate [and agreed to establish an Australian Heritage Commission] . . . There are strong signs that the Government recognises the importance of the rapidly growing citizen concern about what is happening to Australia, and is prepared to take action.7

Wright’s optimism seemed confirmed when in August Australia became a party to the World Heritage Convention adopted by UNeSCO in November 1972. Whitlam believed that under the treaty ‘the Federal Parliament could exercise its jurisdiction over external affairs to preserve sites of outstanding universal value such as the Tasmanian wilderness, the Great Barrier Reef and areas of tourist and Aboriginal significance in the Northern Territory’.8 Optimism also seemed warranted following the delivery of the report of the Royal Commission on Great Barrier Reef oil drilling in October 1974. Regardless of the split decision – with the chairman advising against drilling while the other two members approved it under certain conditions – Whitlam committed the government to creating a marine park ‘based on the Barrier Reef ’ in which oil drilling would not be permitted. But still there were obstacles. Inflexibly opposed to a park and in favour of drilling and exploitation, the Queensland government insisted on State’s rights over

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the Reef. Premier Bjelke-Petersen had little inclination to cooperate. A farmer demagogue and former land clearer driven by a ruthless determination to develop the State at any cost, Bjelke-Petersen possessed a single idea and a fanatic’s blind resolve to pursue that idea. Belligerent and vindictive, he had little understanding of the separation of powers and scant regard for either civil society or the rule of law. Only State-enforced development mattered. To secure development in offshore waters, Queensland joined Western Australia and New South Wales to challenge the validity of the Seas and Submerged Lands Act 1973, which vested sovereignty for the territorial seas and continental shelf in the Commonwealth. Hearings began in the High Court in March 1975. In May Cass introduced legislation enabling the declaration of a marine national park over the Great Barrier Reef and setting up an Authority to oversee the park. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Bill became law in June but Bjelke-Petersen reacted angrily to what he considered pre-emption of the High Court judgment and refused to appoint State representatives to the new Authority. While conservationists welcomed Federal government action to protect the Great Barrier Reef, they deplored government attempts to facilitate the exploitation of Fraser Island. After Rex Connor secured ALP Caucus support for export permits for Fraser Island minerals in April 1975, conservationists believed they had only one possibility left – a green ban. Geoff Mosley met Queensland Trades and Labour Council (TLC) officials, who agreed to ban Fraser Island mining unless there was an impact study. Bjelke-Petersen threatened legal action and a state of emergency if the bulldozers could not work. This proved unnecessary: the mining company shipped bulldozers from Sydney, where there was no ban. In any case, workers had already built the plant and the Australian Workers Union (AWU), whose members would undertake the actual mining, opposed any ban.

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Within days mining began. Workers charged into the island without restraint, operating bulldozers 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They destroyed vegetation, wrecked habitat, and upheaved the very land itself. As bulldozers refashioned Fraser Island, Cass’s environmental inquiry opened and John Sinclair began the busiest period of his life. Day after day he organised witnesses, submissions, papers, press releases, and attended every sitting. One hundred and fifty mining opponents rallied in Melbourne while 1500 industry supporters rallied in Maryborough. ACF president Prince Philip raised the issue with the Prime Minister and the Foundation produced a book of photographs and text, Incredible Fraser Island, celebrating the island’s beauty. The inscription read: ‘Dedicated to Helen and John Sinclair of Maryborough, indefatigable defenders of Fraser Island. But for their efforts we would not still have the chance to save the beauty depicted in this book.’9 On 11 November, before the inquiry’s commissioners could report, the Governor-General dismissed the Whitlam Government. The Liberal Party leader, Malcolm Fraser, assumed office and immediately called elections. Few people doubted the outcome. Widely out of favour, the ALP was sure to lose. But Fraser Island had still to be won. With Connor’s export permission grants about to expire and fearing that the new, caretaker Federal government might give DM Minerals another year-long approval, the commissioners issued a preliminary report detailing the Queensland government’s failure to include adequate environment safeguards in its leases and dereliction in enforcing even the weak regulations and recommending the island be included in the National estate. On election day, Sinclair took an aerial photograph of the mined area. enlarged to poster size, he sent it to Fraser with a note: ‘This photograph was taken on 13 December 1975. every inch that is mined

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after this date is your responsibility.’ For the next year he continued to send updated photographs. His appeal to the Federal government reflected a trend.10 During the Whitlam years, conservationists become more federally focused. From the national estate to the Great Barrier Reef, Fraser Island, and woodchipping, activists looked to the national government to secure the conservation of Australia’s natural heritage. Nature partly determined the politics. Australia was one continent – its territorial limits coincided with its geographical boundaries, which owed nothing to the States. Climate, weather, offshore waters, reefs, forests, rivers and the great arid inland were continuous and did not end or begin at State borders. Conservationists recognised the continent’s unbroken existence and their activism reflected their loyalty – it reflected, Wright and Webb wrote, a ‘growth in our identification with the country and the nation’.11 Given nature’s indivisibility, conservationists found more sense in dealing with one central authority than with a multiplicity of competing, mutually jealous States with overlapping and conflicting jurisdictions. The Whitlam government, more nationally conscious than its predecessors, with strong views on controlling overseas ownership of minerals and oil, willing to assert sovereignty, and prepared to intervene in development through the granting and withholding of export permits, encouraged this orientation. In turn, conservationists encouraged the government’s nationalism. As conservationists met at national forums, formed cross-state links, networks, and organisations, developed national outlooks, and pursued national campaigns, so they discovered they needed a continent-wide authority to safeguard conservation. The national government was the only choice; the national government represented Australia. Thus human arrangements, as well as natural ones, determined conservationists’ approach to the Federal government.

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Conservationists had to be pragmatists and identify conservation with national and collective ambitions. They had to be political. Being political also meant attending to State politics. The States were the principal agents of destruction and in many cases only pressure on the States could ensure conservation. In the early 1970s in New South Wales, the State Forestry Commission began logging the remnant rainforests along the Queensland border. In protest, five locals formed the Border Ranges Preservation Society (BRPS) in January 1973. The Society’s instigator, Jim Gasteen, a former Queensland grazier, beginning in the early 1960s, had sought to raise awareness about the destructive consequences of land clearing. Another member, Russ Maslen, secretary of the Byron Fauna and Flora Conservation Society, had been campaigning for three years to save two pockets of littoral rainforest near Byron Bay and Brunswick Heads. The BRPS advocated a rainforest national park to complement the existing Lamington National Park in Queensland, produced a booklet called Tweed Range and Lever’s Plateau for a National Park, and contacted councils, academics, and politicians. Letters to the press criticising and defending the Forestry Commission generated more publicity. The Forestry Commission produced its own booklet, ran tours through Wiangarie State Forest, and encouraged the timber lobby to attack ‘preservationists’ for wanting to ‘lock-up’ a vital renewable resource that provided employment. Maslen’s son, Peter, contacted Dunphy at the Colong Committee, and the May–June 1973 issue of the Colong Bulletin published a description of the forest. Committee member Alex Colley visited Wiangarie and met Maslen. Geoff Mosley visited Wiangarie in June and wrote to New South Wales Premier Robert Askin seeking an inquiry. The reply, drafted by the Forestry Commission, said an inquiry was unnecessary ‘given the present obviously successful management system applied by the Forestry Commission’.12

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Not everyone thought the Forestry Commission was wonderful. A 1973 music festival at Nimbin staged by the Australian Union of Students attracted several thousand young Australians to northern New South Wales. Many planned to establish rural communes. The first collective bought 500 hectares at the head of Tuntable Valley, a few kilometres from Nimbin. Hundreds of other new settlers followed. In 1974, Hugh and Nan Nicholson purchased a derelict farm adjacent to Goonimbar and Whian Whian State Forests, at the northern end of Terania Creek. They opened a native plant nursery and, concerned about possible logging in the area, inquired about Forestry Commission intentions. Receiving no satisfactory reply, they formed The Channon Residents’ Action Group and called a public meeting in May 1975. The district forester confirmed the whole Terania Creek basin would be logged. For Milo Dunphy and for the Colong Committee, the campaign to save native forests followed efforts to protect the Colong Caves from mining and the Boyd Plateau from pine plantations, which, through the early 1970s, remained a priority. Street theatre and abseiling stunts continued as part of the campaign repertoire. In April 1971, a protestor abseiled a seven-storey building in Melbourne. In Newcastle two protestors, under the names egils Rasmanis and Imants Kavalieris, abseiled the 10-storey Latec building. Always the committee remained alert to government mischief. When the State revoked public reserves at Bungonia in November 1971 and, 75 minutes later, Australian Portland Cement Manufacturers (APCM) applied for a limestone-mining lease over the whole of the just-revoked reserves, Dunphy lodged objections in the Mining Warden’s Court. Anti-corporate campaigning continued and at APCM’s 1972 AGM Dunphy moved a resolution declaring APCM a ‘vandal company’. Boycotts were mounted. Architects advised clients not to use the company’s cement and some local councils banned the use of APCM cement on council projects. In 1972 the Committee secured an assurance from Wal Fife,

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Minister for Conservation, that there would be no clearing of the Boyd until a review had been undertaken. The following year they received another ‘no clearing’ assurance and APCM finally surrendered its Colong Caves lease. In 1974 the State Pollution Control Commission began an investigation into the proposal to plant pines on the Boyd Plateau. Following submissions from the Colong Committee and other conservationists, the Commission recommended against pine planting. The government accepted the recommendations. By now the Colong Committee had broadened its goals – ‘to preserve the remnants of wilderness as they are attacked by exploiters and developers’ – and began describing itself as ‘A National Wilderness Society’. With the Boyd campaign won, the Colong Committee adopted three formal new objectives: the creation of a Border Ranges national park; the establishment of a greater Blue Mountains national park; and the establishment of Kakadu national park. Committee members and other conservationists had already been campaigning on these issues for several years. Kakadu especially had attracted nationwide attention.13 In 1964 the Federal government proclaimed the 505-squarekilometre Northern Territory Woolwonga Aboriginal Reserve a wildlife sanctuary. Conservationists, however, pressed for a much larger Top end (Kakadu) National Park encompassing the east and South Alligator River systems. Then the stakes increased. During the boom in mining shares in 1970, CRA announced the discovery of a huge uranium deposit at Nabarlek in Arnhem Land. Although the company overstated the find, further exploration confirmed the existence of large amounts of uranium to the west, in the area of the proposed Kakadu National Park. Mining these deposits, the ACF realised, would compromise the park. When, in 1972, the Federal government granted the Canadian mining company Noranda leases over the Koongarra (Jim Jim) uranium deposit, the

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ACF objected. The following year Prince Philip visited Kakadu, spoke enthusiastically of the area and urged its conservation. In December 1973, Whitlam announced that Kakadu would become a national park, uranium exploration licences would not be renewed, and there would be no mining in the park. Conservationists suspected park boundaries would be drawn to exclude known uranium reserves. Uranium mining raised a multitude of issues. To explore them the ACF launched a 56-page publication, Uranium: Metal of Menace, in September 1975. Prepared by Doug Hill and Rob Robotham, the publication argued: . . . many dangers will threaten Australians if uranium is mined and exported. Some of these could affect the present generation while others, from radioactive wastes, could threaten generations of Australians for the foreseeable future. Whether these dangers are acceptable, and whether we have the right to leave a legacy of dangers for future unborn generations, are not merely scientific or technical questions. They are not questions which can simply be left to experts. They affect all of us, and as such we must all take part in deciding them.14

Just as advocacy for a Kakadu national park invariably involved opposition to uranium mining, so too it frequently included support for Aboriginal land rights. This was partly a matter of justice – Aborigines still lived in the area, had legitimate claims to land, and mining disturbed and destroyed sacred sites – but powerful sentimental reasons that had little to do with Aborigines helped forge the link. For many conservationists, Aborigines represented a truer, more authentic human relationship with nature. According to Herbert (‘Nugget’) Coombs, public servant, economist, conservationist, and chairman of the Council of Aboriginal Affairs:

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The Aboriginal people of Australia lived, and some still live, in a society of extreme material simplicity. They found both security and challenge in winning a reluctant livelihood from an apparently inhospitable land with which they were in harmony. They found time for an artistic and ceremonial life of a richness we can but envy and in their oral tradition built and preserved a fabric of myths expressed in story, song and ritual which expressed their harmony with the land and its creatures.15

Coombs’s argument hinged on the idea of harmony. Indeed, his exposition revealed an obsession with harmony. From the Greek, armonia – meaning joining, joint, agreement, or a concord of sounds – ‘harmony’ entered english with much the same meaning, but became extended under the influence of Christianity and assumed grander connotations, including accord, unity, and congruity. God, Christians believed, had established an original harmony between mind and matter, body and soul so as to form a consistent and orderly whole. Harmony described highly desirable qualities. One sixteenth-century theologian observed: ‘The soule it self by nature is, or hath in it, harmonie’. Harmony was equivalent to grace. Grace and harmony existed in utopia, which represented another strong Western yearning. From a word meaning ‘no place’ to an idea about an ideal state, utopia was constantly revisited by Western writers from Plato to Marx. But utopia did not just lie in the future. Many people discovered past utopias where harmony prevailed, particularly among traditional or folk-oriented peoples. Coombs’s comments reflected a popular belief that modern urban societies had lost the harmony – life with nature, emotional and moral commitment, personal intimacy, and social cohesion – that characterised folk communities. Uninformed by the often violent and unattractive reality of Aboriginal life, his perceptions rested on wishful

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thinking derived from centuries of Western longing for harmony and utopia. These myths provided exemplary stories that people drew on to make sense of their place in the world, and they endured so long as they performed that work of contrast. In his attempt to understand the modern world, Coombs depicted Aborigines as symbols of ‘a world where’, citing the fact-free Captain James Cook as an authority on traditional Aboriginal life, . . . men and women live in dignity and fulfillment on incomes which would seem ludicrously low to us, with little change from year to year beyond the rhythmic progression of the seasons and lacking almost all the material impedimenta of industrial society.

Conservationists who glorified Aboriginal life rarely referred to flesh and blood, individual human beings driven by conflicting needs and illusions. Instead, Aborigines became ciphers, the abstracted representatives of a fantasy about a golden age.16 In the face of injustice – and Aborigines had been wronged – people tend to overcompensate and to glorify the oppressed. While this bestows no benefits on the oppressed it does fuel a masochistic need for guilt among those who feel themselves identified with the oppressors. People became convinced that not only had europeans wronged fellow human beings but they had also wronged superior human beings – humans who had a finer relationship to the land, to spirituality, to the universe, and to one another. Belief in Aborigines as possessors of superior wisdom particularly appealed to members of the organisation most identified with opposition to uranium mining. Founded in Melbourne in 1974 and affiliated with Friends of the earth (FOe) International, FOe Australia quickly established branches in Sydney, Illawarra, South Australia, Tasmania, Queensland, and Western Australia. But whereas

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FOe International was ‘Committed to the conservation, restoration and rational use of the ecosphere’, FOe Australia narrowed this aim. It intended ‘to mount a strong campaign to raise public consciousness on uranium, energy policy and related issues’.17 More concerned with social justice and salvation than nature conservation, FOe inherited the moral righteousness of the anti-Vietnam war protests of previous years and specialised in demonstrations and anti-capitalist propaganda. FOe’s collectively edited magazine, Chain Reaction, focused on uranium, energy, whales, and Aborigines. Most conservationists considered FOe part of the conservation movement. They thought of conservation as a mansion with many rooms, all connected to the cause. No individual, no group represented the whole. Different people made different contributions, united less by formal affiliation than by what most people perceived as a common goal of saving Australia’s natural heritage. Some conservationists operated entirely outside the organised movement. On the morning of 19 July 1976, a bomb exploded at the base of a gantry leading to the newly-opened Bunbury woodchip loader in Western Australia. The blast showered the area with debris but the gantry survived. Two other bombs failed to explode. Shipments of woodchips continued. The bombers, Michael Haabjoern and John Chester, hoped to wreck the loader and stop logging for as long as 18 months. Meanwhile, public opposition to woodchipping would force the government to save the forests. They saw no other way of preventing the obliteration of the southwest’s jarrah, marri, and karri forests where they lived. State and Federal governments supported woodchipping while unions would not impose a green ban. Haabjoern and Chester justified their action with the argument that limited violence against industrial equipment might prevent the much greater violence perpetrated through the destruction of forests unique to Western Australia.

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Premier Charles Court, fanatically and obsessively committed to exploitation, said his government would not be intimidated by ‘a gross act of terrorism’. He believed conservationists aimed ‘to stultify progress and sow fear, dissension and dissatisfaction among the people’, while timber industry spokesmen claimed conservation groups had campaigned against woodchipping ‘with such venom as to poison minds and provide a savage inspiration to ideological extremists’. But the Campaign to Save Native Forests and the SouthWest Forests Defence Foundation disclaimed any knowledge of the bombing, deplored all forms of violence, and, with membership increasing, continued their campaigns.18 At their trial, Haabjoern and Chester pleaded guilty and the judge sentenced them to seven years’ jail but, taking account of their motives, set a non-parole period of 10 months. The government appealed. The sentence was too lenient. The men had challenged the State’s commitment to resource development and deserved the harshest possible penalty. A majority of the Full Court agreed and increased the minimum term to three-and-a-half years. State intimidation, however, could not stifle dissent on forests. In NSW conservationists continued the campaign for rainforests and, in particular, for a Border Ranges national park. equally, the State government remained committed to logging. An inquiry into the future of the Border Ranges forests convened by the Minister for Forests reported in March 1976 and favoured multiple use; in effect, continued logging. In May, a new State Labor government came to power under the leadership of Neville Wran. Although Wran had visited the Border Ranges and said the forest needed preserving, his government had a majority of one, and the Labor member for Casino, forestry zealot Don Day, constantly reminded cabinet he constituted the majority. Day prevailed in June when the State Labor conference rejected a

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motion calling for a Border Ranges national park. Day had the support of the new Minister for Forests, who declared, ‘The state needs the timber and the local people need the jobs’. Wran, however, ordered another inquiry.19 Interest in the rainforests continued to grow. In earlier decades people thought of rainforests as oriental imports. By the early 1970s, however, Len Webb and other scientists had shown that Australian rainforests descended from an ancient Gondwanan lineage and were once dominant on the continent. They were indigenous, native, trueblue Australians. Subsequently, conservationists promoted rainforests as part of the nation’s heritage. More conservation organisations became involved in the campaign and generated more press releases, pamphlets, and posters. In June 1976, the Royal Society of Queensland and ANZAAS Queensland held a Border Ranges symposium. In August, Habitat published a special Border Ranges issue and the ACF and the Colong Committee called a public meeting on the Border Ranges at Sydney University. In November the Colong Committee proposed the Australian Heritage Commission list Wiangarie and Roseberry State Forests and Lamington National Park on its Interim Register of the National estate. Listing had no legal affect but it did have a moral one, and it garnered more publicity for the issue. And publicity, Dunphy believed, was the key. He counted 20 rainforest-related articles and letters on forests in the Sydney Morning Herald alone during 1976. Local papers carried many more. Conservationists expected opposition and rarely accepted decisions that went against them. They simply changed tactics and continued the campaign by other means. Means reflected circumstances as well as personalities. Medical practitioner Bob Brown first arrived in Tasmania in May 1972. Lake Pedder’s imminent destruction disturbed him so much

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that he spent all his savings on a protest advertisement in the Australian and in Tasmania’s three daily newspapers. He later joined Dick Jones’s United Tasmania Group (UTG) and stood as a candidate in 1975 Federal elections that followed the Whitlam government’s dismissal. He stood again in the 1976 State elections. But the party had changed. In 1974, Jones had declared that ‘At the heart of the UTG movement is the belief that Tasmania’s environmental and social heritage is being sold out or destroyed because of the excessive emphasis by today’s politicians on traditional growth economics’. By 1976, however, UTG policies hardly mentioned conservation. Instead, they focused on unemployment and the need to encourage small business. The party attracted a tiny percentage of the vote.20 early in 1976, Brown and a companion, forester and film-maker Paul Smith, rafted the Franklin River, in part to see the area before the HeC executed its plans for a series of dams in the region. He found the experience life-changing: For a time the grandeur of this monumental place flooded my mind. I lost awareness of all else – my raft, my friend, my obligations; myself. The process of thirty years which had made me a mystified and detached observer of the universe was reversed and I fused into the inexplicable mystery of nature.21

Brown found his reverie suddenly interrupted when, barely a kilometre past the Franklin’s confluence with the Gordon River, he and Smith came across jackhammer-wielding workmen undertaking exploratory work for a 100-metre-high dam that would flood 35 kilometres back up the Franklin, 36 kilometres up the Gordon and a further 100 kilometres of tributary rivers. And other dams were planned. Brown finished the trip determined to stop the HeC plans. Others

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felt the same way, and in July 16 members of the South West Action Committee (SWAC) met at Brown’s house to discuss strategy. Secretary Kevin Kiernan suggested they open an office in Hobart and change their name to the Tasmanian Wilderness Society (TWS). Brown explained: We reckoned the fight for the south-west was a fight for wilderness and this was an ideal way of keeping the word before the public. If people don’t understand wilderness they are unlikely to take much notice of other people making a noise about it. And the more the word is used the more people might come to want to know about it.22

The TWS quickly found a campaigning niche. Plans for Tasmania’s exploitation were ubiquitous. Mad with visions of development, the government targeted forests as well as rivers. The TWS denounced a proposed transfer of 2150 hectares of forest from Hartz Mountains National Park to Australian Paper Manufacturers to compensate for the loss of prospecting leases at Precipitous Bluff. TWS also later labelled a report on the south-west that endorsed existing rights to exploitation ‘a whitewash’, and opposed a Forestry Commission proposal to bridge the lower Picton River on the eastern boundary of the southwest to open up the forests of the Upper Huon and Picton Rivers. The Commission claimed that the visually interesting patchwork of clearfells among the virgin stands of forest would enhance the area’s wilderness appeal.

CHAPTER 10

Come in PeaCe and Love

Following the release of the High Court’s ruling on the Whitlam government’s Seas and Submerged Lands Act in December 1975, the new Fraser government faced a quandary. As expected, the Court declared the continental shelf the property of the nation and subject to Commonwealth jurisdiction: offshore oil drilling was a Federal government concern and Whitlam’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority could proceed. Many government members, however, were hostile to conservation, particularly when initiated federally. Even after the appointment of the first six members of the Marine Park Authority in July 1976, the government remained equivocal. Attorney-General Ralph Ellicott told State attorneys-general the Commonwealth would consider returning jurisdiction over offshore waters to the States. Western Australia and Queensland especially clamoured for control – they believed only the States should be able to declare marine national parks and be able to drill where they wanted, when they wanted. To conservationists, the situation appeared about to revert to the positions held in 1969. The reef seemed as vulnerable to exploitation as ever. These uncertainties prompted resolution at the ACF where, in July 1977, Council approved the policy that

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‘the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park should embrace the whole of the Great Barrier Reef Region as defined by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act’. Implementation of policy, however, depended on access to government and the new Federal government proved elusive. Fraser – one of the ACF’s founders – disapproved of the changes at the Foundation and was generally not available to meet director Mosley. Mosley, nevertheless, attained a high media profile and was always ready to comment on conservation topics. Many councillors resented his prominence and felt he did not always perform well, particularly on issues other than nature conservation. And there were many issues to confront. By 1976 the ACF had adopted a raft of causes in response to new threats of exploitation, destruction, and exploitation. Besides forestry and uranium mining, the Foundation worked on submissions regarding the Newport and Loy Yang power stations in Victoria. Dissension surrounded the election of Mark Oliphant, a nuclear physicist and former governor of South Australia, to replace Prince Philip as president in November 1976. Dick Jones had stood for president and his supporters continued to campaign against Oliphant. Oliphant offered to resign, then agreed to serve one year. Jones was elected a vice-president along with Milo Dunphy, John Coulter, and John Sinclair. Sinclair continued the fight for Fraser Island. The inquiry into sandmining presented a final report in October 1976 and concluded that Fraser Island was not just of national but of international significance, and recommended the Commonwealth refuse export permits. Two weeks later the government adopted all the recommendations and Prime Minister Fraser ordered mining to cease on New Year’s Day 1977. His government became the first Federal administration to stop a major resource project in one of the States on conservation grounds. DM Minerals’ bulldozers worked until midnight on New Year’s Eve.

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Next day, the Australian named Sinclair the Australian of the Year. The paper said he had demonstrated that ‘the little man, the ordinary bloke, could stand up and fight for his beliefs’ and that ‘the individual was still a force in our society’. Nominations for the honour came from novelist Patrick White, who described Sinclair as a ‘courageous conservationist who, in the face of political hostility in his home town, did more than anybody to save the miraculous Fraser Island from being sold off as sand’ and Judith Wright, who said, ‘conservationists all work as unpaid volunteers in the cause of the future; not one has worked harder than Sinclair, more intelligently, more energetically, or more successfully’.1 The Queensland government, however, did not care for Sinclair’s honour. Ministers worked to negate the temporary check on exploitation and in the months following the ban mounted a malicious backlash against conservation: they granted two Maryborough sawmillers 20-year licences to log Fraser Island rainforests; announced an extension of pine plantations; threatened new development for Cooloola and the Great Barrier Reef; gave Moreton Island over to sandmining; extended a grazing lease over the proposed Eurimbula National Park; and transferred a large number of foresters to the new Queensland National Parks and Wildlife Service to ensure the perpetuation and domination of exploitation values. In the face of the continent’s continuing degradation, conservationists had to reinvent conservation, stress the value and special character of nature in Australia, and clarify the incompatibility between conservation and exploitation. The idea of wilderness offered one means of heightening awareness and urgency about the need to defend the country. A powerful antidote to human solipsism, wilderness suggested a world that came into being without human intervention and gave rise to all life. Name changes at the SWAC to the Tasmanian Wilderness Society and the Colong Committee’s claim to

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be a national wilderness society pointed to the growing importance conservationists attributed to wilderness. Len Webb and Judith Wright highlighted wilderness in their Report on the National Estate. ‘The loss of all wilderness would be a considerable contraction of human experience’, they said. Wilderness was an essential part of the National Estate, both for the preservation of wildlife and as a human need: ‘But our last wilderness is rapidly disappearing under the assaults of increasing population and an aggressive technology’. Fortunately, Australia, unlike so many other countries, still had a chance to set aside a few major wilderness areas.2 But what did wilderness mean? To tackle the problem, Peter Helman and colleagues at the University of New England published Wilderness in Australia. Billed as ‘the first detailed study of wilderness in Australia’, the 1976 report identified 20 wilderness areas in the eastern highlands and escarpments in NSW and southern Queensland. Many of the areas lay outside existing reserves. More effort would be needed to secure them. The report inspired similar studies from across the country and helped prompt Australian’s First National Wilderness Conference.3 Organised by the ACF for October 1977, the conference featured 23 speakers and 127 participants. Mark Oliphant opened the proceedings. He hoped the gathering would mark the beginning of an effort to conserve wilderness, but pointed out some difficulties: Unfortunately, no true wilderness, no true primitive area, remains in Australia. Every corner has been visited, and to some extent altered, by rabbits, buffaloes, goats, pigs, camels, horses or sheep, and in most cases by man himself. And such devastation grows rapidly. Hence the extreme urgency of action to save what remains, whatever the cost.4

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A month after the conference, Oliphant resigned his ACF presidency and the Foundation elected Nugget Coombs in his place. Coombs came to conservation late in life. An economist by training and a social engineer by inclination, he helped establish the Department of Post-War Reconstruction, which set the pattern for Australia’s postwar exploitation – which, in turn, ensured the extinction of all true wilderness. He further helped devise and implement national income accounting (i.e. GNP) as the chief measure of the country’s economic wellbeing, which beguiled economists and almost everyone else into believing that growth was a panacea and that the living world made no contribution to human welfare. He served as an adviser to every Australian government from World War II to Whitlam. When he retired as the governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia in 1968, he adopted the cause of Aboriginal land rights. As ACF president, Coombs continued to press Aboriginal issues. This was not difficult: he addressed a receptive audience. Many conservationists were coming to believe that conservation and land rights were identical. In July 1977, the ACF council resolved ‘that ACF supports the principle of recognising Aboriginal Land Rights . . . and that ACF explore with Aboriginal groups ways in which environmentally responsible land management can be adopted under their jurisdiction’.5 This conflation of causes – identifying conservation with justice for Aborigines – derived emotional justification from the myth of the Ecological Aborigine that Theodor Strehlow, Judith Wright, and Coombs, with their mystical references to Aboriginal harmony with nature and the land, helped create. The myth, in turn, received reinforcement and elaboration from anthropologists writing about Aborigines and fire. In 1969 anthropologist Rhys Jones coined the term fire-stick farming. He contended there was no ‘natural environment’ in Australia

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prior to 1788: ‘The continent had been colonised, exploited, and moulded by other men – the Australian Aborigines and their ancestors for tens of thousands of years’. Aborigines shaped the country chiefly through the use of fire, or what Jones grandly referred to as ‘fire-stick farming’, which served Aboriginal purposes of fun, signalling, clearing the ground, hunting, regeneration of plant food, and extending man’s habitat. Hardly neutral, the term ‘fire-stick farming’ connoted notions of control, manipulation, deliberation, and management.6 Neutral terms rarely get noticed; loaded ones, however, can take off like wildfire. Jones’s notion generated reams of commentary – most of it favourable – and scores of theses. In 1975 Sylvia Hallam published Fire and Hearth, a study of Aboriginal use of fire in southwestern Australia. She declared: ‘The land the English settled was not as God made it. It was as the Aborigines made it.’7 This assertion quickly became received wisdom but not on the basis of merit or on evidence marshalled on its behalf. Rather, seeing Aborigines as fire-stick farmers elevated them to the role of active agents in contrast to an earlier view of them as passive occupiers. This new image perfectly suited the growing agitation for Aboriginal rights. Justice advocates frequently rely not on the argument that all humans deserve equal and fair treatment because of their status as human beings but on the grounds that certain groups of humans are special and deserve special consideration. Jones, Hallam, and others purportedly showed that Aborigines were exceptional and played a unique role in the creation of Australia. Therefore they deserved recognition and justice. Other circumstances favoured the rapid proliferation of the view of Aborigines as creators of their world. The idea of making – as in Hallam’s claim that the Aborigines ‘made’ the land – arose from contemporary Marxist fashions and intellectual conceits. For Marx,

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humans made their own humanity and made the world through labour. Human making reigned supreme. Everything of value had a human source and only humans and their activity mattered. The idea of the world as a human artefact was not necessarily what Aborigines believed; nevertheless, a point of view that disallowed a creative role for biology and evolution but exalted human self-creation found great favour among self-obsessed humanist academics isolated in concrete academies. ‘Concrete’ is perhaps the wrong metaphor: the theorising that took place on campuses encouraged people to ignore the diversity and concreteness of the world. Verbal artifice replaced experience. Universities boomed during the 1960s and 1970s. They graduated thousands upon thousands of students skilled in using language and in framing ideas and argument and committed to making the world the instrument of human purposes, but ignorant and careless of nature. This new class of intellectuals consolidated their group identity through adherence to left-wing politics, minority causes, women’s liberation, anti-racism, and Aboriginal land rights. They found an outlet in the irreverent, sophomoric newsweekly Nation Review, which reinforced human chauvinism, perpetuated campus abstractions, and popularised the parallel lines of thought of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marshall McLuhan, and Thomas Kuhn. Anthropologist Lévi-Strauss introduced the idea of structure, which condensed human diversity to patterns of classification. Writer McLuhan’s catchy formula, ‘the medium is the message’, meant that patterns, particularly visual patterns, overwhelmed language and meaning. Words were obsolete, form obliterated content. Physicist Kuhn proposed the idea of paradigm shift, a periodically recurring pattern that changes all fields of research and affects entire domains simultaneously. All these systems followed the Marxist practice of reducing experience, which is dense, multi-layered, and rich, to

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abstractions, which are thinner, barer, and poorer than the world they draw from. Much of the authority for these flimsy ideas derived from the high status accorded anthropology, which, many intellectuals believed, delivered the truth about the world as it was. Anthropology’s key subject was culture. Whereas earlier anthropologists regarded culture as something to be described, interpreted, and explained, later anthropologists treated culture as a source of explanation in itself. Intellectuals understood culture as essentially a matter of ideas and values, a collective cast of mind. And a people’s collective cast of mind, their cosmology, morality, and aesthetics could – if the medium was the message – be described as a symbolic system. Abstractions multiplied and individual human beings disappeared. People were, cultural anthropologists insisted – in an echo of Marx – what their culture made them. If culture was supreme and all customs and values culturally variable, then there were no generally valid standards by which cultural principles and practices could be judged. Everything was relative, including nature. Unlike the idea of wilderness, which lent clarity to the cause of conservation, lines of thinking predicated on cultural relativism only led to obfuscation and confusion. Frequently incoherent, these views nonetheless received no systematic critical scrutiny, at least not from conservationists. Although a view of humans as part of nature – the product of biology and evolution – conflicted with a view of humans as products of culture – as special, self-creators, not subject to biological constraint – many conservationists happily entertained both outlooks. This is not unusual: few people check their ideas for consistency. They have even less motive to do so when mutual consent among friends, colleagues, and contemporaries legitimises those inconsistencies. Not all conservationists endorsed the emerging consensus that land rights were a necessary and intrinsic part of conservation, but it was difficult

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to disagree. Dissenters faced the whole weight of received opinion. And they either lacked the intellectual ability to expose the bogus assumptions behind the several elements of the new orthodoxy or, out of deference to the greater cause of conservation, remained silent. The net result was that one stereotype – Aborigines as hyperactive managers and ecological geniuses possessed of a wisdom unattainable by other human beings – replaced another. Stereotypes anaesthetise minds and substitute for thought. Stereotypes coddle thinking. In this case, the image of Aborigines as fire-stick farmers allowed Strehlow’s outlandish but unchallenged claim that Aborigines had ‘a feeling of oneness with nature that has rarely been equalled, and never surpassed in other parts of the world’ to become a legitimising cushion for even more rank nonsense.8 Nonsense spread because conservation became mixed up in environment. The term environment included both the natural and the manmade. The latter attracted greater attention. Conflict between people, rather than conflict between humans and the natural world, contained more attention-getting drama and seemed – at least to most people – to be of more immediate and pressing concern. The focus of what came to be known as ‘the environment movement’ shifted. The issue was no longer about saving nature from humans: environmentalists were more interested in saving humans from themselves and building a heaven on Earth. An emphasis on social engineering and on the humanist goals of uplifting and improving humanity characterised the activism and publications that burgeoned during and following the Whitlam era. Chain Reaction, the magazine of the inaccurately-named Friends of the Earth (FOE), and Environment News, another Melbourne-based publication, devoted far more space to issues around health, lifestyle, alternative living, recycling, energy, freeways, transport, and uranium than to nature conservation.

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Likewise, the ACF expanded its concerns, covering a greater range of issues and supporting initiatives that had little to do with conservation. In September 1977, the Foundation organised a seminar on ‘Unions, the Environment and Full Employment’ and, in April 1978, launched a network of Environmentalists for Full Employment (EFFE). Causes multiplied. The director’s May report covered 20 major issues involving the ACF, including bauxite mining in Western Australia. Mining began in the State’s jarrah forests in 1963 following an assurance from Charles Court, the Minister for Industrial Development, that the area mined would not exceed 12 hectares a year. In the next 16 years, the area of forest cleared each year increased 20-fold. More mines opened, generating ever-widening circles of disruption: effacing the forest, upheaving the soil, collapsing hydrologies, and spreading dieback. Miners planned still further destruction. Conservationists protested forest demolition from the beginning. With the founding of a West Australian branch of the Campaign to Save Native Forests (CSNF) in 1975, opposition became more organised. When the biggest bauxite miner, Alcoa, announced the construction of an alumina refinery at Wagerup in the Darling Range, the CSNF decided on direct action, modelled on American anti-nuclear protests. Early in February 1979, 300 conservationists rallied outside the Wagerup site. Sixteen of the protestors – all workshop-trained in non-violent protest – entered the property. They occupied the site for three days, until Alcoa called the police. Police warned and threatened the protestors but most refused to move and 12 were arrested. The CSNF returned to Wagerup in May. Two hundred protestors held a rally and set up a weekend camp. Eighty-six police, including members of the Criminal Investigation Bureau, attended. On the Monday, protestors blocked a bulldozer. Once it stopped they climbed

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the blade, unfurled banners, and chanted slogans. Police arrested 23 people. CSNF spokesman Neil Bartholomaeus said: We are prepared to accept arrest to protect our birthright from this destructive industry . . . It will be no consolation for our children if we didn’t have the guts to stand up and oppose the expansion of this juggernaut alumina industry. It is our moral duty to protect our forests for future generations.9

This time a magistrate fined the protesters $20 each, less than 2 percent of the maximum. Conservationists claimed the penalty recognised that their protest ‘was not made in self interest, but in the interest of all West Australians’. The police commissioner expressed outrage. Conservationists, he said, ‘should have to pay heavily for the privilege of protesting’.10 Both the Crown and the protestors appealed. The Full Court upheld the protestors’ challenge, finding that the Crown had not shown that Alcoa was acting under a licence issued under a State law. In response, the government changed the law. Western Australia already required police permission for a public assembly. A new act increased the privileged status of companies and imposed a fine of $5000 or 12 months’ imprisonment on anyone trespassing on land covered by a government agreement. The CSNF originally planned a series of rolling protests at Wagerup, hoping to clog the courts and jails and to create such havoc that, if the State government would not reconsider its decision, the Federal government would establish an inquiry into the bauxite industry. The new punitive legislation, however, intimidated some conservationists. Others believed the State government would never make concessions and the Federal Fraser government would not intervene. Besides, by now the refinery was largely built. Forest protection would have to

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proceed by other means. Direct action, however, had still to be tried in other States. In July 1976, Hugh and Nan Nicholson’s The Channon Residents’ Action Group became the Terania Native Forest Action Group (TNFAG), opposing logging in the entire Nightcap and Border Ranges. In response to letters, submissions, and public meetings, the NSW Forestry Commission agreed to leave the Terania basin intact while logging the surrounding brushbox and blackbutt. Residents countered that these trees formed a protective buffer and that logging and roading would encourage the spread of lantana and crofton weed and undermine the rainforest. TNFAG stepped up publicity. Three other northern NSW conservation groups joined them in forming a new Terania Committee, which distributed press kits to all major newspapers and television stations. The ABC, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the National Times ran features on the basin. Sydney’s major conservation groups refused to assist. They dismissed TNFAG as hippies ‘protecting their own backyard’. They thought the 740 hectares of forest at Terania Creek insignificant compared to the 33 000 hectares of the proposed Border Ranges national park. In May 1979, TNFAG handed the Premier’s department a 1000signature petition calling for an environmental impact study of the Terania basin. A week later, the Minister for Forests and Conservation, Lin Gordon, visited Terania Creek, rejected the petition, said logging would little affect the forest, and that 2-4-5T – a major ingredient of ‘Agent Orange’ – would solve any weed problems. By early August logging appeared imminent, and TNFAG made plans for direct action from a base on the Nicholsons’ property at the edge of Terania Forest. A call for help appeared in the Nimbin News: ‘If you have a feeling for this forest and would like to see one of the last virgin rainforests around remain intact, please come when we call, bring camping gear, lanterns, music and love for the forest,

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but please leave any thoughts of aggression at home’. The first people arrived within days. A sign at the gate read: ‘Come in Peace and Love & Help Save the Forest’. Protestors set up a camp with hot showers, toilets, and a kitchen with piped water, posted forest lookouts, and formed a radio network and telephone tree. TNFAG arranged for lawyers to advise protestors and for a film crew to provide footage to the media.11 On Monday 13 August, three months after the second Wagerup protest, the alert sounded. One hundred and twenty protestors formed a barricade across a narrow dirt road and turned back a Forestry Commission utility. Next day, blockaders turned back another Forestry Commission vehicle – this time with a blockade of vehicles as well as their bodies. On Thursday, 200 protestors stood between loggers, a bulldozer, Forestry Commission officers – who hoped to begin roading – and the bush. Police from Lismore stood by but did not intervene. In Sydney, protest representatives met Premier Wran. Until then he had refused them a meeting. Now he told them that if they made rainforests a public issue he would act. At Terania Creek, protestors sang, made music, and hung a large dollar-sign banner over the bulldozer. The confrontation was unprecedented. Government and loggers had entirely underestimated the opposition. Least of all did they expect a blockade. Within minutes, ABC radio broadcast the news and helicopters from Brisbane and the Gold Coast arrived to film the stand-off. Later that day, the bulldozer and loggers withdrew. On Friday the bulldozer returned, accompanied by over 100 police. The protestors formed a human wall across the road. As police dragged people away, others took their place. Police arrested 17 people and towed away or overturned protestors’ parked vehicles. Scenes from the melee appeared on television news around the country. On the following Monday, protest resumed. Protestors aimed to keep

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the pressure on and slow logging down until the police, loggers, and government gave way. Quickly a pattern emerged. Every morning up to 120 police arrived in 15 police cars, five paddy wagons, a police rescue vehicle, a bus, a radio communications vehicle, and a freezer truck for lunchtime steaks. About 50 police formed a constant cordon around the bulldozer, which slowly pushed a road into the forest. On Wednesday, loggers felled the first trees and police made 12 more arrests. Next day they arrested two more demonstrators as logging continued. The protestors changed tactics. Michel Fanton, a slender, agile Frenchman, climbed a tree in the path of the bulldozer. Others quickly followed his example. Some carried hammocks, slung them between high branches in the brushboxes marked for felling, and began tree-sits. Still others ran in and out of the undergrowth near the falling trees. People became more innovative and strung cable between trees, tying them together in a web so that the entire section of canopy in the cable web would collapse if logging continued. All these tactics slowed but did not stop the work. At the end of the week the local newspaper, the Northern Star, endorsed the logging: It’s about time that these protestors realise that no matter how many heads they can muster at Terania Creek the logging roads will be built and the trees for the timber industry will be cut down. The State, and through its agency the police will see to that. This has to be done and should be done.

State agencies determined on exploitation reacted in the usual manner of governments facing opposition: vilification. Lin Gordon described the protestors as ‘filthy hippies’. He said Terania Forest must not become the preserve of a few people. ‘It’s a matter of principle’, he declared.12

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The avalanche of news and commentary jolted Sydney conservationists. Suddenly realising the significance of the protest, they quickly offered financial and moral support. Every morning and evening, protestors met at a camp circle to talk and thrash out consensus decisions. These, however, did not constrain everyone. Splinter groups emerged. Individuals and groups of friends decided on their own action. Someone cut a battery cable on a bulldozer. TNFAG quickly condemned the action. And one weekend night, two protestors slipped into the forest, drove spikes into trees marked for cutting, and, with a chainsaw, cut deep gashes in the already-felled logs, rendering them useless for milling. TNFAG denounced the spiking and publicly disowned the perpetrators but privately many protestors agreed with the action and thought it complemented their own peaceful actions. Arrests continued and logging made little progress. One day, protestors blocked the road with logs and boulders. Another day they sent floodwaters across the track after damming Terania Creek. On Wednesday 29 August, police escorted the first consignment of logs out of the forest, riding shotgun on two semi-trailers. But they were unable to sustain their presence. Costs were mounting – between $150 000 and $500 000 so far, by some estimates – and some local area police stations were unmanned, while others had only a skeleton staff. The police said they could no longer be in the forest in force. By now the Terania Creek protestors had succeeded not only in turning the preservation of Terania Creek into a major public issue but had also dramatised the destruction of rainforest all over the State. Their blockade and the nightly television news scenes of chainsaws, falling trees, and police dragging away peaceful protestors created controversy, sympathy, and public awareness and suddenly condensed all the years of campaigning by the TEC, the Colong Committee, and the BRPS into one symbolic but particular stand of rainforest.

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Wran had to act: he told the loggers to quit the forest and the police to withdraw. But cabinet was split. Gordon and others wanted the logging to continue. Wran countered with a pile of pro-rainforest telegrams from Labor Party branches. He figured his best tactic was delay and secured a vote in favour of an inquiry. Subsequently, the government appointed a retired Supreme Court judge, Simon Isaacs, to conduct the inquiry. For Judith Wright, the Terania Creek defenders were patriots. ‘For the first time in Australia’, she told the Second National Wilderness Conference in Sydney in November 1979, ‘a piece of land whose value to its defenders is neither a market-value nor a value-as-use has roused a large number of people to physical defence of its integrity’. She called that emotion ‘patriotism’, which she ‘identified with that other value we call “liberty”’.13 Milo Dunphy also saw patriotic symbolism in the Terania Creek protests. He placed the struggle in the context of Australian history, and in Habitat asked: ‘Is This the Eureka Stockade of Australia’s Forests?’ ‘For the first time in the history of NSW’, he wrote, ‘a local country community placed itself between the bulldozers and a forest’. He concluded: ‘The Terania Creek people are proving once again that while Australia remains a democracy, a determined citizen group, particularly if composed of local residents, retains a veto right over unwanted “development”’.14 Unwanted development spread all over Australia. In Tasmania the threats came from mining, forestry, and dam building. State agencies directed most of the destructive schemes against the southwest. In response, Mosley, Kevin Kiernan (of the South West Action Committee), and ACF campaigner Ross Scott published a map of a proposed national park for most of southwest Tasmania in a special issue of Habitat in June–July 1975. Their boundaries enclosed an area three times as large as a Tasmanian State government draft park proposal

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for the southwest, which omitted the Franklin Basin and the Lower Gordon River. To examine the plans, the government appointed a South West Advisory Committee under the chairmanship of George Cartland, chancellor of the University of Tasmania. A preliminary report appeared early in June 1976, recommending the preservation of existing rights to exploitation. This suited the HEC. The flooding of Lake Pedder was just one part of its plans to refashion the entire Gordon River area with dams. Who would oppose these schemes? Despite his revelatory 1976 trip down the Franklin River, Tasmanian Wilderness Society (TWS) secretary Bob Brown could not focus on conservation. He fancied himself first of all a writer and philosopher. He wanted to complete a summation of the human experience, from the premise that ‘each of us is unique’ to the conclusion that ‘While we remain integral in the universe, we transcend it by knowing it’. An incorrigible humanist, he felt the burden of the world’s problems and a need to play the role of martyr. To demonstrate against the arrival of the US nuclear warship Enterprise in October 1976, Brown spent six days fasting on top of Mount Wellington. He protested Australian complicity in the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, campaigned for jail reform, became an active member of the Launceston branch of the Australian Uranium Moratorium, organised anti-uranium rallies and marches, championed a bikeway in Launceston, and opposed plans to install an Omega navigation system in Tasmania. Conservation was only one of his multiple concerns, and not primary. He felt the threat of nuclear war and world poverty more keenly than the need for conservation. But, with the release of the HEC’s plans for the southwest, the cause of conservation appeared closer. It was an area where he felt he could more readily make a difference.15 In December 1977, Doug Lowe became leader of the Labor Party and Premier. He appointed Andrew Lohrey as Minister for Resources

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and Environment. Lohrey did not share the development imperatives that drove most Tasmanian Ministers. He opposed the scrapping of an independent inquiry into the woodchip industry and arranged for an informal inquiry into the HEC. Woodchippers and the HEC objected to accountability and complained to Lowe, who sacked Lohrey in July 1978. Lohrey’s replacement, Neil Batt, allowed the woodchippers to undertake their own inquiry into the industry and left the HEC alone. But while governments quailed before the HEC, citizens did not. In May 1978 the TWS published a 28-page booklet, The Franklin: Tasmania’s Last Wild River. According to editor Helen Gee: The Tasmanian Wilderness Society has launched a campaign to save the Lower Gordon, the Franklin and the King from the imminent threat of inundation for an unjustifiable hydro power scheme . . . This booklet has been prepared . . . in the belief that Tasmanians do really care, but that they lack the information that will add meaning and direction to their concern. It is our moral duty to fight for the protection of these rivers, to alter outmoded legislation, to stress the rights of wilderness for its own sake. The alternative is our own destruction via the economic growth spiral.16

The booklet outlined the HEC’s plans, questioned the need for more electricity, and contained articles on the geography, botany, history, and wildlife of the area. The first edition of 1000 sold out within weeks and was reprinted a month later. More print appeared. In September 1978, the final Cartland report reached Parliament. Conservationists were disappointed. Shortly after the tabling, the ACF released The South West Book, compiled by Gee and fellow conservationists Janet Fenton and Greg Hodge. Gee and academic Bruce Davis commented that the Cartland report contained

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‘a strong thread of contradiction’, and failed to oppose development in the southwest. On the contrary, its recommendations gave ‘development interests the continued opportunity to argue . . . for future development’.17 But while Gee and Davis were united in their reaction to the Cartland report, the TWS was not. The Society had boycotted the proceedings for two years and director Norm Sanders, a geophysicist, former academic and television reporter, condemned the findings. Secretary Brown, however, drafted his own response and, emphasising the report’s positive aspects, welcomed the committee’s acknowledgment of southwest Tasmania as an area of World Heritage status and called on the government to act on the recommendations that would assist in the conservation of the southwest. A newspaper reporter spotted the discrepancy in views and wrote a story for the Examiner about a ‘split’ in the TWS. Sanders felt betrayed. He believed the issue was clear-cut and thought Brown’s upbeat review pandered to politicians. He resigned as director. Brown was the sole replacement nomination and became director at the TWS’s next annual meeting. He headed a small organisation – fewer than 300 members – and moved into a oneroom office in Hobart that shared a telephone with the Environment Centre next door.18

CHAPTER 11

StreamS of viLifiCation

Population unsettled the ACF. The issue was fraught. In 1971, retiring president Garfield Barwick urged the Foundation to develop a population policy based on the idea of an optimum rather than a maximum population for Australia. Two years later, executive member Graham Chittleborough wrote a paper stating that the time for continued growth was past and an attempt should be made to define the optimum population for Australia. The ACF seemed about to give the lead on an issue not much discussed in public. But the cause waxed and mostly waned. Although many members believed population drove destruction, not all willingly or consistently counselled restraint. Only Doug Hill, the ACF’s senior research officer and Bob Birrell, a sociology lecturer at Monash University, reliably argued against population growth. Birrell grew up in Melbourne. Strong conservation leanings led him to observe, with distress, the massive expansion of the suburbs during the 1960s and the resulting deterioration of land, water, beaches, and air and the steady encroachment of roads and buildings over the city’s surrounding hills. He quickly connected the degradation and spreading ugliness with population increase.1

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Birrell joined the ACF in the early 1970s and discussed his concerns with Hill and Mosley. In 1975, he prepared a special report for Habitat, ‘Populate and Perish?’, in which he examined the recentlyreleased Borrie Report, which had argued that Australia needed more people, especially migrants.2 To examine the issue, Birrell helped organise a workshop, ‘The Immigration Issue in Australia’. He and Hill submitted a paper on ‘The Myth of Australia’s “Boundless Resources”’, in which they argued ‘that not only do we not need more people to develop our mineral and agricultural resources, but more people will make such development more difficult’. Most participants agreed that Australia should move towards a stable population and reduce immigration.3 The ACF concurred and in February 1978 council adopted a population policy that recommended immigration be limited to 30 000–40 000 a year – equal to annual outflow. With backing from Mosley and councillors John Sinclair and Chris Watson, council agreed the ACF would make a submission to a Federal inquiry into Australia’s population and immigration policies. Prepared by Birrell and Hill, the submission asked what Australians were trying to achieve: Do we want to grow wheat on every last bit of land which can possibly be tilled? Do we want to have Sydney and Melbourne with populations approaching 10 million? Do we want every last river dammed and used for irrigation or for watering suburban gardens?

Decisions had to be made, for we are reaching a stage where mindless expansion is foreclosing some of our options for the future and denying to our descendants

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some of the pleasures of our youth – clean air, clean water, close contact with nature, and so on. If we value these things, we will have to question whether ‘bigger is better’.4

Many people did not want these questions asked. They suggested that controversy about Australia’s immigration program might threaten community relations and favoured silence and censorship over discussion. Undeterred, the ACF helped sponsor a seminar at Monash in February 1979 on ‘Australia’s Immigration Responsibilities’. Again, Birrell and Hill linked ‘Population Policy and the Natural Environment’ and argued that ‘when determining immigration policy, environmental factors should be concurrently evaluated with family reunion, refugee and other international and humanitarian claims on Australia to accept immigrants’. They accepted that, if immigration policy is to be influenced by such matters as the preservation of forests and rivers, then we appear to be allocating rights to the natural environment which may conflict with human interests. This runs counter to Western anthropocentric cultural and religious traditions, wherein man’s needs – based on his special qualities of intelligence, creativity and perhaps unique relationship with the Deity – have always been considered paramount.5

Contributor Colin Hay, an environmental consultant, wrote about moral dilemmas and argued that ‘until we can throw off the intellectual and emotional blinkers of humanism’ we would not be able to make decisions commensurate with our knowledge of the natural world.6 These were brave voices – and increasingly lonely ones. Until the 1970s, Australian governments justified immigration in terms of defence, development, and economic growth. Then, under the influence of a very small number of intellectuals – most of them

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based in Melbourne – justifications changed. These academics, social workers, and migrant activists claimed a relation between immigration, humanitarianism, and equal worth. All these goals could be achieved, they claimed, under a policy of multiculturalism. Very quickly, the great majority of Australia’s most educated and most brainwashed people cast themselves as pro-multicultural. They saw multiculturalism and immigration as the means to uplift and morally transform a boring, dull, unenlightened, selfish, and bigoted Australian society. Most wonderfully, immigration furthered the cause of anti-racism. By implication, those who advocated immigration control were racist, narrow, self-seeking nationalists intent on cultural homogeneity.7 Anti-racism proved enormously emotionally satisfying to its advocates. A self-consciously anti-racist stance suited intellectuals predisposed to ‘black-and-white’ views. A new duality – a binary world of racists and anti-racists – replaced the Marxist dualities of capital/ labour and ruling class/working class. Armoured in truth, anti-racists lived in a world that banished doubt, ambiguity, and subtlety. More significantly, anti-racists lived in a world utterly divorced from nature in Australia. The clique that manufactured multiculturalism was meticulously urban in outlook and had no feeling for, connection to, or knowledge of the living reality of the land. They lived in an unworld. Their lives consisted of committees, meetings, words, lectures, ideas, argument, exegesis, and advocacy. Sunshine, stars, cloud, wind, rain, soil, storm, birds, trees, forests, woodlands, heathlands, rivers, lakes, mountains, plateaus, and surf never intruded. Abstraction trumped reality. For George Zubrzycki – ANU sociology professor, chairman of the Australian Ethnic Affairs Council, and one of the original architects of multiculturalism – Australia was simply inert, an empty space waiting to be filled with people and their projects. Northern

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Australia, especially, teemed with potential riches. When Vietnamese refugees began arriving in the country in 1978 and 1979, Zubrzycki advocated they be settled as farmers in the north. ‘These peasants’, he said, ‘would feed themselves and provide fresh fruit and vegetables for others in the region . . . [and] would be available for mining development work’. This was a vital opportunity; otherwise, he warned, ‘If we do not grasp the challenge of developing this vast continent we shall find it increasingly difficult to justify our possession of it’.8 Zubrzycki’s Vietnamese ‘peasants’ ignored his advice. Like most Australians, they settled in the cities. Facts and reality, however, never deterred an anti-racist. Next, Zubrzycki turned his attention to those who advocated a stable population for Australia based on the land’s limits. But rather than engage in actual debate about carrying capacity – of which a comprehensive lack of knowledge about the living nature of Australia rendered him incapable – he avoided the issue and instead resorted to vilification: ‘The use of arguments based upon ecology conservation and environmental protection to support exclusion in immigration policy must be regarded, I regret to say, as “racism” in disguise’, he wrote.9 Anti-racists saw race everywhere. The subject obsessed them. While studiously abjuring racism, they nevertheless encouraged an infatuation with racial identity. They kept the notion of race – longsince discredited in human biology – alive for the benefit of their own continued outrage and perpetuated a long misadventure with the idea of race. Their pursuit of virtue nullified truth. Their pursuit of purity complemented the material goals of an industrious growth lobby and bipartisan support for high immigration levels, and helped stifle any debate on population and immigration. Conservationists were not immune to these intellectual fashions. Indeed, some were close to the fashion’s centres of propagation. Others were merely intellectually submissive.

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Being branded racist greatly increased the personal costs of raising critical questions. Intellectuals whose status derives from academic success and peer assessment tend to be conformist and cowardly by nature. Ultimately they defer to authority – in this case the moral authority of the anti-racist position – even when that authority lacks genuine intellectual substance or explanatory power. Subsequently, potential critics of Australia’s pursuit of increased population tamed their inquiries to the kinds of questions about immigration approved by their peers. Asking whether the country needed immigration-fuelled population growth became unacceptable. Meanwhile, conservationists still had to grapple with the country’s steady deterioration caused by growth. Tasmanian Premier Doug Lowe, despite sacking Environment Minister Andrew Lohrey, thought of himself as a conservationist. Although sincerity reflects no intrinsic merit, many conservationists accepted Lowe’s self-assessment as genuine. In November 1978, the ACF held its AGM in Hobart to draw attention to the southwest dispute and Lowe opened the proceedings. The meeting resolved that the Franklin-Lower Gordon campaign become the ACF’s prime focus. The Foundation then appointed a Tasmanian Project Officer, Ross Scott, who in February 1979 joined Brown and other TWS volunteers in their Hobart office. The HEC carried on regardless. It had its own agenda; it would build the dams. Associate Commissioner Ray Ferrar wrote in the Examiner in April that under HEC plans ‘the hillsides of the Gordon would be kept as intact as possible’. But that was beside the point. The real point was that dam opponents must not be allowed to prevail. They were offensive . . . scurrilous . . . untruthful . . . thoughtless fanatics . . . a small closely-knit group issuing streams of

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vilification . . . [engaging in] gross exaggeration . . . [who, moreover, were] stigmatisers . . . outrageous . . . self-appointed guardians of the public conscience . . . In looking at development proposals, Tasmanians, one hopes, will be guided by commonsense rather than unreasoned emotion. The inescapable fact is that no matter how much we deplore some of its facets, we cannot halt development.

That was precisely what the Franklin’s defenders intended – even against formidable odds.10 When the ACF joined the TWS and the Tasmanian Conservation Trust in defence of the Franklin, conservationists confronted a sceptical press, a duplicitous government, and outright opposition from big business and trade unions as well as from the bullying, devious HEC. The cause seemed hopeless. No one had a grand plan; there was no manual of operations. People improvised, driven by ego, love, passion, and an abiding fear of potential loss. Strategies emerged out of expediency and reflected the personalities and backgrounds of the campaign’s principals. But strength lay in tenacity. The people who shaped the campaign shared a total dedication to saving the Franklin. They believed they should, must, and would prevail. Perseverance seems hardly adequate to express their fierce determination to protect the southwest wilderness. There were other advantages. Bob Brown and the TWS made their goal absolutely clear: to secure all remaining wilderness in Tasmania. Defenders would not retreat from this position; there would be no compromise. Their clarity of purpose, commitment to concrete outcomes, and unwavering devotion quickly gained supporters. Audaciousness also helped. The TWS bought large newspaper advertisements soliciting donations – always a risky strategy. But it worked. Money flowed in, buoying hard work. Brown spent six to seven days a week on the job. Membership grew, approaching 1000.

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The Society moved into new premises and in mid-1979 volunteers opened ‘The Wilderness Centre’ in Hobart to sell wilderness books, T-shirts, cards, posters, car stickers, and calendars. The TWS commissioned an opinion survey that showed a two-to-one majority of Tasmanians in favour of saving the Franklin and the lower Gordon. The results further boosted conservation confidence and transformed the wilderness campaign into a credible political issue. Politicians could no longer ignore it. In July 1979 journalist Peter Thompson became the ACF’s Tasmanian Project Officer. Thompson had rafted the Franklin with Brown in 1977. Friends, they worked closely together, usually meeting every day to discuss campaign politics, where they should spend energy, time, and money, decide who to see next, how to tackle the media, and what topics to research. They began meeting with Lowe every couple of months. Brown, bottomlessly sincere himself, was overly impressed by sincerity in others and believed Lowe was genuine and genuinely seeking consensus. More importantly for the campaign, Thompson recognised the value of promoting Brown – an earnest, sober, middle-class, reassuring medical practitioner – as an image. For the moment the status quo appeared unchanged when, following a State election in July 1979, Lowe’s Labor government retained power. Except that Norm Sanders, after changing his citizenship from American to Australian, had nominated for the seat of Denison and nearly won. He vowed to contest again. Otherwise, development continued to command the government. In October, Lowe tabled the HEC’s 2000-page Report on the Gordon River Power Development Stage Two, available to the public for $400. Unsurprisingly, the HEC supported its own plans: ‘The Commission has concluded that the benefits to be derived from development of the water power potential of the lower Gordon, King and Franklin Rivers far exceed any losses that thereby may be incurred’. A weak

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and vacillating leader, Lowe feared decisions. Because he had no idea how to respond to the HEC, he sought refuge in delay and promised a ‘comprehensive programme of public participation’ over the proposals.11 Conservationists, meanwhile, stepped up their campaign for the southwest. Publicity attracted more and more people to the Franklin. They thought they might only have one chance to see it before it was destroyed. The TWS organised rafting trips down the Franklin for the media and VIPs but recognised that most people would never be able to raft the Franklin. They could, however, be reached through pictures. Images proliferated. In 1977, photographer Peter Dombrovskis, a protégé of Olegas Truchanas, began publishing the Tasmanian Wilderness Calendar. Each year new, stunning, attractive wilderness photographs appeared. In 1978, Paul Smith, Brown’s original Franklin River rafting companion, made a film, The Last Wild River. Other films and television documentaries followed. The ACF sponsored a series of television commercials on the southwest. Thousands of different shots and thousands of different angles reinforced one powerful image: a majestic, grand, wild river. No pro-development spiel, no forest of words, statistics, or economic forecasts could compete. Pictures turned the Franklin into an icon and a household name. To counter the campaign, pro-dammers cultivated paranoia. In January 1980, the Hobart Mercury announced that the Army Reserve would conduct manoeuvres near hydro installations and practise anti-sabotage techniques. The paper implied the State was swarming with extremists – which was true. Most of them worked in the higher echelons of the HEC and the government. In early June, with the State government about to make a decision on the power development, between 8000 and 10 000 people joined a TWS-sponsored ‘Walk for the Rivers’ rally – the largest in

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Tasmanian history – in Hobart. They met a smaller rival rally organised by HEC employees who had formed the Hydro-Employees Action Team (HEAT) and who began to chant and heckle and wave posters reading ‘Dam the Franklin’ and ‘Keep Warm This Winter: Burn a Conservationist’. Besides abetting front organisations, the HEC hoped to influence the government with its own opinion poll but the results backfired. They showed that by 46 percent to 37 percent, Tasmanians opposed the flooding of the Franklin River. HEC Chief Commissioner Russell Ashton quickly declared the result irrelevant and told a television audience: ‘If the Parliament tries to work through popular decisions we’re doomed in this State and doomed everywhere’. Ashton belonged to a venerable tradition. Australian developers have been among the gloomiest doomsayers since Biblical times. They invariably predict ruin and a return to the Dark Ages if they do not get their way.12 The following month, cabinet met to choose between two power developments or no further dams in southwest Tasmania. Ministers were divided. Lowe, divided against himself, kept changing his mind and invited Brown to give a short address. Brown predicted mass Australian and international opposition to any scheme affecting the southwest, particularly the Franklin River. Eventually, cabinet decided to save the Franklin but build a dam on the upper Gordon River just above its junction with the Olga River. This Gordon-aboveOlga scheme would cost more than the Gordon-below-Franklin, submerge the Gordon splits, cause significant flooding, and drown a vast area of wilderness. Brown’s response paralleled his reaction to the Cartland report. He felt a compelling need to broadcast optimistic interpretations of events. He emphasised the positive, exuded magnanimity, offered politicians encouragement, and hailed State cabinet for making ‘an historic decision for conservation in Australia. Never before has a

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Tasmanian government said no to the HEC. Nevertheless,’ he added, ‘approving the Gordon above Olga dam is a tragedy for southwest Tasmania. We will oppose it.’ Privately, however, Brown doubted whether the Gordon–Franklin basin could be saved. He thought the dam development was unstoppable.13 When the government introduced Gordon-above-Olga legislation in November, the Liberals, in line with the HEC’s preference, called for a Gordon-below-Franklin dam, while Norm Sanders, now the Australian Democrats member for Denison, opposed any dam construction in the southwest. Energetic, abrasive, and flamboyant, Sanders disrespected the Liberal and Labor Parties without discrimination and dismissed them collectively as the ‘Laborials’. He believed local politicians would never stop the dams’ development because they were part of the problem. Only the next level of government offered a chance. Accordingly, he decided to use his parliamentary position to move the issue to the mainland and spent a great deal of time discrediting the HEC. On the Commission’s plans to spend a billion dollars for 180 megawatts of power, he remarked: ‘If anyone in the real world heard about it, they’d wonder just what these turkeys are smoking’.14 Tasmania’s upper house, the Legislative Council, remained a bastion of pro-HEC opinion and, on the advice of the HEC’s principal legal advisor, inserted the Gordon-below-Franklin option in the government’s legislation. Lowe refused to accept the change. The Legislative Council persisted and Parliament was deadlocked. The Legislative Council supported the Gordon-below-Franklin scheme; the Legislative Assembly supported the Gordon-above-Olga scheme. Both chambers wanted rivers destroyed. A similar rage for development gripped the entire nation. In his 1979 annual report to members, ACF director Mosley noted that Australia was about to embark on massive mining, energy, and metal

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projects with lasting impacts: uranium mining in the Northern Territory; shale oil projects in central Queensland; coal mining in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley; and, around Australia, the biggest expansion in aluminium smelting of any country in the world. None of these projects had been subject to an adequate environmental impact assessment (EIA). But would EIAs make any difference? Milo Dunphy did not think so. He regarded environmental legislation, public inquiries, and impact statements as smokescreens for exploitation. The bureaucratisation of conservation did not mean environmental problems were being solved. On the contrary: Environmental issues are more numerous, bigger, less tractable than they were a dozen years ago. The exploiters, both public service and private sector, are better organised. They are diverting, circumventing, evading, taking over the environmental administrations and inquiries.15

Norm Sanders agreed. In 1980 he, Bob Brown, and photographer Chris Bell published A Time to Care: Tasmania’s Endangered Wilderness. In a chapter entitled ‘Environmental Impact Legislation – The Toothless Lion’, Sanders argued that despite protective legislation the bulldozers always won. Governments helped shield woodchippers, miners, and dam builders from interference and oversight. And in Tasmania, the legislation establishing environmental impact statements (EIS) exempted the biggest land rapist, the HEC. If the law proved a hindrance, then retrospective legislation would override constraints. The law would never thwart a government determined on development.16 Dunphy’s and Sanders’s insights implied a deeper problem. Once bureaucracies and planning authorities become involved in conservation, conservation suffers. For the sake of regulation, bureaucrats

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construct composite landscapes. They abstract a few relatively simple attributes – preferably simple enough to be easily measured – create a fictitious natural unit, and base their planning, modelling, and directives on that fiction. Real nature possesses a variety of other attributes but bureaucrats deem diversity irrelevant to the enterprise. The goal is standardisation. The multifarious loops of energy and layered bundles of life, struggle, growth, decay, and procreation that characterise the natural world and that vary from place to place do not matter in the bureaucratic scheme of things. Model-makers assume that landscapes have enough in common for their models to apply to all of them. Under this mass-production procedure enormous amounts of information about the real world simply disappear. Bureaucratic imperatives to produce a product, a model, a directive, a regulation have more to do with promoting growth and progress than with conservation. Government-initiated boards of inquiry served a similar purpose. Even though conservationists understood that inquiries functioned not to seek the truth or make policy but as political ploys to defuse difficult situations, they often had no choice but to participate. In New South Wales, conservationists appeared before the Terania Creek inquiry under Simon Isaacs and quickly discovered he possessed no botanical, biological, or ecological knowledge. Completely out of his depth, he interpreted the terms of reference so narrowly as to exclude many submissions. Within a year, Dunphy and the TEC withdrew from the inquiry. So did Peter Prineas, secretary of the National Parks Association (NPA), when Isaacs ruled the NPA’s case for a Nightcap National Park, including Terania Creek, irrelevant. Conservationists were convinced Isaacs would recommend logging, regardless of the evidence. In October 1981, he submitted his anticipated decision. The three-volume report, which had taken nearly two years and almost $1 million, endorsed the

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logging of Terania Creek and denigrated conservationists. Premier Wran contrived a further delay and announced another inquiry, a cabinet committee consisting of himself as chairman. By now he had much more than Terania Creek on his mind. In their 1976 report, Wilderness in Australia, Peter Helman and colleagues identified the Washpool area between Grafton and Glen Innes as one of the 23 remaining wilderness areas in eastern Australia. Members of the Colong Committee and the NPA subsequently visited Washpool, which contained the largest remaining virgin stands of rainforest in the State and reported favourably on its suitability as a national park. By then the Forestry Commission had already commenced roading and the NPA called for a halt on the work until the completion of an EIS. The Forestry Commission agreed. Timber companies and workers objected and demonstrated in Grafton when cabinet met there in April 1980. Wran assured them their jobs were secure and ordered another inquiry by Gordon and the Minister for Planning and Environment. This inquiry recommended logging but, under pressure from Peter Prineas and the NPA, cabinet rejected the recommendation. Conservationists now mounted a campaign similar to the one for the Border Ranges four years before. The TEC, the Colong Committee, the NPA, The National Trust, and the ACF cooperated in producing and distributing pamphlets, posters, and articles as well as arranging media tours, lobbying politicians and bureaucrats, and arranging meetings. The ACF launched a ‘Rescue the Rainforest’ appeal and raised $60 000. By mid-1981, the rainforests of Washpool were as well known as those of Terania and the Border Ranges. To conservationists, Wran advised patience; he did not yet have cabinet support to preserve the forests. Rainforest logging continued. In July 1982, loggers moved on Grier’s Scrub on the north side of the Nightcap Range. Terania Creek veterans and others formed the Nightcap Action Group (NAG) to

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undertake direct action. They mounted vehicle blockades and sitins. When these tactics proved difficult to sustain, protestors broke up into smaller groups, infiltrated the forest – closed to the public by the Forestry Commission under threat of fines – and attempted to disrupt the actual felling operations. Protestors appeared under trees in the felling area and in front of bulldozers. When the loggers radioed for the police, some protestors accepted arrest, others disappeared into the forest. The arrests kept the issue in the media for the next several months. When the loggers finished Grier’s Scrub at the end of September they moved to Mount Nardi in the Goolmangar Forest. So did NAG. Before dawn on the first day of logging, protestors rolled an old truck across the road. Thirty police and 40 loggers pushed it aside with their bulldozers. Next, the logging convoy encountered a large fire burning in the middle of the road. The bulldozer scattered the burning logs and embers among the protestors. Further down the road the protestors removed a cattle grid and then massed in front of the first vehicle of the convoy. Steadily the loggers and police pushed forward. As truckload after truckload of timber descended the mountain, cabinet met to consider the rainforest issue, the only item on the agenda for the all-day discussion. Late in the afternoon Wran announced the decision: most of the State’s remaining rainforests would be preserved. Ninety-three percent of the seven areas requested by conservationists, including the Nightcap, would be added to the State’s national parks. Wran said, ‘The Government takes the view that the rainforests are part of our heritage’.17 The leader of the State National Party said, ‘Today marks the day the environmental lobby took over the Government of NSW’, while radio journalist John Laws called down ‘a plague on the house of the greenies’. But conservationists were delighted and NPANSW, the ACF, Nature Conservation Council of NSW, the National Trust, the

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TEC, Greenpeace, and Fund for Animals placed a large advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald praising the ‘Wran–Ferguson Government’, hailing the decision ‘as a shining example for the rest of Australia and for the world’, and concluding: ‘Thanks for the New South Wales rainforests’.18 Wran had no doubt he had done the right thing and told the next Labor Party State conference: I know it was not everyone who thought it was a great thing to save the rainforests, but I make this prediction here today: when we are all dead and buried and our children’s children are reflecting on what was the best thing the Labor Government of New South Wales did in the 20th century, they will come up with the answer that we saved the rainforests.19

Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser cared less about his legacy. Like Lowe of Tasmania, he was an ineffectual leader, unsure of his authority and incapable of disciplining his Ministers and parliamentarians. He was especially dithering over conservation issues. Since assuming power in 1975, his government consistently failed to exercise its constitutional powers with respect to the Great Barrier Reef and continually deferred to the Queensland government, which refused to allow any park within 4.8 kilometres of the coast. Nor would Fraser definitely and unequivocally rule out oil drilling. In April 1979, the Sydney Morning Herald, concerned at Fraser’s ‘vagueness’ and ‘ambiguity’, commented: The context of the [Federal] Government’s procrastination is ominous. It is no secret that the Queensland Government wants to regain control of what were once State territorial waters. While pressing for this, the Queensland Minister for Mines, Mr Camm,

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has argued strongly about the need to drill for oil in the waters between the reef and the mainland . . . Even the remotest possibility of destruction of part of the largest and most complex system of coral reefs on the planet should be rejected. The reefs belong to the nation and to future generations. The interest of mining groups in Queensland should be ignored. What is needed now is an immediate announcement that the Great Barrier Reef will be declared a national marine park.20

Two months later Fraser announced his government’s belated response to the 1974 Report of the Great Barrier Reef Royal Commission. There would be no further exploration for petroleum in the GBR region and no renewal of petroleum exploration permits until the results of both short- and longer-term research were known. But he handed park management to the Queensland National Parks and Wildlife Service instead of the Commonwealth National Parks and Wildlife Service, and transferred the territorial seas to Queensland. When, early in 1980, the Commonwealth and Queensland governments agreed to list only a small part of the Reef for World Heritage, conservationists began a new campaign. They organised a nationwide petition for a referendum on the marine park, with the results fed to Federal Parliament day after day. The returns revealed huge public support. Mosley, Wilcox, and Sinclair lobbied the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which in October 1981 called on the Australian Government to fully protect the Reef by declaring the whole region a marine park – only 14 percent of the Reef region had been so declared. The rest remained unprotected. Nevertheless, later that month the World Heritage Commission inscribed the GBR on the World Heritage List.

CHAPTER 12

no damS

Given a choice between a destructive project and a more destructive project, Australian developers always prefer the more destructive. Money does not enter into the decision. Only power matters – power and control: the greater the destruction, the greater the conquest of nature. When, in July 1980, the Tasmanian government decided to proceed with the destructive Gordon-above-Olga dam in preference to the more destructive Gordon-below-Franklin dam, HEC Commissioner Ashton said the Commission would not accept the decision. Subsequently, HEC employees lobbied Tasmania’s upper house to reject the government plans and insist on the Gordon-belowFranklin dam. Members voted accordingly and the government faced deadlock. Interest in the Franklin waned and support for the TWS declined. Fewer people volunteered. Those who remained barely kept up with the minor administrative work. Internal dissent surfaced. Some members wanted the Society run by consensus with rotating spokespersons – a model for a new world. Others thought the TWS sexist, still others that it should support land rights. While appearing sympathetic to

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everyone’s cause, director Bob Brown deflected these demands. He reminded supporters they must focus on the southwest. Focus, the ACF’s Tasmanian campaign officer Peter Thompson believed, required information and being informed. Conservationists had to be ahead of everyone they dealt with: politicians, bureaucrats and the media. To provide a political view of the situation, Thompson wrote Power in Tasmania, exposing how the HEC functioned as a state within a State and had become Tasmania’s chief economic, social, and land-use planner. Accordingly, conservationists had to insist on government and corporate accountability and transparency. Only citizens could challenge the HEC. Parliament was checked and the impasse split the governing Labor Party. In an attempt to resolve the issue, Premier Lowe proposed a referendum that would include a ‘No Dams’ preference. But the union-controlled Caucus, the HEC, and the Legislative Council opposed any No Dams option and insisted the referendum provide only a choice between alternative dam sites. Lowe capitulated and claimed a No Dams option would be irresponsible. The TWS immediately asked how the Premier could offer a no dams option one week and not the next. The Labor Party, the TWS said, was subverting free choice. The fraud was so obvious – the first referendum in Australian history without a ‘no’ option – that the TWS gained a new focus that re-energised the organisation. Together with the ACF, the Society campaigned for an informal vote and for people to write ‘No Dams’ across their ballot. Two TWS volunteers, Peter and Shirley Storey, recruited 100 other volunteers to door-knock and canvass the State. Soon the No Dams symbol – black lettering within a yellow triangle – appeared on thousands of cars around Tasmania and on the mainland as well as on road signs, schoolbags, backpacks, and noticeboards across the nation. A month before the poll, Labor Party pro-dammers revolted,

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ejected Lowe from the leadership and replaced him with Harry Holgate. Lowe resigned from the Labor Party and joined Sanders on the cross benches. Five days later, Lowe’s whip, Mary Willey, resigned. The defections left Holgate without a working majority. He hesitated and promised that ‘Providing the informal vote is a small one, we will proceed with the scheme which gets the majority vote’. But Holgate was a committed dammer and two weeks later he changed his mind and said one or other of the two HEC projects would proceed regardless of the size of any informal vote. The 12 December 1981 referendum results were staggering: 7.94 percent voted for the Gordon-above-Olga; 47.14 percent voted for Gordon-below-Franklin and a massive 44.89 percent voted informal. And, in Australia’s greatest ever act of electoral defiance, a third of voters wrote ‘No Dams’ on their ballot papers. Although less than half the voters endorsed the Franklin dam the government interpreted the outcome as a vote in favour. Holgate then prorogued Parliament for three months. Construction now seemed inevitable, as did a TWS blockade of the dam site. In recommending direct action, Brown advised that: The direct defence of wilderness will take courage and restraint by a great number of people. Most of all, we must be peaceful. There is aggression in the air. The State government will hope to divert attention from the absurdity of its scheme by creating a ‘law and order’ issue out of our campaign to defend the wilderness. They hope to achieve aggression and confrontation. We will win where they fail.

Brown suggested blockaders adopt Non-Violent Action (NVA) techniques. These involved gathering people into small, tight-knit ‘affinity groups’, which, through an often numbing round of meetings, reached decisions and decided all actions by consensus.1

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In February 1982, TWS workers Pam Waud and Cathie Plowman – assisted by a core group of six to ten people – started discrete blockade planning: they instituted NVA training, undertook reconnaissance, established food and equipment stashes, marked routes, and produced the Franklin Blockade Handbook. Other people collected equipment, including cooking gear, buckets, and rubber duckies. Technically-minded volunteers designed and built radio equipment. Premier Harry Holgate devoted himself to selling the dam. In February he announced the appointment of Harry Butler, an environmental consultant and television personality, as a conservation advisor on $625 a day. Trouble was, Butler had previously appeared in ACF advertisements against the dam. Butler further undermined his credibility when he claimed his expertise in prehistory and archaeology qualified him to comment on the archaeological significance of Kutikina Cave, to be flooded by the Franklin reservoir. This boast engaged John Mulvaney – Australia’s pre-eminent prehistorian – who dismissed Butler’s ‘expertise’ and subsequently became involved in the Franklin issue. Mulvaney had represented Australia at the World Heritage Convention in Paris in June 1977 – the meeting that framed the criteria for putting places on the World Heritage List.2 Upon the resumption of Parliament in March, the Opposition moved a vote of no confidence in the Holgate government. Sanders, Lowe, and Willey voted with the Opposition and the government fell. Holgate announced a State election for mid-May and claimed the Liberals could not be trusted to build the Franklin dam. Robin Gray, the leader of the Opposition, promised: ‘When in government, we will pass the legislation, and start work on the dam as soon as the legislation is passed’. Brown stood in Denison, Sanders’ electorate. He ran second behind Sanders, who retained his seat, and was the highest vote-

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winner not to be elected. The Liberals won in a landslide but otherwise very little changed. Liberal Party hooligans simply replaced Labor Party thugs. Dubiously endowed men remained in charge, with both parties equally committed to dam building and the Franklin’s destruction. The result entirely foreclosed the possibility of saving the river through Tasmanian politics. Premier Gray, modelling himself on Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Charles Court, believed intransigence signalled strength. Like Bjelke-Petersen, a non-stop apologist for ignorance and incoherence, Gray convinced himself that a majority of Tasmanians had voted for the Franklin dam. He assumed a mandate for destruction. One barrier to destruction might be the listing of South West Tasmania as a World Heritage site. The Lowe government had agreed to the listing in April 1981. Now Gray tried to persuade Prime Minister Fraser to withdraw the nomination. When he refused, Gray hinted Tasmania might secede from the Commonwealth if there was Federal intervention. Then he turned on the river itself, which, he claimed, was ‘grossly over-rated . . . For eleven months of the year the Franklin is nothing but a brown ditch, leech ridden, unattractive to the majority of people’. Only ‘superbly fit or mentally ill’ people would ever raft it.3 Gray need not have feared Fraser. An indecisive Prime Minister, Fraser was not about to intervene. In an attempt to placate Gray, he told the National Press Club that the dam, despite the south west’s World Heritage nomination, ‘is entirely a matter for the State Government. Robin Gray made it very clear before the State election and I would have thought that as a result of the State election it is very clear that the people of Tasmania as a whole have made their view very clear.’ Only Fraser’s grasp of syntax remained unclear.4 Upon the election of the united pro-dam Liberals, TWS volunteers concentrated their efforts on the mainland. Convinced that if enough

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Australians realised the beauty of the southwest they would not permit its destruction and would force the Australian government to stop the dam – or elect one that would – they organised film nights, public meetings, and rallies from Perth to Cairns. Some conservationists believed a revolution was underway. The campaign, writer James McQueen wrote, had undone ‘long-accepted truths . . . The conventional wisdom of economic growth at any price has been challenged, exposed as the shoddy rag it is, and rejected by a large part of the community.’5 Early in June, Gray introduced the Gordon-below-Franklin bill – the new government’s first legislative measure – and rushed it through the Legislative Assembly and Council. All but three of Tasmania’s 54 politicians voted in favour of destruction. Upper House member Harry Braid rejoiced: ‘No power on this earth will stop the dam now’. HEC bulldozers began road building in July.6 With both State and Federal Liberal parties dedicated to destruction, the TWS and the ACF turned to the Federal ALP and lobbied delegates to the ALP’s biennial conference in early July. They faced opposition from the Tasmanian ALP, which, while no longer in power in Tasmania, nevertheless continued the fight for the dam. When the Tasmanians appeared to have the numbers, conference chairman Neville Wran adjourned the debate. Next day he again interrupted proceedings to remind delegates they were debating ‘a vital national issue’. In a final vote the conference supported the motion: ‘A Labor government will oppose the construction of a hydro-electric power scheme on the Gordon and Franklin Rivers’. The decision meant that two parties, the ALP and the Democrats, would fight the next Federal election with a clear, no-dams platform. For a rare moment in Australian politics the major parties differentiated themselves on an issue of substance.7 Later in July, the TWS called a press conference to announce a

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blockade for the summer of 1982–83. Brown predicted the blockade would lead to the largest conservation sit-in in Australian history. He said the TWS was prepared to block HEC bulldozers ‘for as long as necessary’ to hinder construction and, ultimately, bring it to a halt. ‘We have determined that we cannot sit by and let the heart of the South West wilderness be roaded, quarried, dammed and drowned’.8 Despite the rhetoric, TWS planners did not really expect the blockade to actually stop the destruction – maybe just slow it down a little. The real point was to focus attention, firstly by providing an opportunity for people to demonstrate their commitment by going to jail, and secondly by attracting media coverage to ensure the fate of the Franklin remained public. More ACF people became involved. In January, Penny Figgis became National Liaison Officer, quickly took up the Franklin cause, and met with Mulvaney and fellow prehistorian Rhys Jones to discuss the possibility of international colleagues publicly endorsing the importance of the archaeological discoveries in Kutikina Cave. Subsequently, the ACF took out a full-page advertisement in The Australian listing the archaeologists, anthropologists, and geographers from New Zealand, Britain, the USA, and Canada who had written to Fraser confirming the significance of Kutikina Cave. The cave, they wrote, symbolised ‘the spirit and adaptability of humankind during its colonisation of the globe, in that [it] constitute[s] the southernmost limits of the last Ice Age settlement’. The Franklin area, they declared, was ‘part of the world’s cultural heritage’.9 As the ACF recruited new people, so others left. In September 1982, Peter Thompson resigned, exhausted from campaign burn-out. Journalist Roger Green replaced him as Tasmanian Project Officer. Green, an active and committed conservationist, described himself as ‘a ruthless pragmatist’. He did not believe ‘plants and animals in wilderness areas have rights. Even the concept of human rights is

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hopelessly idealistic . . . Only people with power have rights’. In a liberal democracy power lay in politics. Politics determined whether conservation succeeded or failed. Therefore conservationists must be political. With Figgis, Green established a Canberra-based lobbying, media and advice bureau and outlined an election strategy identifying marginal seats where conservation voters could make a difference.10 Early in October, newspapers reported that the TWS was training blockaders in Melbourne. Gray compared NVA trainees to guerilla forces in third world countries. They would not be allowed in Tasmania. The government would take a no-nonsense approach to ‘professional troublemakers’: Anyone, be it the Federal government, Tasmanian Wilderness Society leader Dr Brown and his cronies – will have a massive fight on their hands if they try to obstruct the will of the people in Tasmania . . . Only one isolated group, determined to get its way through misinformation, obstruction and, if need be, violence, has not come to terms with the reality of the situation in this state.11

Gray’s constant attribution of violent intent to the Franklin’s defenders betrayed his own obsession with violence. Just as the government planned violence against the Earth so it sought to foster violence against Earth’s defenders. The posture, interpretations, and language of government and HEC spokesmen encouraged an atmosphere of hostility and aggression. Car stickers evoking images of maiming and death appeared on the West Coast: ‘Doze in a greenie – fertilise the south-west’; ‘If it’s Brown flush it’. Rather than being cathartic, expressions of violence led to paranoia. Dam proponents could not believe volunteer effort and genuine feeling lay behind the opposition. They looked for ulterior motives and hidden

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manipulators. One politician suggested an Eastern European government was backing the TWS. Other people believed a multinational resources company with interests in coal was behind the efforts to stop the dam. All of them were victims of their own desperation. Fraser was also desperate. In an attempt to avoid Federal intervention, he offered Gray a Commonwealth subsidy for a coal-fired power station as an alternative to the Franklin Dam. Of limited insight, Fraser did not understand what was at stake – not Tasmania’s electricity requirements, but obduracy and power over nature. Unsurprisingly, Gray dismissed Fraser’s offer and said he would not accept any Federal government trade-off on the dam. He was determined to destroy. Indeed, much destruction was planned. In November HEC Commissioner Ashton announced that 123 men were already in the field and that the workforce would rapidly expand. Furthermore, the HEC organised construction to cause the maximum amount of destruction as early as possible in the project to dishearten conservationists and lead them to believe the damage was irreversible. In Canberra the Senate Select Committee on South West Tasmania called for a moratorium on work on the Gordon-below-Franklin, recommended that no major power scheme be initiated for at least three years, and advised that the Federal government certainly had the power to intervene. This finding merely confirmed legal advice already available to the government. On the same day, the Tasmanian Parliament approved amendments to the Police Offences Act, imposing fines of up to $100 or six months’ imprisonment if found guilty of trespass on ‘land controlled by the HEC’ and permitting police to arrest trespassers on the spot. Gray termed the Senate Select Committee report ‘shoddy, biased and predictable’. He said, ‘We’ve had so many shocking reports prepared against this scheme that another one makes no difference’. An

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hysterical Mercury said conservationists had ‘brainwashed’ senators ‘with a campaign of emotional half-truths and misstatements of facts’ while simultaneously ‘training shock troops to invade the dam site’.12 Meanwhile, 15 000 people led by Brown and English botanist David Bellamy marched through Melbourne in favour of saving the Franklin in the largest conservation gathering in Australian history. The march was part of the lead-up to a by-election in the Victorian seat of Flinders where the ACF and the TWS ran a ‘No Dams’ writein campaign. They hoped 10 percent of voters would respond. In the event, 40 percent of voters wrote ‘No Dams’ on their ballots. A few days later, Federal cabinet confirmed there would be no Federal intervention in the dam dispute. The Minister for Home Affairs and Environment, Tom McVeigh, again betrayed government preoccupation with violence. He said he hoped the decision would not lead to violence. ‘I abhor violence’, he told the House of Representatives, and added, ‘Nothing can be gained from violent confrontation’. Gray welcomed the decision as a triumph for the State and took up the theme of violence. He suggested Dr Brown and the ‘radical’ conservation movement accept the majority decision, otherwise they will ‘expose people to possible danger and violence’.13 The Mercury hailed the decision as a victory for ‘pragmatism’ and ‘commonsense’ and described the ‘anti-dam movement’ as ‘a mortally wounded beast that just won’t lie down and die’. The editorial continued: The conservationists’ last realistic hope . . . is now gone, they can only resort to blockades and clutching at the straws of a High Court challenge or a change of Federal government . . . Next Tuesday’s blockade by conservationists in the south-west is now wholly indefensible.

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The Mercury, like the government, was obsessed with violence, which, it predicted, was ‘inevitable’. Pro-dammers’ warnings about violence – couched in terms of ‘dying’ and ‘mortally wounded’ – began to sound like an incitement to violence.14 Conservationists ignored government and newspaper bombast and concentrated on the politics of the decision. Mosley said the Federal coalition would lose the next election if it did not reconsider. A disappointed Brown remained tenacious. ‘We’ll fight to the last bucket of cement’, he said.15 Elsewhere in Australia the decision proved wildly unpopular. People were outraged at the Federal government’s pusillanimous attitude towards protecting Australia’s natural heritage. Reports and angry letters filled newspapers. Local members all over the country came under a barrage of protest from constituents. The damming of the Franklin was now an election issue. On 4 December, the same day as the Flinders by-election, the first 40 mainland anti-dammers arrived in Strahan, the base for the blockade on Tasmania’s west coast. Two days later, the TWS established the Strahan Information Centre (Info Centre) and Base Camp at People’s Park. More blockaders arrived and on-site NVA training began. By 12 December, 155 people had registered at the Info Centre. Next day, the first boatload of protestors arrived upriver to get into position at the dam site for Day 1 of the action. Other blockaders walked through the forest for two days to occupy a drill rig at the dam site itself. At 7.30 on the morning of 14 December, the blockade commenced. A flotilla of duckies with paddles raised in a gesture of defiance stretched across the river at Warners Landing. The image flashed around Australia. Other protestors occupied the dam site. By day’s end police had arrested 53 people. On their way to the police launches, arrestees sang, ‘Always look on the bright side of life’. At Strahan, Benny Zable wore a gas mask and black cape bearing the

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words: ‘Work, Consume, Be Silent, Die. I Rely on Your Apathy. It’s Costing the Earth.’ His banner, ‘Think Globally – Act Locally’ featured in photographs and on television. Zable had previously appeared at anti-nuclear protests and northern NSW forest actions. Other conservationists from the Nomadic Action Group joined the blockade. Ian Cohen worked as an upriver coordinator and police liaison officer, while Lisa Yeates worked as a TWS organiser. Simultaneous with the Gordon River and Strahan actions, supporters held rallies in Sydney, Bendigo, Hobart, Launceston, and outside Parliament House in Canberra. Inside Parliament, four government senators crossed the floor to vote with the Australian Democrats and the Labor Party to pass the Democrats’ World Heritage Properties Protection Bill. Politicians began to realise what conservationists already knew: there were no votes on the mainland for supporting the dam. That same day, the World Heritage Commission inscribed Tasmania’s southwest on the World Heritage list. Next day, blockaders appeared in three places: at the end of the Kelly Basin Road; at the southern end of the road near its junction with the Franklin River Road; and in the river area. Police arrested 47 people. As they were led away they sang, ‘All we are saying is give trees a chance’. The following day there were more Kelly Basin Road and river actions. Brown was arrested at Sir John Falls, charged with trespass, and remanded to Risdon Gaol to join more than a hundred other blockaders already there. Forty-seven other people were arrested. Gray called the blockaders ‘totally irresponsible . . . extremists [and] fanatics’. More actions followed on the seventeenth, with 62 arrests. By 22 December, 417 people had registered for Stage One of the Blockade, 202 had been arrested and 167 imprisoned after they refused the bail conditions that prohibited a return to the Gordon River area.16 Brown’s jailing enhanced his national prestige. By the end of 1982

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he had achieved an almost ubiquitous presence in the news media. This was partly because the TWS channelled much of the campaign through him. But the media – which prefers to highlight individuals rather than explain ideas, causes, or movements – also contrived in Brown’s promotion. Journalists found him accessible and presented him as an attractive, reassuring, confident figure. His drive and determination seemed to embody the whole Franklin story. Feature writers, in particular, portrayed Brown as charismatic. Charisma exists largely for those who want to be captivated. For many people, the Franklin campaign became a crusade and Bob Brown the spiritual leader. Accordingly, they found in Brown everything they were seeking: calmness, magnanimity, profundity, even a touch of holiness. Author James McQueen, who first met Brown in 1982, described him as ‘the core and conscience of the Tasmanian Wilderness Society’. At first sceptical about the encomiums heaped on Brown, McQueen ‘was defeated within an hour by his humanity and honesty, and by his transparent love for the wilderness’.17 Indeed, McQueen was besotted, and soon claimed to have found the impossible in the TWS under Brown – a conflict-free community: It is not so very rare for an individual to become identified strongly, even uniquely, with the organisation he represents. It is perhaps rare to find an individual who seems to impart almost totally the fabric and colour of his personality to his organisation. It is surely very rare that this should continue over a long period of time, with a complete absence of envy, bickering and politicking. When it does happen, it must surely indicate both an unusual organisation and an extraordinary individual.18

Brown’s supporters frequently extolled his virtues in words that made little sense. Even the pragmatic Roger Green described Brown

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as having ‘a sophisticated sort of egotism, a self-interest that goes beyond personal prosperity and pleasure, beyond his family or his country. His ego encompasses all of humanity, his happiness comes from increasing the world’s wellbeing and security’.19 Other conservationists were less enamoured. They felt no need to see Brown as a saint or cast the Franklin dispute in religious or spiritual terms. Their feelings were straightforward: they wanted to protect beauty and wilderness. And their motivations were patriotic: to save Australia’s natural heritage. An irreverent and sceptical Sanders commented on Brown’s image: On TV Bob Brown does something I can’t do. He has the other approach – he is sincere. He is so sincere you’ve just got to believe him. He doesn’t joke. He wears a funeral suit. You think he is so sincere you’ve just got to help him. He’s good talent but not entertaining talent.20

In contrast, Sanders was entertaining: outrageous, outspoken, and boisterous. Two days before Christmas, he resigned from the Tasmanian Parliament. In part, he wanted to protest the government’s use of special trespassing laws to hinder and arrest conservationists defending the Franklin and to condemn politicians’ careless contempt for democracy. ‘Democracy is dying in Tasmania – the Gray Government is using the Courts and police for political purposes’, he said. ‘I’ve tried to fight it in Parliament. I even tried to bring it up yesterday, but the drunken bums there didn’t want to know about it. They are quite happy to drift off into this totalitarian government’.21 Media focus, however, remained on Brown. On 1 January 1983, the Australian named him Australian of the Year. The paper admitted it did not support Brown’s cause but he ‘was chosen because he has

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displayed qualities of sincerity, courage and determination in fighting for what he believes is right. He is a man whose activities provoke strong opposition. They should also attract admiration’.22 The award did not detract from the campaign. With Brown in jail, blockade organisation and training resumed at Strahan for Stage Two of the blockade, which, after a Christmas moratorium, began on 4 January with a silent vigil on the Lower Gordon River. An average of 50 blockaders a day were arriving at Strahan, where the TWS established a new base camp outside town at ‘Greenie Acres’. On 5 January the police made the first arrests of the New Year and the State Electoral Commission announced that, following a re-count, Brown had taken Sanders’ place as a member of State Parliament. On 12 January, rocks were hurled through the Info Centre windows and telephone and telex cables cut. Elsewhere, public telephones were suddenly out of order, and police blocked the road to Greenie Acres and arrested any protestor attempting to pass. Eighty police escorted the first bulldozer onto a low-loader, which left Strahan next day at dawn. Upon unloading upriver, it began to destroy Warners Landing. Fifty-four people were arrested. Meanwhile, at Strahan, a gang of Queenstown youths attacked Brown. He wrestled a tyre lever from them and avoided serious injury. Work proceeded practically unaffected by the protests – but that was beside the point. As an act of massive political assertiveness the blockade commanded the news. Abstraction vanished, politicians became irrelevant, their humbug replaced by riveting scenes of people struggling against bulldozers, framed by water and the forested banks of the Gordon River. These images concentrated attention on what was about to be lost and what needed to be protected. Even the mounting number of arrests worked against the Franklin’s destroyers. The sight of hundreds of peaceful protestors dragged off to jail exposed the flimsy, unjust, lawless contraption of government that was using

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the police and courts not to enforce the law but to impose policy and suppress dissent. Protest is theatre. Success depends on clever production and direction. In a blockade an action unnoticed by the media is hardly better than no action at all. But how to keep the media interested? Innovative and novel tactics helped. Securing coverage was relatively easy compared to ensuring that the coverage evoked a sympathetic response. Here Brown’s counsel largely prevailed. He emphasised conservative appearance, no stridency, no chanting, only positive messages, and training for spokespersons and press release writers. Success also depended on the script. Enaction of the script depended on NVA training – a form of rehearsal – which helped protestors learn their roles. Meetings dominated camp life. Through them, blockaders learned about the daily situation and reached consensus about their actions and responses. Many lauded consensus as liberating but there were critics, including Sanders. Nevertheless, he thought NVA and consensus were essential. Consensus killed initiative, enforced conformity, disallowed potentially violent, dangerous, or dubious actions, and ensured a successful blockade: By having all those meetings and days of training, you weeded out anyone with any incentive – they were obedient, patient people that you ended up with. Consensus decision-making kept anything from happening. It also meant that the agents provocateurs, which I am sure the cops had because they tried everything else that was amateurish, couldn’t do anything.23

While the blockaders ran their affairs by consensus, the TWS itself did not. Within the largely meritocratic organisation, decisions were made by those competent to make them. Decision-makers derived

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their authority from their skills, experience, commitment, longevity, and persuasive ability. A conflict between the two approaches loomed but the sheer momentum of the campaign overrode potential divisions. The pursuit of a single, unambiguous goal – saving the Franklin River – absorbed all energy, negative and positive. The TWS operated on enthusiasm, dedication, and an abundant supply of voluntary labour and resources – and steady direction by a compelling leader who reminded everyone of the necessity for more effort and focus. Although seemingly modest, even self-effacing and austere, Brown was acutely aware of his ability to inspire. And although he often appeared artless and absent-minded, he possessed a strategic mind and steely resolve.

CHAPTeR 13

Different realms

Australia’s largest-ever conservation protest continued through January 1983. On the seventeenth, Tasmanian police arrested 54 people for trespass in the State’s southwest. The arrest tally now topped 500. Prime Minister Fraser again tried to defuse the situation and offered Tasmania $500 million (the equivalent of $30 000 for every Tasmanian household) to cancel the Franklin scheme. Premier Gray refused. No amount of money could stop the dam. The project was not about money; dam building was about conquering wilderness and taming Australia. A few days after Fraser’s offer, bulldozers began ploughing a road from Warners Landing, now transformed into a large, muddy work-camp, through the rainforest to the dam site, where drilling and blasting continued. On 3 February, against the backdrop of continuing protests, Fraser called a Federal election for 5 March. On the same day, Bob Hawke replaced Bill Hayden as leader of the Opposition and said, if elected, he would stop the dam. Attempting to pre-empt the TWS’s plans, Gray prohibited camping in the Gordon River State Reserve, part of the Wild Rivers National Park and the site of the blockaders’ River Base Camp. Police evicted

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77 people but many others hid in the bush in preparation for future blockade actions. The government explained the ban as a response to blockaders’ ‘guerilla tactics’. With the last day of the blockade – ‘Green Day’ – approaching, Gray suggested, disingenuously, that the TWS cancel the demonstrations to avoid violence. Disingenuous, because Gray needed violence. Violence was his only hope. His obstinacy and commitment to conquest had eclipsed his options and rendered his decisions and instructions irrelevant. Only violence could restore his authority. Only violence could bestow legitimacy on his long-continued hysteria. But events were now well beyond Gray’s control or influence. The TWS retained the initiative and G-Day events unfolded more or less as planned.1 In Hobart, protestors caught the lift to the roof of the HeC building, attached the TWS logo to the flagpole, and draped a ‘No Dams’ banner from the roof. On the street below, a truck unloaded a steel cage on the building’s front steps. Two prisoners inside symbolised those jailed in defence of the river. In Strahan, dam supporters and HeC workers blockaded Greenie Acres and later surrounded the Info Centre. They jeered and threw peanuts and washing powder at the blockaders gathered on the verandah playing music and singing. The antics did not disrupt the day’s actions. On Mount McCutcheon, a HeC helicopter base, blockaders painted ‘No Dams’ on the helipad. On the Gordon River, blockaders assembled a large regatta of river craft. Others showed up at several places on Kelly Basin Road, at Warners Landing, St John Falls, the dam site, and elsewhere. In total, around 400 blockaders appeared in as many as ten locations. Police arrested 231 people. More actions next day resulted in 22 arrests. The following day, 3 March, blockaders agreed to close the Info Centre and convert the blockade into a vigil. Campaigning continued elsewhere, much of it

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featuring Peter Dombrovskis’s picture of the Franklin River’s Rock Island Bend, reproduced more than a million times in advertising. The photograph appeared again in the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald the day before the election under the caption, ‘Could you vote for a party that will destroy this?’ The text asked voters ‘to put Australia’s heritage above party politics’.2 The question was rhetorical. The TWS’s campaign, which had won enormous support extremely quickly through expert use of the media, coincided with a nationwide political swing against the Liberals. The Fraser government was finished and the election outcome became obvious soon after the start of vote-counting. Within the first few sentences of his victory speech, the new Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, announced that ‘The dam will not be built’. Within weeks, the Federal government gazetted regulations prohibiting HeC works in the World Heritage Area. The Tasmanian government immediately challenged their validity in the High Court while continuing its assault on the wilderness of the Lower Gordon River. A number of blockaders remained in the area, both as symbols of opposition and to document and publicise the ongoing damage. early in May, the House of Representatives passed the World Heritage Properties Bill. The Bill cleared the Senate two weeks later and became law. At the end of the month, the High Court began hearing Tasmania’s case against Federal intervention. On 1 July, the Court ruled by four votes to three in favour of the Commonwealth. The Gordon-below-Franklin dam could not proceed. euphoria spread among the river’s defenders. But victory distorted perception. Politically astute during the campaign, Brown gave way to indulgence at the end and hailed the High Court decision as an acknowledgment ‘that there is a limit to the technological destruction we can allow in the name of progress’. He saw universal implications:

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‘I know that hope will go out from the decision to the people in the world who are fighting bigger issues, such as the nuclear arsenals that are aimed against the future of humanity’.3 Brown was not the only politically naïve commentator. Prodammers equally exaggerated the significance of the High Court’s decision. They thought the sky had collapsed. Gray, Bjelke-Petersen, and the acting leader of the Federal Opposition, Doug Anthony, predicted the end of Federation. Bob Santamaria, a conservative newspaper columnist and long-time anti-communist warrior, labelled the ruling ‘more revolutionary than the Communist Party of Australia’. Both Brown and his opponents were deluded. The ruling heralded no revolution. It was, at best, a minor setback to the conquest of nature in Australia. Conservation victories are only ever stays of execution – never permanent. After the ruling, governments remained as committed as ever to conquest and were no more constrained than before. Within weeks, the Tasmanian Parliament approved the construction of seven more dams in the highlands and river gorges of southwest Tasmania. The failure of conservationists to appreciate the nation’s dedication to conquest coincided with an increasing emphasis on abstraction among activists.4 Until the Franklin, conservationists sought to engage people in the defence of beauty, wildness, and natural heritage. Campaigns were strictly pragmatic and specific in their aims: to prevent the destruction of a particular suite of organisms, ecosystems, and landforms. While beauty, wildness, and natural heritage figured prominently in the Franklin campaign, many participants felt more was at stake. They sought something else, something elusive and less tangible: redemption; meaning; community; the possibility of changing the world. Virginia Spate, blockader and professor at the University of Sydney, thought the Franklin campaign was evidence of social change and part of the struggle ‘for a more sane society’. The invocation of these extraneous,

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distant, and abstract goals suited Brown. He regarded conservation as a means to that end. Conservation was a vehicle to a better world.5 Brown had a messianic complex and a desperate, unwearying concern for the salvation of humanity. Saving the Franklin was part of that larger rescue mission, an enterprise that needed an appropriate philosophy. Brown was ready to provide one. It was based on hope. ‘What’s required pretty badly’, he observed, ‘is a philosophy which gives hope to people so that instead of fighting against each other we can really get together to make things work’.6 Hardly profound and certainly not original, this philosophy grew out of one of the great abiding dreams of Western civilisation: the notion of a perfect whole, a state of society that accommodates all good things, where everyone works together towards a common, harmonious goal. Such is the dream; in reality, values clash, outlooks are irreconcilable, and purposes conflict. In reality, the world of human affairs creates winners and losers. In reality, the idea of wilderness is inconsistent with the idea of opening the world to all humans, and conservation and social justice are frequently incompatible. But while some people in the West dreamed of harmony, others recognised and accepted inherent differences between humans. That insight led to liberal democracy, whereby nations, held together by an overarching solidarity achieved through patriotism, were able to manage conflict and cope with disputes between plural groups and individuals. Founded on the recognition of difference, liberal democracy breeds disagreement and argument, and therefore pain. Most people seek to avoid pain. Others experience discomfort in the face of diversity of opinion – it affronts their own opinions. Thus democracies create their own discontents among people averse to conflict, inclined to harmony, or loyal to some absolute. Democracies are robust because they deal with disagreement, and vulnerable because people seek to banish argument. The self-generating oppositions do not end there.

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The very success of the Australian nation, for example, in establishing collective power nourished optimism among publics, politicians, and activists about what was politically feasible. A peaceful, secure, and stable polity fostered the delusion that everything was possible and compatible. But liberal democracies cannot possibly satisfy all the demands they generate. Many claims are incompatible and some agendas undermine the patriotism necessary for a coherent and cohesive liberal democratic community – and therefore undermine conservation. Humanism and left-wing ideologies provide wretchedly poor bases for conservation or for understanding the human manipulation of nature. Progressives share a belief in improvement and in progress. They believe humans and society are perfectible. By using the powers given by growing scientific knowledge, humans can free themselves from the limits that frame the lives of other animals. Possibilities for changing the world were endless, and in the West programs of reform have flowed like an undammed torrent. Many of the blueprints have been inconsistent but they all depended on empowering humans to control and conquer nature. Progressives at the Franklin sought to save what they otherwise sought to conquer. After the blockade, Brown gave a lecture at the University of Wollongong where he developed his theme of hope and offered yet another version of humanism, not an alternative to it. He promised utopia – a time when all the most ancient human fantasies will be realised. ‘We are on the brink of the golden age’, he said. ‘It has been dreamt about by the human race and written about in all the great religious texts – the time to come when humanity would be freed of the troubles that have beset all of its generations’. Unfortunately, this possible golden future was threatened by ‘apathy’ and ‘technological overkill’.7 Notable more for its omissions than its insights, Brown’s speech

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avoided any mention of people, population, or numbers. Like most progressives, Brown tended to view people as victims, never as perpetrators or agents. Human beings were not wrecking the world, nor were their increasing numbers making the conservation of nature increasingly difficult. Rather, the problem lay in another realm entirely: in social structures, systems, and technology. Brown’s inventory of abstract determinants appealed to a new generation of conservationists. Nearly 40 percent of the Franklin blockaders, for example, were students or teachers: people schooled in abstraction and hence susceptible to the lure of abstraction. They tended to see the world the same way – as formula. A view of the world as a product of forces and of people as passive victims of those forces led to intellectually vapid analysis. All agreed the problem lay with economic systems, capitalism, and technology. But these are not definable subjects; rather, they are ventures in abstraction. They reduce under one heading actions, situations, motives, inclinations, and world-views that are, existentially and phenomenologically, distinct. Moreover, abstractions are not agents; abstractions cannot cause anything. Only people can make decisions and act, not economic systems. History reflects the thoughts and deeds of living beings, not forces.8 A predisposition to abstraction generated habits of thought that were feeble and clumsy. Many intellectuals responded to the wrecking of the continent by drawing from irrelevant and turgid Marxist and socialist traditions. Not that there were alternative models, at least not nativist ones. Conservation in Australia developed without an accompanying indigenous literary or intellectual tradition. A few writers celebrated Australian nature but, intellectually parsimonious, they never examined the assault on the continent and failed to create a constituency for conservation. That task fell to the rhetorically and intellectually ill-equiped scientists and activists who initiated and

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defined conservation. The result was a movement whose members were doubly ignorant: ignorant of their own history and ignorant of the sources of their ideas. The TWS, for example, never had a basic philosophy from which the idea of conserving wilderness arose naturally. People in the TWS had prior assumptions about why we should preserve wilderness, but these were based mainly on the pre-existence of wilderness itself: we ought not destroy what already exists. Reasons offered were ad hoc and opportunistic: partly moral, partly utilitarian, partly aesthetic – in short, pragmatic, whatever suited the political needs of the moment. They were not fitted into a political or philosophical framework. Some people tried: Brown, in particular, believed he had a philosophy to offer, but his insights were limited and his philosophising of no account. Nevertheless, Brown’s pronouncements garnered attention. His leadership during the Franklin campaign earned him tremendous moral authority and people listened to him with respect. But audiences confused moral authority with intellectual substance, even though the two do not necessarily equate. As a result, Brown’s vague, semi-mystical, incoherent, humanist ramblings acquired the status of wisdom. Brown partly rose to prominence by default. No other national figure challenged him as a spokesperson for conservation. By the time of the Franklin campaign, Judith Wright was nearly 70 and deaf. And she had spread herself thinly, splitting her energies between literature, Aboriginal advocacy, and conservation. Milo Dunphy, although colourful, ambitious, and articulate, largely confined his activism to New South Wales. He did not seek a national audience. Geoff Mosley probably knew more about conservation and had been involved in more campaigns than anyone else in the country. But, although attracting loyal followers within and outside the ACF, he had many

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detractors who disliked his style and worked actively to undermine his position. He was not a suitable candidate for national leadership. Did the intellectual limits of Australian conservation matter? And did leadership, particularly when it was often a media invention, really influence people’s response to events? Conservation activism continued regardless. Guided by loyalty to Australia, most conservationists made up their own minds about what was important. They remained focused on the particular – and much that was particular about Australia was under threat. But particulars could become fudged. On 27 March 1983, about 140 000 people marched in nuclear disarmament rallies held in all major Australian cities. Organised by People for Nuclear Disarmament and supported by the ACF and other conservation groups, the marchers demanded a nuclear-free Australia and the cessation of uranium mining. The Hawke government took no notice and instead approved the commissioning of the world’s potentially largest uranium mine, Roxby Downs in South Australia. The mine planned to draw from and poison the waters of the Great Artesian Basin and would be part of a highly hazardous worldwide industry. The Coalition for a Nuclear Free Australia immediately began organising a blockade. In August, several hundred people travelled to the South Australian desert, including Franklin veterans and NAG members. Protestors’ vehicles blocked the main gate. Benny Zable, in gas mask and black robes, stood atop a van and mimed a warning to the world. Then, in a forward surge, protestors stormed onto the site.9 Protest continued for two months. Three hundred people were arrested. Although media coverage was largely unsympathetic, it was attentive. For many, many thousands of Australians uranium mining and nuclear power became the overriding concern of the times. But what exactly was the issue?

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The blockade’s planners said the protest aimed to publicise the issues of radioactive hazards, land rights, employment, environment, and injustice. They viewed the campaign as ‘empowering’, particularly for women, who – because they were women – had special ‘life-affirming’ roles to play. Moreover, nonviolent direct action (NVDA), consensus decision-making and affinity groups were not just tactical expedients but rehearsals for a utopian future.10 This smorgasbord of vague, general aspirations undermined the plot. Such indefinite and distant aims, all demanding equal attention, subsumed and diminished real conservation concerns. Clarity of purpose and action disappeared. Many other Australians, however, remained focused on the clear and immediate goal of nature conservation. By the time of the Roxby Downs blockade, roads, real estate development, and logging threatened the Greater Daintree, 350 000 hectares of mountain ranges and lowland coastal plains covered with tropical rainforest lying between Cairns and Cooktown. Within the Greater Daintree lay the largest single stand of virgin forest in the Australian wet tropics, an area of 120 000 hectares stretching from the Daintree River north to Cooktown and west to the mountains. And within that stand, between the Daintree and Bloomfield Rivers, lay the most extensive remnants (totalling no more than a few thousand hectares) of rare and endangered wet coastal lowland rainforest. In 1968 a consortium of Mosman cane farmers illegally bulldozed a track from Cape Tribulation to Bloomfield River through the coastal rainforest. Another private group bulldozed the trail again in 1976 – again without permission. Three years later, Douglas Shire Council officially gazetted the track and pushed a ‘pilot track’ along much of the overgrown, washed-out route. Roads heralded even more damaging development. Local conservationists documented dozens of development proposals for north

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of the Daintree River, including tin mining, logging, cattle ranching, fruit growing, sugar cane farming, real estate subdivisions, and the draining and clearing of freshwater mangroves. These proposals in turn generated further development plans, including a major bridge over the Daintree River. Threats prompted action. In 1980, the Australian Heritage Commission (AHC) placed the Greater Daintree on its Register of the National estate and the Second World Wilderness Congress in Cairns urged the creation of a Greater Daintree national park. The ACF prepared a Greater Daintree park proposal, which Mosley forwarded to Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen in June 1981. BjelkePetersen curtly dismissed the approach. There was no need for more parks. Development must proceed. The development imperative did not appeal to about ten people who met in Brisbane in April 1982 and formed the Rainforest Conservation Society of Queensland (RCSQ). Concerned about the loss and degradation of Queensland’s rainforests, they believed there should be an organisation solely devoted to rainforest conservation. Biochemist Aila Keto became secretary and editor of the organisation’s newsletter, Liane. Keto had a robust, forthright, meticulous style, directed towards one clear aim: the preservation of all remaining rainforests. Skeptical of politicians and government promises, she believed that the ‘greatest [conservation] concessions were achieved by disruptive protest’.11 But people needed to be informed and RCSQ concentrated on increasing public awareness about rainforests by mounting displays, issuing broadsheets, conducting workshops, organising rainforest tours, and holding public meetings. Membership in RCSQ quickly rose, within a year to over 500. Rainforests became an issue. The government took note and Bjelke-Petersen said environmental extremists were ‘raging around like mad bulls’ trying to cripple Queensland’s logging industry.12

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Keto devoted much effort to countering Queensland Forestry Department spin, propaganda, distortion, lies, lunacy, and effrontery. Bill Glasson, the Minister for Forestry, for example, defended rainforest destruction with the argument that without logging there would be no room for regeneration. The counter-argument was clear: ‘The only way “to conserve a natural heritage”’, Keto wrote, ‘is to leave it natural’.13 In July 1983, Bjelke-Petersen, with the strong backing of his Minister for environment, Martin Tenni and Minister for National Parks, Peter McKechnie, offered Douglas Shire full financial and moral support for a 30-kilometre road through the lowland coastal rainforest of the Daintree. To prepare for a blockade, local conservationists formed the Douglas Shire Wilderness Action Group (WAG). Tony Toohey, an ex-farmer, became president, while Mike Berwick, given a haircut and some white shirts from an op-shop, became spokesman. Douglas Shire declined to survey the proposed road. Instead, the council left the route largely up to the bulldozer drivers, one to work from the north, the other from the south. On 30 November 1983, a bulldozer crossed the Daintree River. About 80 men, women, and children, watched by a crowd of tourists, took up positions in the rainforest to block the oncoming bulldozer. By the end of the day, however, the dozer driver had pushed his way to the first creek and a few metres up the other side. Protestors were in shock at the sight of so much destruction. In camp that night they despaired. We ‘felt small in number, helpless and green’, they later wrote. Only two of them, including Ian Cohen of NAG, had any experience of blockading.14 At the northern end, police arrested all the blockaders and effectively finished the protest there. At the southern end, however, after an uncomfortable night, protestors climbed trees in the bulldozer’s path. A council worker attempted to chainsaw the trees but the police intervened and the bulldozers turned around. The tree-sitters stayed

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put. Next day, more blockaders joined them in the canopy. Others sat in front of bulldozers. Still others dug holes in the road and buried themselves up to their chests and necks. Behind them another protestor, John Nolan, had himself tied to a wooden cross to symbolise the crucifixion of an ancient life force, the rainforest. Police used shovels, a backhoe, ice-cream containers, and tin cans to excavate the protestors. Tension developed between some of the local conservationists and others. Toohey, a religious man, did not approve of Nolan’s crucifixion, for example. He thought it was a ‘sick’ stunt. Nevertheless, the new tactics and tangible support in the way food, fuel, and cash, which came in from local farmers, fishermen, and local businesses, improved morale. Construction slowed. By day seven, council workers had pushed the road no more than 250 metres into the forest. News of the blockade attracted more protestors.15 Other activists appealed to the Federal government to use its legal powers and responsibilities to intervene. But Barry Cohen, the Minister for Home Affairs and environment, sensed a trap. The Queensland government might be using the road to take on the Federal government. Hawke’s ministry had no stomach for a Federal–State stoush orchestrated by Bjelke-Petersen. On 8 December Cohen announced that the Commonwealth would not offer Douglas Shire money as an inducement to abandon the road. ‘The responsibility for the Cape Tribulation rain forest lies with the Douglas Shire Council and the Queensland Government’, he said.16 Rain started falling on the Daintree. The blockade continued. Protestors covered themselves in slippery mud so that police could not get a hold on them. By 20 December, nearly 40 people had been arrested and torrential rain deluged the coast. The wet season had begun; the council gave up. The road had progressed a mere few hundred metres and the bulldozers returned to Mossman. The blockaders

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felt they had won a reprieve, at least till the end of the wet. Some of them quickly found action elsewhere. In June 1980, the Native Forests Action Council (NFAC) had stepped up its anti-woodchip campaign in Victoria’s southeast forests. At the same time a local group, Concerned Residents of east Gippsland (CROeG), formed, and the following November held its first annual ‘Forests Forever’ camp at Goongerah. And, in the year to June 1982, some 50 000 Victorians signed the ‘Sassafras Declaration’, opposing current and proposed timber industry developments in east Gippsland. Government and industry plans for even greater forest destruction, however, overwhelmed conservation efforts. In September 1981, the Victorian government approved an application from Harris– Daishowa, the owners of the eden chip mill, to take 100 000 tonnes of woodchips out of east Gippsland. A year later the company obtained an extension of its destructive licence. Assured the trees would find a use at the chip mill, the Victorian Forestry Commission planned to obliterate all old-growth forest by the turn of the century. In April 1983, Labor assumed government under the leadership of John Cain and the slogan ‘To Run the State like a Business’. The party’s platform contained a commitment to expand parks and to cease the clearing of native forests for pine plantations and logging in national parks. But the platform resolved an equally strong and opposite commitment to economic growth and jobs. The government hoped to reconcile conservation and business in the newly amalgamated Department of Conservation, Forests and Lands, where foresters assumed most of the senior positions. How should conservationists respond? Milo Dunphy suggested activists move around the State, protesting at a number of sites to draw attention to logging damage and government dereliction. The idea appealed to Ian Cohen and members of NAG.

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After their action at Daintree, NAG travelled to east Gippsland, camped on the errinundra Plateau, and called a public meeting at the timber town of Bonang in January 1984. Several hundred loggers and their supporters showed up, passed motions in favour of logging, menaced the greenies, and chased them out of town. Undeterred, the protestors returned to their camp, called themselves the Forest People and – early in February – erected a barricade at a logging site and blocked a bulldozer. The police arrived and arrested some 20 protestors, which was most of the blockade – many had already left due to wet weather. Local and Melbourne-based conservationists disapproved of the blockaders’ appearance, anarchism, and tactics, and refused to support the protests. But while the NAG campaign collapsed, the campaign for the forests continued. Meanwhile, during the Queensland wet season from December 1983 to March 1984, heavy rains washed away large sections of the partly-built Cape Tribulation to Bloomfield road, eroded much of the rest, washed red clay into once-clear creeks, and turned the nearby crystal sea murky and dark. Denying there was a problem, Minister for environment Martin Tenni stepped up the argument for the road’s completion. No conservationist, he thought saltwater crocodiles were ‘unnecessary’, believed in their ‘total destruction’, and had likened the spread of national parks to a disease. He claimed the citizens of the north had a right to the benefits of civilisation and said the road would provide access for the infirm and unfit and would improve surveillance of drug trafficking, wildlife smuggling, illegal immigration, and the white slave trade.17 Such absurd rationales prompted conservationists to ask what purpose the road really served. Surely no one would build a road for the ridiculous reasons offered? The question, however, assumed a rational, material explanation. But perhaps the road had nothing to do with immediate, tangible ends. Perhaps the road satisfied other

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needs. Perhaps the real reason was the perennial urge among civilised people to warp unyielding nature in improbable ways – an itch to improve on nature combined with bloody-mindedness. Opposition to the road roused a government desire to conquer and win. ‘We will bring ’dozers in’, Tenni vowed. ‘We will cut the tops off the ranges if it’s necessary, and it will be necessary. And no hippie, no greenie, no environmentalists will stop that from happening, they can go their hardest, they won’t win.’18 Hysteria might have guided governments but those who were determined to save the Daintree and other rainforest went about their task methodically and rationally. In January 1984 Aila Keto’s RCSQ undertook a study for the Australian Heritage Commission into the conservation value of the wet tropical rainforests. Keto calculated that the planned road placed some 10–20 percent of the highly depleted lowland rainforest in the path of the bulldozers or at least within the road reserve.19 The ACF joined the campaign coordinating opposition: they appointed a Cairns project officer, lobbied politicians, and pressured Federal environment Minister Barry Cohen to intervene. Cohen, however, again backed off. Despite legal opinion to the contrary, he claimed the Federal government had no authority over the wet tropics or the nearby reef. He said he was unconvinced that the Daintree forests warranted World Heritage nomination and added, ‘It is no use petitioning Barry Cohen to invoke the [World Heritage] Act to save every bit of uncleared bushland in the country’.20 Cohen’s dissembling and disavowal of responsibility disappointed many conservationists. They thought they lived in a new era. Following the High Court’s Franklin ruling in favour of Federal powers, Bob Brown, for example, believed that ‘the Australian Government will assume the true guardianship of the nation’s natural and cultural heritage’. This was extreme wishful thinking. Politicians’

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agendas rarely coincide with those of conservationists. Governments are constituted for conquest, not conservation. All are progressive, whether Labor or Liberal, and all seek to extend the human domain. Certainly, Hawke was never interested in nature conservation. His priorities were industrial relations, multiculturalism, boosting the country’s population, deregulation, economic reform, growth, and re-election.21 And in relation to the Daintree, the problem was not, as Cohen maintained, that the government was constrained by law and lacked jurisdiction. Governments can and do find means when they think the end sufficiently compelling. Rather, the government lacked willingness. Labor was not prepared to take on Bjelke-Petersen’s government. Conservationists were not so faint-hearted. The second Daintree blockade began on 6 August 1984. The dispute was now national. Demonstrations against the road occurred in all major cities. At the Daintree itself, protestors from all over the country arrived to help the local forest defenders. Bulldozers backed by Brisbane riot police with dogs appeared, as did the national media. Conservationists felt that the use of non-local police was a deliberate provocation. The government wanted to ‘get the greenies’. The issue was not the road, but crushing conservation protest. Still, about 200 blockaders persevered, set up camp in the bush, and erected a barricade of logs to which many attached themselves with high-tensile steel. Others chained themselves to cement pillars in the ground. The tactics collapsed against an unrelenting police assault. Pursued by dogs, protestors moved deeper into the forest. Only tree-sitters now stood between the bulldozers and the forest. Radio link-ups kept the blockaders and tree-sitters in contact with a home base near Cairns and with the Brisbane and interstate media. But the preparations, back-up, and determination could not prevail against a State government utterly focused on destruction and

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prepared to use brutal police tactics and the riot squad to defeat conservationists. By the end of August, the blockade collapsed, about 40 people had been arrested, and the bulldozers completed the road. Many locals welcomed the new imposition on the forest. Aborigines from the Bloomfield area, the Kuku Yalanji, for example, had supported the road. Over 200 residents of the Wujalwujal mission community signed a petition in favour.22 In October, the shire officially opened the Cape Tribulation to Bloomfield road. A motorcade of around 60 four-wheel-drive vehicles set out carrying Martin Tenni and council chairman Tony Mijo. A busload of senior citizens from Mossman joined the celebratory parade. But rain began and the vehicles quickly became bogged. A State emergency Service helicopter rescued Tenni while a bulldozer towed out Mijo. Another bulldozer pulled out the bus.

CHAPTeR 14

Vanity fair

Supported by Geoff Mosley and the ACF, Bob Birrell and Doug Hill continued examining the implications of population growth through the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1982 Birrell and Hill, along with John Stanley, edited Quarry Australia?. Contributors detailed the immense damage already done to nature in Australia and argued the impossibility of sustaining existing development policies. During 1983, Birrell and Hill planned another book, Populate and Perish?, making the case for population stability based on the continent’s vulnerability to population pressure. Mosley backed the venture and Birrell and Hill expected ACF help with publication. But the Foundation was changing. New councillors, members, and staff tended to be university-educated, unimaginative, and conventional, not strongminded mavericks like Wright, Dunphy, Sinclair, and Dick Jones. Unlike the rebels, the new humanists cared about what their peers thought. ‘The people who are running ACF’, Jones observed, ‘like to be respected, they like to be liked, they like to be in the corridors of power’. Their neediness and conformity left them uncommonly sensitive to intellectual fashions, especially those generated by academia. They even embraced fads, such as multiculturalism that undermined conservation.1

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In March 1984, historian Geoffrey Blainey gave a lecture on multiculturalism. He pointed out that, except for a brief period in the 1930s and 1940s, Australia had always been a multicultural society. The country’s history of diversity had generated tolerance of different customs and beliefs. But effective democracy required common values. A tolerant, open society had to be monocultural as well as multicultural. At the end of his speech he suggested that the present massive increase in immigration from Asia was a mistake because it ran well ahead of public opinion. The media highlighted this last remark – even though polls showed that public opinion did question Asian immigration. ethnic leaders and their academic supporters picked up on the Asia comment. Asianisation was inevitable, they claimed, not a political preference but an historical destiny. Blainey countered that this amounted to a ‘surrender Australia policy’. Australia could and should choose its own future, he said. Criticism increased. Students held anti-Blainey demonstrations. Academics laid down guidelines for acceptable speech – Blainey had breached them. Leading intellectuals attacked him and said his claims rested on ‘shallow analysis’ and ‘extraordinary ignorance’. They accused him of ‘xenophobic stereotyping’ and of being in the ‘vanguard of Australian racism’. For the intelligentsia, the popularity of the anti-Blainey campaign served as actual proof of Blainey’s racism. Anti-racists must be on the right track if people as savvy as themselves were convinced about Blainey. Thus fortified in righteousness, some sought to vilify him and destroy his scholarly reputation. Historian Henry Reynolds, for example, boasted that ‘a whole team got together with the jackhammers’ to undermine Blainey’s standing.2 ACF members and councillors took note. They concluded that population was a sensitive issue and that those who called for restraint allied themselves with Blainey, racists, and the privileged. Council

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immediately resolved to revise the Foundation’s population policy, which until then advocated immigration controls. Meanwhile, Hill planned a population conference for August 1984, where he and Birrell were to launch Populate and Perish?. Blainey was invited to give the after-dinner speech. Councillors became increasingly nervous. They did not care to offend their left-wing peers by hosting Blainey. Lacking the courage to actually disinvite him, they decided instead to postpone the conference and ‘reconsider scheduling it during 1985 if the climate of discussion on immigration improves’. It never took place.3 Councillors further decided that the ACF should concentrate on energy and per-capita demand and promote the concept of a conserving society rather than focus on numbers of people. This retreat into statistical constructions and abstractions, away from concreteness, betrayed intellectual cowardice, which was on display again when ACF factions lobbied against the Foundation’s sponsorship of Populate and Perish?. eventually, the ACF jointly published the book with Fontana late in 1984 with a disclaimer disassociating the Foundation from the opinions expressed in the book and with the additional mea culpa that: ‘This book has been produced to help stimulate discussion on population in the community. The Foundation is reviewing its policy on population and believes that such discussions will assist it with that review’. Thereafter, the ACF never again spoke out on population.4 Anti-racists thought themselves different from other Australians: more learned, cosmopolitan, and superior. Through their muchhyped, self-labelled anti-racism, they magnified the bogus idea of race and made it of decisive importance almost everywhere in society. Attitudes to race defined one’s identity and politics, while multiculturalism became an anti-racist weapon, particularly in the struggle against patriotism, which was dismissed as parochial, chauvinistic, and racist. Such

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anti-racist rhetoric undercut conservation. No doubt xenophobia, dogma, and callousness inflict considerable human wretchedness, but patriotism does not necessarily equal xenophobia. Rather, patriotism provides the glue that binds a political community. Through patriotism, people recognise a common identity and collective interests. Patriotism generates the political authority that enables democratic agendas, including conservation. But the links between conservation and patriotism go even deeper. Conservation not only requires a liberal democratic community to succeed but also explicitly solicits and extends patriotism, urging people to identify with and care about the life that belongs to their home country. Without such identification there is no possibility of conservation. Without patriotism, conservation fails. Besides its disdain for patriotism, the ACF had other problems. By 1984, the Foundation was a large bureaucracy. Twenty-six people worked in the secretariat. Another 12 worked on contract on limited projects funded by bequests and appeals. These included rainforest campaigns in Queensland and Tasmania, as well as energy and soil projects. Increasing size and increasing bureacratisation, clashes between younger and older members, and disagreements over tactics and style led to discontent. Discontent prompted the executive to appoint a firm of management consultants to review the Foundation’s operations. Bureacratisation coincided with an increasingly pro-Labor stance. More Labor Party members became councillors and worked on staff. Opposition to Mosley – who felt no sentimental attachment to the ALP – grew. Labor supporters thought of conservation as therapy, and they found Mosley high-handed, unable to extend the personal support they felt they deserved. Moreover, his unwillingness to compromise in the defence of nature offended the faint-hearted, who thrived on concession and conciliation.

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At first, Mosley’s critics directed their destabilisation campaign against Mosley’s ally and ACF projects director Doug Hill. Some councillors would vote against any Hill proposal simply because it was his. Increasingly unpopular, he resigned in November 1985. Coincident with Hill’s resignation, Council elected Dunphy, Alan Tingay, Figgis, and Bob Burton as vice-presidents. The insurgents blocked Sinclair, John Coulter, and Bruce Davis – all Mosley supporters – from the positions. elsewhere, Mosley found himself excluded from meetings and consultation. His position was becoming untenable. That month, the Victorian government released a Draft Timber Industry Strategy. There were no surprises. The document envisaged exploitation as usual based on increasing demand and increasing production and foreshadowed a State woodchip industry. From the east Gippsland Coalition (eGC) came A Critical Response, written by Margaret Blakers and Peter Christoff. They followed with Jobs in East Gippsland: A Transitional Economic Strategy. The accent was misplaced. economics was not the issue, nor were jobs. Although governments around Australia were attempting to reduce politics to economics, this was a feint. The nature of politics remained unchanged. Politics was about power, most especially about the power to refashion nature. Politicians understood that civilisations were distinguished by the way they transform the world to their own ends. Civilisations make their own habitat. Civilised people are civilised in direct proportion to their distance from unmodified nature. economics and jobs are simply rationales for that larger transformative project. But those conservationists who, like many of their peers, thought in terms of economics and followed the money trail frequently mistook rationales for reality and accepted the terms of debate as defined by politicians: only economics mattered and only economic analysis convinced. In deferring to economics, both conservationists and their opponents pretended that politicians and other decision-makers were

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rational and prudent. This was fantasy. Out of this world of makebelieve came a final version of the Timber Industry Strategy – released in August 1986 – that was little more than a glossy public relations booklet. No one was satisfied. eGC argued that ‘the strategy lacks direct and explicit controls of the woodchip industry and entrenches the status quo as long term forest management’. The timber industry responded with a $1.75 million television and newspaper PR campaign that claimed logging and clearfelling were essential to the economic wellbeing of both Victoria and Australia, would generate extra jobs and income, were perfectly benign, and caused no lasting damage.5 These claims echoed Tasmanian timber industry propaganda. Conservationists did not believe a word. The reality was vast destruction of forests, which the TWS, after the High Court ruled on the Franklin dam, vowed to save. Tasmania’s Forestry Commission targeted several forests, including those along the Great Western Tiers, a dolerite and sandstone escarpment of the island’s Central Plateau. In December 1983, the TWS – which, in recognition of the Society’s national role, had changed its name to The Wilderness Society – mounted a campaign to limit woodchip export licences. Subsequently, the State Forestry Commission imposed a moratorium on logging in the Lemonthyme near the Great Western Tiers and Farmhouse Creek in the southwest pending an environmental Impact Statement (eIS). However, a reprieve in one area often preceded destruction in another. Jackeys Marsh in central northern Tasmania, near Deloraine – forested, beautiful, isolated, and relatively unspoilt – had attracted a number of mainlanders hoping to create alternative lifestyles. They quickly discovered that the Forestry Commission had plans to clearfell most of the forest. In February 1983, at the height of the Franklin blockade, locals held a Jackeys Marsh Forest Festival and formed the Forest Action Network (FAN). Members spent the next

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year assembling a case against the Forestry Commission, and joined TWS, the ACF, and the Tasmanian Conservation Trust in calling for an assessment of the Tasmanian forest industry and the broadening of the eIS. FAN also compiled a national park proposal for the DouglasApsley forest in eastern Tasmania. Activists learned much about forestry and government chicanery but knowledge alone would not stop the bulldozers. In May 1984, loggers descended on Warners Sugarloaf in the Western Tiers. FAN and Save the Quamby and Tiers Campaign organised about 80 people to form a symbolic blockade behind a wall of cardboard boxes. Spokeswoman Rosemary Norwood said the blockade was part of a statewide campaign to give Tasmanian forests a fair hearing. ‘The only thing that can stop the ’dozers is public opinion’, she said.6 earlier in 1984, Bob Brown resigned as director of TWS to concentrate on his role as a member of the Legislative Council. He and the Franklin dispute had transformed the Society. By 1984, TWS had around 7000 members, tens of thousands of supporters, and a budget of a million dollars a year. The Hobart Mercury noted TWS’s growth under Brown’s leadership, highlighted his determination, and praised his ‘calmness in a crisis’, but predicted ‘a brown day for the greenies’. With Brown gone, ‘hard-core’ members would become prominent and there would likely be violence.7 Violence, often cloaked in a forest of print, remained the monopoly of the state. The draft eIS, released in February 1985, claimed the ‘Woodchip industry can be maintained at its present level without adverse effects on the environment’. Conservationists said the study failed to examine over-cutting and job losses, and did not meet Federal requirements. FAN and TWS assessed woodchipping in a booklet published in March, Woodchipping: The Real Impact. The text, compiled by Sean Cadman and Rosemary

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Norwood of FAN and by TWS campaigners, examined and documented the massively destructive effects of ‘the voracious export woodchip industry’, concentrating in particular on the Picton Valley in the southwest, the Huntsman Valley on the Western Tiers and the South Arthur forests.8 One of the authors of Woodchipping was the ACF’s Tasmanian campaign director, Geoff Law. Law grew up in Victoria, where he acquired a love of the outdoors. Physically embracing Australia, he bushwalked, camped, whitewater-rafted, and cross-country skied. He liked mountains and remote country and sought out wilderness. He worked for TWS in Melbourne, then joined the Franklin campaign in Tasmania and stayed. He learned quickly and soon became one of the State’s most effective campaigners: writing press releases, staging protests, running public relations campaigns, talking to politicians, organising volunteers, and promoting the power of photography. Along with his co-authors, he concluded that forestry operations were savage, wasteful, and conducted with extreme indifference to ecology.9 Many people were determined that the damage continue. In December 1985, 5000 Tasmanian forest workers rallied in Hobart in praise of woodchipping. They had the support of the State government as well as the Federal government, which sanctioned a greater volume of woodchip exports for a further 15 years. Brown vowed that conservationists would ‘raise a campaign to save Australia’s forests from Daintree to Tasmania’.10 Around that time, newcomer Alec Marr walked into TWS headquarters in Davey Street, Hobart. Marr, a pugnacious, stocky bricklayer who loved the outdoors, especially caving and climbing, found a ‘bleak, hollow shell’. everyone was depressed over the Federal government’s renewal of woodchip export licences. A staffer suggested that Marr organise a blockade at Farmhouse Creek – the entrance to the superb old-growth forests of the Upper Picton

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catchment. Action suited Marr. He thought a lengthy tree-sit might benefit the blockade. On 25 February 1986, he climbed 20 metres to a platform in a tree in the path of the bulldozers. An Australian flag hung below him. On the same day, 300 kilometres to the north, 30 protestors stopped a bulldozer in the Lemonthyme. Vigilantes from the Forest employees Action Group (FeAG) bashed them, sending two to hospital, and warned the protestors they were about to do the same at Farmhouse Creek.11 But first the media arrived, gathered under Marr’s tree, and turned his sit into front-page news. Protestor numbers swelled. Politicians visited. Bulldozers appeared and, along with them, two busloads of forest vigilantes. Protestors, including Brown, stopped a bulldozer. Then the vigilantes, with the police standing by, attacked. Several wielded chainsaws; one started cutting Marr’s tree. The violence that Premier Gray had long predicted had come to pass – with the direct connivance of the State. Many of the assaults occurred in front of television cameras and later appeared on national television. Brown, who frequently divined universal and momentous significance in events, declared: ‘The Battle of Farmhouse Creek will ring down through the generations as a watershed in the campaign to save the forests, not only of Tasmania, but throughout Australia’.12 The day after the assaults, vigilantes fired shots at Brown and others and the Gray government rushed exclusion laws through Parliament barring the public from public forests. Three days later, a State election returned Gray to power. Brown was re-elected along with environmental lawyer Gerry Bates, who had been active at Farmhouse Creek. Gray remained bellicose and dismissed opponents: These same professional protestors have been seen at Roxby Downs, and the Franklin Dam . . . They just move around Australia . . . They are out to cause trouble and I think that’s a very sad situation.

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Someone has to take a stand – we can’t afford to see these areas locked up. If we give in now, these areas will become sacrosanct and we’ll never be able to log them.13

A couple of days later, police raided the Farmhouse Creek blockade and arrested 32 people. After 16 days, Marr’s tree-sit came to an end. In Hobart, 2000 people rallied in front of Parliament House calling for a halt to logging at Farmhouse Creek. Blockaders regrouped. Norm Sanders, now Democrat Senator for Tasmania, led about 100 demonstrators through a Farmhouse Creek roadblock. He, along with 37 others, was arrested. Protestors returned to the Lemonthyme where, early in April, they built a two-metre-high stone wall across the logging road and then held a family day in the forest. The rallies, blockades, commentary, and lobbying aimed to secure Federal government attention. It worked. Two days after the second Lemonthyme blockade, Labor senator and party powerbroker Graham Richardson visited the southern forests by helicopter with TWS and ACF representatives. Some conservationists believed Richardson underwent a genuine ‘conversion’ in favour of forest conservation. Sincere or not, Richardson had politics in mind. He wanted to secure conservation votes for the ALP. In December, Federal cabinet decided to ban logging of the Lemonthyme but to allow logging at Jackeys Marsh and announced a review of Tasmanian National estate forests to consider ‘feasible and prudent’ alternatives to logging. Hawke called on Gray to halt logging the National estate until the inquiry was complete. Gray refused. Forests began receiving more and more attention from the ACF, particularly after March 1985 when council approved a National Forest Campaign. Besides woodchipping in Tasmania, the campaign encompassed the rainforests of Queensland’s Wet Tropics, the Cape Tribulation–Bloomfield Road, the renewal of the export licence for

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Harris-Daishowa at eden in NSW, and the desecration of State forests in WA from the Manjimup woodchipping operation. As campaigns started and concluded, personnel changed. Penny Figgis resigned as National Liaison Officer in September 1984. Jonathan West, recently appointed director of TWS, assumed the position. He did not stay long. A former member of the ALP, he left the ACF a few months later to work in Barry Cohen’s office. Hal Wootton, recently retired as a judge of the Supreme Court of NSW, took over as ACF president in July 1984. Wootton had helped found the first Aboriginal Legal Service in Australia, was keen on the outdoors, which he explored as a bushwalker and camper and believed that conservation has long ceased to be a matter merely of preserving this or that area, or this or that species. What is at stake now is the world, it is threatened by the population explosion, by the growth philosophy that grips most of the world, and by the development of nuclear power and armaments.14

These were high stakes. Mosley considered all of them in his time as director. His commitments, however, did not save his position. Steadily his critics eroded his authority. ALP delegations complained about his attacks on the government. Other critics cited his inability to work with inexperienced staff and his media performance. eventually, in August 1986, council resolved that Mosley take two months’ paid leave. He knew his time was up. He resigned. When he stood for council at the next election, he received the highest vote in the country. Council unanimously voted Philip Toyne director and he assumed the post in November 1986. Toyne did not have a conservation background. A graduate of Melbourne University law school, he was a humanist who sought to improve the world for humans, and had worked for 14 years as a lawyer on Aboriginal issues.

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To many people in the ACF, experience in Aboriginal affairs seemed the perfect complement to conservation. A growing body of literature argued that understanding, sympathising with, and emulating Aborigines was the key to conservation, a belief encapsulated in a mantra repeated by poet Kath Walker in a 1985 Habitat article, ‘Looking at Australia from Both Sides of the Fence’: ‘No Aborigine can own the land because the land owns us’.15 Walker’s rhetorical flourish was certainly neat, conveying a swift movement of meaning and a striking contrast in less than a dozen words. Its power hung on the word own. Own derives from Old english, is both adjective and verb, and means ‘possessed’ and ‘to appropriate or take possession’. Through a reversal of subject and object, of possessor and possessed, Walker’s formula expressed what she thought were two diametrically opposite ways of relating to the world: europeans ruled the land while Aborigines allowed the land to rule them. While this romantic cant highlighted Aboriginal moral superiority, it bore no resemblance to the manner in which human beings actually live on the planet. Aboriginal life was opportunistic. Aborigines looked to nature for what they could get out of it. They were as aggressive and ambitious in manipulating their world as nature and technology permitted – like every other human group. All Homo sapiens have interacted with the world in destructive ways, including Australia’s first human inhabitants. People everywhere adopt a variety of means to cope with the impositions and limits of their natural surroundings; none is inherently more virtuous or more innocent or more irrational than another. All humans have to manipulate, exploit, and prey on other species. Some learn prudent self-restraint in dealing with the rest of the living world; others respond with an unremitting drive to civilise and reframe the world in an image of their own devising.16 This continuum of approaches to nature ill-suits disaffected

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moralists and people seeking sharp dualities and didactic lessons. Judith Wright, for example, made the dichotomy between the ecological Aborigine and the rapacious european central to her conservation advocacy. In ‘Our Story is in the Land’, a book review of Kakadu Man by Bill Neidjie, she wrote: Our history in this land, we european-Australians, has been one of not listening, not understanding, not looking after. It is hard for us, brought up as we are to reverence only what will bring in immediate dollars, to pause in our crazy race towards destruction and listen to Bill Neidjie’s words.17

These were gross generalisations. They did not describe everyone. Wright’s own life of caring and fighting for the land put the lie to them. So did the existence of the conservation movement. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of Australians of non-Aboriginal background cared about the country. Many dedicated their lives to its defence. Some risked their lives. Walker and Wright’s image of the ecological Aborigine revealed a kind of race thinking that exercised a powerful hold over some conservationists. Unlike conservation thinking, which is always about the specific, race thinking rests on abstraction: it consists of singling out certain traits that are observed, accurately or not, in one or more individuals, and then assigning those traits to the whole group. Hence, caring for the land was held to be a trait inherent among Aborigines. even the sceptical Norm Sanders yielded to race thinking. He idealised Aborigines. He saw them as ‘other’, separate from ‘white people’, possessed of an eminently workable land ethic . . . [based on the knowledge] that nature and society are mutually dependent. They perform

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rites to ensure the fertility of the species which they hunt and to confirm the link between humans and the vital forces involved in Nature . . . [In comparison] Our culture has lost its traditional wisdom.18

Superstitions like these – ideas not grounded in fact – encouraged people to imagine that whites were uncaring and ignorant while their Aboriginal neighbours were the reverse. Many people found this an attractive picture. After all, race thinking is endemic among humans. Both strong and weak minds succumb to its lure, which does not merely depend on believing a particular theory about human races. More insidiously, the appeal of racism derives from the human propensity to sort people into categories. All humans share a passion for labelling and classifying other humans based on insufficient evidence. Thus, despite the role of reason and science in conservation many conservationists could still draw spurious inferences and reach illogical conclusions, especially under the influence of race thinking about Aborigines. While maladroit endorsement of the fictitious ecological Aborigine hindered clear thinking about conservation, specifics, not abstractions, kept some conservationists focused. In 1985 a consortium of Australian and Japanese companies applied to mine and export silica from Shelburne Bay on eastern Cape York Peninsula. Less than 200 kilometres from Cape York, the area contains over 150 giant sand dunes rising out of a mosaic of lush forest, open heath, wetlands, and lakes. Little-disturbed fringing reefs, part of the Great Barrier Reef, lie just offshore. Conservationists believed mining – to be concentrated on two large sand dunes, Conical Hill and Saddle Hill – would irrevocably change natural topographical features, destroy natural vegetation, including rainforest and mangroves, and disrupt and pollute the

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adjoining reefs. Most of all, the operation would intrude on an area of almost unspoilt wilderness and lead to development throughout the region. Led by WPSQ director, Don Henry, the ACF and the Queensland Conservation Council (QCC) lodged objections in the Mining Warden’s Court. Hearings began in July 1985. The Senate Standing Committee on Science, Technology and the environment also held hearings. At a public meeting in Cairns, Henry stressed Shelburne Bay’s wilderness appeal. Company representatives countered that mining would have minimal impact. Like the Mining Warden, the Committee recommended against mining and concluded that the economic benefits were uncertain and minor, that alternative supplies of silica existed, and that the wilderness values of the area ought to be protected. The Federal government noted the several findings and in 1987 rejected the project under the powers of the Foreign Investment Review Board.19 To preserve wilderness, conservationists employed many, often linked, tactics: direct action, court challenges, administrative appeals, publicity, lobbying, participation in bureaucratic decision-making, and drafting legislation. In 1985, TWS expanded its presence in Sydney, believing that NSW offered the best chance for the enactment of wilderness legislation. TWS campaigner Margaret Robertson and wilderness champion Peter Prineas approached the government. They were in luck. They met a politician actually interested in conservation. even more unusual, he was Minister for Planning and the environment. Bob Carr had already been bushwalking with Milo Dunphy. Dunphy frequently invited politicians into the bush as a way of introducing them to their country and impressing upon them the need for conservation. Few proved as receptive as Carr. Their first walk in the Blue Mountains took place in April 1985, shortly after Carr became Minister. The subject of a wilderness act to protect defined wilderness in the State came up. The Colong Committee had already raised

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the idea with Premier Wran. Carr was impressed. He liked Milo, and did not see him as eccentric: ‘He was level-headed and rational. The people who are eccentric are those who argue that the globe can take all the battering and not suffer.’ For Carr, that first and the subsequent walks ‘confirmed and fleshed out my view that the natural world is under threat and that the Australian bush is worth saving’.20 Further discussions led to the establishment of a Wilderness Working Group, which presented Carr with a report that identified 36 wilderness areas in NSW – barely 4 percent of the State – and recommended a wilderness act. Upon releasing the report, Carr said he expected the ‘usual’ outcry from the mining, forestry, and development lobbies but added, ‘None of the economic problems of this country are an excuse for stopping short of excellence in nature conservation’.21 In November 1987, Carr introduced a wilderness bill into the NSW Parliament and made explicit what many conservationists already knew: conservation drew on and expressed patriotism. ‘Wilderness’, he said, is a source of our patriotism. Australian history is a story of the interaction between immigrant peoples and a continent with unique landscapes, plants and animals. If we lose our feel for this grand old continent in its natural condition, then we lose something of our character as a people. The case for conservation is founded therefore on patriotism. Our commitment to protecting our wilderness is a measure of our maturity as a nation and pride in our identity.22

Few conservationists were as bold as Carr. Under the influence of the humbug of left-wing colleagues, many suspected that patriotism was the next-of-kin to racism. Accordingly, conservationists downplayed their patriotic feelings – they did not care to be branded racist. Yet they needed and depended on patriotism.

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In this they were fortunate. They lived in a remarkably successful nation-state that protected and nurtured an alert civil society. Civil society oversaw a tremendous expansion in liberty and prosperity and, in turn, counterbalanced government. The separation of powers, an independent judiciary, and a whole set of diverse non-governmental institutions worked to prevent government from dominating and atomising society while not preventing it from fulfilling its role as keeper of the peace and arbitrator between major interests. Liberal democracy is not achieved without cost. Behind every mature, settled, comparatively civilised nation lies a history of popular mobilisation and violence. Machiavellian skeletons lurk behind the serene assumption that the collective power and solidarity necessary to sustain democracy, justice, the rule of law, and conservation could be taken for granted. But again, Australians were fortunate. They had fewer Machiavellian skeletons than most people – at least with respect to inter-human venality. With respect to nature, however, Australians were far less fortunate. Two hundred years of european settlement had caused a catastrophic extinguishment of forest, widespread degradation of land and rivers, and an unparalleled extinction of animals and plants. Only people motivated by patriotism could confront this disaster, prevent its continuation, and perhaps mitigate some of the consequences. Only patriots allied with other patriots could summon the authority and muster the legitimacy necessary for conservation. Through civil association, they could influence politics and build organisations, campaigns, institutions, and scholarship in the interests of saving the country’s natural heritage. Patriotism lay behind New South Wales’s Wilderness Act. And only an active, politically engaged, patriotic citizenry could give the Act any force.

CHAPTeR 15

Don’t You WorrY About thAt

Western people share a long history of taming forests. Conquest was based on and in turn engendered a deeply ingrained antipathy to forests. Forests were ugly; forests were the lair of barbarism and lawlessness. Forests were oppressive. Trees presided over gloom and miasma – hence the appeal to forestry agencies of clearfelling or ‘the full sunlight method of regeneration’. Forests were the enemy of civilisation, deforestation the place of civilisation. Forests represented raw nature and affronted the civilising instinct. And no Australian leader was entirely free of the civilising pull. All wanted to leave their mark on the land. For State leaders especially, the country’s remaining forests represented their best opportunity to reframe the world. These were acutely emotional commitments. Reason never entered the calculation. emotion guided every plan for destruction and trumped reason in every conflict. In Tasmania opposition to logging goaded the government into more destruction. Logging plans spread across the island. In late February 1987 protestors returned to Farmhouse Creek ‘in order’, according to blockade planner, Alec Marr, ‘to keep tensions in the relationship [between State and Federal governments], keep ourselves

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relevant and stop any pre-emptive work by the Forestry Commission’. Blockaders winched logs across the road, filled the Farmhouse Creek bridge to the rails with boulders and logs and installed platforms for tree-sitters Marr, Ted Mead, and Paul Chatterton. Following a dawn raid by police, most of the on-ground protestors disappeared into the bush. Subsequent searches failed to find them. The blockade continued and the police banned the ABC from the area. After nine days, Police Search and Rescue removed Marr from his tree. The following day they took down Mead and Chatterton.1 The Hawke government, desperate to resolve a conflict that could cost it electoral support, introduced legislation establishing a 12-month inquiry into alternatives to logging in the Lemonthyme and Southern Forests. Presided over by a retired NSW equity Court Judge, Michael Helsham, the inquiry began in June, a month before a Federal election. TWS and the ACF mounted a national ‘Vote for the Forests’ campaign. Under the slogan, ‘The Forests Can’t Vote! . . . But You Can’, conservationists organised election signs and handouts and staffed polling booths. Placards read: ‘Whatever you do don’t vote Liberal. Their policies are a disaster for Australia’s natural heritage.’ Prime Minister Hawke, photographed hugging a baby wombat, won a third term. TWS and the ACF claimed their campaign delivered the ALP 2.2 percent of votes in 11 marginal seats, critically influencing the outcome in seven. even Liberal Party spokespersons admitted a green factor in the voting and leader John Howard reversed his pre-election policy of not talking to TWS. Tasmanian conservationists now focused on the Helsham inquiry. They quickly realised that two of the three commissioners had no interest in conservation. Bob Brown predicted a disaster: ‘a win for the companies, the chainsaws, the cable loggers, the woodchip mills’.2 Upon the release of the Helsham Report in May 1988, two of the

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commissioners concluded that only 10 percent of the area under investigation was worthy of World Heritage nomination. In complete contrast, Peter Hitchcock, a forester seconded to the inquiry from the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, declared that the whole inquiry area was worthy of World Heritage listing plus forest outside the inquiry’s boundaries. Conservationists argued that nothing had been resolved and mounted a campaign to influence the Federal cabinet’s response.3 TWS printed 100 000 ‘Write Now’ leaflets and in six weeks generated 20 000 letters from people around the country to Hawke urging him to reject the report. Brown visited the editors of all the major daily newspapers to ensure coverage. In Melbourne, TWS’s patron, Yehudi Menuhin, said that chopping down the giant eucalypt forests of Tasmania was like melting down Jews for their gold teeth. And, at TWS’s instigation, nine of the inquiry’s 11 environmental and cultural consultants wrote to Graham Richardson, now Federal Minister for environment, dissociating themselves from the majority conclusions and complaining that the commissioners had trivialised and ignored their advice. In cabinet, Richardson argued for protection. His colleagues were unconvinced. While they agreed to protect 70 percent of the Heritage area, this actually amounted to only 30 percent of the forests. Hawke then negotiated a Tasmanian Forests Agreement with Premier Gray that provided for compensation, another woodchip export licence for Tasmania, increased logging, no more World Heritage listings, no more forest inquiries, and mining exploration in areas nominated for World Heritage. There seemed no end to the fight for the forests – all over Australia. A few weeks after the Queensland police broke the August 1984 Daintree blockade, the AHC recommended that the tropical rainforests of North Queensland be nominated for inclusion in the World

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Heritage List. Two days later, Barry Cohen, Federal Minister for the environment, released the report behind the recommendation: Aila Keto and Keith Scott’s A Study of the Conservation Significance of the Wet Tropics of North-East Queensland.4 While Cohen changed his mind on the value of the Wet Tropics, the Queensland government remained committed to exploitation. Minister for National Parks, Peter McKechnie, declared: ‘I am not in favour of having one more inch of Queensland on the World Heritage list’. Premier Bjelke-Petersen added: The Australian Heritage Commission can do what it likes. It can do that if it wants to waste its time and waste public money. There’s no way that area will ever be on the World Heritage List. No way at all. No way. Don’t you worry about that.5

But conservationists did worry, and their determination to protect the rainforests matched the Queensland government’s determination to destroy them. The 1987 Federal election presented another opportunity for conservation. In March 1986, the ACF advised Cohen of research that showed tourists were more interested in Queensland rainforests than even the Great Barrier Reef. A unilateral move to nominate the Wet Tropics for World Heritage listing and protect them from logging would be an electoral plus, not a liability. In April, Habitat published photos of the White Lemuroid, a rare possum found only in high-altitude old-growth rainforest. extensive reproduction of the image followed in the media, accompanied by the information that the possum’s habitat was under threat. One month before the election, Hawke and Cohen announced the Commonwealth would act unilaterally – without Queensland’s cooperation – and nominate the Wet Tropics for World Heritage listing. Keto was asked to prepare the justification documents, and she

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joined Australia’s delegations to the World Heritage Committee. The nomination consolidated ACF and TWS support for the reelection of the Labor government and the Wet Tropics became part of their ‘Vote for the Forests’ campaign. Full-colour newspaper advertisements in the days before the poll said: ‘Your vote will save more than the trees’. They featured the photo of the White Lemuroid. Queensland government opposition to the nomination continued. For the sake of appearances and to prepare a credible management plan for the Wet Tropics that justified logging, the government established the Northern Rainforest Management Agency (NORMA). The Agency’s main function was to oppose World Heritage listing. Richardson dismissed it as a ‘pathetic, sniveling protest effort’. Bjelke-Petersen responded by telling a pro-logging rally in Cairns: ‘We are at war . . . Put a fire under Richardson when he comes here.’ He urged timber workers to harass Federal Labor MPs by calling them at home. ‘You’ve got my permission to do that. Knock them up any old time of the night’. When Richardson visited the Queensland logging town of Ravenshoe, timber workers assaulted him while the police stood by. Meanwhile, Queensland stepped up logging within the World Heritage-nominated area – by up to four times the normal rate.6 NORMA lobbied the IUCN in January 1988 and in March the World Heritage Committee itself. Although the Committee rejected Queensland’s case, State cabinet undertook an advertising campaign to oppose the listing only weeks before its completion. After the formal listing in December, the government still would not accept the decision. ‘We are totally uncompromising in our determination not to cooperate with the Federal Government on management’, declared environment Minister Geoffrey Munz. He said the Commonwealth would need to call in the Federal Police and the army if it wished to enforce its plans for the area. Queensland Attorney-General Paul Clauson stated that listing ‘meant nothing’ and that the World Heritage

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Committee and its scientific body were ‘inept’ and ‘a conglomerate of incompetence’. Queensland would fight the listing through the High Court whatever the cost.7 The High Court, however, rejected Queensland’s challenge. A further court challenge collapsed when, following the State elections in December 1989, the new ALP government dropped the case and accepted the listing. But only the Wet Tropics were safe – for the time being. Governments adopted various means to entrench logging in Australia. Since the 1970s woodchip licences contained a provision providing for the eventual introduction of downstream or valueadded processing of timber taken from concession areas. In July 1987 North Broken Hill (NBH), the owners of Australian Pulp and Paper Manufacturers (APPM), announced it was ready to build a $1 billion pulp and paper export mill in Tasmania. The largest single manufacturing project in Australia, the mill – destined for Wesley Vale on Tasmania’s north coast – would feature a 100-metre-high smokestack belching gas and a pipeline into Bass Strait pumping in 1.3 tonnes of toxic organo-chlorine wastes every day. Wesley Vale residents objected. They did not want a huge, polluting industry in the midst of their community and farms. In December they formed a resident action group: Concerned Residents Opposed to Pulpmill Siting (CROPS), led by Christine Milne. A local teacher who had grown up on a farm one kilometre from the site of the proposed mill, Milne was no campaign novice. Arrested at the Franklin, she later participated in forest blockades and had organised a campaign to save mountain huts. She was a forceful and impassioned advocate: articulate, quick, and unflinching. Her activism and sense of justice, however, equipped her with a philosophy no more coherent than that of other conservationists. She embraced a clutter of contemporary postures: she praised multiculturalism and condemned

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Australian society as inherently racist and Australian affluence as wasteful. She believed that all the issues she cared about were interconnected and that peace, social justice, and conservation cohered as part of the same struggle. She endorsed the fatuous slogan, ‘Think Globally, Act Locally’ and believed in the amorphous catchphrase, ‘People Power’. But she was clear as to what was at stake in Wesley Vale – the destruction of a rural way of life. Milne formed alliances. She contacted abalone divers, medical practitioners, the Tasmanian Farmers and Graziers Association, the Tasmanian Fishing Industry Council, trade unions, and conservation groups, including the ACF and TWS. Greenpeace opposed the project as part of its global campaign against chlorine bleach pulp mills. Milne found another ally in United Scientists for environmental Responsibility (USeRP), formed by some 60 scientists following the sham of the Helsham Inquiry. each group wrote press releases, held press conferences, and organised meetings. The ACF took the campaign national. TWS ran a campaign on the forests. In May 1988, NBH announced a 50-percent partnership with Noranda Forests Inc., a Canadian pulp and paper company with a history of exploitation and pollution. Company negotiations with State and Federal governments proceeded amicably. Both governments proved biddable. Prime Minister Hawke and his Ministers gave the project gushing praise. Hawke exalted in its size. In late October, the company released its eIS, with a 30-day comment period. Objections were immediate and scathing. USeRP said the document was inadequate, containing serious errors and is misleading through its selective omission of details. On the basis of this poor document, no guarantee can be given of an environmentally safe operation. To

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fast-track this development is not only an insult to democracy, but it is also a crime against humanity.

Ten Tasmanian Government departments and authorities also lodged objections and concerns.8 eIS weaknesses did not bother the government, which, three days before the comment period closed, introduced project-enabling legislation. Nevertheless, even Tasmanian Minister for the environment Peter Hodgman could not ignore the eIS’s glaring inadequacies, and queried 85 areas that were ignored or insufficiently covered. The company’s recalcitrant and cavalier reply embarrassed the government, which announced guidelines. By now the ACF, TWS, Greenpeace, and Milne had made the issue national. Milne believed campaigning was as much about cultivating relationships as gathering information, and she invited Graham Richardson to Wesley Vale. Thereafter he became a lone sceptic in Federal cabinet and said he would go through NBH’s proposal ‘with a fine-tooth comb’. At the end of January 1989, NBH/Noranda threatened to abandon the mill unless the Tasmanian government revised the guidelines. The government backed down and at the company’s behest recalled Parliament to re-frame the guidelines to the company’s satisfaction. The threat and Parliament’s capitulation actually weakened the mill cause. Criticism mounted and the Tasmanian Opposition, which had previously supported the mill, opposed it. early in February, 12 000 people attended a Save Our State rally in Hobart. But the mill still had supporters. For the Australian there were no grounds for dissent: We do not have the luxury of a choice about whether we need a mill . . . if Australia cannot cope with investments of this magnitude

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then we have no future . . . The benefits . . . are so obvious that not even the most shrill of its greenie opponents can dispute them . . . environmentalists are wrecking their cause by associating with ideologues.9

Dissent grew. The issue could not be ignored. By the end of February, the Prime Minister and development Ministers expressed concern. Minister for Industry John Button and Minister for Primary Industry John Kerin commissioned independent studies and presented them to cabinet. Kerin, one of the most pro-development Ministers, told his colleagues: ‘The eIS is ratshit and the guidelines are laughable’. Cabinet agreed to give in-principle support for the mill but with stronger environmental guidelines. Next day, company officials said they would not tolerate any change to the guidelines. Noranda announced it was withdrawing from the project. The company was concerned that if it accepted Australian emission standards, then Canadian conservationists would demand the same.10 Milne described the decision as a victory for ‘people power’. TWS campaigner Alec Marr celebrated in State Parliament, opened a bottle of champagne in the gallery, and threw the cork at the Minister for Forests, Ray Groom. ‘He didn’t like it’, admitted Marr, ‘but it is very rare for democracy to triumph in Tasmania’. Democracy’s triumph took over a year’s full-time effort by Milne and fellow conservationists. Other campaigns could last much longer. Some continued for decades.11 Moreton Island’s proximity to Brisbane meant that many people knew the place and felt protective towards its almost 19 000 hectares of near-wilderness. In 1971 edie Hegerl, who was active in the Great Barrier Reef campaign, and others formed a Save Moreton Island Committee. By 1974, they had learned that mining leases covered 55 percent of the island. Subsequently, Brisbane City Council (BCC), which had acquired management of Moreton Island, zoned the island

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‘open space’, effectively prohibiting sandmining. The State government, however, continued to seek means to establish sandmining. Conservationists regrouped and in March 1978 formed the Moreton Island Protection Committee (MIPC). The government likewise changed tactics and in May 1979 amended the Mining Act to ensure that BCC’s planning regulations could not be used to prevent companies with existing mining leases from exploiting them, effectively nullifying citizens’ statutory rights to object to Town Plans. In March 1981, the mining companies said they wanted to mine up to 20 percent of the island. The government announced approval for 6.4 percent. In turn, MIPC released a management strategy for Moreton Island that promoted tourism and claimed a national park was more economically viable than sand mining. BCC endorsed the argument. In August, AHC officially gazetted Moreton Island in the Register of the National estate. When, in the following year, Mineral Deposits applied to mine their Moreton Island leases, MIPC, QCC, the ACF, BCC, and the ALP lodged objections with the Brisbane Mining Warden who, in May 1983, upheld the objections and ruled that the sand mining lacked economic viability. The ruling did not deter the State government, nor did a February 1984 Federal export permit ban on minerals from Moreton Island. In August, the Queensland Mines Minister overturned the Warden’s ruling and granted three leases. Two-and-a-half years later, State cabinet approved mining, claiming the mine would supply rutile and zircon to the domestic market and therefore did not need Federal approval. Conservationists immediately pledged to stop the project. As the miner, Associated Minerals Consolidated began drilling tests; MIPC started a petition, and within three months collected 40 000 signatures. A highly organised and dedicated group, MIPC produced a regular newsletter, information sheets, and slogan T-shirts. Mines Minister Brian Austin admitted they were formidable

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opponents: ‘the spokesmen and women for this group are no longer the cheesecloth and shoulder bag brigade but they are seemingly moderate, articulate people who disguise their extremism behind a well-presented exterior’.12 At the end of 1987 Bjelke-Petersen was deposed as Premier. His successor, Mike Ahern, announced plans to ‘end Moreton Island mining’. But he kept open the possibility of mining at some future time. For conservationists, Moreton Island’s preservation required everlasting vigilance – as did all conservation in Australia. Mount etna rises almost 300 metres above the plains north of Rockhampton. Caves once riddled the half-limestone conical peak and sheltered one of Australia’s most important breeding grounds for bats, including the eastern horseshoe bat, the unpouched sheathtailed bat, the eastern bent-winged bat, and the ghost bat. The little bent-wing is the most common and a small cave known as Bat Cleft provided the maternity site for 50 000 bent-wings. In 1920 Mount etna came under the protection of a recreation reserve but a few years later the government approved mining leases over the slopes. In the early 1960s Central Queensland Cement (CQC) bought all Mount etna’s mining leases and in 1966 began quarrying and blasting limestone from the mountain’s eastern face. Cavers had already discovered the mountain’s attractions and, following a 1967 protest meeting in Rockhampton against the quarrying called by the city’s mayor, formed the Central Queensland Speleological Society (CQSS). Two years later other conservationists formed the Queensland Cave Conservation Committee under the presidency of Judith Wright. Both groups agitated for a Mount etna national park. By the mid-1970s quarrying had come to within 50 metres of Bat Cleft. The QCC and the University of Queensland Speleological Society called for a limit to quarrying and the conservation of the little bent-winged bat and the ghost bat. The company shifted operations

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around the mountain but in 1975 abandoned an undertaking to leave a buffer around the caves. Likewise, the Bjelke-Petersen Government broke an election promise to make Mount etna a national park. Protest continued over the next ten years as Central Queensland Cement levelled one cave and broke into several others. Only direct action could prevent further destruction. In December 1987, CQSS members, filmed by two television crews, plugged 26 drill holes to stop the company extending its operations. The following year, after visiting the caves to witness the nightly exodus of tens of thousands of female bent-wings in search of insects for their young, Premier Ahern announced the company would relinquish one of its leases over 40 of the mountain’s remaining caves, including Bat Cleft. He and the company described the gesture as an ‘unprecedented gift’. Conservationists pointed out that the concessions were trivial and would not affect the company’s 30-year mining plans, which would see Bat Cleft eaten away by quarries on three sides. even worse, the company retained two caves – elephant Hole and Speaking Tube – that served as roosts for a colony of the rare and vulnerable ghost bat, a species unique to Australia. When the company prepared to blast those caves in April, protestors again filled in drill holes and occupied the caves, mounting a ‘cave-in’ to stop the blasting. For three weeks protestors undertook nightly forays onto the mountain to bring in food and supplies and change guard against a company squad of Wormald Security agents with dogs and torches. Quarrying continued and at the end of the month the company blasted the mountain twice, once in its main quarry and once near elephant Hole. Supported by Ahern, the company threatened to blast again but two weeks later agreed that, in return for an end to the protest, it would suspend blasting for six months pending evidence of the caves’ scientific significance.

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The report, delivered in August, drew on the work of bat experts and concluded that rare and endangered ghost bats used elephant Hole as a roost, while Speaking Tube, the warmest cave on Mount etna, was essential to their survival. The company took a contrary view and declared the caves were not vital to the bat population and, after conservationists reoccupied the caves, resumed blasting. The blasts destroyed the outer chamber of Speaking Tube and the inner passages of elephant Hole and plugged the entrances of both caves with hundreds of tonnes of rubble. Conservationists contemplated a legal challenge. The problem was obtaining standing. The Minister for the environment refused to sanction a prosecution and an attempt through criminal law failed. Civil action proceeded fitfully, with the speleologists trying several tactics to obtain standing. Appeals took them to an unsympathetic High Court. Costs mounted. even with some legal aid, demands for surety proved insurmountable and in June 1989 the conservationists abandoned the case. Immediately, the company set out to destroy Speaking Tube. employees worked through the weekend to place explosives in the cave, even though the general manager admitted the limestone would not be needed for years. A screen of trucks attempted to block waiting television cameras. On Monday, 12 June 1989 the company blasted the cave. Next day, workers blasted the cave four more times. QCC project officer Adrian Jeffreys said Ahern had ‘the blood of the ghost bats on his hands’. Liz Bourne, QCC coordinator, described the blasting as ‘one of the most irresponsible acts of deliberate environmental vandalism ever perpetrated’. The Brisbane Courier-Mail agreed: The destruction of Speaking Tube cave is inexcusable. The fight to save the bat colonies of Mount etna was one of Australia’s longestrunning conservation battles . . . [The company] had available

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limestone resources sufficient for eight more years; time enough to resolve outstanding questions about the habitat of the bat. Serious questions need to be asked about its priorities and perceptions of a Government able to stand by and allow such environmental vandalism.13

As far as the company and government were concerned, the destruction highlighted the unrelenting and exhilarating march of progress. Ambition triumphed; blasting extended human power over nature. Conquest excited scientists at CSIRO who, in 1984, drew up plans for a very fast train (VFT) linking Sydney and Melbourne via Canberra. Two years later, corporate giants elders, Thomas Nationwide Transport (TNT), and Japanese construction firm Kumagai formed a VFT Joint Venture to build the railway. Soon joined by BHP, the consortium began to lobby State and Federal governments to approve one of the largest construction projects ever contemplated in Australia. Cutting a several hundred-metre-wide swath through the forests of southeast Australia, along river valleys, and across river flats, the project, as far as TNT’s chairman Peter Abeles was concerned, would be ‘an opportunity to restructure the eastern coast of Australia [and] the catalyst for the major redevelopment of Australia . . . The train is only a by-product’.14 Governments were enthusiastic. Schemes of this scale – schemes that massively and monumentally reworked the land – held a perennial and compelling appeal for leading Australians. As a way of imposing the imprint of civilisation, they had no equal. The scheme found less favour among conservationists. A fast train through east Gippsland would divide national parks and compromise the wilderness and conservation values of the region. Construction would cause soil erosion, destroy rainforests, disrupt animal movements, and lead to several hundred kilometres of

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sprawling development from major centres. The ACF and the Australian Railways Union called for a Federal inquiry. VFT consortium chief executive officer Alan Castleman responded: ‘It’s not appropriate to have some form of public enquiry to make the decisions that we should be making’.15 east Gippsland residents meanwhile vowed to disrupt any construction. Action groups formed in most of the towns and localities to be affected and protestors removed orange survey tags placed along the route. Governments remained supportive. Against the advice of eight Federal departments, Richardson backed the project. So did Hawke. It perfectly matched the vision he shared with Abeles of a thoroughly conquered and transformed continent. He told the consortium that he believed the VFT was ‘the most important development project since World War II’.16 Words piled up. In November the consortium released its progress report, Focus For The Future. Counter publications, besides those of the ACF, included VFT, Why a Public Inquiry? by the Gippsland AFT Awareness Group, VFT: Need or Greed? by the VFT Awareness Groups Coalition, and The Social Implications of the Very Fast Train, by the Fast Train Polis Action Group. Leftist perspectives dominated much of the analysis. Critics claimed the issue went beyond conservation, raised a ‘complex range of social and economic questions’, and demonstrated that ‘environmental problems are inextricably linked to social and economic ones’. Furthermore, campaign alliances pointed to a new green politics: an integration between conservationists, unionists and local communities; development of the beginnings of an alternative, ecologically sustainable, national transport strategy; and concern for the processes that enable genuine community participation in decision-making.17

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Talk of a ‘new green politics’ reflected the intellectually vapid fashions of the times. Rather than appeal to a patriotism arising from a firm loyalty to the living land, leftists framed the discussion in terms of abstractions that had no sociological reality. For the struggle for conservation is not a struggle against ‘forces’, ‘structures’, ‘social constructions’, or ‘cultural artifacts’, but a struggle against human nature. Most people identify more with a society that takes on and challenges nature than with one that exists in a sustainable relationship with the natural world. Hence the enormous appeal of the VFT, which promised huge and enduring transformations – transformations glorifying human power. In any case, leftist rhetoric made little impression on the consortium. Cost estimates were more worrying. They escalated, from $5 billion to $7.5 billion, then to $10 billion and beyond. every month saw another half-billion dollars added to costs. Several investigations, including one from CSIRO’s Division of Wildlife and ecology and a Senate inquiry, reported unfavourably on the scheme. Some of the partners dropped out and when, in 1991, the Federal government refused to provide the tax concessions and huge subsidies demanded by the consortium, the last major partner, BHP, abandoned the project.

CHAPTeR 16

House of THeory

During the Wesley Vale campaign, Tasmanian conservationists thought the times might favour the election of more greens to Parliament. Christine Milne decided to stand, so did fellow CROPS campaigner Diane Hollister and peace activist Lance Armstrong. With Bob Brown and Gerry Bates, they campaigned on a joint ticket as the Green Independents. Quickly dubbed the ‘Greens’, they announced their intention to gain the balance of power. As part of a panic campaign to stop the Greens, timber workers took out a full-page newspaper advertisement pleading with voters: ‘Don’t Vote Independent’. Meanwhile, the Tasmanian Chamber of Commerce warned that ‘the whole Tasmanian economic fabric was under attack from the Independents and their radical conservation supporters throughout the world’. On the day before the May 1989 election the Hobart Mercury advised that under no circumstances should people vote for the Greens. Stability demanded a vote for a major party. Anti-democratic doom-saying aside, the Independents won 18 percent of the vote, five seats in Parliament, and the balance of power.1 Premier Gray, always bellicose and now desperate, refused to

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concede defeat, formed a minority government, and delayed recalling Parliament until the last possible date. While his supporters demanded another election so as to engineer a more suitable result, the chairman of Gunns sawmilling company, edmund Rouse, attempted to bribe a Labor member to cross the floor and vote with the Liberals. The revelation undermined the new election movement. When Parliament finally met at the end of June, the Gray Government lost a no-confidence motion moved by Brown. A subsequent Royal Commission hinted at Gray’s involvement in the bribery attempt, found his conduct ‘grossly improper’, and described him as ‘evasive and dishonest’. He later joined the Gunns board.2 Michael Field assumed the Premiership in a Labor Government based on an Accord with the Greens. In exchange for Green support in Parliament, Field agreed to consider Aboriginal land rights, scrap the planned Huon Products Mill at Whale Point, ban mining in national parks, and introduce deposit legislation on bottles and cans. Forests, however, formed the linchpin of the agreement. Conservationists wanted a moratorium on logging of national estate forests and an extension of World Heritage boundaries. To ensure that forest protection was central to the agreement, TWS activists Geoff Law and Bob Burton joined the negotiations. Field, however, never liked the moratorium. He wanted loggers in the forest; he needed loggers in the forest. Gray had so loaded logging operations over the previous years that no sawlogs were available except from national estate forests. Alec Marr, TWS State Director, joined Law in a new round of negotiations and reached what the participants called the Salamanca Agreement. In exchange for an increase in the World Heritage Area from 235 000 hectares to 550 000 hectares, conservationists accepted logging in some 300 hectares of State forests. All parties – the logging industry, Forestry Commission, TWS, the ACF, and the State government – further agreed to

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work towards long-term forest management strategies, to be set out in a final agreement by September 1990. Then, Graham Richardson, thinking of the next Federal election, visited Tasmania. Anxious to secure second preferences from the Democrats and the Greens for the Labor Party, he supported a further extension of the World Heritage Area. New negotiations began. Milne, Brown, Marr, and Sean Cadman worked out revised boundaries that took the World Heritage Area up to 600 000 hectares. Some of the area included forest; much did not. even as Richardson gained the World Heritage nomination, talks between the parties to the Salamanca Agreement broke down. Meanwhile, industry and government’s entrenched commitment to what they euphemistically referred to as ‘resource security’ – continued logging and exploitation – undermined the Accord. Field and his Ministers were torn between wanting government power and wanting to be part of the conquest of nature in Australia. The pursuit of government required an alliance or accord with the Greens, while the pursuit of conquest meant the possible alienation of the Greens and loss of government. Within a few months conquest proved more appealing than government. In October 1990, the Field government decided to increase woodchip exports beyond the level agreed with the Greens. The Accord was over, although for the time being the ALP remained in government. After his later defeat, Field said his chief regret was negotiating the Accord: ‘We should have stood the Greens up. The whole week of discussions about the national estate should not have occurred’.3 As with the Very Fast Train, the election of the Greens attracted a good deal of fervid leftist commentary. Leftists hoped that socialist ideas rapidly losing favour among most Australians might gain new life through the Greens. Some writers proclaimed a ‘working class’ victory; others saw the Greens as ‘the repository of alternative economic,

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social and political thinking’; still others praised the Greens’ ‘internationalism’. Generally, the Greens accepted these analyses, or at least gave them no critical evaluation. Their lazy embrace of Marxist-inflected ideas demonstrated the lack of a robust philosophy they could rely on to justify and explain their stance in the world.4 Despite their collateral allegiance to hackneyed socialist rhetoric, the Greens proclaimed themselves the harbingers of a genuinely new politics, different from anything that had gone before. They stood outside history, independent of human ambition and folly. They believed that destiny, in the form of a bright and shining new politics, was shaping both the Greens and the society in which they lived. According to one sympathiser, the principle of ‘interconnectedness’ and new paradigms ‘based upon the insights of ecology, will re-embed our species within nature, and proceed from a standpoint of reverence for the object of study, seeking understanding, not improved mechanisms of an exploitive mastery’.5 In arguing their patchwork philosophy, the Greens chose jargon, density, and vagueness over comprehensibility, clarity, and consistency. But problems of articulation were not confined to the Greens. All conservationists faced difficulties presenting their case. Conservation starts with a feeling – a felt need to protect nature. For some people the love of living things was connected to a sense of loss, of nostalgia, and of guilt. Others believed that if only we behaved better towards nature, we might re-establish the pristine idyll that once was – or at least protect some of the animals and plants that once lived in it. Many were motivated by the idea of making good, of putting matters to right. Most believed there were limits to our interaction with and exploitation of the rest of planetary life. These feelings could be justified in utilitarian and self-interest terms – up to a point. But the promise of tourism and the possibility of obtaining medicinal drugs from forests or coral reefs did not explain the strong moral compunction that motivated most conservationists.

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Why should humans value the natural world? No one had constructed a clear or forceful answer. Some people found their moral intuitions supported and reinforced by religious traditions that emphasised the sanctity of nature. Some claimed to have found direct inspiration in the wilderness. Brown, for example, wrote: ‘The wilderness is my best place on earth. It is at least as important to me as a place of refreshment, inspiration and fulfillment as is the local house of worship to many other Australians’.6 These justifications did not satisfy everyone. Nor could they. The fact was, conservationists lacked a persuasive intellectual frame in which to place their strong feelings. There was no house of theory: an elaborated set of philosophical principles to which all conservationists assented. Given the difficulty of building a house of theory, many conservationists were content to fudge, improvise, adapt, and borrow. So long as a position seemed to indicate dissent from an imprecisely defined ‘dominant paradigm’, then it could serve conservation. Relevance, coherence, and sense counted for little. Only an oppositional stance mattered. Consequently the Greens especially, but many conservationists as well, confected many rambling arguments derived from socialism, multiculturalism, feminism, and the myth of the ecological Aborigine. These variously fashionable and ephemeral ideologies were products of slippery and vacuous dogmas based on philosophies that responded to crisis but had no staying power. Leftist history is littered with abandoned projects. Left groups form, divide, re-form, and redivide in a miasma of incoherence. In contrast, conservation requires tenacity and endurance. The steady and unrelenting assault on nature in Australia demanded conservationists’ full attention – often over very long periods of time. When woodchipping plans for the southeast forests of NSW unfolded in 1967 a spokesman for the Harris-Daishowa eden

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woodchip mill assured the public the forests in the 300 000-hectare concession area would certainly not be denuded, rather they would be improved, after centuries of neglect, with the company’s silvicultural experts working in, and guarding the forests. Wildlife will be perfectly safe, as there would be intense reforestation at all times, ensuring the survival of birds and animals.

Hardly reassured, conservationists began protesting almost as soon as logging started in 1969.7 Over the next 10 years the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, the ACF, and the Nature Conservation Council of NSW unsuccessfully argued for southeast national parks. Then, in 1985, Sydney, Canberra, and local conservation groups formed the South east Forest Alliance (SeFA) to revive the idea of expanded national parks. The following year, Jeff Angel, SeFA convener and assistant director of the Total environment Centre (TeC), announced that 130 conservation groups backed proposals to establish two national parks in southeast NSW – the Tantawangalo and Coolangubra national parks, which would cover ‘about 60,000 hectares or a quarter of the woodchip zone’.8 Speaking for the ACF, Milo Dunphy, never shy about invoking nationalism in the cause of conservation, reminded Australians that the ‘wholly foreign-owned’ Daishowa was destroying ‘more native forest’ than any other company in the State. He called woodchipping ‘the greatest assault on native wildlife in the history of NSW’. Four months later, the AHC listed both Tantawangalo and Coolangubra on the interim Register of the National estate.9 AHC evaluation failed to impress the Forestry Commission, which began clearfelling in Coolangubra in mid-1987. Conservationists went to court demanding the Forestry Commission prepare

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an environmental Impact Statement. Victory seemed at hand, especially because in the lead-up to the April 1988 State election Barrie Unsworth’s Labor government promised, if re-elected, to establish the Tantawangalo and Coolangubra national parks. But Labor lost the election and the Liberal–National Party Coalition assumed government under the leadership of the determinedly pro-logging Nick Greiner. From the beginning, every government decision concerning the southeast forests favoured woodchipping and entrenched destruction. In December 1988, with the approval of Graham Richardson, Federal Resources Minister Peter Cook extended Harris–Daishowa’s licence for another 15 years and increased the woodchip quota to 880 000 tonnes annually, almost double the amount originally granted in 1969. Angel said conservationists would continue the campaign and were about to establish a ‘peaceful resistance base camp’ on private property near Coolangubra Forest. A few weeks later the blockade began. Protestors, in breach of public forest trespass laws, confronted loggers and bulldozers. Police moved in and by the middle of March 1989 had arrested 41 people. In the next two weeks they arrested another 87. As the trees fell, a leaked Forestry Commission document revealed that foresters had planned roading and logging to deliberately target and destroy the conservation values of the forest. More protestors arrived and arrests mounted, 450 by the end of April. During a long weekend in June, 2000 protestors gathered on Roland Breckwoldt’s farm near Candelo for the preservation of Tantawangalo, Coolangubra, egan Peaks, and Yowaka forests. A 500-strong demonstration on one day resulted in 105 arrests; a much bigger demonstration the following day resulted in no arrests. Over winter, logging wound down and protestors dispersed. They

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returned in September, blocked a logging road into Coolangubra, and chained themselves to logging trucks. The AHC entered the debate. Chairman Pat Galvin called for a halt to logging in all remaining undisturbed old-growth forest. One blockader maintained a tree-sit for 25 days – the longest known period of continuous tree-sitting. Another went on a hunger strike for over three weeks. Meanwhile, NSW and the Commonwealth agreed to commission a biological survey of the National estate Areas in the southeast. Prepared by scientists from the Australian Museum and released in May 1990, the report called for an immediate halt to the logging of all old-growth forests and for Coolangubra to be declared a wilderness. The NSW Minister for Natural Resources, Ian Causley, said he was disappointed at the report’s timing, while the Forestry Commission described it as a ‘fairly disappointing contribution’ to the forests debate. Implementing its recommendations would close down half of the region’s timber industry and lead to the loss of hundreds of jobs.10 More reports followed but they hardly altered the situation on the ground, where logging and protest continued. By October over 1000 people had been arrested while defending Coolangubra. That month, Hawke and Greiner signed a South east Forest Agreement, opening up large areas of the National estate to logging. Jeff Angel observed: It’s quite clear that the Hawke and Greiner governments are going to embark on a massacre of the National estate forests . . . You can only come to the conclusion that these two governments don’t give a damn about the environment or what the community demands.11

Angel was right. Only politics mattered. Governments would never act in the interests of conservation merely for the sake of conservation. Scrupulously dedicated to the conquest of nature, they would only conserve when forced to by political pressure.

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When the Hawke government proclaimed Stage II of Kakadu National Park in 1983, large areas of the eco-region still lay outside the park. A possible Stage III, encompassing the South Alligator River, included tidal flats, mangroves, open woodland, tall forests, and Coronation Hill, where exploration had revealed major deposits of gold, platinum, and palladium. The local Jawoyn people claimed Coronation Hill as a sacred site. Although Hawke’s Ministers supported Kakadu Stage II, several sought to ensure Stage III did not preclude mining. In concert with the Northern Territory government and miners, they first denigrated the land itself and said it was severely degraded. Naturalist Harry Butler, employed as an adviser to the Northern Territory government, had already labelled Stage II a ‘clapped-out Holden’. Gareth evans, Minister for Resources and energy, adopted Butler’s theme and described Stage III as mostly ‘clapped out buffalo country’. Other areas were ‘getting close to being a tatty old tart’. Next, mining proponents argued that a mining ban would constitute a negligent disregard of the possibility of vast mineral wealth. Australia could not afford to forgo mining. evans recommended that only 65 percent of the proposed Stage III be dedicated to national park. The remaining 35 percent should be available for exploitation.12 Campaigners from the ACF, TWS, and the Northern Territory environment Centre argued the South Alligator River country was a magnificent transitional zone between monsoonal ecosystems and land further south. It was a necessary and essential part of an enlarged park, especially crucial for Kakadu mammals. Mining would undermine the area’s integrity, contaminants would leak into the watershed, wildlife would drink the cyanide-contaminated water stored in the tailings dam, and buildings, roads, traffic, noise, earthworks, pits, and dust would spread expanding zones of disturbance. Furthermore, because the mining industry had such a huge stake in Coronation

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Hill conservationists realised that access to Kakadu would open every national park in the country to mining. It had to be opposed. The government proceeded warily and in September 1986 cabinet compromised: it would exclude all further exploration and mining from Stages I and II, nominate Stage II for World Heritage listing, and expand the park by 4000 square kilometres but declare a 2150-square kilometre mining-tolerant Conservation Zone around Coronation Hill. Confirmed in December, the decision displeased both miners – who wanted access to the whole area – and conservationists, who said mining at Coronation Hill would threaten downstream wetlands. With the campaign for Kakadu attracting more and more attention, the Australian Mining Industry Council (AMIC) warned that it would ‘go in boots and all’ if the Federal government prohibited mining at Coronation Hill. Likewise, conservationists from national and State peak groups foreshadowed a campaign of direct action and international protest if the government allowed mining.13 Conservationists met Richardson and suggested the Conservation Zone for Stage III be reduced to less than 50 square kilometres. Although they wanted no mining, they believed that a smaller Conservation Zone would buy time until the movement garnered enough support to stop mining altogether. For quite separate reasons, Richardson supported the suggestion. So did Hawke. Neither wanted to go into the 1990 Federal election with Kakadu open to miners. The following month, over the opposition of economic Ministers such as Peter Cook, John Button, John Dawkins, and Peter Walsh, cabinet decided to reduce the Conservation Zone to 47.5 square kilometres. Meanwhile, representatives from TWS, the ACF, Greenpeace, the NT environment Centre, and the Jawoyn met and agreed to form a ‘green-black’ alliance to block mining in Kakadu. ‘We are determined to assist the Jawoyn people of the Kakadu National Park area to resist

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mining’, declared ACF director Philip Toyne. His bravado disguised differences in the alliance. Not all Jawoyn opposed the mine. Some worked for BHP and supported mining and there was no blanket opposition to mining among Northern Territory Aboriginal groups. ‘The days of “land rights, not mining” are long gone’, said a spokesman for the Northern Land Council. Other Aborigines felt conservationists gave less support to the cultural reasons for stopping the mine than the conservation ones.14 Cabinet’s decision to reduce the Conservation Zone came with qualifications. Ministers agreed to refer questions concerning the Jawoyn’s claim over the area and the cumulative environmental impact of Coronation Hill and other mining to an inquiry to be conducted by the newly-established Resource Assessment Commission (RAC), designed to investigate conflicts between resource development and conservation from an economic point of view. Pro-development Ministers thereby hoped to reduce the influence of conservationists and ensure that development received priority in government decisions.15 Toyne, who had spent 90 minutes on the phone with Hawke just before the cabinet decision, congratulated the government. ‘It has clearly been a hard-fought battle, but we think the Government has got it right’, he said and vowed the Foundation would continue to fight before the RAC to have mining totally stopped. Miners were less pleased. The assistant director of the AMIC said, ‘Our first reaction is that it is an appalling decision. We are very, very disappointed the Government does not appear to have gone any way towards honouring its word on either the Conservation Zone or the Coronation Hill mining lease.’ He predicted ruin: ‘This decision will destroy investor confidence in Australia’.16 Likewise, mining zealots in cabinet and on the backbench scorned the decision. Bob Collins, Northern Territory Labor senator, said, ‘It

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was a very bad decision for the Northern Territory’. Of conservationists, he observed, ‘Those bastards wouldn’t be satisfied with anything’. To formalise anti-conservation sentiment, Labor member for Kalgoorlie, Graeme Campbell, announced a Coalition for Sustainable Development, dedicated to combating green influence. He described the Kakadu decision as ‘wrong, silly [and] indefensible’, and predicted the government would win no votes through its support for conservation.17 When Labor did win the March 1990 Federal election, opinions differed. Richardson, at least, ascribed Labor’s narrow victory to the flow of preferences from ‘environmentally-aware’ voters supporting the Democrats and green candidates. The election did not yet resolve the fate of Kakadu but within a few weeks the RAC’s inquiry into the Kakadu Conservation Zone started. It ran for over a year and the report, tabled in May 1991, concluded that ‘the evidence suggests that a single mine, properly managed and monitored, would have a small and geographically limited direct impact on the known biological resources of the Conservation Zone’. Commission chairman Donald Stewart was less sure about the impact on the Jawoyn: If mining proceeds in the Zone it will be against the wishes of the senior Jawoyn men, who are supported in their view by many Jawoyn people and other senior Aboriginal people in the Region; further, mining will adversely affect the ability of Jawoyn people, particularly the senior men, to sustain cultural and religious values, beliefs and practices that are important to them.18

Pro-mining critics objected to the report’s partiality to Aborigines. The AMIC faulted the inquiry for not suggesting ‘any mechanism for educating the Jawoyn on the fallacy of some of their mythological beliefs’. A mining company executive said Stewart had either ‘erred’

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or ‘been misled’ on the Aboriginal issues, while the Opposition Spokesman for Aboriginal Affairs, Michael Wooldridge, dismissed the sacred site claim over Coronation Hill as ‘ridiculous’, saying, ‘If the Government thinks this is a one-off . . . then it is quite wrong, because under this interpretation of the [Heritage] Act any area of significance, no matter how trivial to Aboriginal people, can be declared a sacred site’.19 Six weeks later, cabinet decided against mining. Stage III of Kakadu National Park would incorporate the remainder of the Conservation Zone, including Coronation Hill and the whole of Kakadu would be nominated for World Heritage listing. It was Hawke’s decision – on behalf of the Jawoyn. As a humanist, he believed more in their cause than in the protection of nature and he defended their beliefs. Despite Hawke’s Aboriginal emphasis, media commentators interpreted the decision as a victory for conservationists. So did most of the cabinet. Ministers vowed conservation would never again receive priority. There would be no more ‘Coronation Hills’ and certainly no mechanism for educating people about the fallacies of the mythological beliefs underpinning mining. In any case, such exposure was unlikely to end the conquest of nature in Australia. The end of sandmining on Fraser Island in 1976, for example, did not end the exploitation. Logging, in place for over a century, continued. Year after year, loggers had their way with the island’s tall, open satinay-brushbox and blackbutt forests, upheaving the land and destroying habitat as disastrously as mining would have done. And year after year John Sinclair and FIDO campaigned for conservation and World Heritage listing. Just as regularly, successive Federal governments refused to act. They did not care to take on the BjelkePetersen government. even with the collapse of the corrupt Bjelke-Petersen government, followed shortly after by the end of National Party rule in 1989 and

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the coming to power of a State Labor government under Premier Wayne Goss, logging continued. Although the State ALP’s policy supported a national park for all of Fraser Island, once in power, Goss reneged. The government agreed to extend the park but only to include swamps and heath, not forests. Then, in January 1990, to forestall possible Federal government nomination, Goss announced an inquiry to be headed by Tony Fitzgerald who had conducted the royal commission exposing corruption in the Bjelke-Petersen government. Although Fitzgerald knew little about conservation, he received broad terms of reference: to investigate all aspects of the ‘conservation use and management’ of the Great Sandy Region – the area formed by Fraser Island and Cooloola on the adjoining mainland – as well as to recommend alternative dispute resolution procedures in conservation conflicts. Loggers and their unions welcomed the inquiry. Bill Ludwig, Queensland secretary of the Australian Workers Union (AWU), said if ‘hardline greenies [got their way over forests] Australians will be reduced to eating bark for food’.20 Conservationists were ambivalent. They believed Fraser Island’s World Heritage values had already been established. There was no need for another inquiry, just action. But with the Queensland Forest Service about to present a case for continued logging, they had no choice but to participate. Seven conservation organisations formed the Joint Conservation Group (JCG), represented by Aila Keto, Sinclair, and Adrian Jeffreys, director of the WPSQ. When the initial hearings started in April 1990, conservationists suggested a logging moratorium pending the inquiry outcome. Fitzgerald said he had no authority to order a moratorium. Keto and others then negotiated directly with the Forestry Service and the two sawmills involved and the Service agreed to limit logging to regrowth areas. The government promptly claimed credit for the arrangement.

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Not all local conservationists participated in the inquiry. Brisbane’s Rainforest Action Group preferred direct action and mounted a blockade in April – the latest of a number stretching back through the 1980s. Protestors erected tripods, buried themselves in the middle of roads, and glued themselves to logging equipment. JCG endorsed the blockade and Sinclair was sympathetic. He had occasionally camped with earlier blockaders and lent them gear – some of which he never recovered. But he did not believe blockades worked tactically. Nor did he have time for all-day meetings and consensus decision-making. Furthermore, he believed blockaders’ lack of stamina for sustained campaigning demonstrated ‘a gap between passion and performance. Very few causes can be won in a day or a week or a month or a year’.21 Two months after the inquiry began, TWS, citing bias, withdrew and joined the direct action against the loggers. And, in July, after police and forestry workers busted the protestors’ camp in a pre-dawn raid and unlawfully detained protestors, the Australian Democrats withdrew from the inquiry. Conservationists accused Goss of copying the ‘strong-arm tactics’ employed by former Premier Bjelke-Petersen.22 Fitzgerald’s May 1991 report declared that the Great Sandy Region was ‘a magnificent inheritance to pass on to future generations’, meeting all four criteria for World Heritage listing. The long delay suited Goss. He had satisfied his AWU allies, allowed loggers to take out thousands of extra trees, and was now able to announce broad acceptance of Fitzgerald’s recommendations including the declaration of park status, an end to logging, nomination of the area for World Heritage, co-management with Aborigines – who would have rights to traditional hunting, gathering, and fishing – and sanction of a tourist resort at Kingfisher Bay.23 Protection of one area often doomed another. Governments and

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their agencies frequently interpreted conservation as a licence to exploit. even as the Goss government agreed to World Heritage status for Fraser Island, it contemplated oil drilling next to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and hydro-electric schemes that would flood part of the Wet Tropics. And in New South Wales the Wran government’s 1983 decision to end rainforest logging placed the fate of 3.6 million hectares of forest remaining in the hands of the Forestry Commission in greater jeopardy than ever. Foresters regarded the rainforest decision as fixing a boundary between areas intended for conservation and those marked for destruction. And open slather – as far as the Commission was concerned – made environmental Impact Statements unnecessary. Between 1982 and 1987 the Commission undertook no new impact assessments. To remedy this omission conservationists went to court. Trevor Bailey of the South Arm Catchment Protection Group successfully challenged timber licences granted by the Commission for the Mistake State Forest near Bowraville. Next, in 1990, John Corkill of the North east Forests Alliance (NeFA) obtained an interim injunction restraining the Commission from logging 7000 hectares within the Chaelundi State Forest near Dorrigo. Unwilling to abandon logging, the Commission quickly prepared an eIS for three compartments of Chaelundi covering 550 hectares, containing some of the last stands of mature tallowwood on the North Coast and exceptionally rich in wildlife. Unsurprisingly, the impact statements favoured logging. In response, the NPWS said the statements failed to adequately assess logging disturbance. Court action complemented on-ground action. In July 1991 NeFA supporters set up camp near Chaelundi and mounted a blockade: they erected road barriers, clung to seven-metre-high timber tripods, crouched in concrete pipes embedded in the road, chained themselves to road-building equipment, and buried themselves in the

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ground. Within a week police had charged 70 people with obstruction and breaching the peace. With the blockaders defending forest, Corkill again appeared in the Land and environment Court. He said it was disgraceful that the people of NSW could not trust public authorities to protect the State’s natural heritage and charged that cabinet’s approval of logging disregarded endangered species. The court agreed and found that the Forestry Commission would be committing an offence under sections of the National Parks and Wildlife Act if it logged the Chaelundi State Forest.24 Adverse reactions to the Chaelundi judgment were extreme and the implications exaggerated. Pro-development Ministers claimed the ruling could halt major NSW highway projects and stop normal farming activity. National Party Ministers began to pressure Premier Greiner to circumvent the court decision by altering the law. In October, cabinet approved regulations limiting the operation of the National Parks and Wildlife Act and exempting government and private activities from laws protecting endangered animals. Next, the government appealed the original Land and environment Court decision but lost – and lost in Parliament as well. Members, including the former Minister for education, Terry Metherell – who had resigned, citing, among other grievances, the government’s stance on Chaelundi – voted to disallow the Chaelundi regulation and then passed interim endangered species legislation drafted by Corkill, his barrister, and the environmental Defender’s Office. Greiner equally failed to gain a majority in the Legislative Council, where Fred and elaine Nile of the Call to Australia Party declared the government’s measures contrary to their obligation to be ‘good stewards of God’s creation’.25 Unable to accept defeat and fanatically committed to forest destruction, the government declared the new legislation unworkable and in

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March 1992 introduced the Timber Industry Protection Act to ensure that employment took precedence over conservation, regardless of the consequences for endangered animals. The Labor Opposition agreed and only Independents raised objections. As 2500 timber workers rallied outside Parliament, even Terry Metherell dropped his opposition. In return, the government conceded that eight areas nominated for wilderness listing – including the Chaelundi compartments – would not be logged pending impact statements. Metherell later alleged that Greiner had offered his help in obtaining a position with the State’s new environment Protection Agency. The Independent Commission Against Corruption found that Greiner and his Minister for environment, Tim Moore, had breached public trust. They both resigned over the affair.

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GreeN sABoTeur

The defence of Australia’s natural heritage pitted conservationists against governments that were extreme, irrational, hysterical, dishonest, unscrupulous, abusive, cowardly, despotic, and often corrupt. Much government mendacity and duplicity reflected the humbug and manipulation intrinsic to public life. Leaders survive by deceiving others – followers as well as opponents – and by doing to others what they would prefer not to have done to themselves. everywhere and at all times, leadership and malefaction go hand in hand.1 Conservation, however, changed the character of political debate. While much of conservation seemed entirely compatible with a modern politics devoted to bureaucracy, plans, proposals, and blueprints, the task of saving the country’s natural heritage raised questions that could not be resolved through business as usual. Conservation demanded a kind of clarity and veracity entirely alien to a politics based on fantasy and simplification. For, although people can be fooled, tricked, and beguiled, nature cannot. Material reality resists importuning, finessing, or re-negotiation. Nature’s machinery is invariant, not subject to legislation or cultural conditioning. It cannot be compromised.

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Additionally, despite rhetorical and conceptual concessions by conservationists, the cause still implied a challenge to the country’s commitment to expansion and increase. This was, potentially, by far the most subversive aspect of conservation. By the 1990s politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, and most intellectuals had spent a lifetime championing, justifying, mystifying, and facilitating growth. The quest for more had become a common cause, beyond question or doubt, beyond reason and compromise. A bigger Australia with more humans and more human enterprise seemed right and good, not a viable undertaking but a moral one. The idea of growth was simple, general, and, in effect, religious – and extremely difficult to oppose. In any dispute or conflict the negative case needs a double dose of brilliance to arouse enthusiasm and prevail. But brilliance is rare, genius uncommon. And while tenacious and impassioned, Australian conservationists were neither brilliant nor especially articulate. Their case against development and growth was inchoate, feeble, often incoherent, recurringly inconsistent, indistinct, and ambiguous. Conservation successes – always temporary, partial, and qualified – depended, more often than not, on fortuitous political alignments and the bungling incompetence of opponents than on the proficiency and foresight of the conservation case. Furthermore, the case against growth lacked candour. Conservationists challenged something many did not really wish to oppose. For, to oppose growth would be to oppose part of their own human nature. The great majority of humans find the idea of growth alluring. It suggests adventure, excitement, opportunity, and accomplishment. In comparison, sustainability implies monotony, tedium, and stasis. People prefer association with action rather than passivity. They would rather belong to a civilisation that challenged the world even at the risk of self-destruction than live modestly in a sustainable society. People want to be part of a society keen to take on nature, rather

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than submissively to remain ‘at one’ with her in stagnant equilibrium. Dazzling, loudly proclaimed ambition compels more interest and allegiance than self-effacing counsel. Growth worshippers, however, misread the situation. They interpreted conservationists’ resolve as evidence of an organised, indivisible, and seditious movement. They feared a systematic undermining of their religion of growth and conquest. Leaders in the mining industry, for example, believed that increasing conservation awareness and the accompanying ‘greening’ of Australian politics threatened expansion. Abandonment of the Wesley Vale project and the conservation of Coronation Hill seemed portents to the end of growth. Pro-growth propaganda increased. The backlash started with an intellectual justification: the need for balance between conservation and development. According to the AMIC, ‘The balance between the need to conserve and protect the environment and the need for economic development has to be struck’. What could be more reasonable?2 But balance was a weasel word, one that concealed and confused more than it clarified. Commonly promoted by miners, governments, bureaucrats, and developers, balance was never used neutrally but always to buttress a preconceived position: there was too much protection and not enough development. The argument relied on the notion of nature as a pie that could be sliced into ever-thinner pieces to accommodate new people and their always-growing demands. With each re-division – a little more water to power, a little more to irrigation, a little more land to mining, a little more to coastal development – what remained to support other species diminished. But life does not survive on smaller and smaller shares in the name of ‘balance’. At some level of exploitation, life collapses and dependent relationships disintegrate: much as dammed, drained, and polluted rivers like the Murray–Darling shut down; much as vast areas of

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de-vegetated, salt-poisoned, eroded land shut down; much as overexploited fisheries shut down. Moreover, the notion of balance took no account of damage already done. To its proponents, balance only applied to the present and the future. They never acknowledged past depredations that had left Australia degraded, and in many places beyond repair. Life in Australia could not afford any more ‘balance’ between conservation and development. Too much had already been destroyed. There were other reasons to suspect the idea of balance. Achieving balance requires negotiation. But, if negotiations do not include all the concerned parties, then the resulting ‘balance’ has not been legitimately obtained. And never do negotiations include the full community of subjects. Politics specialises in exclusion and in eliminating whole realms of questions from the political agenda. What politics most excludes is nature. And by 1990 the politics of exclusion enjoyed the willing involvement of many conservationists. Whereas once conservationists had argued for the conservation of nature for nature’s sake, by the late 1980s many had recast their conservation rationales in utilitarian and economic terms – conservation for tourism, conservation for potential drug finds, conservation for use. Utilitarian conservationists dominated the ACF, and the Foundation began to speak more for economics than for nature. Here, the ACF reflected the times. The end of the Cold War in the late 1980s revivified the Marxist view of humans as essentially economic beings and the Marxist view of the world as essentially dependent on economic arrangements. The emphasis on economics – although no longer labelled Marxist – suited business. In 1990 the Business Council of Australia argued that environmental concerns should ‘be integrated into economic decision-making, which in turn has to be focused on improved international competitiveness’.3 The hope of business, governments, and many conservation

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groups that the earth could be managed so as to prolong growth received expression in the proposal for ecologically Sustainable Development (eSD). ‘The task confronting us’, according to a Federal government discussion paper on the subject, ‘is to take better care of the environment while ensuring economic growth’. Subsequently, the government convened a number of working groups to study how sustainable development could be applied in nine different industries. Government grants funded the participation of the ACF and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in discussions dominated by bureaucrats from development-oriented departments. The focus remained the welfare of the economy.4 eSD campaigners believed inherently damaging and dangerous activities such as tourism, forestry, mining, fisheries, agriculture, transport, energy use, and manufacturing could all be made ‘environmentally friendly’, chiefly through economic means. They endorsed the view that conservation issues were fundamentally economic. But what did eSD mean? Delia Paul, ACF/WWF eSD Liaison Officer, admitted that ‘eSD is not an easy concept to grapple with, or to convey or implement. The issues are so broad and complex that this [special 1992 edition of Habitat entirely devoted to eSD] can in no way convey the full extent of our thinking.’ But how complex could a subject be? even einstein’s 1905 special theory of relativity took only 30 pages to explain – about half a typical edition of Habitat. In contrast, the ACF’s prolixity reflected not profundity and complexity but a desperate failure of imagination. To further obscure the issue, Habitat provided a half-page glossary of eSD jargon terms – ‘intergenerational equity’, ‘natural capital’, ‘social equity’, ‘efficiency’, ‘global perspective’, and ‘pricing environmental values and natural resources’ – that accentuated the determining frame of economics at the expense of nature conservation. An idea so convoluted and overloaded with jargon was doomed to topple.5

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A chorus of anti-conservation hysteria accompanied the government’s reassertion of economic growth as the only valid purpose of human community. In Western Australia the mining industry launched an advertising blitz to counter the ‘greenie threat’. elsewhere, Alan Moran, the first assistant commissioner of the Industries Commission, claimed Australian development had already proven sustainable and concern about land degradation was ‘completely unfounded’ and was one of the ‘great fabrications of alarmists and rhetoricians’. Historian Geoffrey Blainey suggested that the biggest threat to solving the nation’s foreign debt crisis was the ‘seductive and deceptive propaganda’ of powerful conservationists. Under the alarmist headline ‘Green menace threatens to destroy the economy’, columnist Greg Sheridan described greens as ‘wowsers’, ‘profoundly anti-human’, and ‘blatantly politicised and extreme’. Meanwhile, the Australian’s National Affairs writer, Des Keegan, argued that ‘The conservation thing is now beyond reason and far short of our economic imperatives’. Other columnists accused conservationists of arrogance, cynicism, elitism, hypocrisy, and of being driven by religious fervour.6 In reality, the conservation movement was far less homogenous than opponents chose to believe. The cause of conservation encompassed a wide variety of views, attitudes, and understandings. Motivations differed and clashes of opinion and emphasis marked a whole range of issues. Population was among the most contentious. The ACF’s 1983 decision to focus on energy and consumption rather than on immigration and numbers of people did not mean the end of population as a conservation issue. Members and councillors continued to submit motions committing the ACF to a reduction in immigration. Director Philip Toyne argued against the position and carried council with him. He suggested ‘a large number of people who are anti-immigration for ethnic and cultural reasons’ adopted

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ecological arguments to bolster their views and were pushing their way into green groups. Some were joining the ACF and their motives needed investigating. He did not want the ACF to be seen as fellow travellers of racists.7 In the meantime, the ACF adopted the feeble view that consumption was the key problem and cause of unsustainability. To concentrate on population, Toyne said, was ‘too simplistic’. This was disingenuous. Toyne’s dismissal of opponents’ arguments as ‘simplistic’ inflated his ‘much more sophisticated approach’ and disguised his own crude understanding.8 Toyne’s spurious ‘sophisticated approach’ also represented a retreat into abstraction. An abstract idea, consumption, subsumes, under one all-encompassing word, a multitude of actions, behaviours, decisions, outlooks, and habits different in their origins and different in their effects – some are sustainable, some unsustainable, some merely conspicuous, and some prevalent but not obvious. They do not necessarily belong together. Accenting consumption set an abstract idea against a concrete reality (numbers of people) and gave greater credence to the abstraction. Such is the bias and folly of the sophisticated mind. Attributing causation to the abstraction compounded the folly. Furthermore, emphasising the conceptually-jumbled idea of consumption ignored the destructive multiplier affects of increasing numbers of people in an already affluent society. One councillor stated that, ‘In the past the ACF policy considered population size only, but it is clear that it is neither practical nor honest to divorce numbers from the behaviour of the population’. Identifying consumption as the source of the problem, however, only consolidated the divorce. Some conservationists refused to accept the separation. Geoff Mosley continued to argue for population restraint, while ACF president Hal Wootton saw population as an ‘overriding issue’ that

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conservationists could not ignore simply because it was ‘difficult and politically controversial’.9 Conservationists who ventured into the ‘difficult and politically controversial’ area of population included Bob Birrell and former ACF councillor and CSIRO soil scientist Chris Watson. In 1986 they started a newsletter, Population Stability for Australia, to track the issue. They described immigration as ‘The New Cargo Cult’ and in successive issues discussed immigration numbers, analysed the politics of population growth, and provided a forum for people concerned about population. Watson lived in Canberra, where he began a file of clippings of letters to the editor from people questioning population growth. He contacted the writers and suggested they convene an organisation that would tackle the issue other conservation groups avoided. Australians for an ecologically Sustainable Population (AeSP) formed in early 1989. Branches opened in other States, and members began organising public meetings to tackle the view that Australia was an underpopulated country. They argued that, in relation to the country’s carrying capacity and present lifestyle, the population was already too large. AeSP members included a large number of people with scientific backgrounds, who insisted the organisation be scientifically oriented and argue the case for population restraint on the evidence of the continent’s biological decline. Scientific credentials, however, were no prophylactic against foolishness or credulity, especially in relation to Aborigines. People believed what they wanted to believe, regardless of evidence. At a rainforest symposium in Cairns in 1987, Ian Lowe, head of Science Policy at Griffith University, argued that ‘there are general principles of resource management which [hunter-gatherer] societies embody, and from which we can learn if we have the perceptiveness (and the humility) to do so’. Usually, advocates of native peoples as exemplars

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of ecological rectitude never specify what they expect modern people to emulate. What are the long-established principles and methods people can adopt to tread softly on the earth? In this instance, however, Lowe attempted to elaborate. ‘Some of these lessons’, he claimed, ‘were spelled out over a century ago by Chief Seattle’: The earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves. This we know: The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know: all things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life: he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.10

Fine sentiments. except Chief Seattle never proclaimed them, nor did any other Native American. The entire speech was a concoction, written by a modern, non-Native American scriptwriter (Ted Perry) for a 1972 film about ecology and falsely attributed to Chief Seattle.11 Despite their counterfeit, modern provenance, Chief Seattle’s words won disciples all over the world and appeared on t-shirts and wall posters, were reproduced in books and articles, and were frequently cited as the distillation and epitome of ‘traditional wisdom’ and the true and authentic expression of the beliefs of indigenous people everywhere. In Australia, they provided the template for platitudes about Aborigines living in ‘ecological balance’ with their environment. Some commentators who cited Chief Seattle’s phoney words went further. economist and former RAC researcher Clive Hamilton claimed that ‘Much of the inspiration for the philosophy of environmentalism comes from the spiritual outlook of indigenous peoples

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such as Native Americans and Australian Aborigines’. As an example, he quoted Chief Seattle and observed that ‘It is apparent that these words express a powerful sense of unity between ourselves and the earth’. Like the belief in the authenticity of Chief Seattle’s speech itself, these comments rested more on projection and wishful thinking than on fact. And perhaps there was guilt. At least Judith Wright admitted it. Her desire to fight for the Aborigines’ cause, she said, was composed of ‘two strands: the love of the land we have invaded and the guilt of the invasion’.12 The myth of the ecological Aborigine elevated Aborigines to positions of moral and spiritual superiority, and disparaged people of non-Aboriginal background. They would never belong in Australia. Their ancestry rendered them incapable of ever acquiring a sense of connection. After a visit to Kakadu, Michael Krockenberger, Darwin environment Centre coordinator and ACF councillor, observed: ‘In country like this white people feel like strangers. It is awe-inspiring. There is also a sense of incongruity, a feeling that white people cannot easily belong. Only the Aboriginal people are truly at home’.13 even Geoff Mosley – otherwise sober in his assessments – succumbed to the contemporary propaganda of exclusion. He said of Aborigines: ‘The deepness of their feeling of attachment to their country surpasses any similar feeling we may have. even the Aborigines who have been cut off from their country retain this “land need” through their Aboriginality’.14 These were extraordinary claims: racist, self-scourging, and, for conservationists, self-defeating. After all, conservation sought to encourage people to feel at home in Australia. Citizens were not condemned forever to be outsiders, interlopers, or usurpers. They could change, identify with the continent, and care and conserve. Otherwise what was the point? Who else would support conservation except patriots? Many prominent conservationists, however,

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declared that for non-Aboriginal people connection was impossible. According to the tenets of racial thinking, people of non-Aboriginal descent could never and would never feel comfortable living in Australia. If true – if non-Aboriginal people were inherently incapable of attachment – then conservation was doomed. Indeed, the subject tested people’s commitment to conservation. Rock singer Peter Garrett – who became ACF president in 1989 – along with Toyne, campaigned as much for land rights as for conservation. ensnared by the myth of the ecological Aborigine, many conservationists displayed a perverse unwillingness to accept Aborigines as members of the human race. Land rights advocates couched their arguments in terms of ‘them’ and ‘us’. Individual human beings disappeared, replaced by a generalised Aborigine and a generalised white. This was fantasy, a fantasy about the other. The fact was, there is no them and no us, only benighted individual human beings, each with their own foibles, traits, infirmities, and delusions. All humans share the same biology and endure the same existential anxieties generated by common flesh and blood in a common material world. All humans came out of Africa and all are indigenous to planet earth. All are capable of alienation and of belonging. Race thinkers, however, insisted on discrimination. The 1991 Queensland land rights bill allowed Aborigines to claim land rights over all the State’s national parks, or 2.7 percent of the State. Aboriginal groups had already indicated they would seek rights over Green Island and Fitzroy Island near Cairns, Iron Range and Archer River Bend on Cape York, as well as Mossman Gorge, Fraser Island, and other parks. The Kuku Yalanji clan said it would apply to hunt cassowary and other wildlife in the Mossman Gorge and Daintree national parks. Some conservationists applauded the legislation. Others said it was inconceivable that Aborigines should hunt rare wildlife with

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modern firearms in the relatively small proportion of land protected as national park. In a letter to Garrett, ACF member Harry Dick of Cooktown described the ACF’s and other groups’ support for the Queensland land rights bill as treachery. He said he would work to reverse the ACF policy and would resign if he failed. ‘No other group in the community has the right to hunt in national parks and it is just not on with Aborigines’, he wrote. ‘The ACF leaders have gone about this with no consultation with their membership. Members are afraid to speak out because they’ll be branded racists’.15 Not all conservationists were cowed. Bill Fisher, North Queensland director of the National Parks and Wildlife Service, said the government rushed into a land rights policy without informed consideration. Changing the protective status of national parks, he said, had ‘very serious potential to weaken the status for all time’. Jill Thorsborne, president of the Cairns WPSQ branch, backed Fisher and led a campaign to pressure the Government to exempt national parks from land claims.16 Judith Wright viewed this dissent with alarm. With a dogmatism deriving from her blinkered view of justice for Aborigines, she would not tolerate any questioning of the myth of the ecological Aborigine. She resigned as patron of the WPSQ and, in an open letter to members, condemned the Society: ‘I must disassociate myself completely from any organisation opposed to land rights and I therefore have no option but to resign the patronship’, she wrote. And, in a display of the race thinking – dividing the world into ‘them’ and ‘us’ – that had come to characterise her conservation advocacy, she continued: If it hadn’t been for the Aborigines’ systems of management, their respect for the country, their self-control, we would never have had these areas [wilderness] to take over in the first place. They are a darned sight better at managing than we are.17

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John Sinclair vigorously disputed this claim. At the Fourth National Wilderness Conference in 1993, he cited several instances of Aboriginal involvement in destructive development and argued, ‘It is not safe to say that Aborigines will protect and respect wilderness values of land’. He did not believe there was a ‘complementarity of interests’ between Aborigines and wilderness campaigners. On the contrary, there was conflict. even worse, conservationists had ceded priority: . . . the Aboriginal community has now scored a . . . significant victory over conservation by persuading the nature and wilderness conservation movement to make their claims subservient to Aboriginal land claims. This abdication of priority for conservation advocacy is now one of the most disturbing trends in the future of conservation in Northern Queensland and Northern Australia.18

Disturbing trends for conservation could be discerned everywhere, particularly in the Federal government. In December 1991, Paul Keating replaced Bob Hawke as Prime Minister. A former Federal treasurer, Keating articulated an economic view of life. Under the influence of Treasury’s economic rationalists, he became enamoured of abstractions and lived in a world of models. The reality and abundance of life on earth entirely passed him by. Only nominally attached to the Australian continent, he had no mind for conservation, no feeling for the land, no sense of place, and no especial loyalty to Australia. Keating quickly revealed his priorities when, in February 1992, he delivered an economic policy entitled One Nation and announced the formation of a Major Project Facilitation Unit. For the unit’s head, Laurie Brereton, the purpose was clear: ‘To cut through red, green and black tape and get projects of $50 million or more up and running during the countdown to the Federal election’.19 Business immediately responded. The chief executive of Mount

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Isa Mines (MIM) suggested that the company’s proposed mine at McArthur River in the Northern Territory be the first major project to be fast-tracked. Brereton, who described himself as belonging to ‘the Labor school of optimists . . . the school who admired what Chifley did with the Snowy Mountains, and the school that is seduced by developments of the scale of the Pilbara’, readily agreed.20 Potentially the largest zinc–lead–silver mine in the world, the $250-million development would consist of a mine reaching under the McArthur River, road transport taking the ore to the coast and then barges across the shallows to ships, 30 kilometres offshore. The operations would occur in and among some of the largest seagrass beds in Australia, a vital habitat for turtles, prawns, and fish, and the principal dugong site in the Northern Territory. MIM prepared a draft eIS in about six weeks and allowed only 30 days for public responses. Conservationists, fishermen, and the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service objected. The draft was deficient and inadequate. Sam Lake, a Monash University marine ecologist, called it ‘very crude’.21 In July, MIM released its response to the comments on the draft eIS, packaged them together, and said they constituted the final eIS. All the relevant authorities quickly approved the project and in January 1993 the Northern Territory Minister for Mines and energy issued a 25-year mining lease to MIM. The entire process took less than 12 months. Natural heritage was irrelevant; only development mattered. Zeal for development drove Keating. Conservation stood in the way and he committed himself to ‘getting the environment off the front page’. After his first year in office he boasted that the environment had been ‘put back where it belongs’ as a political issue. To foreclose the possibility of its restoration, he resorted to what he did best: abuse and misrepresentation. He described conservationists as ‘extremist’, lacking courage and leadership. No one paid them any

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attention. ‘The environmental lobbies’, he said, ‘have no moral lien over the environment. This issue belongs to the nation, it belongs to the Government, to the nation’. In practice, Keating’s appropriation of the cause of conservation meant indifference to the country’s natural heritage.22 Two of Tasmania’s biggest rivers, the Pieman and the Arthur, contain 350 000 hectares of bountiful country including the catchments of the Whyte, Savage, and Donaldson Rivers, the Meredith and Norfolk Ranges, rocky coastal headlands, sandy beaches, dune fields, button grass plains, healthland, and the largest continuous area of temperate rainforest in Australia. In 1967, Peter Sims, the North West Walking Club, and Burnie Field Naturalist Club drew up a national park proposal for the area. Although little conservation resulted, much of the land remained wild and relatively unexploited. But the war on nature never stops. Loggers wanted the forests. To log them they employed old methods as well as new. In the mid1980s, they introduced cable-logging, which uses large winches to pull logs up slopes impossible for bulldozers. every stick of timber on the slope must be cut to avoid impeding or entangling the cables. This highly destructive practice opened up many steep, previously inaccessible areas to logging and to severe erosion. One contractor planned to scalp every ridge along a series of tributaries of the Arthur River. Under the Salamanca Agreement, conservationists agreed to the first coupe. But when the loggers could not stop, TWS organised demonstrations. But more was at stake than cable-logging. Conservationists knew the whole northwest needed protection. For the sake of campaign focus, the area needed a single, all-encompassing name. In 1991, Bob Brown suggested the Tarkine, after the earliest inhabitants, and TWS started drafting a World Heritage nomination. Just as conservationists were busy protecting natural heritage, so

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governments were equally busy undermining natural heritage. In February 1991, State and Federal Ministers agreed to support Resource Security Legislation (RSL) that would give the forest industry guaranteed access to native forests. In Tasmania, the Field Government enthusiastically endorsed RSL. So did the Liberal Opposition, which, better able to articulate plans for destruction than the Labor government, won government in early 1992. Despite a reduction in the percentage of their vote, the Greens retained their five seats but lost the balance of power. Logging continued, so did protest. A few days after the election, 80 protestors blockaded an east Picton logging road in forests excised from the Hartz Mountains National Park in 1976. Vigilantes, armed with dogs and guns, set fire to the barricade. A few days later, firing their guns and using gelignite and petrol, they bombed two cars at the blockade site. Police later accused conservationists of blowing up their own cars. Now focused on the Tarkine, TWS released a World Heritage recommendation. It cited the extraordinary beauty of the majestic, temperate rainforest wilderness, ‘a major living link with the ancient super-continent Gondwana’. Industry and government dismissed claims that the Tarkine was special. Minister for Forests Tony Rundle said the existence of the so-called Tarkine wilderness was the biggest lie ever told by the conservation movement; it had ‘no more wilderness than Battery Point [a Hobart suburb]’.23 Rundle might have added that if wilderness did exist in the Tarkine, then governments would eradicate it. early in the new year (1993) the Federal government renewed all woodchip licences for another 12 months. TWS announced that in recognition of Tasmania’s distinction as the woodchip capital of Australia, the Society would mount a ‘Long Hot Summer Campaign’, including fortnightly actions through to March. At the end of January, 60 TWS protestors halted cablelogging in Boco, west of Cradle Mountain. Two weeks later, blockaders

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closed the Picton road and bridge. Twenty one people were arrested. But, by the end of the year, despite the best efforts of conservationists, the Tasmanian woodchipping industry had actually expanded and the Federal government granted export licences from Tasmania for 2.8 million tonnes of chips. Inevitably, wilderness attracts exploiters. By the 1980s, the largest remaining coastal wilderness on Australia’s east coast south of Cooktown lay around the waters of Shoalwater Bay, about 50 kilometres north of Rockhampton. Acquired by the Defence Department in 1965, the 290 000 hectares of land contained 80 kilometres of coast, white beaches, mangroves, wetlands, rainforest, rugged hills, and 200metre-high sand dunes. In 1981, sandminer Murphyores asserted a pre-existing authority to prospect in the area. In February 1990, Minister for the environment Graham Richardson accepted the sandminer’s eIS. Queenslanders objected. Federal Labor MP Keith Wright said Richardson’s decision was ‘inept’. The army, the AHC, CSIRO, and several local and State government bodies – as well as conservationists – also opposed the mining. Nevertheless, in October, Federal cabinet approved the project. The decision precipitated a mining rush. North Broken Hill (NBH) and Peko applied for exploration permits for heavy minerals. Other companies wanted to prospect for gold and shale oil. Disaster loomed.24 Brisbane TWS mounted a Shoalwater campaign. Local fishing cooperatives, Livingstone Shire Council, and other groups voiced opposition to mining while TWS and the ACF demanded an inquiry. Ahead of the 1993 Federal election, Keating announced a range of conservation measures designed to win green support. Commitments included money for the Murray–Darling, plans for a national system of marine and land reserves, extra funding to control feral animals and weeds, a Southern Ocean whale sanctuary, and an inquiry into sand-mining in Shoalwater Bay.

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During the 12-month inquiry, NBH had 18 people working on the case, including economic consultants and lawyers. Additional help came from the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource economics, the Australian Geological Survey Organisation, and the Bureau of Resource Sciences. The three Federal departments marshalled nearly 60 people to champion the economic value of mining. They submitted a two-volume report that became part of the miners’ challenge to virtually every detail of the argument for conservation submitted by the Defence Department, TWS, and the ACF.25 In this instance, however, the inquiry favoured conservation. The commission’s report, released in June 1994, concluded that mining would spoil landforms, destroy large areas of plant communities, and diminish diversity. Sandmining on the higher dunes would detract from their outstanding ‘visual amenity, and its impact on archaeological values would cause distress to local Aboriginal people’. Recommending a ban on mining and exploration, the Commission proposed that conservation be recognised as an equally significant use of the area as military training.26 Business Review Weekly said the report ‘outraged’ the mining industry. The AMIC claimed it was ‘unlawful’ and ‘unscientific’. The government was split. environment Minister John Faulkner praised the report as thorough and professional. But Primary Industry and energy Minister Bob Collins and Resources Minister David Beddall supported mining. Beddall said he was disappointed that the inquiry did not take into account ‘multiple use’ – there was a lack of balance between the environment and the economy.27 After intense ACF lobbying, Federal cabinet agreed to prohibit all mining and mineral exploration in Shoalwater Bay. According to Labor’s Peter Walsh, the decision was ‘absolutely indefensible from every perspective other than that of the green saboteur’.28

CHAPTeR 18

WoodcHips oN sTumps

Logic, argument, and evidence are rarely persuasive in daily life and not at all in politics. emotion, myth, and symbols rule; passion is pervasive. As in life and politics, so in conservation – symbols and passion are paramount. And few symbols stir as much passion as forests. ever since the introduction of industrial forestry in the 1960s, the pillage of native forests has symbolised the destruction modern humans have unleashed on the Australian continent. Thus, in their fight for the country, conservationists and patriots have devoted extraordinary efforts to protecting forests. And not just as symbols. As places of beauty and fecundity, forests arouse ardour. Forest campaigns attract and animate people like no other aspect of conservation activism. Working at a desk will not enliven; writing reports will not enthuse; making phone calls will not move. But night after night around a campfire, sleeping on the ground, scrambling through the bush, climbing trees, enduring leeches, flies, and dirt, and nursing sore muscles and injuries accentuates the physicality necessary for love of nature. As well, the stripped-down intimacy of life in the forest with other activists builds the empathy, sympathy, comradeship, and the networks essential to the task of conservation. Blockades and

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confrontation with police, bulldozers, and loggers radicalise young conservationists, many of whom continue conservation work as journalists, politicians, and campaigners against land clearance, salinity, river degradation, and marine pollution. Forests galvanise. For the young men and women defending these forests, the experience was among the most intense of their lives. Many activists – both men and women – likened blockade life to that of Australian soldiers at Gallipoli. They felt the same vigour, solidarity, common purpose, loyalty, and patriotism; they felt they were doing the right thing. They were at the barricades, not for their own sakes but for beauty, for life on earth, and for generations to come. But whereas Gallipoli was an imperial venture, part of geopolitical events orchestrated by Britain on behalf of empire, forest campaigns were parochial and local, organised by citizens concerned for integrity of place.1 Places are real and imaginary, pre-existent and invented. Nature lays down landforms, clothes with vegetation, and inhabits with animated life; humans appropriate, differentiate, and name. Affixed with names, places enter consciousness. Naming makes a place. When conservationists ascribed the name ‘Tarkine’ to a region of northwest Tasmania, they acquired an obligation to defend that place. Conversely, the Tasmanian government assumed a commitment to destroy the place’s integrity. Intact, the Tarkine – like Kakadu, the Franklin, Daintree, and Shoalwater Bay – affronted the intent to conquer nature in Australia. Bisected, the place was reduced and incorporated into a tamed land. Bulldozing a road proved one of the most effective and quickest ways to reduce a place. In 1993, the Tasmanian Government decided to continue the road through the Tarkine abandoned by the Labor government in 1989. The 50-kilometre track would run through heathland, traverse mountains, cross two rivers, slice through forest in the pristine Donaldson Valley, and segment the proposed World Heritage area. In response, Tasmanian conservationists formed the Tarkine

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National Coalition with Peter Sims as coordinator. They appealed to the Federal government to intervene. Acting environment Minister James Kerr refused. In February 1995, two work crews, armed with tracked excavators, bulldozers, and helicopter support, started work from both ends of the road. A Tasmanian Government spokesman said the road had to be built ‘because it will do a lot of good for the area’. Protests started, and nine people were arrested. Bob Brown appealed to Federal environment Minister John Faulkner, who only reaffirmed the government’s refusal to intervene. Brown joined the Tarkine protestors. He and 20 other people were arrested and jailed. The Examiner newspaper called the Tarkine track a ‘road to nowhere’ and said its $3.5 million cost would be better spent elsewhere. The argument missed the point. Governments never count cost when extirpating wilderness or defeating conservation. Financial prudence never restrained government. The road appeared unstoppable; direct action the only possible response. Volunteers appeared and Sims based them at two camps on private property outside the Tarkine. Calling themselves the Tarkine Tigers, after the extinct Tasmanian tiger, the protestors focused their actions on the forests of the Donaldson Valley. Over the winter of 1995, they marked tracks through the bush, carried in supplies, established hidden camps, mounted surveillance, erected tree-sits, sat in front of bulldozers, and locked on to machinery and gates. With the Tigers camped at the Donaldson, Sims and other conservationists journeyed to Canberra, met Faulkner, and pleaded with him to use his external Affairs powers to stop the road. He agreed the road was environmental vandalism but said he could do nothing. While Faulkner was expressing his distress, the Tasmanian Government helicoptered bulldozer drivers and fuel into the Donaldson and in three days roadbuilders crossed the river valley.

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By December, Sims and the Tarkine Tigers had recruited over 1000 people into the campaign. In the Tarkine there had been 38 actions and nearly 100 arrests. More arrests followed, including Brown again and Kevin Parker, national director of TWS. By then the road was finished.2 When he opened the road to traffic in January 1996, Premier Ray Groom revealed the real reason for construction: to beat the greenies. He claimed final victory over conservationists in the long-running battle for the State’s wilderness. ‘To be frank, we haven’t won many of these battles’, Groom admitted to 200 supporters at the opening ceremony. ‘But we have won this battle because the road has got through.’ It was proof that the tide was turning against the green movement.3 Groom proclaimed a victory sought by all governments. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, State and Federal governments schemed to neutralise the forest issue and outflank conservationists. In November 1989, Hawke announced what he hoped would be a definitive inquiry into forests – this time by the RAC. Dealing with pulp mills, woodchipping, sawmilling, forest management, old-growth areas, conservation reserves, eSD, and sustainable yield, the RAC inquiry spanned more than two years and produced a three-volume report totalling over 1300 pages. During the inquiry logging continued to destroy around 200 000 hectares of native forest a year. Most was clearfelled and most of the timber became woodchips for export. Keating received the RAC’s findings in March 1992. Much of the report hung on the fraudulent notion of balance: ‘The sustainability of ecosystems and development has been a key criterion in the Inquiry’s assessments’. That premise pre-empted conservation. Accordingly, like the 78 previous forest inquiries to 1992 – of which 15 related to Tasmania alone – the RAC inquiry recycled the same information and recommendations and endorsed the self-assessment of forest agencies that logging, bulldozing, clearfelling, burning, and

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poisoning were compatible with conservation. ending woodchipping would be a bad idea: hasty and disruptive.4 RAC’s recommendation for a ‘permanent forest estate’ received new wording in a National Forest Policy Statement signed in December by the Federal and all State and territory governments except Tasmania. This committed governments to a ‘comprehensive, adequate and representative’ (‘CAR’) network of dedicated and secure nature conservation reserves for forests’ and wilderness while simultaneously continuing logging.5 Forest activists seized on the CAR idea when they met in Canberra in July 1994. They backed an ACF call for an accelerated plantation program to provide an alternative source of wood, a ban on the export of woodchips from native forests, and an end to the logging of native forests by 2000. In October, Faulkner – aided by research from conservation groups around the country – proposed that 1311 high-conservation-value forests be excluded from the year’s round of export woodchip licences. Resources Minister David Beddall, who believed trees were ‘just woodchips on stumps’, ignored the recommendation. In December, he renewed all existing licences and added three new ones, covering most of the 1311 areas recommended for conservation. There was a public outcry. Faulkner and other Labor Caucus members criticised the decision. From a blockade in the Picton valley Labor’s Tasmanian senator, John Devereux, announced his resignation from the party. Brown said Keating, in endorsing Beddall’s decision, had ‘a better feeling for the Japanese woodchip contract than for koala habitat’.6 The Greens, the Democrats, and NSW Opposition leader Bob Carr called for forest protection as did members of the arts community, and the Anglican, Baptist, Uniting, and Catholic churches. Priest and author Paul Collins commented: ‘To actually destroy some of the most extraordinary and beautiful and unique images of

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God we have, like old-growth forests, is totally unethical and even sinful’.7 The logging industry counterattacked. Within the ALP, prologging MPs accused colleagues of seeking to overturn an agreed balance between conservation and the commercial use of native forests. ‘All we are seeking’, they claimed, ‘is to put a bit of balance into the debate. We are going to fight for this industry on the basis of how much it puts in the Australian economy.’ Outside Parliament – under the umbrella of the industry front group, Forest Protection Society – loggers marshalled some 250 trucks to blockade Parliament House for six days in January 1995. Labor members rethought their support for conservation and early in February Keating announced that of the original 1311 areas proposed for protection, only 509 would actually receive protection. A month later he dropped this to 452. At the end of March, Beddall announced that cabinet proposed to list just 264.8 With most forests likely to end up in the chipper, the government signed an agreement with the States to manage forests . . . so as to conserve biological diversity, heritage and cultural values for current and future generations and at the same time develop a dynamic, internationally competitive forest products industry that can operate on a sustained yield basis and develop value added industry.9

These were impossible, contradictory goals. either conservation or logging could prevail but not both. And governments everywhere favoured logging. To ensure logging continued decades into the future – in effect, to entrench logging until Australian forests were entirely depleted – bureaucrats had to devise an appropriate regulatory framework. In November, the Federal government announced the coming of Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs), which would

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consist of reports and assessments of forest areas around Australia leading to logging plans. Alec Marr from TWS predicted that the assessments would be ‘quick and dirty’, that conservationists would get little input compared to industry, and that fewer worthy forests would be protected.10 He was right. Designed to lock up forests for logging, RFAs undercut heritage constraints, provided timber companies with unrestricted access, opened previously conserved areas to logging, abolished limits to woodchip exports, and sought to circumvent future government intervention. The first RFA covered east Gippsland. Concerned Residents of east Gippsland (CROeG) commented: ‘The RFA is a sham. Its predetermined outcome is dressed up in thick spiral-bound documents and fancy language to dupe the public into believing it must be scientific and credible’. CROeG summarised the process as a recipe: ‘To Make One RFA’, Sift available information carefully, water down scientific recommendations, add large cup of public money, a hint of public consultation, mix in essence of buzz-word, season with the merest pinch of artificial green colouring. Boil together until all logic has evaporated, heat until light and fluffy and garnish with the promise of jobs.11

Promising jobs was a government and forest industry mantra. Throughout the forest debate, logging supporters represented the plunder of native forests as a means of maintaining employment. At the same time, Australian industry and government were restructuring, rationalising, downsizing, rewriting conditions of employment, and making redundant thousands of employees. In each case proponents applauded the reduction in employment as a means of

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increasing efficiency and saving money. But no one applauded employment reduction if it saved natural heritage. Logging jobs, like those generated through building dams, flooding lakes, bulldozing roads, mining national parks, or constructing resorts in pristine areas, were sacrosanct. Because of the symbolic role it played in clearing a space for civilisation amidst the waste of forest, logging received more government support than any other form of employment in the country. To fight Victorian woodchipping, conservationists formed the east Gippsland Forest Alliance (eGFA) and invited activists to a spring festival at the east Gippsland hamlet of Goongerah. In November 1993, up to 500 Goongerah protestors called on the Federal government to cancel export woodchip licences due for renewal before Christmas. In the interim they had a more local purpose in mind: to protect the nearby ellery Creek catchment, one of only 30 pristine catchments left in Victoria and home to 300-year-old trees, endangered quolls, sooty owls, and long-footed potoroos. Loggers planned to clearfell 70 hectares of the area, which bordered the errinundra National Park. A counter-demonstration from the Forest Protection Society – mainly loggers’ wives who used their cars to block a gate to the protesters’ camp – failed when the forest defenders left for the bush via a rear entrance. Using wooden tripods and locking themselves to a bridge, they blocked access to a coupe in an old-growth area. Fifty police moved in, arrested four people, and took control of the bridge. Protesters vowed to continue the campaign through the summer.12 To coordinate the east Gippsland blockades, conservationists established the Goongerah environment Centre Office (GeCO). Intended as a temporary expedient, GeCO outlasted the 1993–94 summer protests. A core group of activists turned GeCO into an anarchist collective dedicated to direct action in defence of the forests. In late 1993, activists established a blockade at Hensleigh Creek on a

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recently cut logging road into a rainforest. They held the site through the summer and into mid-autumn, until the first snows closed the road. The following September, GeCO re-established the blockade. Twenty police in six vehicles busted the protest in October. GeCO’s direct actions complemented CROeG’s lobbying activities. CROeG and its coordinator, Jill Redwood, campaigned via letters to the editor, interviews on radio and television, press releases and submissions – and by meeting Ministers, scrutinising logging plans, checking operations, highlighting infractions of the logging code, conducting fauna surveys, appealing to the courts, and, through the newsletter Potoroo Review, noting government, industry, and union hypocrisies, inconsistencies, and foolishness. Possessed of verve, fearlessness, and wit, Redwood began her conservation activism as a child in Melbourne collecting money for the RSPCA. She later moved to the bush, learned how to use a chainsaw and a rifle, worked as a track ganger, and built a homestead on the Brodribb River flats in Goongerah. every year thereafter she hosted a Forests Forever camp. She mocked the deliberate incompetence of government departments charged with overseeing logging, called the Department of Conservation and environment (DCe) the ‘Department of Costly errors’ and, when the new government of Jeff Kennett changed the name to the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR), she referred to it as the ‘Department of Constant Name Revisions’. She was scathing of Keating’s 1995 promotion of woodchipping: ‘When Prime Minister Paul Keating promised to phase out woodchipping by the year 2000, we didn’t realise he intended to achieve this by phasing out the forest first’.13 Not all conservationists focused on forests. Many sought to understand the underlying reasons for the country’s ecological decline. Some pointed to population. In 1991 Joseph Smith, a philosopher at Flinders University, edited a collection of essays critical of the ‘passive’

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acceptance of the ‘inevitability of large-scale population increases for Australia through immigration’. Australia’s large-scale immigration program was unjustifiable and undesirable: ‘An ecologically sustainable Australia, is a post-immigration Australia’.14 Smith and his collaborators were not alone in arguing for population restraint. In 1992, Tim Flannery, a research scientist at the Australian Museum and a founding member of Australians for an ecologically Sustainable Population (AeSP) in NSW, argued in Australian Natural History that Australia was ‘a poor and already over-populated land . . . our resources were, and still are, simply being mined to support the unlimited growth of an affluent society’.15 Forthrightness failed most politicians, who simply denied any link between people and degradation. At the beginning of 1994, the House of Representatives Standing Committee for Long Term Strategies, under the chairmanship of Barry Jones, commenced an inquiry into Australia’s population-carrying capacity. Over 90 percent of the submissions received advocated lower population growth, population stability, or a reduction in population. Nevertheless, the committee rejected ‘the view that Australia is close to its maximum population already’ and expressed its unbounded faith in expansion: ‘There is no numerical population level beyond which the social fabric and environmental quality might be expected to go into precipitate decline’.16 In contrast, the Australian Academy of Science was more plainspoken. During the year that Jones complacently dismissed the notion of limits, the Academy held a symposium, Population 2040: Australia’s Choice, and concluded that Australia should aim for a stable, stationary population of no more than 23 million by the year 2040.17 In 1994 Flannery published The Future Eaters. He argued that the arrival of humans (beginning with Aborigines) had a profound and invidious impact on nature in Australia, leading to rapid or ‘blitzkreig’

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mass extinctions of species and a steady and continuing pauperisation of flora and fauna. The country was now overpopulated: 6–12 million people was a reasonable figure. More people and more consumption would only further undermine the continent’s biological integrity. Therefore, ‘Attitudes to growth should . . . be revised so that rapid growth and “big” ventures are . . . carefully assessed’. Without changes in our view of the land, ‘any sense of Australian nationhood is bound to conflict with environmental sustainability’. Neither nationhood nor sustainability was advanced by multiculturalism, which would not ‘help Australians to live comfortably in their own land’. For ‘a truly adapted Australian culture’ the population must remain small.18 Candour on population continued in 1996 when Doug Cocks, a research scientist in the CSIRO Division of Wildlife and ecology, published People Policy: Australia’s Population Choices. Cocks had served on the Jones committee and had been critical of the report’s attitudes and recommendations. In his own work, he quickly and bluntly got to the point. He wished ‘to convince as many Australians as possible that we have enough and possibly too many people living in this country’ as well as ‘to make people aware that Australia’s population growth can be stopped within a generation or so by the relatively simple expedient of reducing net migration into this country to a few tens of thousands per annum’.19 For the conservationists and social justice advocates who founded a new national Green party, population remained taboo. Lacking frankness and boldness, they twisted themselves in braids of gobbledegook. In an inelegant simile, Bob Brown and Peter Singer explained the formation of the Greens as ‘like spontaneous combustion from the rotting haystack of an overblown consumerist society’. More prosaically, a national Greens party, The Australian Greens, formed in 1992

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following the amalgamation of several State-based Green parties. From the start, the party was conflicted. Some members emphasised conservation, some social justice. Many tended to the utopian view that everything they held to be good and desirable was not only compatible but actually mutually reinforcing. These incompatibilities ran much deeper than most members could imagine.20 People who advocate social justice and human rights speak a different language and subscribe to a different worldview than conservationists. The social analysis that justifies human rights depends on abstraction and inculcates a habit of subdividing downward in the expectation of reaching unbreakable rules or units. Once discovered, these rules can be used to impose uniform, universal laws. The world becomes the same everywhere, subject to the same progress and development. Social justice advocates locate universality in the notion of rights. Rights are absolute, everywhere the same, and never contingent. This kind of reasoning undercuts conservation. Conservation concerns place and material reality; it does not depend on the universal abstract. Conservation focuses on specific suites of organisms interconnected through unique, non-duplicable relationships in particular places. For conservationists, life cannot be reduced to universal abstractions. Life is dependent. The ecological thinking that justifies conservation focuses on relationships and context, not individual entitlement. Furthermore, emphasising rights discourages the adoption of collective and individual responsibility. But the assumption of responsibility, not demands for rights, lies at the heart of conservation activism. People champion conservation because they feel a moral compunction to defend life. Conservation activism reflects an appreciation of the unique, the non-repeatable, the particular, and the local. The cause of conservation arises from and fosters a concrete patriotism derived not

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from abstract discourses about freedom and rights but from living in and breathing a physical, tangible, sunlit Australia. Activists mounted blockades, dug themselves into the ground, lay in front of bulldozers, and sat in trees because they cared about the continent. An accent on Australia and its incomparable coast, wildlife, vegetation, forest, rivers, and desert as a land worth defending conflicted with the reductive, abstract thinking characteristic of social justice advocates. Abstraction in the furtherance of rights led to internationalism – the ultimate abstraction, the ultimate universal rule. But the universal justice and rights that internationalists advocated were not self-evident products of universal human reason. Rather, they represented specific heritages tied to liberal democratic communities confined to the territorial limits of nation-states. Cosmopolitanism was the privilege of those who could afford to take a secure nation-state for granted. In contrast, conservation was parochial, geographic, and territorial; its success depended on the nation-state. Conservation’s particularist patriotism allowed no easy reconciliation with leftist political agendas pitched in universalistic, extra-territorial terms. Prominent Greens shared their internationalism with Australia’s most cosmopolitan Prime Minister, Paul Keating. But Keating had little interest in, and indeed was antagonistic to, conservation. He catastrophically misunderstood the role of patriotism in national community. His arrogant detachment from his own land compromised his leadership. Unable to convince the larger, patriotic political community to accept his universalistic aspirations, he spectacularly lost the March 1996 Federal election. Upon assuming office, the new government of John Howard faced the first national State of the Environment (SOe) report. Prepared over two years by the State of the environment Advisory Council, with contributions from more than 60 scientists, the report drew attention

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to land clearing, forest destruction, extinction and biodiversity loss, the fouling and ruin of waterways and wetlands, and the nation’s failure to deal with greenhouse emissions. A diligent reader could find much evidence of continental-wide destruction and neglect. Indeed, the Advisory Council’s media release warned that ‘The report shows that Australia has some very serious environmental problems and unless these problems are tackled urgently Australians run the risk of losing forever vital elements of their natural heritage’.21 But the report contained much that a government committed to development could find innocuous, even reassuring. In a covering letter, the Chair of the Advisory Council, Ian Lowe, adopted an upbeat tone: ‘The report’, he wrote, ‘is not a catalogue of problems. Overall it is very positive. Most of the problems identified do have solutions.’ This gimcrack optimism undercut the previously cited urgency and signified that the SOe was not an attempt to understand the state of nature in Australia.22 Indeed, nature hardly rated a mention, except embedded in terms such as ‘natural capital’, or ‘natural hazards’. Wild nature – the blooming, efflorescing, ever-merging, self-maintaining riotously diverse world of life – was excluded. Instead, the report focused on Australian’s economic relationship with the continent and the text reproduced the parlance of commerce – stocks, resources, and capital. ecological sustainability, for example, was defined as ‘the need to maintain natural capital in order to live off the “ecological interests” provided by the natural capital stock’. Thinking of nature as capital encouraged use and exploitation, not conservation.23 An additional focus on management further eclipsed understanding and clarity. The SOe believed that ‘Most serious problems identified here seem to be due to mismanagement, usually through ignorance’. If the problem was bad management and ignorance, the solution was better management, more research, more funding, and an

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intensification of programs already underway. This message required the premise that the country’s decline was nobody’s fault: ‘no single government or sector is to blame for the problems highlighted’.24 The SOe’s frame and language failed the significance of the contents. By reducing the world to economics and management, in talking of assets and capital, the report provided the government with a convenient segue into pressing for the sale of the national communications network Telstra. Assets could be traded for assets. environment Minister Robert Hill used the report to argue that programs to improve the situation could only be funded from the sale of one-third of Telstra.25 even as the SOe proclaimed Australians ‘among the most environmentally aware people in the world’, governments continued to oppose conservation. Some years previously, north Queensland conservationists Arthur and Margaret Thorsborne had published Hinchinbrook Island: The Land Time Forgot, a celebration of the island they had helped protect and a warning of imminent peril. Already by 1988, threats were creeping closer to Hinchinbrook. Major earthworks started for a resort at Oyster Point near Cardwell on the mainland side of Hinchinbrook Channel. The company behind the development failed, but destructive plans never die. They may hibernate but they can always be revived, and a few years later Queensland developer Keith Williams bought the 130-hectare site and revived the resort idea. He planned accommodation for 1500 guests and 750 staff, and a 250-boat marina with access, via a dredged channel, to the waters of Hinchinbrook Channel. The State labor government under Premier Wayne Goss fast-tracked approval and neither the local council nor the State requested an eIS for the development that lay between the mainland Wet Tropics World Heritage and the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Areas. To protect the island, Margaret Thorsborne, Cardwell neighbour

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Margaret Moorhouse, and Townsville environmental lawyer David Haigh formed Friends of Hinchinbrook. Backed by several scientific assessments, they said the resort would destroy nearby World Heritage wilderness values, damage seagrass beds in Hinchinbrook Channel, befoul the water, and endanger dugongs and sea turtles. Following agreement with the Queensland Government and Cardwell Shire, Williams began site-levelling and excavation in October 1994. Around 80 people led by Democrats Senator John Woodley and Thorsborne protested the clearing of the mangroves. A few days later Williams suspended work and then served Thorsborne and a fellow local conservationist Ken Parker with a writ, seeking damages for trespass. 26 Despite harassment, Friends of Hinchinbrook maintained a daily dawn-to-dusk vigil over the mangroves and, when bulldozers returned in November, attempted to protect the area. Workers assaulted them while police stood by. On the fifteenth, Faulkner invoked powers under the World Heritage Properties Protection Act to stop the clearing. The Governor-General signed the proclamations at 10 pm. The bulldozers kept working, under floodlight, for another five hours until three in the morning, by which time they had uprooted and destroyed most of the mangroves Faulkner sought to protect. Goss, obsessively and fanatically committed to the project, took out a series of newspaper advertisements deploring Federal intervention. Williams threatened to sue the Federal government and angry Cardwell residents chainsawed the remaining mangroves. After a year of wrangling between Williams and the Queensland and Federal governments, Faulkner lifted the ban on construction but denied a permit for the marina and artificial sand beach. With the likelihood that the Opposition would win the next Federal election and review the decision, Williams proceeded with the work. In July 1996, the new environment Minister Robert Hill approved

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the marina and channel. He said Williams had given him assurances that ‘best-practice’ engineering would be adopted at the site and he was convinced development would not damage the area’s World Heritage values. Prime Minister Howard described the decision as ‘terrific’. The project had been a test of whether the Government could ‘deliver’.27 At the opening of stage one of the resort in December 1997 – by which time the development emphasis had shifted from a resort to real-estate subdivisions and residential sales – Queensland Premier Rob Borbidge called opponents a ‘disgrace’. From the deck of Williams’ luxury vessel Achilles III, he described the development as a victory for ordinary people. Two hundred protestors gathered along the highway opposite the site. Williams told them to ‘Bugger off ’. Despite abuse and death threats, Thorsborne remained trenchant in her opposition. The development was ‘a cancerous sore on the edge of town . . . We have to leave some areas unspoiled’.28

CHAPTER 19

Trespass

Decades of conservation activism and park or World Heritage status did not necessarily protect ‘protected’ areas. As part of the 1996 East Gippsland RFA, for example, the Federal government agreed to open native forests of ‘lesser conservation value’ to mining. Conservationists immediately understood the implications. So did miners: all conservation reserves should be available for exploration and mining. Within weeks of the Coalition’s 1996 Federal election victory, Prime Minister Howard said new mines – such as Energy Resources Australia’s (ERA’s) proposed Jabiluka uranium project in Kakadu National Park – ‘ought to be given the green light’ because of their jobs potential. ERA already operated the nearby Ranger mine in Kakadu. ERA’s application to proceed with Jabiluka split Northern Territory Aborigines. Yvonne Margarula, designated by the Northern Land Council as senior traditional owner for the 27-member Mirrar Gundjehmi clan who originally lived in the area, opposed the mine. She believed that Ranger had already damaged Aborigines – chiefly through the introduction of alcohol. Another mine would cause more harm. The Northern Land Council supported ERA.

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The ACF, TWS, and FOE began talks with Aboriginal mine opponents. Conservationists would fight the mine regardless, so would Aborigines. Together they could marshal formidable opposition. For many conservationists the agreement was a pragmatic, convenient arrangement. For social justice advocates, the ‘black–green alliance’ heralded a new era of social change. Blockade planning began in July 1997, when about 80 mainly students from all over Australia visited Kakadu, met Mirrar spokeswoman Jacqui Katona, viewed the proposed mine site, and returned to the cities and universities to found local Jabiluka Action Groups and to campaign to raise issues of Aboriginal land rights, uranium, nuclear power, and World Heritage. In March 1998, campaigners constructed a campsite near Jabiluka. Capable of accommodating 500 people, it contained a communal kitchen, water tanks, pit toilets, bucket showers, and a communications and legal aid centre. Direct action protests began when TWS representative Alec Marr and Victorian forest campaigner Alan Gray delayed work on the Jabiluka mining lease for several hours after they chained themselves to a drill rig. Cut free and escorted from the area, they re-entered the lease. Police charged them with trespassing. Later, activists barricaded the dirt access road to the site and maintained a 24-hour vigil. To avoid protesters, ERA used helicopters to ferry workers onto the job. ERA chief executive officer Phillip Shirvington predicted the blockade would collapse as demonstrators realised that world-bestpractice environmental safeguards were in place and that Aboriginal people would gain from Jabiluka. ‘Once it becomes apparent that they are standing in the way of Aboriginal betterment, the protest will fall away. It will be immoral at that point’, he said.1 But protest had only just begun. In May, more than 100 antiuranium protesters rallied outside the Melbourne offices of ERA’s

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chief shareholder, North Limited, a resource company with major investments in mining, woodchipping, forestry, and paper. Two days later the Jabiluka Action Group organised a protest at North’s Brisbane office. Demonstrators hung banners from the roof of the office building and offered staff ‘radioactive tea’ made from water taken from a creek near the Ranger mine. They declined. Even as ERA announced an agreement to mine with the Northern Land Council and the local Aboriginal Working Committee, protests and arrests continued, including that of Margarula. Police charged her with trespass – on her own land. At the Ranger mine protestors blocked the gates. Two men and two women chained themselves to a 44-gallon drum filled with concrete. A car half buried in the road blocked the entrance for two weeks. Protestors dug in two more cars and chained themselves to each of the bodies. Police used cranes to remove the cars and arrested nine protestors.2 Maintaining the blockade required extraordinary logistics. The weather was hot and the camp was dusty, mosquito-plagued, 20 kilometres from the mine site and three hours’ drive east of Darwin. Transport was scarce, communications difficult. Two food trucks left Darwin each week to feed the protestors. Every week new people arrived. FOE organised buses from Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and Adelaide. Others made their own arrangements. Fifteen people set out to cycle the 5000 kilometres from Melbourne. By mid-year some journalists considered the blockade a failure, a reflection of a general decline in environmental interest. Others said the issue had failed to ‘connect with mainstream Australia’. But while mainstream media gave patchy coverage to Jabiluka, the issue predominated on campuses and at other youth venues. Jabiluka sites proliferated on the Internet. Campaign news featured regularly on the ABC’s popular youth radio station Triple J. Campus and city posters exhorted young people to help ‘make history’ by defeating the

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mine. TWS’s Jabiluka campaigner Chris Doran commented, ‘This is the younger generation’s Franklin’.3 For conservationists, the stakes were high. If ERA succeeded in building another mine in Kakadu, then uranium mines would spread all over Australia. Another 25 had already been mooted. Conservationists had no choice but to fight Jabiluka. ‘If this goes ahead, nothing is safe’, warned ACF Director Don Henry.4 By June, direct action and court injunctions had delayed the project by six months. Nevertheless, Shirvington again predicted victory for the miners and observed, ‘The environment groups have done a great service to mankind over the last 20 years in raising environmental consciousness, but the message has well and truly lodged in people’s minds, even the minds of mining companies’. Protest, he suggested, was now unnecessary. ERA and other miners were responsible and knowledgeable. Australians could have it all: jobs and investment, uranium mining, natural wonders, international tourism, and Aborigines and their sacred sites co-existing in a multiple-use paradise.5 Mine opponents never expected the blockade alone to prevail. They pressed other courses of action. In the courts, the Mirrar asserted their right to veto ERA’s plans to process Jabiluka ore at Ranger. TWS lobbied North Limited and ERA’s banker, Westpac, and asked the World Heritage Bureau to send a delegation to assess the threats the mine posed to Kakadu. A national poll found that two-thirds of Australians opposed the mine and the blockade continued to build. By July, some 1200 people had passed through the drug- and alcohol-free camp. Record numbers began arriving. One day, police arrested 106 people after 300 protesters marched through a police line to the site entrance bearing banners reading ‘Over our dead bodies’ and ‘The world is watching’. Complementary protests took place in the cities. People marched through Adelaide. A small tent city sprang up outside ERA’s Sydney

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offices. One hundred members of the group Women in High Heels rallied outside North’s Melbourne headquarters. Anti-uranium protestors picketed Howard’s September election appearances. At Jabiluka, a car decorated as a lizard blocked the mine site entrance. A few days later, 250 protestors, including 150 wearing John Howard masks, marched to the site. Ninety-three ‘John Howards’ were arrested. All gave their names and addresses as ‘John Howard, Canberra’. With the coming of the wet season in October, organisers disbanded the camp. During the seven-month blockade, over 2500 people had camped at Jabiluka and 527 had been arrested. Both the Mirrar and the conservationists maintained the campaign. In December, the World Heritage Commission called for a moratorium on mine construction pending a decision on whether to place Kakadu on the World Heritage in Danger list. The following year a Senate inquiry into Jabiluka condemned the mine and a group of North shareholders called an Extraordinary General Meeting to question the company’s Jabiluka involvement. In August 2000, the world’s largest mining company, Rio Tinto, acquired North Limited – mainly for the company’s iron ore holdings – and obtained a controlling interest in ERA but gave no commitment to pursue ERA’s mine. The Greens, TWS, FOE, and the Mirrar appealed to Rio Tinto to close the mine. Early in 2001, Rio Tinto began hinting that the mine might not go ahead. A year later, ERA approached the Mirrar for talks and 18 months later Rio Tinto announced that ERA would backfill the mine with the ore already extracted and give the traditional owners a right to veto any future development at the site. Upon the actual signing of the agreement in April 2004, Margarula rejoiced, ‘We stopped the mining here. Now they have put the ore back in the ground. It will never again come out. The country is at peace and I am very happy.’6 Peace, however, did not break out in Australia’s forests – not in

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Western Australia, not in Tasmania, not in New South Wales, and not in Victoria. The Howard government’s decision to increase woodchip exports and pursue the Keating government’s RFA process meant increasing destruction. From East Gippsland, Jill Redwood commented, Forget the swaggie by the billabong, the kangaroo and the kookaburra, Australia’s new image will now be the woodchip . . . [Howard has] snatched the title of the country’s greatest forest piranha. This man has lied and cheated on environment issues from the start. He brings a whole new meaning to the term ‘lying in front of the bulldozers’.7

Escalating exploitation met escalating resistance. In January 1997, forest activists from the Goongerah Environment Centre Office (GECO) set up a blockade on a bridge over Goolengook River at the end of Goolengook Road in East Gippsland. They aimed to disrupt and delay the logging of the 5000-hectare Goolengook block of old-growth forest. Early in June, police broke the blockade across the bridge and arrested five people. More protestors arrived, including Bob Brown who, along with 14 others, was arrested and charged with obstructing a forestry operation.8 Recent Mt Everest climber Brigitte Muir began another week of protests when she climbed 30 metres up a mountain grey gum and unfurled a banner that read ‘Let This Forest Ever Rest’. She commented, ‘The Australian wilderness is unique; it is our soul. What would our future be if our country loses it? The identity we seem to be fighting so hard to find is there for us to be proud of.’ Police arrested another 23 people, taking the total number of arrests to 95.9 A month later arrests totalled 135. After clearfelling about 32 hectares, loggers, police, and the Department of Natural Resources and

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Environment (DNRE) pulled out. Defended by barrister Brian Walters, Brown appealed his charges and the Victorian Supreme Court found the logging itself illegal and the RFA questionable. Charges against the others arrested were dropped. Activists maintained the blockade over the next several months and into 1999. Government threats and rumours of an imminent bust only increased blockaders’ resolve. The camp remained almost continuously occupied and became the longest running forest blockade in Australian history. Over the years hundreds of people visited Goolengook. The blockade became a legend among, and a destination for, conservation activists, students, and travellers from all over Australia. They stayed a few days to a week to months at a time. Backpackers from Britain, the United States, Canada, and Germany included Goolengook in their Australian itinerary. One night in February 2000, some 40 loggers raided the camp, destroyed tents and possessions, overturned cars, and assaulted campers. Undaunted, activists returned the next day and over the next several months rebuilt the blockade as a palisaded fort with a moat and a drawbridge. The reconstruction enhanced the blockade’s appeal and drew new people into the East Gippsland campaigns. Young Australians concerned with the defence of nature found a focus for their loyalties. Claire Dunn first visited Goolengook in January 2001. Growing up near the small village of Woodville on the Paterson River near Maitland, NSW – where her parents owned 30 hectares of river-flat farmland and a brick and shingle colonial farmhouse – she lived in a place crowded with the evidence of lived life, human and nonhuman. Bricks revealed convict imprints: hearts, circles, and triangles. Open to the world, the house smelt different from others, while echidnas and turtles wandered the verandahs. Possums and their young appeared on windowsills. Huge tree-frogs clung to the glass. Spiders and other

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insects crawled and buzzed through the building’s corridors, cracks, and ceilings. Even from the inner rooms one could sense the rain coming and hear the birds calling. The outdoors always beckoned. Gardens, treehouses, canoes, and the hunt for eels and witchetty grubs provided inducements. Claire stood in a line of time populated by faces and figures from the past: her grandfather was canon of Maitland Anglican Church; her grandmother founded the Lantern Club to raise money for the blind and deaf. Claire inhabited a world that had been richly endowed and richly inhabited. Camping holidays and trips to the beach introduced her to a wider world. With advancing teenage years, she realised that that world was under threat. At university she joined the Green Club. Later, she joined a blockade on Survey Road on the Errinundra Plateau and then camped at Goolengook.10 Activism acquainted Claire with the continent’s enormous diversity and variety. Like other conservationists, she learned what was distinctive, what was rare, and what was valuable. She practised a concrete patriotism located in experience and expressed in the defence of the beautiful, real, natural world of Australia. Sheltering under sodden tarpaulins, and crouched around smoky fires, a small group of activists maintained the Goolengook blockade through the winter of 2001. With the coming of summer, numbers increased – until Australia Day weekend in 2002, when over 100 people used Goolengook as a base to mount actions and blockades against logging elsewhere in East Gippsland. Thereafter, numbers dropped away. Rumours of an imminent bust swirled through the camp. In a pre-dawn raid in early March, police and DNRE officers broke the blockade, evicted and arrested defenders, and bulldozed the fort. They prohibited public entry to the forest, installed gates and roadblocks, guarded logging operations, and provided escorts

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for logging vehicles. Over the next six weeks the State government spent around $1.7 million policing Goolengook in return for royalties of some $110 000 from 90 hectares of clearfelled and destroyed old-growth forest. Protests shadowed the logging and 70 people were arrested for defending place and diversity.11 For Federal Minister for Forestry and Conservation Wilson Tuckey, Victoria’s RFA was a huge success – and he wanted more. In March 1999, he said the Federal government was moving ahead at ‘a million miles an hour’ on completing RFAs, despite then only having secured three out of eleven. He predicted an RFA for southeast Queensland by June.12 Recently elected on a promise to end logging in native forests, the Queensland Labor government was less committed to an RFA for the State’s southeast forests than Tuckey. Besides, conservationists and the logging industry were already discussing alternatives. In May, Premier Peter Beattie hinted that Queensland might withdraw from the RFA. TWS applauded the prospect and said an RFA driven by Tuckey had no chance of solving the serious problems facing southeast Queensland’s native forests – the most damaged in Australia. Talks, however, broke down. Unions and sawmillers issued their own plans for logging. Rainforest Conservation Society president and chief conservation negotiator Aila Keto observed: ‘It appears that the industry wants to bring southern forest management practices to Queensland – practices that have caused great conflict and division in the industry. We don’t want that in Queensland’.13 With the government procrastinating on an RFA, talks between logging unions, sawmillers, and conservationists resumed. Negotiators sought to specify exactly where small mills could procure the logs they needed. In September, Beattie announced a forest agreement that bypassed Federal RFA guidelines. The deal depended on the government buying the timber concessions of large miller Boral

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and shifting the company’s logging allocation to smaller mills. The agreement included greatly increased protection of native forest, no logging of old-growth or wilderness forests, a timetable to end native forest logging, no export woodchipping, and no clearfelling.14 Queensland’s forest agreement took persistence, tenacity, and political skill. All successful conservationists embody these qualities. Few employed them over as many decades as Milo Dunphy. He fought until his death in April 1996. He was 67. At Dunphy’s funeral, NSW Premier Bob Carr observed that conservation and patriotism walked hand in hand and that ‘Milo Dunphy was a patriot. No-one knew the landscape and the ecology of the continent we call our own better than Milo. He was a true Australian.’ Peter Prineas, Dunphy’s conservation co-worker and bushwalking companion of more than 25 years, also recalled Dunphy’s patriotism and later reflected: ‘Milo taught me how to be an Australian. He showed me a way of living in this country, of being connected to it. He put me in touch with a tradition.’15 Dunphy shared his love of country with Judith Wright. They both acted on their patriotism. At 85 years of age, in June 2000, Wright told an interviewer that ‘Anyone can write poetry but to be an activist is far more important’. A few days later she died. Obituaries appeared in all major Australian newspapers and many overseas. They emphasised her poetic voice and her efforts on behalf of conservation and Aborigines. Both Dunphy and Wright rooted their patriotism in the living reality of the land itself. In contrast, the country’s leaders, like many of the country’s intellectuals, owed their fidelity to abstraction and transformation. Few pursuits excited those destructive propensities as much as the possibility of bringing water to the desert through damming rivers and flooding gorges. Western Australia’s Fitzroy River, in the Kimberley, provides the

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largest freshwater flow in the State, runs through popular tourist sites such as Geikie Gorge and through wilderness, pastoral country, and Aboriginal-owned land, floods vast plains for the three months of the wet season and contracts to narrow channels in the dry. One of Australia’s last great wild rivers, it has long attracted schemers. In the early 1990s, the State Minister for Water Resources Ernie Bridge envisaged pipelines from the Fitzroy and the Ord to Alice Springs, Kalgoorlie, and Adelaide. Along the way the water would irrigate central Australia. ‘The deserts would flower’, Bridge declared and predicted that ‘a Kimberley pipeline would emasculate the word “drought” in the Australian vocabulary . . . it will lay the foundation for possible new industry, agriculture and communities along its route’. Irrigation would induce a humid climate in Central Australia, lead to the growth of forests, and reverse the greenhouse effect.16 Absurdly and insanely grand, Bridge’s scheme nevertheless illustrated government ambition to harness and imprison the Fitzroy. In 1996 the State called for expressions of interest in a privately-funded scheme to dam the river and turn the flood plain over to agriculture, chiefly genetically-engineered, insect-resistant cotton.17 A year later the government awarded Western Agricultural Industries (WAI) the right to conduct a feasibility study into a Fitzroy River irrigation project almost three times the size of the Ord River Scheme. Managing Director John Logan said the scheme would end the ‘joke’ of millions of litres of fresh water from Fitzroy River floods pouring into the ocean.18 Support for the river was national, State-wide, and local. Michael Curr, who owned nearby Mornington Station and used Dimond Gorge – the most favoured site for a dam – for wilderness tourism, said he would fight the proposal. ‘As an Australian I reckon this is a World Heritage area. There’s more money to be made out of keeping this wilderness area when there’s other alternatives to irrigation.’

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Mornington Station’s camp manager, David Hughes, said: ‘Anyone who can go down to Dimond Gorge and not come back saying it is a sacred site for all Australians has sold their soul a long time ago’. The traditional owners of the Dimond Gorge, the Bunuba, opposed any dam that would flood rock art sites and said they did not want a ‘watery desert’.19 As WAI’s study got underway, the ACF’s coordinator of natural resources, Tim Fischer, said the environment movement was prepared to ‘die in a ditch’ over the West Kimberley project. ‘We won’t move aside easily because there is so much at stake’. The project’s long timeline was its biggest weakness. ‘We figure that the more people know about the extraordinary beauty of the Fitzroy River and Dimond Gorge in particular, the greater the opposition will be.’20 In June 1998, Federal Opposition leader Kim Beazley and State Opposition leader Geoff Gallop pledged ALP opposition to any plan to dam the Fitzroy. Although he refused to oppose the project outright, Federal Environment Minister Robert Hill subsequently raised doubts over the proposal. And West Australian Premier Richard Court conceded that while he had not ruled out a dam on the Fitzroy, he said he ‘couldn’t see it happening in the next 20 years’.21 In November, WAI abandoned the plan to dam the river. Local Aborigines believed their united and strong case about the dam’s impact on their cultural and spiritual life proved decisive.22 While the Fitzroy continued to run to the sea, the State’s southwest forests fell before the chainsaw and the bulldozer. Campaigns to protect them had been continuous since the start of woodchipping. Many campaigners worked through the 1970s, 1980s and into the 1990s. In 1992, long-term forest activist Beth Schultz joined a Department of Conservation and Land Management (CALM)-sponsored steering committee to consider alternatives to logging the Crowea block near Northcliffe in the State’s southwest. In 1994, the Court government

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rejected the suggested compromise and Crowea was logged. Conservationists blamed CALM for the destruction and turned to direct action.23 Over 1000 people took part in month-long protests in the oldgrowth karri and marri of the Giblett block near Pemberton in WA’s first-ever forest blockade. The blockade concluded with the arrest of 13 people for blocking the railway line used by the woodchip train. Later in 1994, ‘Friends of Jane’ set up a small camp and built stick towers over logging machinery at the Jane block near Northcliffe where CALM proposed to clear-fell 500 hectares. Protest was not confined to the bush. In February 1995, 10 000 people attended the Perth ‘Rally to Keep Our Forest’. In the following year, the Court government began RFA negotiations with the Federal government. The Conservation Council boycotted the stakeholders’ meetings: spokesman Peter Robertson said participation would give tacit approval to a flawed process. He said the steering committee was heavily weighted with government bureaucrats and CALM and mining industry representatives. There were better means to protect forests.24 In April 1997, conservationists launched a major campaign against CALM’s renewed plan to log the Giblett block. A blockade began in early May when a protestor climbed 30 metres up a karri tree to a tree-sit. Rallies, public tours to promote Giblett’s conservation value, and a ‘Bu ×y-pass Bunnings’ – the company behind the logging – campaign urging consumers to boycott the company’s retail outlets followed. Several metropolitan councils, including Nedlands – in the heart of the Premier’s electorate – voted to support the campaign. In June, former West Coast Eagles footballer Craig Turley joined the Giblett blockaders and climbed to a tree-sit. In August, basketball star Luc Longley joined the Giblett protestors and spent a night in a tree-sit. Other anti-woodchipping actions included a pre-dawn raid

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in November, when 100 protesters took control of the Bunnings terminal at the Bunbury port, locked themselves on to machinery, and delayed the loading of a Japanese ship for several hours. By year’s end, the government offered to delay the logging. The following May, the government released a RFA discussion paper that provided for the logging of much of the State’s remaining old-growth forest, including Giblett. TWS campaigner David Mackenzie said the options were diabolical: ‘These scenarios will entrench logging in old-growth forests for the next 20 years and we have only six weeks to comment on the future of our forests’. Schultz said the governments should stop the RFA process and negotiate the protection of WA’s remaining old-growth forest: ‘We should all hang our heads in shame if we do not take this opportunity to stop the senseless destruction of a beautiful and irreplaceable community asset’.25 Celebrities and high-profile people continued to support the forests campaign. In June, Mick Malthouse, coach of the West Coast Eagles football team, visited the Northcliffe area with a television camera crew. In a subsequent broadcast he talked about the scandalous destruction of magnificent karri trees for woodchips, called CALM a contradiction in terms, and said the fate of the forests was more important to him than his friendships with politicians or his job.26 The following month, 8000 people attended another ‘Rally for Old-Growth Forests’ outside the Perth Concert Hall. The rally, held in pouring rain, coincided with the beginning of a blockade at the Lane block. Three months later, CALM declared Lane a Temporary Control Area and threatened protestors with fines of $2000. Most left, and some joined the blockade at the nearby Wattle block, where protestors used ‘dragons’ – old cars cemented into the road – to obstruct logging.27 CALM prevailed at Lane but was beginning to lose in the public

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realm. In December, the EPA disputed the department’s soporific assurances that all was well in the forests and warned that logging in the jarrah forest was unsustainable. Paul Murray, editor of The West Australian, said that until then he had rejected conservationists’ pleas for the paper to be more involved . . . because it was my view that it was the same old debate, bogged down in technical terms and very obscure arguments which we’d heard before. The EPA report changed all that. It gave a factual basis to the argument. We had a government environmental watchdog coming out and saying that the level of forest harvesting was unsustainable. That was a major development and we got interested again.28

Renewed media interest overlapped with ever wider public concern over forest destruction. In December 1998, 100 professionals and businessmen and women calling themselves ‘Men and Women in Suits’ gathered outside Court’s St Georges Terrace office to protest old-growth logging. They tried calling him on their mobile phones. Insurance lawyer Gray Porter said he had been following the debate for decades and could not understand why the government was not responding to concerns.29 Other Liberal Party supporters protested logging. In February 1999, Fashion designer Liz Davenport joined protestors in the Gardner block and was prosecuted for obstruction. Dame Rachel Cleland, whom the media regularly referred to as a ‘Liberal matriarch’ – she had been a founding member of the Liberal Party in the 1940s – visited Gardner, joined the Campaigners for Ancient Forest, appeared on television, and spoke to Court and to CALM’s director, Wally Cox. The government pushed ahead with logging, however, and in May

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1999 signed an RFA with the Federal government. A major public outcry followed. Opposition leader Geoff Gallop and Opposition spokeswoman for the environment Judy Edwards promised Labor would end the logging of old-growth forests if elected. In July, several Liberal Party members formed Liberals for Forests, committed to ‘the immediate cessation of old-growth logging in our unique West Australia forests’. Cleland was a founding member, as were many of the people who took part in the ‘Men and Women in Suits’ protest.30 Court’s coalition partner, the National Party, came out against old-growth logging. With the Liberals split and growing public pressure against logging, Court began to renege on the RFA deal. In July, he said logging in old-growth karri and tingle tingle forests would end when current contracts expire, while the woodchipping industry would become predominantly plantation-based after 2003. He promised nothing for the jarrah forests. The momentum for conservation unhinged loggers. In August 1999, a gang of about 40 masked men attacked the Wattle camp, upended a caravan, trashed the contents, and threatened further violence. On the same day two men lobbed petrol bombs at the Northcliffe Craft Shop, whose owners opposed logging. A second attack occurred some days later. The West Australian blamed Wilson Tuckey and State Liberal MP for Warren, Paul Omodei, for inciting the violence.31 Court’s attempt at compromise did not sway public opinion. Polls consistently found more people in Western Australia – 70 percent – were concerned about logging of native forests than in any other State. Newspaper editor Murray believed, ‘The timber industry has tried to downplay the extent of this swing in public opinion but it’s the most remarkable swing I’ve seen in 30 years of journalism. It happened and it’s real.’32 Support for conservation rested on 25 years of forest campaigning and a consistent message – the idea of old-growth, grand, old

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trees, hundreds of years old and almost untouched – that was short and succinct. The image speared the public psyche. Conservationists took advantage of the awareness they had created and made logging a major issue at the State elections of February 2001. Labor won and, in addition, five members of the Greens Party were elected to the Legislative Council. CALM’s foresters, however, continued to press for logging and resorted to terminological obfuscation and contorted the meaning of terms like ‘old-growth’ and ‘ecologically sustainable management of forests’ in order to maintain destruction. After the election, log trucks laden with old trees continued to rumble out of the southwest forests.

CHAPTER 20

a FarT in a CyClone

By the end of the twentieth century, protected areas – national parks, wilderness, and flora and fauna sanctuaries – formed the cornerstone of Australian conservation. The outcome of decades of defending the country’s natural heritage, they were, nevertheless, limited. Island-like parks cannot meet the needs of wide-ranging species, or maintain natural disturbance regimes, or enable the dispersal and reestablishment of wildlife following natural events such as fires. Only a continental-wide network of core wild areas, wildlife corridors, and intact lands can protect the continental-scale flows of nature. This insight had already activated conservationists in the United States who, in 1991, founded the Wildlands Project.1 TWS campaigners urged a similar program for Australia. In March 1997, the Society endorsed Wilderness-Wildlands as its new campaign framework and dedicated itself to securing . . . a series of protected lands, across the full range of natural environments and land tenures in Australia . . . capable of ensuring the long-term conservation of biodiversity, natural processes and the evolutionary potential of Australia’s native biota, as well as

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preserving to the fullest extent our wilderness areas and values, and the wild and original nature of Australia.2

TWS’s initiative occurred against a background of criticism of the very idea of wilderness. In The Future Eaters, Tim Flannery described the concept as ‘problematic’ – it kept alive the notion of terra nullius. Wilderness, he claimed, did not exist in Australia. Thereafter, attacks on wilderness escalated. For Aboriginal academic Marcia Langton there was no such thing as wilderness, only ‘cultural landscapes’. Furthermore, ‘the term “wilderness” was a mystification of genocide’, because The popular definition of wilderness excludes all human interaction within allegedly pristine natural areas even though they are and have been inhabited and used by indigenous people for thousands of years. Like the legal fiction of terra nullius which imagined us out of existence . . . popular culture also imagines us out of existence . . . The national park is an institution of power which governs and commodifies ‘nature’ and thereby culturally constructs an imagined ‘wilderness’ [and] can be understood as a part of the colonial repertoire when [it is] understood as the further delineation, naming and categorising of Terra Nullius Incognito. It is a further conquest.3

This ill-reasoned, chaotic argument rested on a terrifying ignorance of history, language, biology, and ecology. Wilderness defenders had been among the first activists in Australia to acknowledge Aboriginal presence and had never defined wilderness as a place that ‘excludes all human interaction’. Even proponents of terra nullius did not deny the presence of humans in Australia – only their ownership of the land.

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Langton’s specious claims conflated influence and creation. Humanists believe people stand at the inventive centre of all that they survey. But nature is bigger than us. Humans, like all creatures, influence their surroundings. But they do not create them. Humans did not bring the Earth or life into existence. Processes and transformations – plate tectonics, shifting climate, glaciation, asteroid impact, and the constant burning and evolution of life – on a magnitude and scale that hugely transcend our presence and our influence create and shape life on Earth. We are travellers only; we barely dwell, let alone create or control. Semantic and ideological confusions between influence and create reflected the human chauvinism and arrogance inherent in the post-modern fakery fashionable at the universities where Langton found support for her idea of Australia as a ‘cultural construct’. Many academics thought her jargon and incoherence profound and meaningful. People with superficial knowledge are easily impressed. Some conservationists were intimidated by Langton’s sanctimonious arguments. Others felt wilderness activism had been stopped dead. A number of scientists, however, defended wilderness. In a 1998 report to Environment Australia and in a corresponding article for Pacific Conservation Biology, Brendan Mackey, Rob Lesslie, David Lindenmayer, and Henry Nix outlined the crucial role of wilderness in nature conservation.4 The authors supported TWS’s ambition to take a long-term, continental-scale approach to conservation. But first the undertaking needed a name. Several campaigners suggested ‘WildCountry’. Andrew Wong explained the reasoning: the project needed a title that evoked ‘Australian images and an Australian identity’. Wild suggested ‘wilderness, but without some of its current negative connotations’, while Country appealed to images of ‘The Man from Snowy River in Mountain country, Crocodile Dundee in outback country, Ned

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Kelly in bush country, the bronzed surfer in beach country’ as well as Aborigines ‘on walkabout through Dreaming country’. An ‘inclusive’ term, WildCountry ‘put wilderness at the core’ of the new frame ‘but extends it well beyond’.5 TWS then convened a scientific committee charged with developing the principles for justifying and implementing whole landscape conservation. Michael Soulé, a conservation biologist and one of the founders of the US WildLands Project, co-chaired the committee with Henry Nix. While committee members met to define principles, plan research, and write papers, TWS campaigners put WildCountry into practice. By 2004 the Society was pursuing WildCountry projects in every State. Gondwana Link aimed to protect and restore lands across the southwest from Margaret River to Kalgoorlie, while a Western Wilderness corridor aimed to protect 21 million hectares across South Australia, from the Eyre Peninsula through acacia and eucalypt woodlands and mallee along the Great Australian Bight into Western Australia. WildCountry projects also sought the conservation of adjoining lands in western Victoria, South Australia, and New South Wales and 100 million hectares across northern Australia. In Tasmania a group of activists in sympathy with WildCountry aims formed a North-East Bioregional Network. Besides the North American example, much of the impetus for conservation over very large areas of land came out of efforts to protect the 14 million hectares of Cape York, a plexus of mangroves, rainforest, savannas, woodlands, rivers, and wetlands. TWS established a branch in Cairns in mid-1992. The following March, campaigners learned about the proposed sale by developer George Quaid of the Starcke property: 215 000 hectares of land and 120 kilometres of coastline on the east coast of Cape York. Fearing subdivision and damaging development, TWS, in concert with the

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area’s traditional owners, started a media campaign against the sale, mounted a roadshow, and secured television coverage. After first declaring nothing could be done, Premier Wayne Goss announced that all of Starcke would be resumed. Campaigners continued to seek the conservation of the whole of Cape York. In February 1996, TWS, the ACF, the Cape York Land Council and the Cattlemen’s Union of Australia signed a Regional Heads of Agreement on future land use in Cape York Peninsula. Although opposed by Premier Rob Borbidge and the AMIC, the agreement survived until the election of a new Queensland government under Premier Peter Beattie. In 2001, Beattie formally adopted the principles of the Heads of Agreement and agreed to develop a conservation plan for the whole of Cape York. Three years later, campaigners secured a ban on landclearing in Queensland, including Cape York, despite opposition from ranchers and members of the Napranum Aboriginal community. TWS described the end to broadscale clearing as ‘one of the biggest environmental wins in Australia’s history’. Furthermore, the Beattie government promised legislation to safeguard the State’s wild rivers. By then, Cape York had become a working model for WildCountry throughout Australia.6 Beattie’s commitments to conservation were atypical. For the most part – with the exception of Victoria under Rupert Hamer and New South Wales under Neville Wran and maybe Bob Carr – ranters, fanatics, and madmen and, in at least three instances, madwomen, have governed the Australian States and Territories. They all opposed conservation. Indeed, confrontation with conservationists stimulated their psychopathology. Insecurity compounded the hysteria. To prop up their tottering psyches, politicians need constant self-assurance, which they seize through exhibitions of authority and decisiveness. Any means will do. Perverting and changing the law and overriding

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court rulings are commonly used to circumvent conservation. Politicians are also cowards, temporisers, and opportunists, some are liars, others unscrupulous with the truth, scores believe only what they want to believe, many are bullies, few – very few – are patriots. Only liberal democracy constrains political excess. Only a virile civil society and vigilant citizens can check politicians who use timehonoured methods – cover-up, sleight-of-hand, rationalisation – to undermine liberal democracy in the pursuit of destruction. This story played out in every State and territory, including the ACT. Throughout the 1990s, successive ACT governments backed a freeway from the suburb of Gungahlin to the city through parts of Canberra Nature Reserve and across a bushland ridge. To disguise the impact of the up-to-six-lane road, the government referred to the freeway as the benign-sounding Gungahlin Drive Extension (GDE). In 1999 conservationists formed Save the Ridge to fight the proposal. In early 2004, Save the Ridge won an injunction against the work in the ACT Supreme Court. The judge found that the government had failed to obtain development approval for its actions and that the road should remain on hold until lawfully approved. The government said the people needed the road, delays were costly, and that the decision called into question every building project in Canberra. Chief Minister Jon Stanhope said opponents missed the point. The environment was just one of the three pillars of sustainability, each of which had to be balanced in the best interests of the community.7 Stanhope’s unctuous definition of balance and sustainability convinced no-one. One hundred and fifty scientists from Canberra research institutions signed a petition calling for a moratorium on construction of a road that was incompatible with the conservation of remnant bushland. Stanhope dismissed the petition and accused the scientists of ‘whingeing’.8

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Rather than comply with the court ruling, the government passed legislation removing the need for development approval and embargoing the road from further legal challenges. Save the Ridge pointed out that the regulations set a precedent whereby governments could write a new law every time they encountered public opposition. Spokesperson Christal George observed: ‘The development approval wasn’t proper and the licensing a sham. These moves are an attack on democracy . . . Decision-makers immune to public scrutiny will be tempted to part from the law.’9 In June, Save the Ridge obtained another temporary injunction. The increasingly vindictive government threatened further legislative amendments. Urban Services Minister Bill Wood quickly approved new authorisations, and destruction of the woodlands resumed. On-site protests continued and Save the Ridge went to court again. But after four such challenges, Save the Ridge’s legal team realised they would not prevail against a government determined to abolish appeal rights and prepared to retrospectively amend a flawed and rushed approval process. In September, the team appealed to a Federal court on whether the National Capital Authority had properly approved the road. By the end of the year, however, contractors had cut a several-kilometre swath through the nature reserve, destroying trees several hundred years old, and displacing and killing a great number of animals. All across Australia patriots bore witness to destruction. The scenes were often unbearable but patriots shouldered other costs as well. Defending the country’s natural heritage attracted abuse, violence, vilification, and lawsuits. Designated ‘Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation’, SLAPP writs need not necessarily succeed in court to achieve their aim. Their threat alone could stifle speech and intimidate and impoverish opponents. Beginning in the United States in the 1980s, SLAPP arrived in Australia in the 1990s. In 2003, Brian Walters,

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a Melbourne Senior Counsel, vice-president of Liberty Victoria, and a co-founder of Wild magazine, noted that, ‘Faced with criticism from the public, powerful interests are responding by threatening legal action, with predictably chilling effects on public debate’.10 A year later, in December 2004, Tasmanian forestry giant Gunns Ltd – the world’s biggest exporter of hardwood woodchips and the largest donor to the Tasmanian Labor Party – sued 20 individuals and groups, including Greens senator Bob Brown, Tasmanian Greens leader Peg Putt, TWS campaigners Geoff Law and Alec Marr, as well as TWS itself and Doctors for Forests. Gunns claimed $6.36 million in damages and alleged the defendants conspired to interfere unlawfully with its business and engaged in ‘publicly denigrating, vilifying and criticising’ the company. Examples cited included letter-writing, lobbying, and media campaigns: standard, everyday democratic devices that citizens use to restrain corporate and government power. The defendants, conscious of their obligation to protect the conditions under which Australian liberal democracy can survive into the future, prepared to fight the suit.11 Every campaign engages new people and generates new leaders. By the twenty-first century, Australians prepared to defend their country’s natural heritage lived in every city, suburb, town, village, and hamlet across the continent. They would not be silenced. Australia’s largest fringing reef, Ningaloo, lies 1100 kilometres north of Perth. Home to endangered turtles, dugongs, and 300 species of corals, the Reef nourishes manta rays and whalesharks and adjoins a terrestrial wilderness of red ranges and empty beaches. In the early 1990s, Greenpeace successfully campaigned for the banning of oil exploration and production on Ningaloo. But exploitation is never far from a politician’s mind. In April 2000, the government approved a $180-million tourism resort at Ningaloo Reef. The developer, Coral Coast Marina Development (CCMD),

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planned 710 tourist accommodation units, 200 residential blocks, 100 boat pens and food and retail outlets at Mauds Landing, just north of the small town of Coral Bay. The Conservation Council suggested the 1500 to 2000 people a day at the resort would put too great a pressure on the fragile coast. To protect the Reef, conservationists from the Conservation Council, the Australian Marine Conservation Society, WWF, TWS, and the Australian Wildlife Conservancy formed Save Ningaloo. Locals split over the development. Coral Bay’s traditional Aboriginal landowners supported the resort, and in December 2000 signed an agreement releasing 250 hectares of their land to CCMD. The Coral Bay Progress Association, however, voted against the development.12 CCMD argued that development would actually protect the Reef from development. Company executive Richard Hay said, ‘I must say I’m surprised at the fervour and heat in the debate. Our project is the answer to all the problems that exist right now in Coral Bay.’13 Privately, conservationists feared the resort would go ahead. Nevertheless, during 2001, through rallies, bumper stickers, t-shirts and publicity, the campaign grew. Author Tim Winton became increasingly involved. In September he hosted a ‘Say No To The Coral Coast Marina Resort’ evening at the Perth Library and called for people power against wealthy and powerful business interests. Elsewhere, he described Ningaloo Reef as the State’s crown jewels. ‘You don’t just sell them off to the first entrepreneur that comes along and can relieve a few headaches for the Government.’ The development was a 1980s hangover that had all the hallmarks of excess.14 Campaigners took to the streets. In May 2002, protestors dressed as ‘Ninga-turtles’ gathered outside Premier Geoff Gallop’s office and called on him to stop the resort. They delivered about 3000 postcards from people opposed to the project. Later that month Winton won the WA Premier’s Book Award for his novel, Dirt Music. As he

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accepted the $25 000 prize money from Gallop, he said he would donate all of it to the Save Ningaloo campaign. In October, Western Australia’s Environmental Protection Authority – which boasted on its website that it approved 99 percent of projects it had examined – approved the Ningaloo resort. The State government reserved its decision for six months. The West Australian editorialised in favour of the development and branded opponents part of a ‘presumptuous . . . self-proclaimed environmental elite’. Furore over the EPA decision and West’s editorial actually mobilised more support for the Reef. Supporters began an email campaign and in the next several weeks 20 000 people wrote to Gallop. Thousands of Save Ningaloo t-shirts appeared and 80 000 stickers went all over Australia and abroad.15 The response, Winton believed, reflected ‘a new sense of stewardship [that] has galvanised locals into overwhelming opposition to this behemoth’. Polls showed most West Australians opposed to the Reef development and in December 10 000 people marched through Fremantle in protest. Smaller demonstrations took place at Exmouth and Coral Bay. Winton told the Fremantle protestors the development would ruin the fragile marine ecosystem at Ningaloo Reef. ‘I think this is one of our greatest tourist assets and I think it’s part of our natural heritage.’16 Gallop visited the Reef in June 2003. One hundred and fifty Save Ningaloo campaigners greeted him chanting: ‘It is OK to say no’. Winton, who dived with Gallop, called the campaigners patriots. Four weeks later Gallop said no, the resort would not go ahead.17 Upon hearing the news, Winton said it was a ‘David and Goliath moment. I can’t think of a more important fight other than the Franklin River’. He later wrote that ‘The amazing fact was that a small group of volunteers, a bunch of amateurs, had taken on the big end of town and won. We were a fart fighting with a cyclone.’18

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Winton brought fresh, vivid language into conservation. In contrast, the word store of many conservationists had turned into an exhausted quarry. Decades of conservation talk had left a vocabulary that was formulaic, clichéd, stale, driven by management speak, and intellectually evasive. As they recycled their depleted language store, conservationists became less interesting, less compelling, and less appealing. In referring to the living world as capital, resources, assets, systems, and environment, they suggested the land and all the life on the land was only a set of inputs and outputs of the economy. This defining metaphor of economics was most obvious in State of the Environment reporting. The second national SOE report, released in 2001, pursued an even more obfuscating, economic-dominated approach than the 1996 report. Again, nature was excluded. Instead, the linked notions of natural capital and ecosystem services governed the analysis, while a highly misleading method of accounting, comparing Unfavourable News – a catalogue of the quantitative decline in the physical and biological richness of the continent – with Favourable News – mainly a list of research initiatives and improvements in measurement – presented the findings. The two sides of the ledger did not equate. Biology and bureaucracy are not equivalents.19 Rhetorically inept, the report failed to alert, inform, or persuade. The major problem lay with the impoverished central organising metaphor, ecosystem services. An image of Australia as an ‘ecosystem’ providing ‘services’ was hardly evocative or compelling and unlikely to engage, mobilise, or inspire people to act in the country’s defence. Elaborated through economic jargon, the metaphor carried no moral weight, implied a severely restricted world view, and did not convey any galvanising values other than self-interest – a protean and vague motivation. Nor did the metaphor suggest an ethical narrative about how humans ought to interact with the nonhuman world.

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Paleobotanist and writer Mary White cut through the jargon. She had already challenged the report’s central premise and goal – sustainable development – which, she wrote, is an oxymoron. ‘Ecologically sustainable development’, the much vaunted ESD, is no less an oxymoron if the underlying motive is first and foremost the welfare of the economy. For as long as the aim is to manage and redesign nature in order to keep economic growth going, ‘sustainability’ is a meaningless concept. At best we can hope to slow the decline in ecosystem health.20

The weakening of conservation through the devaluing language of economics suited governments. They encouraged the process, even making it mandatory. In 1997, the Minister for the Environment, Robert Hill, armed with the argument that economic growth had as much importance as environmental protection, instructed the Commonwealth Department of the Environment to cease being an advocate for conservation and become a single-focus department ensuring that its activities promoted economic objectives.21 Many conservationists did not wait on government to take the language initiative. In willingly borrowing and promoting the drab argot of economics and management, they already perfectly served the government’s purpose. Conserving words were conspicuously absent at the ACF. In July 1992, Philip Toyne announced he needed ‘time out’ with his family and resigned as ACF executive director. Patricia Caswell, who had spent 13 years in the union movement, replaced him. Caswell had well-established Labor connections but no background in conservation. Like Toyne, she considered herself a ‘professional’, an expert in management. Nature, like other aspects of the world, needed managing. Her professionalism clashed with the amateur, volunteer

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ethos still prevalent in the Foundation. She resigned in 1995 and later joined Western Mining Company’s advisory panel. She also worked for other major exploiters, becoming chief executive of the Victorian Association of Forest Industries (VAFI) in 2004. Toyne’s post-ACF career parallelled Caswell’s. He became a consultant to the timber industry and later a board member of Australia’s second-largest sawmilling and plantation company. The ACF’s Far North Queensland campaigner, chartered accountant Jim Downey, became executive director in March 1996. He believed in building alliances, including with multinational businesses, as well as with Aboriginal, social justice, and civil liberty groups. Nature got squeezed out of the picture. But Downey never had a chance to implement his big vision. After two years in the job he resigned, citing frustration with the federal government.22 Another self-ascribed alliance builder, Don Henry, took over from Downey in May 1998. Henry had been active in the struggle for Moreton Island, headed the WPSQ for eight years, and later joined WWF International. His reign coincided with the return of rock star Peter Garrett for a second term as ACF president. Garrett resigned in 2004 to contest a safe seat for the Federal Labor Party. Suddenly he muted his conservation opinions, especially those concerning Tasmanian forests, to conform to party policy. This passing parade of leaders oversaw a steady decline in the political relevance of conservation. Additionally, each successive leader displayed an extreme reluctance to discuss population, a reticence shared with the Australian Greens, who developed an argument about the degradation of Australia in isolation from the numbers of people causing the despoliation. Greens leader Bob Brown encapsulated this legerdemain in his 2004 book, Memo for a Saner World, where he described himself as ‘a big-G Green, for whom human welfare is an essential political consideration’. Generous with what did

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not belong to him, Brown offered Australia as a welcome centre for the world’s poor. He supported immigration because ‘We have to accept our responsibility as part of the global community [and] take our share of the world’s desperate people’.23 Brown did not name other countries accepting their share of ‘desperate’ people, or explain how Australia acquired its singular international obligation, nor justify how that obligation overrode a responsibility to look after the country. Perhaps he considered it unnecessary. The Greens, after all, consisted of people blind to moral dilemmas. They constituted a party that denied the truth of living experience out of deference to a defunct corpus of esoteric leftist ideology that privileges humans. Humanity, however, already had six billion passionate advocates – how many spoke for eagle, quoll, hairynosed wombat, golden-shouldered parrot, or the Snowy River? By the mid-1990s, a chain of methane-producing puddles, choked with sand, strangled with willows, blueberries, and briars, and polluted by sewage marked the course of the once-mighty Snowy River. The Jindabyne dam, completed in 1967, restricted the flow to less than 1 percent of the original. For many people, the river’s destruction symbolised all that was wrong about modern man’s disregard for nature. To put matters right, the Cooma-based Snowy Genoa Catchment Management Committee commissioned an expert panel to examine the river. In 1996 the scientists reported that the river’s life could return, provided 28 percent of the original flow was restored. The Snowy River Alliance – representing community groups, river trusts, catchment boards, tourism operators, Aboriginal land councils, and local government from south of Jindabyne to Orbost on the Victorian coast – at once began campaigning on the theme ‘The Snowy Must Flow Again’. The Victorian, NSW, and Commonwealth governments opposed

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restoration, as did the SMA, which said returning the river to even 25 percent of its original flow would have a ‘disastrous impact’. As far as the Alliance was concerned, not restoring the river would be even more disastrous. Although suspicious of ‘greenies’, Alliance leaders realised they needed experienced campaign help, and contacted the ACF and Jeff Angel at the TEC. Angel at once saw the potential to use the iconic Snowy River to popularise the idea of restoring flows to rivers. The campaign would also expose the Snowy scheme as outdated, in both technology and attitudes. The TEC agreed to take on the campaign and, with the Alliance, began lobbying for a public inquiry before Parliament approved the corporatisation of the Snowy Mountains Scheme. River defenders urged the NSW government to determine the Snowy’s water allocation before it corporatised the SMA. The government said the matter could wait. But the Opposition and Independents in the Upper House refused the corporatising legislation, and the government agreed to consider the outcome of a water inquiry.24 To publicise the Snowy’s plight, demonstrators – including eight horse-riders wearing Akubras and oil-skin jackets – gathered outside Parliament House in Sydney. Paul Leete, chairman of the Alliance, said: ‘If we don’t put a quarter of the water back we might as well get the liquid paper and wipe the river off the maps’.25 When the government announced the inquiry into Snowy water, the terms of reference required ‘regard to the continuing viability of the [Snowy Mountains Hydro] scheme’. Leete objected: You have to meet the river’s requirements first and foremost, because the river has to be there forever and we know that it cannot be traded like power; it doesn’t operate in a marketplace. The river has to have a

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flow volume necessary to sustain it ecologically . . . We certainly don’t want to see the end of the scheme. But we certainly couldn’t see this river die. If it did, so would part of the soul of this country.26

At the inquiry, the SMA said helping the river would threaten Australia’s greenhouse performance, the security of $1 billion in borrowings, irrigation farming worth $3.5 billion, the formation of a national electricity market, and even power supplies for the Sydney Olympics. Leete said the greenhouse argument was a ‘new excuse for wrecking rivers’. The alliance submission warned that: Any political decision that attempts to trade down the experts’ recommendations [for 28 percent of original flows] would be short-sighted, ignorant and an act of deliberate vandalism. The restoration of the Snowy River to a river which Australians can have pride in represents a maturing of our society and will be one of the most valuable moments in our history.27

In October 1998, the inquiry recommended a return to flows of 15 percent. Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett said 15 percent was the best possible outcome. Leete said this was a political rather than an environmental flow. More people spoke up for the river. The mayor of East Gippsland Shire, Shaun Beasley, said the environmental flow could easily be restored if irrigators were more efficient and added: ‘Irrigators don’t have [the water] as [a] right. It is not theirs to give back. It is the Snowy River’s water.’ The president of Native Fish Australia, Craig Ingram, who was running as an Independent candidate in the State seat of Gippsland East, said 15 percent would not significantly help matters.28 The Myer Foundation backed a revitalised Snowy River. Foundation president Lady Marigold Southey said she was disappointed that

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Mr Kennett – she went to school with his mother and had known him all his life – supported a compromise solution described by Snowy campaigners as a waste of water: ‘There are two rivers dying in this country. One is the Snowy because it hasn’t got any water and the other is the Murray because it has had too much.’29 In September 1999, Ingram won election as an Independent. The following month, he and Leete met NSW Premier Bob Carr. Meanwhile, the chief executive of the NSW Irrigators’ Association, Gary Donovan, dismissed the idea of restoring 28 percent of the Snowy as ‘fairyland stuff . . . The situation there has been fundamentally changed and we don’t think we should look back to some prehistoric past. We should look forward to a well-managed future.’ Federal Environment Minister Robert Hill concurred, declared there was no water to spare and rejected the rehabilitation of the Snowy as a ‘romantic notion’.30 At a horseback protest rally outside the NSW Parliament, Ingram said that when the Alliance proposed the restoration of environmental flows to the Victorian treasurer, he ‘just laughed at us’. A few days later, Ingram, who held the balance of power in the Victorian Parliament, ended Kennett’s seven-year reign and put the treasurer out of a job when he announced he would support the Labor Party as a minority government. Labor had promised to restore environmental flows to the Snowy. Ingram remarked: ‘People here feel that the Snowy River is our river and we’ve had our river stolen. We’re not after anything more than just our river back.’31 The two State governments began negotiations and reached an agreement that would allow the flow to increase to 28 percent at some point in the future. Only 15 percent would be guaranteed in times of drought. Jo Garland, deputy chairwoman of the Snowy River Alliance, said the 10-year plan to gradually increase the level of water returned to the river was not good enough. The Alliance would continue the campaign.32

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Rural people, people who lived by and loved the river, assumed the fight for the Snowy. Unabashedly patriotic and unconstrained by the ideological strictures handicapping many, more established conservationists, they paid no heed to the oracular sensitivities endorsed in books such as Memo for a Saner World. Ideological inhibitions, however, prevented other conservationists from speaking up – for example, for the dugong, hunted to near extinction by what at least one euphemism-friendly environmental journalist referred to as ‘unregulated indigenous cultural harvesting’. Only the fearless Mary White put the matter forthrightly: A major problem [in conservation in northern Australia] is the difference in the laws which govern Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal behaviour. Aboriginals may burn where and when they like on land they own and lease; they can range over country held by others as well as over that which they own in the course of their hunting and foraging; they are allowed by law to kill animals which are protected, even endangered, and which non-Aboriginal Australians are prohibited from killing, and they use high-powered modern guns, not traditional methods to do so. This situation has to be addressed. It creates a divided nation and a great deal of resentment.33

White’s candour affronted many people. Fantasy more perfectly satisfied their multiple needs. Several impulses, for example, upheld the myth of the Ecological Aborigine. Some people sought to recover habits of thought they imagined prevailed during a past era, before the disruption of the human and natural worlds by heedless agriculture, runaway industrialism, loss of faith, galloping modernity, and reductionist science. Others, driven by guilt, overcompensated for past wrongs by designating Aborigines possessors of superior wisdom. Still

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others wanted a story about the natural life against which they could contrast the modern world and expose its ills. Academics concocted substantiations for all these converging needs. As one rejoiced: In Australia, we have the distinct advantage of sharing the land with a culture that retained abilities our culture has lost. Aboriginal Australians are certainly more alive than we are to their surroundings and are acutely aware of the uniqueness of each ‘place’ they might visit.34

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, this endemically patronising view of Aborigines as moral lessons for effete Europeans became an overriding, unchallenged cause for left-wing intellectuals. Furthermore, many intellectual conservationists presented their belief that indigenous people enjoyed a fundamentally different relationship to the land as the only starting point for critiquing Western society. This decree prevented conservationists from examining the multitude of critical possibilities inherent in Western culture. Conservation commentators who ignored the polemical diversity of the Western inheritance favoured a narrow and conformist outlook. Truth never penetrates unwilling minds, and commentators pursued the Ecological Aborigine dogma with an infatuation that defied consistency and sense. Scientist Mike Archer and conservation writer Bob Beale began their 2004 book Going Native with a defensive, reverential, and romanticised account of Aboriginal occupancy. After fashionably dismissing the idea of wilderness, they suggest that while Aborigines walked every square metre of the continent, invested every feature with spiritual significance, and ‘managed’ the entire landscape intensively for at least 60 000 years until it was ‘just as much a human construct as it is a natural one’, they had no impact, caused no extinctions, and kept Australia’s biota intact. Such claims

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stagger belief and outrage coherence. But Archer and Beale persist. Aborigines were model conservationists and we have much to learn from their ‘sustainable land-management strategy’. The authors did not elaborate. Instead, their main recommendation featured the economic valuing of ‘ecosystem services’ – a program dependent on premises and principles utterly foreign and contrary to Aboriginal cosmologies.35 The myth of the Ecological Aborigine became a dogma because conservationists failed to call one another intellectually to account, to question mythmakers, and to rigorously and ruthlessly evaluate evidence. Even sceptical conservationists remained silent, either out of fear of being branded racist or because they lacked the forensic skills necessary to unpack the myth. Their silence complied with the country’s general intellectual timidity. As in other areas of social inquiry, intellectuals in conservation disparaged dissent and discouraged critical oversight. In their 1999 history of the environment movement, Queensland Greens leader Drew Hutton and fellow academic Libby Connors noted approvingly: ‘Many in the Australian [environment] movement’ welcome the lack of philosophical dispute, which they see as ‘debilitating’, consisting largely of ‘labels’ and ‘purity’.36 Conservationists trapped in wishful thinking about the wisdom of the elders and disdainful of dissent are incapable of recognising the truth: there are no models, no templates for living sustainably on this continent or on this planet. We are on our own and must make our own way. Success will draw on the efforts and achievements of several generations of conservationists whose patriotism galvanised people into defending the country against the ruinous course set by governments and developers. Without conservation activists to stop the looting of wild places, aqueducts and powerlines would have strangled the Kosciuszko high country, dams would have flooded the Franklin, mines would have contaminated and fragmented Kakadu,

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oil rigs and pipelines would have crisscrossed and polluted the Great Barrier Reef, and clear-cuts would have ravaged every ancient forest on the continent. Without concerned citizens there would be no laws to protect wildlife, no mechanisms to preserve and enlarge wild country, and no institutions to look after national parks. Without conservation authors, journalists, poets, photographers, film-makers, musicians, and scientists, people would be largely unaware of the threats to nature. Without patriots ready to defend their country, developers, with the connivance of thuggish allies in government, would have overrun the continent, razed, paved, destroyed without restraint, and eliminated every vestige of beauty and wild nature. Without patriots there would be no Australian natural heritage to be inherited, cherished, and passed on and on. More will be demanded of patriots in the future – much more. Several decades of population and economic growth leading to continued destruction lie ahead. Possibly, this binge of human indulgence will prove transient. In the long-term future, human numbers and impacts might decrease. In the meantime, patriots must mount a militant defence of what remains and begin re-wilding the continent.

aCKnoWleDGMenTs

Early in 2001 I took to the road and the bush and spent two years visiting and talking to conservation activists around Australia. Each encounter led to others and several involved activism. I joined blockades, participated in meetings and assemblies, addressed rallies, and ran errands. During that time it was my privilege to meet a fair proportion of the people who appear in this chronicle and many who do not but who, nevertheless, belong to the story of conservation. Along with tens of thousands of others, they made conservation central to the modern history of Australia. Patriots records only part of their contribution. Limits of space and imperatives of narrative required the omission of vast slabs of material. This is not the book I had in mind when my travels began. At the end, however, there was really only one thing to do with all the experiences, contacts and knowledge I had acquired. Amanda Lohrey knew that before I did and she made the clinching argument for this history. Carol Booth and Tim Low quickly endorsed Amanda’s advice. Since I declared my intention I have enjoyed many more conversations about conservation. Alec Marr and Virginia Young exuberantly

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detailed the politics and personalities behind various campaigns. Much of that back story, while not explicit in Patriots, coloured the way I viewed events and people. Paul Collins nourished a long exchange about the lack of rigour in the philosophy behind conservation and about the politics of fighting for nature. Conversations with Paul deepened my thinking about what conservationists have done and have tried to do in Australia. Other conversations with Dierk von Behrens, Jenny Goldie, Nick Goldie, Todd Dudley, Ian Johnstone, Julie McGuiness, Mark O’Connor, Haydn Washington, Chris Watson and Graeme Worboys revealed information and leads that enlarged my approach to this story. Andrew Wong also belongs to this list. But, in addition to wideranging and astute conversation, Andrew offered his time and lent material assistance to this undertaking. I am especially and most gratefully indebted to Bob Birrell who encouraged me to think critically and expansively about patriotism. He not only intellectually and morally supported this project but he also secured crucial financial backing through a fellowship with the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University. I owe many thanks to Bob and the Centre. Conversation can only go so far. Eventually an historian must consult the documentary record. Fortunately the National Library in Canberra houses a bountiful archive of relevant Australian and nonAustralian material. Access to that collection through the Petherick Room and the assistance of many fine, discreet, and selfless librarians completed my good fortune. Paul Livingstone and Andrew Sargent were unfailingly helpful in locating and recommending material and advising with searches. Petherick reader and scholar Janet Williams generously shared her files and notes on Judith Wright and provided a time-saving shortcut through the voluminous Wright papers. I was most fortunate in finding at UQP a publisher, Madonna

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Duffy, and an editor, Anna Crago, with the talent and courage to recognise and support an idiosyncratic point of view. Even better, they formed their own perspectives on what this story of conservation might mean. Likewise for my copy editor Sean Doyle who, for a second time, offered creative advice and attentive treatment of the manuscript. Attentiveness was also conspicuous from Tjua Kui Kam who, undaunted by her lack of English, gamely applied herself to the index. Her pluck and her tact were highlights of the year that I took to write this book. While informants, interlocutors, and institutions have been catalytic and decisive, none can be held accountable for the book’s narrative, argument or opinions. I accept full responsibility. From the annals of conservation I selected the facts according to my own judgment and grouped them according to my own vision. But, having accepted liability for the book’s errors, prejudices and outrages, I again submit that it is the product of a measureless collaboration. Both the living and the dead have buoyed and informed my wayfaring from the city to the bush, from Tasmania to Queensland to Western Australia and places between, and from the National Library to the wide world. Without co-agency there would be no Patriots. Paupong, March 2006

AbbreviAtions

AAP Australian Associated Press ABC Australian Broadcasting Commission ACF Australian Conservation Foundation AFR Australian Financial Review AGPS Australian Government Publishing Service AHC Australian Heritage Commission AMIC Australian Mining Industry Council ANTA Australian National Travel Association ANU Australian National University ANZAAS Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science APCM Australian Portland Cement Manufacturers APPM Australian Pulp and Paper Manufacturers AWU Australian Workers Union AESP Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population BCC Brisbane City Council BHP Broken Hill Proprietary BLF Builders Labourers’ Federation BRW Business Review Weekly

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CUP CSNF CT CQSS CSIRO

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

Cambridge University Press Campaign to Save Native Forests Canberra Times Central Queensland Speleological Society Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation CAR Comprehensive, Adequate and Representative CROEG Concerned Residents of East Gippsland CROPS Concerned Residents Opposed to Pulpmill Siting CCV Conservation Council of Victoria CRA Conzinc Riotinto of Australia Ltd CALM Department of Conservation and Land Management (WA) CM Courier-Mail (Brisbane) DT Daily Telegraph DNRE Department of Natural Resources and Environment (Victoria) EGC East Gippsland Coalition ESD Ecologically Sustainable Development ERA Energy Resources Australia EIS Environmental Impact Statement EPA Environment Protection Agency FNCV Field Naturalists Club of Victoria FAN Forest Action Network FIDO Fraser Island Defence Organisation FOE Friends of the Earth GECO Goongerah Environment Centre Office GBR Great Barrier Reef GBRC Great Barrier Reef Committee HEC Hydro-Electric Commission (Tasmania) IUCN International Union for the Conservation of Nature



LPAC MUP MIPC NLA NPA NR NT NFAC NRCL NAG NVA NPDA NBH NEFA OTD OUP QCC RCSQ RFA RAC SOBAC SLPNC SMA SRS SCOOP SWAC SWC SWFDF SEFA SOE SPA

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361

Lake Pedder Action Committee Melbourne University Press Moreton Island Protection Committee National Library of Australia National Parks Association (NSW) Nation Review National Times Native Forests Action Committee Natural Resources Conservation League Nightcap Action Group, later Nomadic Action Group Non-Violent Action Noosa Parks Development Association North Broken Hill North East Forest Alliance Organisation for Tasmanian Development Oxford University Press Queensland Conservation Council Rainforest Conservation Society of Queensland Regional Forest Agreement Resource Assessment Commission Save Our Bushlands Action Committee Save Lake Pedder National Park Committee Snowy Mountains Authority Social Responsibility in Science South Coast Organisation Opposing Pollution (NSW) South West Action Committee (Tasmania) National South West Committee South-West Forests Defence Foundation (WA) South East Forest Alliance State of the Environment State Planning Authority (NSW)

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SMH TNFAG TEC TWS

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

Sydney Morning Herald Terania Native Forest Action Group Total Environment Centre The Wilderness Society (before 1983, Tasmanian Wilderness Society) UTG United Tasmania Group UNSW University of New South Wales VFT Very Fast Train VNPA Victorian National Parks Association WA The West Australian WAFA Western Australian Forest Alliance WLPSA Wild Life Preservation Society of Australia WPSQ Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland WWF World Wildlife Fund ZPG Zero Population Growth

select bibliogrAphy

Most of Patriots is based on primary sources. These are detailed in the notes. This Select Bibliography lists those books that influenced the way I framed and analysed material. Abbey, Edward, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto): Notes From a Secret Journal, St Martin’s, New York, 1989 Bailey, F. G., Humbuggery and Manipulation: The Art of Leadership, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1988 Bailey, F. G., The Tactical Uses of Passion: An Essay on Power, Reason, and Reality, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1983 Barzun, Jacques, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present, HarperCollins, New York, 2000 Barzun, Jacques, Race: A Study in Superstition, Harper & Row, New York, 1965 Bate, Jonathan, The Genius of Shakespeare, Picador, London, 1997 Beder, Sharon, The Nature of Sustainable Development, 2nd edition, Scribe, Newham, Victoria, 1996 Beder, Sharon, Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism, Scribe, Melbourne, 1997

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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Betts, Katharine, The Great Divide: Immigration Politics in Australia, Duffy & Snellgrove, Sydney, 1999 Brown, Donald E., Human Universals, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1991 Canovan, Margaret, Nationhood and Political Theory, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK, 1996 Clendinnen, Inga, Dancing with Strangers, Text, Melbourne, 2003 Eckersley, Robyn, The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty, MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2004 Edgerton, Robert B., Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony, The Free Press, New York, 1992 Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature, The Free Press, New York, 2001 Galligan, Brian and Winsome Roberts, Australian Citizenship, MUP, Melbourne 2004 Gellner, Ernest, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1994 Gray, John, Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern, Faber, London, 2003 Gray, John, Beyond the New Right: Markets, Government and the Common Environment, Routledge, London, 1993 Gray, John, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and other Animals, Granta Books, London, 2002 Grayling, A. C., The Reason of Things: Living with Philosophy, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2001 Hampshire, Stuart, Justice is Conflict, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2000 Hay, Peter, Main Currents in Western Environmental Thought, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2003 Hays, Samuel, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985, CUP, Cambridge, 1987



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Hays, Samuel P., Explorations in Environmental History, University of Pittsburg Press, Pittsburg, 1998 Hill, Barry, Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession, Knopf, Sydney, 2002 Horton, David, The Pure State of Nature: Sacred Cows, Destructive Myths and the Environment, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2000 Ignatieff, Michael, Blood & Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism, Viking, London, 1993 Johns, Gary, Waking up to Dreamtime: The Illusion of Aboriginal Self-Determination, Media Masters, Singapore, 2001 Jones, Steve, Darwin’s Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated, Random House, New York, 1999 Killingsworth, M. Jimmie and Jacqueline S. Palmer, Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 1992 Krech III, Shepard, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, Norton, New York, 1999 Kuper, Adam, Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1999 Lewis, C. S., Studies in Words, CUP, Cambridge, 1960 Lopez, Mark, The Origins of Multiculturalism in Australian Politics, 1945-1975, MUP, Carlton, 2000 Lukacs, John, At the End of an Age, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2002 Luoma, Jon R., The Hidden Forest: The Biography of an Ecosystem, Henry Holt, New York, 1999 Malouf, David, ‘Made in England: Australia’s British Inheritance’, Quarterly Essay, Issue 12, 2003 Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan, What is Life?, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1995 Midgley, Mary, The Myths We Live By, Routledge, London, 2003

366

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Miller, Sally M. (ed.), John Muir in Historical Perspective, Peter Lang, New York, 1999 Nelson, Richard, The Island Within, Vintage, New York, 1991 O’Connor, Mark, This Tired Brown Land, Duffy & Snellgrove, Sydney, 1998 Olson, Steve, Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past Through our Genes, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2002 Pepper, David, The Roots of Modern Environmentalism, Croom Helm, London, 1984 Pinker, Steven, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Allen Lane, London, 2002 Ridley, Matt, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, Viking, London, 1993 Said, Edward W., Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures, Pantheon, New York, 1994 Sandall, Roger, The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays, Westview, Boulder, Colorado, 2001 Scruton, Roger, The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Wilmington, Delaware, 2002 Sheehan, Paul, The Electronic Whorehouse, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 2003 Stillman, Edmund and William Pfaff, The Politics of Hysteria: The Sources of Twentieth Century Conflict, Victor Gollancz, London, 1964 Waddell, Craig (ed.), And No Birds Sing: Rhetorical Analyses of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 2000 Wolpert, Lewis, The Unnatural Nature of Science, Faber, London, 1993 Worster, Donald, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination, OUP, New York, 1993



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Young, David, Our Islands, Our Selves: A History of Conservation in New Zealand, University of Otago Press, Dunedin, New Zealand, 2004

notes

1  Storm 1 Weather description drawn from Australian Weather Charts 1946, 22–27 March 1946; Age, 26 March 1946; SMH, 27 March 1946 2 Wild Life, June 1946, pp. 195–98 3 Morrison’s life from Graham Pizzey, Crosbie Morrison: Voice of Nature, Law Printer, Melbourne, 1992 4 Wild Life, January 1952, p. 9 5 Wild Life, May 1946, p. 149 6 ibid., p. 141 7 My analysis of nationhood and patriotism draws on Margaret Canovan, Nationhood and Political Theory, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK, 1996 8 The complementary party election posters are reproduced on facing pages in A. W. Martin, Robert Menzies: A Life: Volume 2, 1944–1978, MUP, Melbourne, 1999, pp. 52–53 9 Elyne Mitchell, Soil and Civilization, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1946, pp. 2, 5 10 ibid., pp. 11, 73–74 11 Park Watch, No. 169, June 1992, pp. 8–12



NOTES

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12 Wild Life, May 1946, p. 149. 13 L. E. B. Stretton, Report of the Royal Commission to Inquire Into Forest Grazing, Victorian Government Printer, Melbourne, 1946 14 Bushland, Vol. 1, 1938, p. 7 15 The Sydney Bushwalker, July 1945, p. 5 16 G. L. Sutton, Comes the Harvest: Half a Century of Agricultural Progress in Western Australia, 1900–1949, Perth, 1952, p. 24 17 L. F. Crisp, Ben Chifley: A Biography, Longmans, Croydon, Vic., 1961, p. 319 18 M. D. Williams, Out of the Mist, Book II: The Story of Man’s Mastery of his Physical Environment, and his Intellectual and Spiritual Development, Oldham, Beddome and Meredith, Hobart, Tasmania, 1948, p. iv 19 New South Wales Department of Education, The Junior Tree Warden, No 7, 1946–47, p. 4 20 ibid., p. 8 21 Bushwalker, 1948, No 11, p. 33 22 ibid., Emphasis in the original 23 T. G. H. Strehlow, An Australian Viewpoint, Hawthorn Press, 1950, p. 12 24 ibid., p. 16 25 ibid., p. 26 26 J. C. Beaglehole (ed.), The Journals of Captain James Cook On His Voyages of Discovery: The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768–1771, CUP, London, 1955, p. 399 27 On the West as a ‘mongrel civilization’ see Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present, HarperCollins, New York, 2000 28 Graeme Starr, The Liberal Party of Australia: A Documentary History, Drummond/Heinemann, Richmond, Vic., 1980, pp. 136–9

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NOTES

2  This Gentle Art of Bulldozing 1 Pizzey, op. cit., pp. 2–20 2 On Australia’s British inheritance see David Malouf, ‘Made in England: Australia’s British Inheritance’, Quarterly Essay, Issue 12, 2003 3 Marie Beuzeville Byles, By Cargo Boat & Mountain: The Unconventional Experience of A Woman on Tramp Round the World, Seeley, Service, London, 1931, p. 309 4 Australia Today, 1951, p. 41 5 W. K. Hancock, Discovering Monaro: A Study of Man’s Impact on his Environment, CUP, London, 1972, p. 164 6 Claire Miller, Snowy River Story: The Grassroots Campaign to Save a National Icon, ABC Books, Sydney, 2005, pp. 15–17 7 Wild Life, June 1951, p. 507 8 Wild Life, July 1951, p. 7 9 Edna Walling, The Australian Roadside, OUP, Melbourne, 1952, pp. vii, 23 10 Wild Life, April 1952, p. 309 11 Wild Life, July 1952, p. 9; November 1952, p. 409 12 Your Garden, Vol. 8, No. 7, July 1955, p. 31 13 John Walker, Society for Growing Australian Plants, 1957–1997, Melbourne, 1997 14 A. B. Costin, The Ecosystems of the Monaro Region of New South Wales, NSW Government Printer, Sydney, 1954, Foreword 15 Australian Academy of Science, A Report on the Condition of the High Mountains Catchments of New South Wales and Victoria, Canberra, 1957, p. 3 16 Max Angus, The World of Olegas Truchanas, ACF, Melbourne, 1980, pp. 24–26 17 Email from Peter Sims, 8 March 2004 18 Peter Thompson, Bob Brown of the Franklin River, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1984, pp. 4–7



NOTES

371

19 Richard Aiken, Gardenesque: A Celebration of Australian Gardening, Miegunyah Press/State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, 2004, p. 162 20 Kathleen McArthur, Queensland Wildflowers: A Selection, Jacaranda Press, Brisbane, 1959, p. 1 21 Peter Meredith, Myles and Milo, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1999, pp. 205, 206 22 ibid., p. 204 23 Age, 9 November 1996, p. 25; Graeme Wheeler, The Scroggin Eaters: A History of Bushwalking in Victoria, to 1989, VicWalk, Melbourne, 1991, p. 160 24 Dorothy Hill, ‘The Great Barrier Reef Committee, 1922–82. Part II: The Last Three Decades’, Historical Records of Australian Science, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1985, pp. 195–221 25 ‘The Future of the Kosciuszko Summit Area: A Report on a Proposed Primitive Area in the Kosciuszko State Park’, The Australian Journal of Science, Vol. 23, No. 12, June 1961, pp. 391–9

3  Harmony 1 CM, 24 July 1962, p. 2 2 Judith Wright, The Coral Battleground, Nelson, Melbourne, 1977, p. 3 3 ibid., p. 2 4 Judith Wright to Kathleen McArthur, 12 September and 7 and 22 October 1962, NLA, Papers of Judith Wright, MS 5781, Box 78, Folder 570 5 National Trust Bulletin (NSW), No. 8, February 1963 6 The South West Committee First Annual Report, 21 March, 1964; Mercury, 28 November 1962, p. 13 7 Wildlife, Vol. 1, No. 1, June 1963 8 Wildlife Vol. 1, No. 2, September 1963, p. 1; Vol. 1, No. 3, December 1963, p. 2 9 Judith Wright to Kathleen McArthur, 26 February 1964, NLA, Papers of Judith Wright, MS 5781, Box 78, Folder 570

372

NOTES

10 DT, 20 February 1964, p. 2 11 Gavin Souter, Mosman: A History, MUP, Melbourne, 1994, p. 282 12 Libby Robin, Defending the Little Desert: The Rise of Ecological Consciousness in Australia, MUP, Melbourne, 1998, pp. 78–9 13 My account of the formation of the ACF draws from Beverley Broadbent, Inside the Greening: 25 Years of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Insite Press, Melbourne, 1999, pp. 1–14 14 Wildlife, Vol. 1, No. 2, September 1963, p. 1 15 Judith Wright to Kathleen McArthur, 15 July 1963, NLA, Papers of Judith Wright, MS 5781, Box 78, Folder 570 16 CM, 20 October 1964, p. 3 17 CM, 26 October 1964, p. 2 18 I. W. Morley, Black Sands: A History of the Mineral Sand Mining Industry in Eastern Australia, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1981, p. 178 19 Francis Ratcliffe, ‘The Australian Conservation Foundation’, in Wildlife Conservation in Eastern Australia, Proceedings of the University of New England Seminar, January, 1965, pp. 21–23 20 Len Webb, ‘Afterthoughts’, ibid., pp. 72–3 21 A. A. Strom, ‘A Design for Wildlife Conservation’, ibid., pp. 5–10 22 Judith Wright, ‘The Role of Public Opinion in Conservation’, ibid., pp. 24–30 23 ibid. 24 ibid. 25 T. G. H. Strehlow, ‘Culture, Social Structure, and Environment in Aboriginal Central Australia’, pp. 121–45 in R. M. Berndt and C. H. Berndt (eds), Aboriginal Man in Australia: Essays in Honour of Emeritus Professor A. P. Elkin, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1965, pp. 121–45 26 ibid., p. 145 27 Email from Peter Prineas, 9 April 2004



NOTES

373

28 Mercury, 31 August 1964, p. 8 29 Mercury, 21 June 1965, p. 7 30 Wildlife, Vol. 2, No. 4, July 1965, pp. 16–17 31 F. N. Ratcliffe, ‘Conservation Language’, in Conservation in Education, Proceedings of the University of New England Seminar Held in January 1966, pp. 3–9 32 A. M. Fox, ‘Towards a Quality of Living’, ibid., pp. 24–49 33 A. A. Strom, ‘Some Problems for National Park Administration’, in Practical Problems of National Parks, Proceedings of the Seminar Held at the University of New England, February 1966, pp. 20–9

4  Level-Headed Men 1 Harris, Kerr, Forster & Company and Stanton Robbins & Co, Australia’s Travel and Tourist Industry, New York, 1965, p. 218. Italics in original 2 ibid., p. 239 3 A. J. Marshall (ed.), The Great Extermination: A Guide to AngloAustralian Cupidity, Wickedness & Waste, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1966, pp. 5, 8, 47, 8, 26, 49, 54, 30, 38 4 ibid., pp. 94, 95, 117, 135, 146, 201 5 Wildlife, Vol. 3, No. 4, September 1966, p. 109; Walkabout, Vol. 32, No. 9, September 1966, p. 40; Vol. 32, No. 10, October 1966, p. 13 6 Wildlife, Vol. 3, No. 5, December 1966, p. 129; WPSQ Newsletter, No. 1, September 1966 7 Mercury, 23 September 1966, p. 2 8 Save Lake Pedder National Park Committee, Newsletter, August 1967 9 Mercury, 6 June 1967, p. 4; 14 June 1967, p. 4 10 Gordon River and Thermal Power Development, Report of Select Committee of the Legislative Council with Minutes of Proceedings, Parliament of Tasmania, 1967; Serventy transcript from NLA, Vincent Serventy Papers, MS 4655, Box 366, Folder 116 11 Examiner, 3 July 1967, p. 23

374

NOTES

12 Mercury, 23 August 1967, p. 4; Advocate, 24 August 1967, p. 4 13 Advocate, 10 August 1967, p. 2 14 Broadbent, op. cit., p. 26 15 Judith Wright to Kathleen McArthur, December 1966, NLA, Papers of Judith Wright, MS 5781, Box 78, Folder 570 16 Papers presented at a Symposium, Caring for Queensland, organised by the ACF and held at the University of Queensland St Lucia, Brisbane, 14–15 October 1967, p. 2 17 Don McMichael, ‘Underwater National Parks and the Great Barrier Reef ’, ibid., p. 25 18 WPSQ, Newsletter No. 11, December 1967 19 WPSQ, Newsletter No. 4, February 1967 20 WPSQ, Newsletter No. 7, June 1967 21 Quadrant, January–February 1968, pp. 29–33 22 See Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: The Roots of Ecology, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1977 23 E. & J. Bradley, Weeds and Their Control, Mosman Parklands and Ashton Park Association, 1967 24 National Parks Association of NSW, Quarry Valuable Scenery?, Sydney, 1967 25 DT, 5 January 1968, p. 2; 16 January 1968, p. 2 26 SMH, 27 April 1968, p. 2 27 SMH, 21 May 1968, p. 2 28 SMH, 4 May 1968, p. 2; 25 May 1968, p. 2

5  Abyss of Folly 1 Australian Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 1, March 1968, pp. 58–64 2 ibid. 3 ibid. 4 Judith Wright to Kathleen McArthur, 11 August 1968, NLA, Papers of Judith Wright, MS 5781, Box 78, Folder 570



NOTES

375

5 McArthur, Living, op. cit., p. 76 6 ibid., pp. 72, 73 7 Quoted in obituary of John Büsst, Nation, 1 May 1971, p. 14 8 Judith Wright, The Coral Battleground, Nelson, Melbourne, 1977, pp. 32–3 9 Donald McMichael, ‘Underwater National Parks and the Great Barrier Reef ’, Appendix 2, Australian Academy of Science, National Parks and Reserves in Australia, Canberra, 1968, pp. 34–7 10 Harry S. Ladd, Preliminary Report on Conservation and Controlled Exploitation of the Great Barrier Reef, July 9, 1968 11 CM, 11 September 1968, p. 3; Wright, op. cit., pp. 35–8 12 Wright, op. cit., p. 38 13 CM, 13 September 1968, p. 3 14 Wright, op. cit., p. 45 15 ibid., p. 51 16 ibid., p. 59 17 W. G. H. Maxwell, ‘Physical Geology & Oceanography’, in ACF, The Future of the Great Barrier Reef: Papers of an Australian Conservation Foundation Symposium, Sydney, 3 May 1969, pp. 5–14 18 P. C. Spender, ‘The Great Barrier Reef: Legal Aspects’, ibid., pp. 25–41 19 The Future of the Great Barrier Reef, op. cit., p. 68 20 Vincent Serventy, Vincent Serventy: An Australian Life: Memoirs of a Naturalist, Conservationist, Traveller and Writer, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, 1999, p. 110; Wright, op. cit., p. 65 21 Save Colong Bulletin, No. 1, 2 August 1968 22 SMH, 27 September 1969, p. 2 23 SMH, 1 October 1969, p. 1 24 New South Wales Parliamentary Debates, session 1969–70, Vol. 82, 4 & 5 November 1969, pp. 2205, 2294 25 Robin, op. cit., p. 15 26 Age, 29 May 1969, p. 7

376

NOTES

27 Save Our Bushland Action Committee, Save Our Bushland: a Record of the Proceedings of the Public Meeting Held in the Lower Melbourne Town Hall and Scots Church Hall on the Evening of Friday, 29 August, 1969, Melbourne, 1969 28 ibid. 29 ibid., pp. 25–31; Age, 18 September 1971, p. 2 30 Robin, op. cit., pp. 72–3

6  Gadarene Swine 1 Judith Wright, Conservation as an Emerging Concept, ACF Occasional Publication, No. 2, Melbourne, 1970. Emphasis in the original. Also published in Overland, No. 43 as ‘Survival of our Species: Conservation as an Emerging Concept’, Summer 1969–70, pp. 17–21 2 CM, 25 August 1969, p. 3; Commonwealth of Australia, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 26 August 1969, p. 640; CM, 28 August 1969, p. 2 3 CM, 9 September 1969, p. 3 4 Australian, 3 January 1970, p. 1 5 Australian, 14 January 1970, p. 1 6 Australian, 19 January 1970, p. 6 7 Wright, Coral Battleground, op. cit., p. 126 8 CM, 10 February 1970, p. 6 9 Noosa Parks Development Association, Newsbulletin, No. 14, December 1967; Australian, 13 October 1969, p. 14 10 The Australian Mineral Sands: And a Profile of one of its Early Pioneers, NSW Rutile Mining Company Pty Ltd, Brisbane, 1965 11 Wildlife, Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1967, p. 33 12 SMH, 15 October 1969, p. 2 13 SMH, 12 June 1970, p. 5; DT, 12 June 1970, p. 12 14 Australian, 5 November 1970, p. 2 15 Sun (Sydney), 4 November 1970, p. 77



NOTES

377

16 Save Colong Bulletin, No. 17, 30 January 1971 17 SMH, 12 February 1971, p. 13 18 Save Colong Bulletin, No. 18, 13 March 1971 19 ibid. 20 Save Colong Bulletin, No. 20, 12 May 1971 21 Margaret Shaw, The History of the Battle to Save Kelly’s Bush and the Green Ban Movement in the Early 1970s, Buckleys, Petersham, NSW, 1996, p. 19 22 A copy of Campbell’s address is in NLA, Vincent Serventy Papers, MS 4655, Box 243, Folder 77 23 Pip Kalajzich, The Battlers for Kelly’s Bush, Sydney, 1996, p. 3 24 Meredith Burgmann and Verity Burgmann, Green Bans Red Union: Environmental Activism and the New South Wales Builders Labourers’ Federation, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1998, p. 173 25 Kalajzich, op. cit., p. 34 26 ibid., p. 29 27 Joan Bradley, Bush Regeneration, Mosman Parklands and Ashton Park Association, 1971

7  Pedderised 1 ACF, Conservation Directory, 1970, Parkville, Vic., 1970 2 Society for Social Responsibility in Science (ACT), What can I do? Guidelines for citizen action on environmental problems, O’Connor, ACT, 1971 3 L. J. Webb, D. Whitelock, and J. Le Gay Brereton (eds), The Last of Lands: Conservation in Australia, Jacaranda Press, Milton, Qld., 1969, p. xi 4 Stephen Boyden, Australia and the Environmental Crisis, The George Judah Cohen Memorial Lecture 1970, University of Sydney, 1970 5 Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley, The Subversive Science: Essays Toward an Ecology of Man, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1969 6 AFR, 4 May 1971, p. 15

378

NOTES

7 AFR, 24 September 1971, p. 44 8 SMH, 21 August 1971, p. 6 9 Age, 28 September 1971, p. 5; David Marr, Barwick, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1980, p. 235 10 Age, 28 September 1971, p. 5 11 Habitat, Vol. 14, No. 3, June 1986, p. 32 12 Peter Meredith, Myles and Milo, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1999, p. 248; Richard Jones (ed.), Damania: The Hydro-Electric Commission, The Environment & Government in Tasmania, Fullers Bookshop, Hobart, Tasmania, 1972, pp. 9, 20 13 Helen Gee and Janet Fenton, The South West Book: A Tasmanian Wilderness, ACF, Hawthorn, Victoria, 1978, p. 241 14 Mercury, 24 April 1972, p. 9 15 Broadbent, op. cit., p. 61 16 ibid., p. 62 17 NR, 15 July 1972, p. 1123 18 NR, 22 July 1972, pp. 1134–5 19 ACF, Pedder Papers: Anatomy of a Decision, Parkville, Vic., 1972, p. 63 20 NR, 18 November 1972, p. 149 21 Broadbent, op. cit., p. 75 22 Meredith, op. cit., p. 244 23 Milo Dunphy, ‘Emergence of the Australian Environmental Conscience – Tasmania and Lake Pedder in Perspective’, in Jones, op. cit., pp. 5–22 24 Save Colong Bulletin, No. 12, 22 May 1970

8  Bogus Letters 1 John La Nauze, Walter Murdoch: A Biographical Memoir, MUP, Melbourne, 1977, p. 154; Colin Clark, ‘Agricultural Productivity in relation to Population’, in Gordon Wolstenholme (ed.), Man and His Future: A Ciba Foundation Volume, Churchill, London, 1963, pp. 23–35.



NOTES

379

2 SMH, 27 August 1970, p. 2 3 SMH, 24 August 1970, p. 2 4 Australian Institute of Political Science, How Many Australians? Immigration and Growth, Proceedings of the 37th Summer School of the Australian Institute of Political Science held at Canberra 30 January to 1 February 1971, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1971, p. 81 5 F. J. Fenner, ‘The Environment’, How Many Australians?, op. cit., pp. 37–60 6 How Many Australians?, op. cit., pp. 29, 199 7 Zero Population Growth: Colin Clark versus Derek Llewellyn-Jones, Heinemann Educational, South Yarra, 1974; and Zero Population Growth, Questions & Answers, ZPG, 1972 8 Population – The Main Polluter, Symposium organised by ANZAAS-SA, Adelaide, 14 August 1971 9 Derek Whitelock, A Dirty Story: Pollution in Australia, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1971, pp. 18, 23, 34 10 AFR, 17 September 1971, p. 2 11 Meanjin Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 2, June 1971, pp. 219–26; Quadrant, September–October 1970, pp. 54–9 12 The Review, 8 October 1971, p. 1467 13 Gough Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, Penguin, Ringwood, 1985, p. 547 14 Tom Uren, ‘Bombs, Babies and Bulldozers’, in Rob Dempsey (ed.), The Politics of Finding Out: Environmental Problems in Australia, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1974, pp. 231–6 15 Roger Green, Battle for the Franklin: Conversations with the Combatants in the Struggle for South West Tasmania, Fontana/ACF, Sydney/ Melbourne, 1984, p. 71 16 David Yencken, ‘Jewels and Old Shoes: A Recollection of the Australian Heritage Commission’, NLA, Papers of Judith Wright, MS 5781, Box 15, Folder 107

380

NOTES

17 Whitlam, op. cit., p. 529 18 Jack Mundey, Green Bans and Beyond, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1981, p. 105 19 The Review, 25 March 1972; NR, 2 September 1973; 23 March 1973; 28 September 1973; 30 August 1974; Age, 1 November 1973, p. 15 20 Australian Left Review, No. 42, December 1973, pp. 15–24 21 Richard J. Roddewig, Green Bans: The Birth of Australian Environmental Politics, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1978, p. ix 22 Report of the Committee of Enquiry on Differences and Conflicts Between Interests of Parks and Conservation Authorities, Scientific Bodies and Mining Companies, Joint volumes of papers presented to the Legislative Council and Legislative Assembly, New South Wales Parliament, 1968–69, pp. 1207–89 23 H. K. Garland and Joy Wheeler, Myall Lakes: Creation to Controversy, Palms Press, Pacific Palms, NSW, 1982, p. 162 24 NR, 23 March 1973, p. 688 25 Garland and Wheeler, op. cit., p. 167 26 ibid., p. 168 27 John Sinclair with Peter Corris, Fighting for Fraser Island: A Man and an Island, Kerr Publishing, Alexandria, NSW, 1994, p. 102; Moonbi, No. 11, 12 December 1972 28 NR, 2 March 1973, p. 610 29 Broadbent, op. cit., p. 86 30 ibid., p. 101 31 Tim Bonyhady, Places Worth Keeping: Conservationists, Politics and Law, Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1993, p. 13 32 Sinclair, op. cit., p. 110 33 On Connor’s character: see ibid. 34 Whitlam, op. cit., pp. 541, 540 35 Bonyhady, op. cit., p. 2



NOTES

381

9  Reverie 1 The Forestry Log, 1968, pp. 35–7 2 ibid., pp. 15–17 3 Ecology Action Newsletter, March 1973 4 R. and V. Routley, The Fight for the Forests: The Takeover of Australian Forests for Pines, Wood Chips and Intensive Forestry, Research School of Social Sciences, ANU, Canberra, 1973, p. 154 5 ibid., p. 152 6 Report of the National Estate, AGPS, Canberra, 1974, pp. 125, 337 7 Age, 2 May 1974, p. 8 8 Whitlam, op. cit., p. 530 9 The Incredible Fraser Island, ACF, Melbourne, 1975 10 Sinclair, op. cit., p. 128 11 Report of the National Estate, op. cit., paragraph 1.26, p. 25 12 Colong Committee, How the Rainforest was Saved: The Inside Story of the 10 Year Battle, Sydney, February 1983, pp. 6–7 13 Save Colong Bulletin, No. 24, May 1972; No. 25, August 1972; No. 36, February 1976 14 D. G. Hill and F. P. J. Robotham (eds), Uranium: Metal of Menace, ACF, Melbourne, 1975, p. 9 15 H. C. Combs, Matching Ecological and Economic Realities, ACF, Parkville, Victoria, June 1972, Occasional Publication No. 9, pp. 17–18 16 ibid., p. 17 17 Chain Reaction, No. 2, May 1975 18 Bonyhady, op. cit., p. 41; Frank Crowley, Tough Times: Australia in the Seventies, William Heinemann, Richmond, Victoria, 1986, pp. 352–3 19 Colong Committee, op. cit., p. 13 20 UTG Extra, No. 3, May 1974 21 Thompson, op. cit., p. 51 22 ibid., p. 54

382

NOTES

10  Come in Peace and Love 1 Australian, 1 January 1976, pp. 1, 13; 21 December 1975, p. 6; 30 December 1975, p. 6 2 Report of the National Estate, op. cit., pp. 81, 336 3 Peter M. Helman, Alan D. Jones, John J. Pigram, and Jeremy M. B. Smith, Wilderness in Australia: Eastern New South Wales and Southeastern Queensland, Department of Geography, University of New England, November 1976 4 Geoff Mosley (ed.), Australia’s Wilderness: Conservation Progress and Plans, Proceedings of the First National Wilderness Conference, Australian Academy of Science, Canberra, 21–23 October 1977, ACF, 1978, p. 12 5 Broadbent, op. cit., p. 155 6 Australian Natural History, Vol. 16, September 1969, pp. 224–8 7 Sylvia Hallam, Fire and Hearth: A Study of Aboriginal Usage and European Usurpation in South-Western Australia, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1975, Preamble 8 Strehlow, op. cit., p. 144 9 Daily News, 28 May 1979, p. 1 10 Bonyhady, op. cit., p. 44 11 Jeni Kendell and Eddie Buivids, Earth First: The Struggle to Save Australia’s Rainforest, ABC Books, Sydney, 1987, pp. 46, 43 12 Northern Star, 24 August, 1979, p. 4; Kendell and Buivids, op. cit., p. 50 13 Habitat, Vol. 8, No. 1, February 1980, pp. 27–31 14 Habitat, Vol. 7, No. 5, December 1979, pp. 11–12 15 Thompson, op. cit., pp. 58–64 16 Helen Gee (ed.), The Franklin: Tasmania’s Last Wild River, TWS, Hobart, May 1978 17 Gee and Fenton, op. cit., p. 256 18 Thompson, op. cit., pp. 89–90



NOTES

383

11  Streams of Vilification 1 Email from Bob Birrell, 9 July 2004 2 Habitat, Vol. 3, No. 3, August–September 1975 3 Robert Birrell and Doug Hill, ‘The Myth of Australia’s “Boundless” Resources’, in Bob Birrell and Colin Hay (eds), The Immigration Issue in Australia, Department of Sociology, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Vic., 1978, pp. 147–63 4 Habitat, Vol. 6, No. 5, October 1978, pp. 19–22 5 Bob Birrell and Doug Hill, ‘Population Policy and the Natural Environment’, in Bob Birrell, Leon Glezer, Colin Hay, and Michael Liffman (eds), Refugees, Resources, Reunion: Australia’s Immigration Dilemmas, VCTA Publishing, Fitzroy, Vic., 1979, pp. 51–69 6 Colin Hay, ‘Moral Dilemmas and Population Fallacies: The Case for Population Stabilization in Australia’, ibid., pp. 79–91 7 On the half dozen or so people responsible for multiculturalism see Mark Lopez, The Origins of Multiculturalism in Australian Politics, 1945–1975, MUP, Melbourne, 2000 8 Age, 4 May 1979, p. 9 9 Quadrant, Vol. 23, No. 8, August 1979, pp. 42–5 10 Examiner, 2 April 1979, p. 6 11 Thompson, op. cit., p. 103 12 Peter Thompson, Power in Tasmania, ACF, Melbourne, 1981, p. 28 13 Thompson, Bob Brown, op. cit., p. 118 14 Australian Playboy, April 1982, pp. 40–43, 128–31 15 Habitat, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1978, pp. 22–7 16 Norm Sanders, Chris Bell, and Bob Brown, A Time to Care: Tasmania’s Endangered Wilderness, Chris Bell, Blackmans Bay, Tasmania, 1980, p. 81 17 SMH, 27 October 1982, p. 1 18 ibid.; Colong Committee, op. cit., p. 43; SMH, 30 October 1982, p. 2 19 Kendell and Buivids, op. cit., p. 71 20 SMH, 9 April 1979, p. 6

384

NOTES

12  No Dams 1 Kendell and Buivids, op. cit., p. 106 2 Mercury, 4 February 1982, p. 1 3 Thompson, Bob Brown, op. cit., p. 160 4 Green, op. cit., p. 193 5 Australian Playboy, April 1982, pp. 40–43, 128–131 6 Thompson, op. cit., p. 157 7 ibid., p. 156 8 Mercury, 27 July 1982, p. 1 9 Weekend Australian Magazine, 4 September 1982, p. 8 10 Green, op. cit., p. 17 11 Mercury, 14 October 1982, p. 1 12 James McQueen, The Franklin – Not Just a River, Penguin, Ringwood, Vic., 1983, p. 31; Mercury, 25 November 1982, p. 6 13 Mercury, 9 December 1982, pp. 1, 3 14 Mercury, 10 December 1982, p. 6 15 Mercury, 9 December 1982, p. 7; 10 December 1982, p. 6 16 Examiner, 17 December 1982, p. 2 17 McQueen, op. cit., p. 5 18 ibid., p. 17 19 Green, op. cit., p. 158 20 ibid., p. 158 21 Mercury, 24 December 1982, pp. 1–2 22 Australian, 1 January 1983, p. 1 23 Green, op. cit., p. 162

13  Different Realms 1 Mercury, 1 March 1983, p. 1 2 SMH, 3 March 1983, p. 5; Age, 3 March 1983, p. 17 3 Thompson, op. cit., p. 3; Age, 2 July 1983, p. 1 4 Age, 2 July 1983, p. 1; Thompson, op. cit., p. 3



NOTES

385

5 Age, 4 March 1983, p. 12 6 Green, op. cit., p. 132 7 Bob Brown, Australia’s Natural Heritage at the Crossroads: The Fight to Save the Franklin River, R. F. X. Connor Memorial Lecture, 1983, University of Wollongong History Society, 1983, Delivered, University of Wollongong, 24 June 1983, p. 6 8 TWS, Franklin Blockade, Hobart, 1983, pp. 9, 69 9 Age, 30 August 1983, p. 1 10 The Roxby Downs Booklet Collective, Background to Roxby Downs, FOE, Collingwood, 1984 11 Liane, No. 2, September 1982 12 CM, 14 March 1983, p. 3 13 Liane, No. 9, October 1983; No. 6, March 1983. Emphasis in the original 14 Wilderness Action Group, The Trials of Tribulation, Port Douglas, 1984 15 Account of the blockade by Antony Toohey in NLA, Papers of Antony Toohey, MS 1053, Box 1 16 Quoted in Commonwealth of Australia, Protection of the Greater Daintree: Report from the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Environment and Conservation, August 1984, AGPS, Canberra, 1984 17 Queensland, Official Record of the Debates of the Legislative Assembly (Hansard), Vol. 289, 24 November 1982, p. 2742; Vol. 285, 22 October 1981, p. 2933 18 Liane, No. 15, March 1985 19 Liane, No. 11, February 1984 20 CT, 3 February 1984, p. 9 21 Brown, op. cit., p. 6 22 CM, 18 August 1984, p. 13; Christopher Anderson, ‘Aborigines and Conservationism: The Daintree–Bloomfield Road’, Australian Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 24, No. 3, August 1989, pp. 214–27

386

NOTES

14  Fashion Consciousness 1 Green, op. cit., p. 66 2 My account of the Blainey affair draws from: Katharine Betts, The Great Divide: Immigration Politics in Australia, Duffy & Snellgrove, Sydney, 1999, pp. 256–67; Australian, 16–17 February 1985, p. 5; National Times, 22–28 March 1985, pp. 3–4, 7 3 Broadbent, op. cit., p. 226 4 Robert Birrell, Douglas Hill, and Jon Nevill, Populate and Perish? The Stresses of Population Growth in Australia, Fontana/ACF, Sydney/ Melbourne, 1984, copyright page 5 David Mercer, The Victorian Timber Industry Inquiry: Summary, Context and Critique, Monash Publications in Geography No. 32, Melbourne, 1987, p. 82 6 Examiner, 24 May 1984, p. 3 7 Mercury, 21 February 1984, p. 8 8 Helen Gee (ed.), For the Forests: A History of the Tasmanian Forest Campaigns, TWS, Hobart, 2001, p. 353; FAN and TWS, Woodchipping: The Real Impact, March 1985 9 ibid., pp. 215–17 10 ibid., p. 353 11 ibid., pp. 174–5 12 Multinational Monitor, October 1987, p. 18 13 Advertiser, 12 March 1986, p. 3 14 Broadbent, op. cit., p. 229 15 Habitat, Vol. 13, No. 2, April 1985, p. 29. Italics in original 16 Following the original invasion of Australia, humans drove 13 genera and at least 38 species of large marsupials to extinction, as well as extirpating a huge lizard, a massive snake, a huge horned tortoise and an ostrich-like bird. See Peter Murray, ‘Extinctions Downunder: A Bestiary of Extinct Australian Late Pleistocene Monotremes and Marsupials’, in Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein (eds), Quaternary



NOTES

387

Extinctions: A Prehistoric Revolution, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1984, pp. 600–628 17 Habitat, Vol. 14, No. 3, June 1986, p. 11 18 Sanders, Bell, and Brown, op. cit., p. 100 19 Senate Standing Committee on Science, Technology and the Environment, Shelburne Bay, Commonwealth Parliament, Parliamentary Paper No. 431/1986, Canberra, 1987 20 Meredith, op. cit., pp. 316, 317 21 National Parks Journal, Vol. 30, No. 4, September 1986, pp. 8–12 22 New South Wales Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), 3rd Series, Session 1986–87–88, Vol. 199, 12 November 1987, p. 15931

15  Don’t You Worry About That 1 Gee, op. cit., p. 179 2 ibid., p. 227 3 Department of the Arts, Sports, the Environment, Tourism and Territories, Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Lemonthyme and Southern Forests, AGPS, Canberra, 1988 4 Tropical Rainforests of North Queensland: Their Conservation Significance, A Report to the Australian Heritage Commission by the Rainforest Conservation Society of Queensland, Australia Heritage Commission Special Australian Heritage Publication Series No. 3, AGPS, Canberra, 1986 5 Liane, No. 13, August 1984 6 Australian Playboy, August 1988, p. 40; Australian, 8 September 1987, p. 10 7 Townsville Bulletin, 9 December 1988, p. 1 8 The Bulletin, 10 January 1989, pp. 28–32 9 Australian, 16 February 1989, p. 10 10 BRW, 27 April 1990, p. 40 11 Mercury, 16 March 1989, pp. 1, 2

388

NOTES

12 CM, 26 March 1987, p. 14 13 SMH, 13 June 1989, p. 3; CM, 13 June 1989, p. 1 14 CT, 8 December 1988, p. 9 15 VFT Awareness Groups Coalition, VFT: Need or Greed?, Melbourne, 1990 16 SMH, 19 August 1989, p. 1 17 Paul Rutherford, ‘The Web of Environmental Concerns’, in Paul James (ed.), Technocratic Dreaming: Of Very Fast Trains and Japanese Designer Cities, Left Book Club, Melbourne, 1990, pp. 19–27

16  House of Theory 1 Mercury, 10 May 1989, p. 33; 12 May 1989, p. 4; 12 May 1989, p. 8 2 W. J. Carter, Report of the Royal Commission Into an Attempt to Bribe a Member of the House of Assembly; and other matters, 3 Vols, Hobart, 30 October 1991, pp. 722–71; Age, 6 November, 1991, pp. 1, 18 3 Mercury, 3 February 1992, p. 3 4 See the respective contributions of Richard Flanagan, Michael Lynch, and Marion Wescombe in Cassandra Pybus and Richard Flanagan (eds), The Rest of the World is Watching: Tasmania and the Greens, Sun, Sydney, 1990 5 ibid., p. 176 6 Australian, 1 January 1983, p. 13 7 Bega District News, 17 November 1967, p. 1 8 SMH, 14 January 1986, p. 4 9 Imlay Magnet (Eden, NSW), 9 January 1986, p. 34; SMH, 14 January 1986, p. 4 10 Report of the Joint Scientific Committee, Biological Conservation of the South-East Forests, Canberra, 1990; SMH, 1 May 1990, p. 7 11 SMH, 4 October 1990, p. 1 12 SMH, 17 September 1986, p. 1 13 AFR, 2 October 1988, p. 8; SMH, 30 August 1989, p. 9 14 AFR, 10 October 1988, p. 3



NOTES

389

15 John Kerin, ‘Making Decisions We Can Live With’, Canberra Bulletin of Public Administration, No. 62, October 1990, p. 20 16 SMH, 6 October 1989, p. 1 17 SMH, 17 October 1989, p. 3; 28 November 1989, p. 9 18 RAC, Kakadu Conservation Zone Inquiry: Final Report, Vol. 1, April 1991, pp. xxi, 248 19 Phillip Toyne, The Reluctant Nation: Environment, Law and Politics in Australia. ABC Books, Sydney, 1994, p. 143; Australian, 9 May 1991, p. 2 20 BRW, 13 April 1990, p. 32 21 Sinclair, op. cit., pp. 177–8 22 SMH, 2 July 1990, p. 4 23 Age, 23 May 1991, p. 5 24 AFR, 27 September 1991, p. 9 25 CT, 5 December 1991, p. 5

17  Green Saboteur 1 F. G. Bailey, Humbuggery and Manipulation: The Art of Leadership, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1988 2 Reuters News, ‘Australian mineral sands industry hits boom time’, 25 September 1989 3 Sharon Beder, The Nature of Sustainable Development, 2nd Edition, Scribe, Newham, Vic., 1996, p. 280 4 Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Ecologically Sustainable Development: A Commonwealth Discussion Paper, AGPS, June 1990, Canberra, p. 1 5 Habitat, Vol. 20, No. 1, February 1992, p. 2 6 Australian, 11 May 1989, p. 4; Age, 22 May 1990, p. 16; Australian, 1 May 1990, p. 4; 14/15 October 1989, p. 22; 24 October 1989, p. 17 7 SMH, 4 June 1990, p. 1 8 Australian, 1 June 1990, p. 9

390

NOTES

9 SMH, 28 July 1990, p. 65; ACF Newsletter, Vol. 17, No. 4, May 1985; Habitat, Vol. 13, No. 3, June 1985, pp. 2–3 10 Ian Lowe, ‘Scientific Objectivity and Values’, in L. J. Webb and J. Kikkawa (eds), Australian Tropical Rainforests: Science – Values – Meaning, CSIRO, Melbourne, 1990, pp. 133–41 11 The Seattle Times, 17 June 1991, p. B1; New York Times, 21 April 1992, p. 1; Newsweek, 4 May 1992, p. 68 12 Clive Hamilton, The Mystic Economist, Willow Park Press, Canberra, 1994, pp. 122, 123; ACF, Tasmanian Wilderness Calendar, Melbourne, 1981, and reproduced in Judith Wright, Born of the Conquerors: Selected Essays by Judith Wright, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1991, p. 30 13 Michael Krockenberger, ‘Kakadu: Unleashing the Wrath of Bula’, Habitat, Vol. 17, No. 1, February 1989, pp. 4–6 14 Geoff Mosley, ‘Reconciling the Interests of Two Cultures: A Testing Time for the Wilderness Conservation Movement’, in Will Barton (ed.), Wilderness: The Future, Papers From the Fourth National Wilderness Conference, 1993, Envirobook, Sydney, 1994, pp. 205–19 15 SMH, 12 November 1991, p. 13 16 ibid. 17 ibid. 18 John Sinclair, ‘Wilderness Threats and Progress in Northern Australia’, Barton, op. cit., pp. 61–7 19 BRW, 11 June 1993, p. 23 20 Toyne, op. cit., p. 152 21 K. J. Walker and K. Crowley, Australian Environmental Policy 2: Studies in Decline and Devolution, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1999, pp. 113–14 22 Age, 14 May 1994, p. 18; 23 December 1992, p. 1 23 TWS, A Proposal for a Tarkine Wilderness Rainforest World Heritage Area, September 1992; Mercury, 29 May 1992, p. 5 24 SMH, 26 February 1990, p. 4



NOTES

391

25 Shoalwater Bay Military Training Area: Resource Assessment, prepared jointly by Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Australian Geological Survey Organisation, and Bureau of Resource Sciences, Canberra, 1993 26 BRW, 20 June 1994, p. 24 27 ibid.; Age, 12 July 1994, p. 12 28 AFR, 14 September 1994, p. 21

18  Woodchips on Stumps 1 Based on interviews and conversations with forest activists, 2001– 2004 and on the author’s experience at Goolengook blockade, East Gippsland, 2001–2002 and at Badga blockade, southeast NSW, 2001–2002 2 Age, 12 December 1995, p. 14 3 SMH, 1 February 1996, p. 6 4 RAC, Forest and Timber Inquiry, Final Report, Volume 1, March 1992, AGPS, 1992, pp. 3, xxxix, xli 5 ibid., p. 9; Commonwealth of Australia, National Forest Policy Statement: A New Focus for Australia’s Forests, 2nd Edition, AGPS, 1992, p. 9 6 Gee, op. cit., p. 316; Age, 23 December 1994, p. 1; Gee, op. cit., p. 316 7 Age, 20 October 1995, p. 7 8 Age, 15 November 1994, p. 5 9 Colong Bulletin, No. 150, May 1995, p. 5 10 Age, 1 February 1995, p. 9 11 CROEG, An Illustrated Guide to the Regional Forest Agreement: or why we’re getting sweet RFA, Goongerah, Vic., February 1998, p. 2 12 Age, 4 December 1993, p. 4 13 Potoroo Review, No. 120, November/December 1990; No. 132, December 1992/January 1993; No. 144, March 1995 14 Joseph Wayne Smith (ed.), Immigration, Population and Sustainable

392

NOTES

Environments: The Limits to Australia’s Growth, Flinders Press, Bedford Park, SA, 1991, pp. v, vi 15 Australian Natural History, Vol. 23, No. 10, Spring 1991, pp. 769–75 16 Report by the House of Representatives Standing Committee for Long Term Strategies, Australia’s Population ‘Carrying Capacity’: One Nation – Two Ecologies, AGPS, Canberra, December 1994, Paragraph 8.5, p. 143 17 Australian Academy of Science, Population 2040: Australia’s Choice, Proceedings of the Symposium of the 1994 Annual General Meeting of the Australian Academy of Science, Canberra, 1995, p. vii 18 Timothy Fridtjof Flannery, The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People, Reed, Chatswood, NSW, 1994, pp. 369, 394, 400–401 19 Doug Cocks, People Policy: Australia’s Population Choices, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1996, p. xi 20 Bob Brown and Peter Singer, The Greens, Text, Melbourne, 1996, p. 64 21 Media Release, State of the Environment Australia 1996, 27 June 1996 22 Executive Summary, Australia State of the Environment 1996, CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood, Victoria, 1996, p. 7 23 Department of the Environment, Sport and Territories, Australia: State of the Environment 1996, CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood, Victoria, 1996, pp. 10–15 24 ibid., pp. 10–26; Media Release, State of the Environment Australia 1996, 27 June 1996 25 Age, 28 June 1996, p. 4 26 AFR, 24 October 1994, p. 55 27 Townsville Bulletin, 24 July 1996; SMH, 25 January 1997, p. 32; Age, 23 August 1996, p. 9 28 Herbert River Express, 16 December 1997, p. 1; Cairns Post, 15 December 1997, p. 1; SMH, 25 January 1997, p. 32



NOTES

393

19  Trespass 1 Australian, 20 April 1998, p. 5 2 WA, 20 May 1998, p. 31 3 SMH, 11 July 1998, p. 43 4 SMH, 20 June 1998, p. 38 5 ibid. 6 SMH, 29 May 2004, p. 13 7 Potoroo Review, No. 151, August/September 1996 8 Age, 14 June 1997, p. 1 9 Age, 24 June 1997, p. 6; Potoroo Review, No. 155, Spring 1997, p. 16 10 Email from Claire Dunn, 23 November 2004 11 Age, 1 November 2002, p. 15 12 AAP, ‘Tuckey says RFAs going well’, 14 March 1999 13 AAP, ‘Timber plan will lead to conflict says conservationist’, 20 May 1999 14 AAP, ‘Forest agreement signed, bypassing Federal guidelines’, 16 September 1999 15 SMH, 27 April 1996, p. 5; Meredith, op. cit., p. 12; email from Peter Prineas, 9 April 2004 16 AFR, 28 January 1992, p. 11 17 Australian, 28 August 1996, p. 6 18 WA, 11 October 1997, p. 4 19 SMH, 25 August 1997, p. 1 20 Australian, 27 February 1998, p. 40 21 AAP, ‘WA premier says Fitzroy dam is 20 years away’, 18 June 1998 22 WA, 10 November 1998, p. 1 23 Patricia Crawford and Ian Crawford, Contested Country: A History of the Northcliffe Area, Western Australia, University of Western Australia Press, Crawley, 2003, pp. 196–8 24 CT, 5 July 1997, p. C2 25 WA, 2 May 1998, p. 10

394

NOTES

26 WA, 4 June 1998, p. 1 27 Crawford and Crawford, op. cit., p. 218 28 WA, 25 August 1999, p. 8 29 WA, 9 December 1998, p. 11 30 Crawford and Crawford, op. cit., p. 217 31 WA, 24 August 1999, p. 16 32 WA, 25 August 1999, p. 8

20  A Fart in a Cyclone 1 Dave Foreman, Rewilding North America: A Vision for Conservation in the 21st Century, Island Press, Washington, 2004 2 TWS, Wilderness-Wildlands, Discussion Paper, October 1997 3 Flannery, op. cit., pp. 378–9; Marcia Langton, ‘The European Construction of Wilderness’, Wilderness News, No. 143, Summer 1995/96, pp. 16–17 4 B. G. Mackey, R. G. Lesslie, D. B. Lindenmayer, H. A. Nix, and R. D. Incoll, The Role of Wilderness in Nature Conservation, A Report to the Australian and World Heritage Group, Environment Australia, July 1998, School of Resource Management and Environmental Science, ANU; B. G. Mackey, R. G. Lesslie, D. B. Lindenmayer, and H. A. Nix, ‘Wilderness and its place in nature conservation in Australia’, Pacific Conservation Biology, Vol. 4, 1998, pp. 182–5 5 ‘New name for Wildlands?’, email circular sent by Julie McGuiness, 3 May 1999 6 TWS email circular, 27 January 2005, ‘A year of wins for wilderness’ 7 CT, 8 April 2004, p. 1 8 CT, Times2, 1 November 2004, pp. 4–5 9 CT, 8 May 2004, p. 1 10 Brian Walters, Slapping on the Writs: Defamation, Developers and Community Activism, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2003, p. 7 11 CT, 15 December 2004, p. 3



NOTES

395

12 WA, 12 April 2000, p. 8 13 Australian, 16 April 2001, p. 5 14 Sunday Times (Perth), 30 September 2001, p. 31; Australian, 4 May 2002, p. 6 15 WA, 29 October 2002, p. 14 16 Australian, 30 November 2002, p. 21; ABC News, 1 December 2002, ‘10,000 protest Ningaloo Reef development’ 17 WA, 9 June 2003, p. 5; AAP, ‘Save Ningaloo says development rejection a win’, 5 July 2003 18 Australian, 5 July 2003, p. 7; Bulletin, 5 August 2003, pp. 16–21 19 State of the Environment 2001, CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood, 2001 20 Mary E. White, Listen . . . Our Land is Crying: Australia’s Environment: Problems and Solutions, Kangaroo Press, Kenthurst, NSW, 1997, p. 286 21 SMH, 10 May 1997, p. 1 22 Age, 17 October 1997, p. 7 23 Bob Brown, Memo for a Saner World, Penguin, Melbourne, 2004, pp. 69–70 24 SMH, 8 February 1997, p. 4; 23 April 1997, p. 6 25 SMH, 17 June 1997, p. 2 26 CT, 31 December 1997, p. 4; Sun Herald, 13 July 1997, p. 61 27 SMH, 27 June 1998, p. 10 28 Herald and Weekly Times, 28 October 1998, p. 3; Age, 21 July 1999, p. 7 29 Age, 4 September 1999, p. 20 30 SMH, 20 May 2000, p. 6; 8 October 1999, p. 2 31 Environment News Service, 18 October 1999, ‘Snowy River Campaigner Brings Down Victoria Government’ 32 DT, 31 May 2002, p. 16; Miller, op. cit., p. 199 33 CT, Times2, 22 November 2004, pp. 4–5; White, op. cit., p. 221 34 Martin Mulligan, ‘Re-enchanting Conservation Work: Reflections on the Australian Experience’, Environmental Values, Vol. 10, No. 1, February 2001, pp. 19–33

396

NOTES

35 Michael Archer and Bob Beale, Going Native: Living in the Australian Environment, Hodder, Sydney, 2004, pp. 82–3, 91, 104, 110–14 36 Drew Hutton and Libby Connors, A History of the Australian Environment Movement, CUP, Melbourne, 1999, p. 14

index

Abeles, Peter 262, 263 Aborigines 14–17, 47–50, 153–5, 155, 169, 243 see also Ecological Aborigine abstraction 123, 167–8, 183, 211, 220, 264, 289, 295, 312–13 Age (Melbourne) 85, 87, 100, 133, 139, 216 Ahern, Mike 95, 259, 260, 261 Alcoa 170, 171 Ampol 78, 92 Anderson, Ian 61 Angel, Jeff 270, 272, 349 Anthony Doug, 217 anthropology 168 Anti-Clutha Action Committee 111 anti-racism 183–4, 233–5 see also race thinking Aranda 14, 17 Archer, Mike 253–4 Argus 3 Arid Lands of Australia 107 Armstrong, Lance 265 Arthur River 297 Ashton Park 41–2, 68 Ashton, Russell 189, 197, 205 Askin, Robert 82, 102, 103, 111, 150 Associated Minerals Consolidated 258 Atkinson, Gladys 41 Attiwill, Peter 87 Austin, Brian 258 Australia Party 99, 105, 111

Australian 64, 92, 94, 159, 163, 203, 210, 256, 288 Australian Academy of Science 29, 36, 76, 107, 124, 310 Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS) 47, 126, 158 Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) 172, 173, 250, 320 Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics 300 Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) 43–4, 46, 53, 60, 61, 62, 63, 73, 78, 79– 81, 92, 99, 106, 112, 114, 115, 115–9, 136, 139–40, 141, 142, 144, 145, 148, 153, 158, 162, 164, 165, 170, 176, 180–2, 185, 186, 187, 193, 194, 198, 200, 203, 206, 221, 224, 229, 232, 233–4, 235–6, 238, 241, 242–3, 246, 250, 252, 253, 255, 256, 258, 263, 266, 270, 273, 274, 286–7, 288–90, 292, 293, 294, 300, 305, 319, 321, 339, 346–7, 349 Australian Democrats, the 190, 202, 208, 267, 279, 305 Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) 92 Australian Financial Review 127 Australian Geological Survey Organisation 300

Australian Heritage Commission (AHC) 158, 224, 229, 251, 258, 270, 272, 299 Australian Institute of Political Science 125 Australian Left Review 133 Australian Marine Conservation Society 343 Australian Mining Industry Council (AMIC) 73, 274, 275, 276, 285, 300, 339 Australian Museum 80, 272 Australian Mutual Provident (AMP) 39–40, 84 Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service 196, 296 Australian National Travel Association (ANTA) 55, 58 Australian National University (ANU) 108, 124, 125, 144, 183 Australian Paper Manufacturers 160 Australian Portland Cement Manufacturers (APCM) 69, 82, 97, 98, 100, 151–2 Australian Railways Union 263 Australian Roadside, The (Walling) 25 Australian Ugliness, The (Boyd) 34 Australian Union of Students (AUS) 115, 151 Australian Wildlife Conservancy 343

398 Australian Workers Union (AWU) 135, 147, 278, 279 Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population 290, 310 see also Zero Population Growth Bailey, Trevor 280 balance 56, 95, 97, 102, 285–6, 304, 306, 340 Bartholomaeus, Neil 171 Barwick, Garfield becomes ACF president 43–4 at Caring for Queensland symposium 63 chairs dissident ACF AGM 118 and Clutha campaign 112–13 on Lake Pedder’s destruction 118 lobbies for Colong Caves 82 mishandles GBR symposium 80–1 opposes SMA plans 36 on population 180 resigns as ACF president 114 votes against alpine grazing 30 Barnes, John 64 Bates, Gerry 240, 265 Batt, Neil 178 Battlers for Kelly’s Bush 101–4 bauxite mining 170 Bayley, Ian 115, 116, 118, 138, 140 Beale, Bob 353–4 Beasley, Shaun 350 Beattie, Peter 320, 339 beauty 57, 84, 109, 210, 217–18, 302 Beazley, Kim 329 Beddall, David 300, 305 Bell, Chris 191 Bellamy, David 206 Berwick, Mike 225 Between Wodjil and Tor (Main) 107 Birrell, Bob 180–2, 232, 234, 290 Bjelke-Petersen, Joh advised by ACF over GBR 80 assures GBR protection 77 breaks Mount Etna promise 260 claims conservation credentials 93 confronted by Sinclair 138 corrupt government of 277, 278 and the Daintree 224, 226, 230

INDEX delays Cooloola mining 95 deposed 259 disdains due process 116 endorses exploitation 91 a fanatic for development 147 and Graham Richardson 253 opposes GBR park 147 reaction of to Franklin conservation 217 responds to Ampol decision 92 as a role model 201, 279 threatens legal action over Fraser Island 147 and World Heritage 252 Blainey, Geoffrey 233, 288 Blakers, Margaret 236 Blanch, John 119, 139, 140 Blue Circle Cement 69, 98 Blue Mountains 98, 110, 113, 152 Bodley, Jan 117, 139 Bolte, Henry 27, 84, 86 Boral 326 Borbridge, Bob 317, 339 Border Ranges 150, 152, 157, 158, 172, 193 Border Ranges Preservation Society (BRPS) 150, 175 Borrie, Wilfred 124, 125 Borthwick, Bill 88 Bourne, Liz 261, 281 Boyd, Guy 140 Boyd Plateau 83, 97–8, 144, 151 Boyd, Robin 34 Boyden, Stephen 108 Bradley, Eileen and Joan 42, 68, 103–4 Braid, Harry 202 Brereton, Laurie 295–6 Bridge, Ernie 328 Brisbane City Council (BCC) 257–8 Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited, The (BHP) 262, 264, 275 Broomhill, Glen 126 Brown, Bob addresses Lowe cabinet 189 attacked at Farmhouse Creek 240 background of 31–2 champions human welfare 347–8 commits to forestry campaign 239 early activism of 177 and the Franklin campaign 198–200, 203, 206, 207, 208–11, 212, 213, 216–17

at Goolengook 323, 324 as a Green independent 265 on the Greens 311–12 leadership of 221 negotiates World Heritage 267 philosophy and wishful thinking of 218, 219–20, 229 public optimism of 189–90 publishes book 191 responds to Helsham inquiry 250, 251 starts Franklin campaign 185, 186–7 sued by Gunns 342 and the Tarkine 297, 303, 304 in Tasmania 158–9 and TWS 159–60, 179, 238 on wilderness 269 Brown, Ron 39, 115 Browne, William 23–4 Builders Labourers’ Federation (BLF) 104–5, 132, 135 Bunning, Walter 135, 136 Bunnings 330 Bunuba 329 Bureau of Resource Sciences 300 bureaucracy 191–2, 283, 345 Burton, Bob 236, 266 Bush Regeneration (Bradley) 103 Bushwalker 10 Business Council of Australia 286 Business Review Weekly 300 Büsst, John 62–4, 74, 76, 77–8, 79, 92 Butcher, Dunbavin 115 Butler, Harry 200, 273 Button, John 257, 274 Byles, Baldur 30 Byles, Marie 9–10, 13–14, 21–2, 54 Byron Fauna and Flora Conservation Society 150 cable logging 297 Cadman, Sean 238, 267 Cain, John 227 Calaby, John 40 Calder, Malcolm 86 Caldicott, Ron 139 Cameron, James 83 Camm, Ron 65, 93, 95 Campaign to Save Native Forests (CSNF) 144 Campaign to Save Native Forests (WA) 145, 157, 170–1

Campbell, Graeme 276 Campbell, Mary 102 Cape York 245, 293, 338–9 Caring for Queensland (ACF) 63 Carr, Bob 246–7, 305, 327, 339, 351 Carson, Rachel 105, 107 Cartland, George 177, 178–9, 189 Casey, Richard 22–3 Cass, Moss 130, 131, 139, 142, 144, 147, 148 Castleman, Alan 263 Caswell, Patricia 346–7 Causley, Ian 272 Central Queensland Cement (CQC) 259–60 Central Queensland Speleological Society (CQSS) 259–60 Chaelundi 280–1, 282 Chain Reaction (FOE) 155–6, 169 Channon Residents’ Action Group, The 151, 172 Chatterton, Paul 250 Chester, John 156, 157 Chief Seattle 291–2 Chifley, Ben 6, 12 Chisholm, Alec 25, 38 Chittleborough, Graham 180 Christ, Jesus 17 Christian, Clifford 115 Christianity 154 Christoff, Peter 236 civil society 81, 134, 248, 340 see also liberal democracy civilisation 236 see also conquest and Western civilization Clark, Colin 124, 126 Clauson, Paul 254 Cleland, Dame Rachel 332 Closing Circle, The (Commoner) 105 Clouston, Brian 37 Club of Rome 129 Clutha Development Corporation 110–11, 113 Coalition for a Nuclear Free Australia 222 Cocks, Doug 311 Cohen, Barry 226, 229–30, 242, 252 Cohen, Harvey 100 Cohen, Ian 208, 225, 227 Cold War 26, 286 Colley, Alex 150 Collins, Bob 276–7, 300

INDEX Collins, Paul 329 Colong Bulletin 150 Colong Caves 39, 68–71, 106, 151–2 Colong Committee 71, 81–2, 97–100, 113, 120, 144, 150, 151–2, 158, 163, 175, 193, 246 Committee of Inquiry on the National Estate 130, 135, 139 Committee of Inquiry into Oil Drilling on the Great Barrier Reef 93 Commoner, Barry 105 Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) 42, 43, 262, 264, 299 communism 21 Communist Party 133 Concerned Residents of East Gippsland (CROEG) 227, 307 Concerned Residents Opposed to Pulpmill Siting (CROPS) 254, 265 Connell, Des 62 Connor, Rex 141–2, 147, 148 Connors, Libby 354 consensus 212 conservation and Aborigines 14–17 according to ACF 63 according to Francis Ratcliffe 72–73 according to Judith Wright 65, 66, 89–90 according to Len Webb 65 and beauty 57, 84, 109, 210, 217–18, 302 beginnings of a movement of 46–47 and bureaucracy 191–2, 283, 345 and conflict 84 and Crosbie Morrison 3–4 and cultural relativism 168 and dissent 354 disturbing trends for 295 and emotion 83–4, 89–90, 97 as a felt imperative 110 for nature’s sake 10 hostility of major parties towards 19 hostility of politicians towards 339–40 ideas behind 268–9 increasing appeal of 106 and land rights 165 and language 53, 345–6 and liberal democracy 149–50

399 moral aspects of 86 new ideas about 54 no home on left or right for 128–9 opposed to abstraction 123, 312 and original sin 48 and patriotism 2–6, 102, 110, 149, 235, 247, 355 philosophy of 220–1 and political life 283–4, 286 political nature of 81 and rehabilitation 68 undermined by multiculturalism 232 and wilderness 164 as wise us 9 see also ecology Conservation Council (Victoria) 87, 88 Conservation Council (WA) 343 Conservation Directory (ACF) 106 controlled exploitation 74, 77 conquest 6, 12–13, 20, 23, 26, 33, 96, 131, 217, 249, 262, 267, 272, 302 Conzinc Riotinto of Australia (CRA) 73, 79, 152 Cook, Captain James 16–17, 155 Cook, Peter 241, 274 Coolangubra 270–2 Cooloola Sands 2, 93, 95–6, 98, 106, 137, 163 Coombs, Herbert (‘Nugget’) 153–5, 165 Coral Bay Progress Association 343 see also Ningaloo Coral Coast Marina Development 343 Corkill, John 280, 281 Coronation Hill 273–4, 285 Corrigan, Francis 24 Costin, Alec 28–9, 30, 43 Coulter, John 125–6, 162, 236 Council for Civil Liberties (NSW) 111 Courier-Mail 91, 137, 261–2 Court, Charles 157, 170, 201 Court, Richard 329, 330, 332, 333 Cox, Wally 332 Critical Response, A (Blakers and Christoff) 236 crown-of-thorns 64, 91 Cudgen Rutile Pty. Ltd. 44, 95 cultural relativism 168

400 Curr, Michael 328 Daintree campaign 223–6, 228–318 Davenport, Liz 332 Davis, Bruce 178–9, 236 Dawkins, John 274 Day, Don 157–8 Day, Max 43, 46 Daily Telegraph 69 Dawson, Chris 101 Dell, Hugh 131 Department of Conservation and Land Management (WA) 329–30, 331, 332, 334 Department of Costly Errors (VIC) 309 Devereux, John 305 Dick, Henry 294 Dillingham Murphyores (DM Minerals) 137, 138, 141, 142, 148, 162 Dirt Music (Winton) 343–4 Dirty Story, A (Whitelock) 127 Doctors for Forests 342 Dombrovskis, Peter 188, 216 Donovan, Gary 351 Doran, Chris 321 Douglas-Apsley 238 Douglas Shire Council 223, 225, 226 Downes, Ronald 117 Downey, Jim 347 Dunn, Claire 324–5 Dunphy, Milo and the ACF 139, 140, 162, 236 on activism 120–1 attacked by Don McMichael 99 attacked in NSW parliament 83 on beauty and development 34 believes in publicity 158 bushwalks with Carr 246 campaigns for native forests 150, 151, 227 character of 71 and the Clutha campaign 112 and Colong Caves 39, 69–70, 71, 151 on conservation and politics 81 and corporate campaigning 97 on Daishowa 270 and Fraser Island 139, 144 helps UTG campaign 114–15 leadership of 221 life of 327

INDEX as a maverick 232 and Myall Lakes 134, 136 on the power of a few 100 questions EIAs 191 recommends political action over Pedder 114 sees patriotism at Terania Creek 176 at TEC 119–21 withdraws from Isaacs inquiry 192 Dunphy, Myles 10, 29, 34, 39, 47 East Gippsland Coalition (EGC) 236, 237 East Gippsland Forest Alliance 308 Ecological Aborigine, myth of 14–17, 47–50, 153–5, 165–7, 169, 243–5, 290–3, 352–4 ecology according to Judith Wright 66 according to Len Webb 65 discussed in first edition of Wildlife 40 education in recommended by Morrison 20 endorsed by Courier-Mail 91 as expounded by Rachel Carson 107 history of idea of 66–8 influence of on conservation 109 Ecology Action 110, 111, 133, 144 Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) 287, 304, 346 economics 236–7, 286–7, 295, 314, 345–6 see also growth and money Eden (NSW) 143, 144, 227, 242, 269 Edwards, Judy 333 Ehrlich, Paul 105, 124 Einstein, Albert 287 Ellicott, Ralph 161 Ellison Reef 62, 64–5 Eltham Tree Preservation Society 32 emotion advised against at ACF 119 and conservation 73–4 conservationists charged with 136 fear of among fanatics for development 97 and forest destruction 249 as opposed to reason 83–4

role of according to Wright 89–90 see also reason Endean, Robert 35, 77 Energy Resources Australia (ERA) 318, 319, 320–1, 322 environment 121, 122, 123, 133, 169 Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) 191, 237, 238, 255, 256, 271, 280, 296, 299, 315 Environment News 169 Environmental Protection Authority (WA) 332, 344 Esso Standard Oil 79 Evans, Gareth 273 Everett, Merv 116 Examiner 179, 185, 303 Fairbridge, Rhodes 79 Fanton, Michel 174 Farmhouse Creek 237, 239–41, 249–50 Faulkner, John 300, 303, 305, 316 Fenner, Frank 124–5, 140 Fenton, Arthur 38 Ferrar, Ray 185 Field, Michael 266, 267, 298 Field Naturalists Club of Victoria (FNCV) 3, 8, 24, 27, 85, 87 Fife, Wal 70, 82, 151 Figgis, Penny 203, 204, 236, 242 Fight for the Forests, The (Routley) 144–5 fire 165–6 Fire and Hearth (Hallam) 166 fire-stick farming 165–6, 169 Fisher, Bill 294 Fisher, Tim 329 Fitzgerald, Tony 278–9 Fitzroy River 327–9 Flannery, Tim 310–11, 336 Fleay, David 37–8 Forest Action Network (FAN) 237–8 Forest Employees Action Group (FEAG) 240 Forest Protection Society 306, 308 Forestry Commission (NSW) 150, 151, 270, 193, 280, 281 Forestry Commission (TAS) 160, 237, 238 Forestry Department (QLD) 225 Fox, Allan 53–4 Franklin Blockade Handbook (TWS) 200

Franklin campaign 185–90, 197–213, 214–17 Franklin River 159, 177, 354 Franklin, The (TWS) 178 Fraser Island 1, 136–9, 140–2, 147–9, 162–3, 277–9 see also Sinclair, John Fraser Island Defence Organisation (FIDO) 137–9, 140, 277 Fraser, Malcolm becomes PM 148 and the Franklin 201, 203, 205, 214 and Fraser Island 162 helps found ACF 43 response of to GBR 161–2, 195–6 Friends of the Earth (FOE) 155–6, 169, 319, 320, 322 Frith, Harry 38, 43, 46 Fund for Animals 185 Future Eaters, The (Flannery) 310–11, 336 Gallipoli 302 Gallop, Geoff 329, 333, 343–4 Galvin, Pat 272 Garland, Jo 351 Garnet, Ros 8–9, 27, 85–6, 140 Garrett, Peter 293, 294, 347 Gasteen, Jim 150 Gee, Helen 178–9 George, Christal 341 Georges, George 91, 92 Giblett block 330 Gill, Billie 62 Glasson, Bill 225 Goolengook 323–6 Goongerah Environment Centre Office (GECO) 308–9, 323 Going Native (Archer and Beale) 353–4 Gordon, Lin 172, 174, 176, 193 Gordon River 31, 51, 58, 159, 177 Gorton, John 76, 80, 91, 92 Goss, Wayne 278, 279, 315, 316, 339 Grassle, Fred 77, 80 Gray, Alan 319 Gray, Robin 200, 201, 202, 204, 205, 214, 240, 241, 251, 265–6 Great Barrier Reef (GBR) 2, 56, 63–5, 74–81, 90–3, 102, 106, 129, 146–7, 161, 195–6, 252, 257, 355 Great Barrier Reef Committee (GBRC) 3, 35, 74–5, 76, 77, 78, 93

INDEX Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority 161 Great Barrier Reef Royal Commission, Report of 196 Great Extermination, The (Marshall) 56–58 Great Forest Sell-Out, The (ACF) 145 Green Bans 132–4, 140, 147 Green, Roger 203, 209–10 greenie 133 Greens, the 265–9, 298, 305, 311–12, 322, 334, 347–8 Greenpeace 195, 255, 274, 342 Greiner, Nick 271, 272, 281, 282 Griffith University 290 Groom, Ray 257, 304 Gross National Product (GNP) 125, 130, 165 Growth 108, 125–6, 126–7, 165, 284–5, 355 see also economics Gungahlin Drive Extension (GDE) 340–1 see also Save the Ridge Gunns Ltd 266, 342 Haabjoern Michael, 156, 157 Habitat 141, 158, 176, 243, 252, 287 Haigh, David 316 Hallam, Sylvia 166 Hamer, Rupert 339 Hamilton, Clive 291–2 harmony 154, 218 see also utopia Harris-Daishowa 227, 242, 269, 270 see also woodchipping Harrold, Arthur 93, 95, 139 Hawke, Bob 214, 216, 230, 242, 250, 251, 252, 255, 263, 272, 273, 274, 277, 295, 304 Hay, Colin 182 Hay, Richard 343 Hayden, Bill 214 Hegerl, Eddie 62, 139, 257 Helman, Peter 164, 193 Helsham, Michael 251–2, 255 Henry, Don 246, 321, 347 Herald 87 Herald and Weekly Times 119 heritage 4–6, 21, 194 see also patriotism Hill, Doug 153, 180–2, 232, 234, 236 Hill, Robert 315, 317, 329, 346, 351 Hinchinbrook 315–17 Hiscock, Ian 57

401 Hitchcock, Peter 251 Hobart Walking Club 30, 59 Hodgman, Peter 256 Holgate, Harry 199, 200 Hollister, Diane 265 Hope, Robert 130, 131 Horler, K. M. 97 Howard, John 98, 250, 313, 317, 318, 322 Hudson, William 36 Hughes, David 329 Hughes, Tom 136 humanism 128–9, 167, 169, 219, 377 Hunters Hill Trust 101 Hutton, Drew 354 Hydro-Electric Commission (HEC) 52, 59–61, 114, 115–6, 159, 177, 178, 185, 187–8, 189, 190, 191, 197, 198, 203, 204, 205, 215 immigration 12, 127, 181–3, 233–4, 288–90, 310–1, 348 see also population Incredible Fraser Island (ACF) 148 Industries Commission 288 Ingram, Craig 350, 351 International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) 196, 253 internationalism 268, 313 see also humanism Isaacs, Simon 176, 192 Jabiluka 318–22 Jabiluka Action Group 319, 320 Jackeys Marsh 237, 241 Jacobs, Max 143 James, Betty 101 Japex 78, 90, 92 Jawoyn 273, 274, 276, 277 Jeffreys, Adrian 261, 278 Jennings, A. V. 101–5 Jobs in East Gippsland (Blakers and Christoff) 236 Joint Conservation Group (JCG) 278 Jones, Barry 310 Jones, Dick 113, 114, 118, 140, 145, 159, 162, 232 Jones, Owen 35 Jones, Rhys 165–6, 203 Junior Tree Warden, The 13 Kakadu 152–3, 273–7, 292, 318, 319, 321, 354 Kakadu Man (Neidji) 244 Katona, Jacqui 319

402 Keating, Paul 295, 296–7, 299, 304, 305, 306, 309, 313 Keegan, Des 288 Kelly’s Bush 101–5, 106, 132 Kennett, Jeff 309, 350, 351 Kerin, John 257 Kerr, James 303 Keto, Aila 224–5, 229, 252, 278, 326 Kiernan, Kevin 113, 131, 160, 176 Knight, Allan 52 Kosciuszko State Park 10–11, 28, 98 Kosciuszko State Park Trust 28, 29–30 Krockenberger, Michael 292 Kuku Yalanji 231, 293 Kuhn, Thomas 167 Kumagai 262 Kutikina Cave 200, 203 Ladd, Harry 76–7, 92 Lahey, Romeo 40 Lake Pedder 30, 51–2, 58–61, 106, 113–18, 129, 130–1, 158, 177 Lake Pedder Action Committee (LPAC) 113–16, 131 Lake, Sam 116, 139, 296 land rights 153, 165, 167, 266, 275, 293–4, 319 see also Ecological Aborigine Langton, Marcia 336–7 language 53, 345–6 see also economics Last of Lands, The (Webb, Whitelock, and Brereton) 107 Last Wild River, The (Smith) 188 Law, Geoff 239, 266, 342 Laws, John 194 leadership 6, 23, 283 Leeper, Geoffrey 127 Leete, Paul 349–50 Lehany, Kath 101 Lemonthyme 237, 240, 241, 250 Leopold, Aldo 17, 57 Lesslie, Rob 337 Lévi-Straus, Claude 167 Lewis, Tom 69, 83, 134 liberal democracy 81, 134, 218–19, 248, 340 see also patriotism Limits to Growth, The (Club of Rome) 129 Lindenmayer, David 337 Little Desert 39–40, 42, 84–8, 106 Llewellyn-Jones, Derek 126

INDEX Logan, John 328 Lohrey, Andrew 177–8, 185 Longley, Luc 330 Lowe, Dough 177–8, 185, 187–8, 189, 190, 199 Lowe, Ian 290–1, 314 Ludwig, Daniel 110 Ludwig, Bill 278 McArthur, Kathleen 33, 37–8, 40, 44, 74, 95 McArthur River 296 McDonald, William 84–5, 86, 88 McCartney, Roy 81 McKechnie, Peter 225, 252 Mackenzie, David 331 McLuhan, Marshall 167 McMahon, Billy and Sam 82 McMichael, Don 63, 73, 76, 99 McPherson Ranges 2, 40 McQueen, James 202, 209 McRae, Nita 132 McVeigh, Tom 206 Mackey, Brendon 337 Main, Barbara York 107 Malcolmson, Donald 44, 140 Malthouse, Mick 331 Margarula, Yvonne 318, 320, 322 Marr, Alec 239–40, 241, 250–1, 257, 266, 267, 307, 319, 342 Marshall, Jock 38, 40, 43, 56–8, 107 Marx, Karl 17, 154, 167 Marxism 268, 286 Maryborough Field Naturalists’ Club 137 Maslen, Peter and Russ 150 Mawby, Maurice 73 Maxwell, William 79 Mead, Ted 250 Meanjin Quarterly 127 Memo For a Saner World (Brown) 247–8, 352 Menuhin, Yehudi 251 Menzies, Robert 6, 18–19, 20–1, 26 Mercury 116, 188, 206, 207, 238, 265 Metherell, Terry 281, 282 Mijo, Tony 231 Milne, Christine 254–5, 256, 257, 265, 267 Mineral Deposits 135, 136, 258 Mirrar 318, 321, 322 Miscellaneous Workers Union 104 Mitchell, Elyne 7–8 money 96, 197 see also economics

Monte Bello Islands 26 Moonbi 138 Moore, Tim 282 Moorhouse, Margaret 315–16 Moran, Alan 288 Moreton Island 163, 257–9 Moreton Island Protection Committee (MIPC) 258 Morrison, Crosbie advocacy and patriotism of 24–5 and birthrights 4–5 early life of 3 on an ecological education 20 and FNCV 3, 8 his magazine compared with Judith Wright’s Wildlife 40–1 legacy of 28 promotes conservation 3–4 protests nuclear tests 25–6 on standing in front of bulldozers 25 writes for Your Garden 27 Mosley, Geoff on Aborigines 292 appointed to ACF 73 background of 54 backs population limits 181, 232, 289 and Colong Caves 69 82 concerned about Border Ranges 150 consultant to National Estate Inquiry 130 and Cooloola 95 and the Daintree 224 and the Franklin 207 and Fraser Island 140, 147 and the GBR 196 high profile of 162 and Lake Pedder 60, 115 leadership of 221 notes Australia-wide development 190 opposition to within ACF 235–6 replaced as ACF director 242 seeks change at ACF 118, 140 and Tasmanian forests 176 Morton, Roy 104 Mount Armour 97, 98 Mount Etna 259–62 Mount Isa Mines (MIM) 295–6 Mount Nardi 194 Moving Image, The (Wright) 18 Muir, Brigitte 323 Muir, John 67 multiculturalism 183, 233, 311

see also humanism and internationalism Mulvaney, John 200, 203 Mundey, Jack 105, 132–3 Munz, Geoffrey 253 Murdoch, Keith 3 Murdoch, Walter 124 Murphyores 137, 299 see also DM Minerals Murray, Paul 332, 333 Myall Lakes 83, 120, 134–6 Myall Lakes Committee 134, 135 Myer, Ballieu 140 Myer Foundation 350 Nation Review 117, 128, 133, 167 National Parks Association (ACT) 89 National Parks Association (NSW) 47, 69, 71, 135, 192, 193, 194 National Parks Association (QLD) 45 National Parks Authority (VIC) 28, 35 National Parks and Primitive Areas Council (NPPAC) 10, 39 National Parks in Victoria (FNCV) 8 National Parks and Wildlife Service (NSW) 73, 99, 251, 270, 280, 281 National Parks and Wildlife Service (QLD) 163, 196, 294 National Population Inquiry 125 National Times 141, 172 National Trust (NSW) 69, 102, 111, 135, 136, 193, 194 Native Forests Action Council 227 nature 11, 13, 14, 66–8, 121–2, 183, 192, 283, 314, 337, 345 Nature Conservation Council (NSW) 71, 194, 270 natural heritage 4–5, 27, 37, 217, 335, 341 see also patriotism Natural Resources Conservation League (VIC) 85, 86 Neidjie, Bill 244 Nicholson, Nan and Hugh 151, 172 Nicklin, George 63 Nightcap Action Group (NAG) 193–4

INDEX see also Nomadic Action Group Nile, Fred and Elaine 281 Nimbin News 172 Ningaloo 342–4 Nix, Henry 337, 338 Nixon, Richard 91–2 Nixon, Toby 24 No Dams 198–9 Nolan, John 226 Nomadic Action Group (NAG) 208, 222, 225, 227–8 Non-Violent Action (NVA) 199–200, 207, 212 Noosa Parks Development Association (NPDA) 44–5, 93 Noranda Forests Inc. 255, 256, 257 North Broken Hill (NBH) 254, 255, 256, 299, 300 North-East Bioregional Network (TAS) 338 North East Forests Alliance (NEFA) 280 North Limited 320, 321, 322 Northern Land Council 275, 318, 320 Northern Rainforest Management Agency (NORMA) 253 Northern Star 174 Northern Territory Environment Centre 273, 274 Norwood, Rosemary 238 nuclear bomb tests 26 nuclear disarmament 222 Oliphant, Mark 162, 164 Omodei, Paul 333 One Nation (Keating) 295 Ord River Scheme 328 Out of the Mist 12–13 Owens, Joe 105 Pacific Conservation Biology 337 Parker, Kevin 304 Parker, Ken 316 patriotism absence of among politicians 340 and blockades 302 changing source of 21 and conservation 102, 110, 149, 355 and Crosbie Morrison 24–5 invoked over Colong Caves 82 of Marie Byles 21–2 and material nature 264 material source of 312–13, 325, 327

403 and natural heritage 27, 37 of Paul Keating 313 and political community 4–5, 234–5, 313 of Robert Menzies 26 sources of in Australia 5–6 at Terania Creek 176 as understood by Ben Chifley 12 Paul, Delia 287 Pedder Papers, The (ACF) 118–19 People for Nuclear Disarmament 222 People Policy (Cocks) 311 Perry, Ted 291 Piesse, Dick 55, 73, 81–2, 86, 95, 116, 117, 118, 138, 140 Pizzey, Graham 38 Plato 154 Plowman, Cathie 200 politics 81, 236, 268, 283–4, 286 Pollard, David 57 Populate and Perish? (Birrell, Hill, and Nevill) 232, 234 population and Australian development 12 in the future 355 issue engaged 124–7 issue raised by Allan Fox 54 issue raised by Allen Strom 54 issue raised in Wildlife 40 issue unsettles ACF 180–2, 232–5, 288–90 public questioning of 310–11 questioned by Moss Cass 130 questioned by Tom Uren 129 as regarded by Bob Brown 219–20, 348 Population Bomb, The (Ehrlich) 105, 124 Population Stability for Australia 290 Port Phillip Conservation Council 140 Porter, Gray 323 Potoroo Review 309 Power in Tasmania (Thompson) 198 Prince Philip 42, 114, 116, 135, 140, 148, 153, 162 Prineas, Peter 50–1, 192, 193, 246 Pringle, Bob 104, 105 Putt, Peg 342 Quadrant 66, 70, 128 Quaid, George 339

404 Quarry Australia? (Birrell and Hill) 232 Quarry Valuable Scenery? (Mosley) 69 Queen Elizabeth II 122 Queensland Conservation Council (QCC) 246, 258, 259, 261 Queensland Littoral Society 62, 76, 78, 80, 91, 93 Queensland Titanium 95, 137, 138, 140 Queensland Trades and Labour Council 96 Queensland Wildflowers (McArthur) 33 race thinking 244–5, 293 see also Ecological Aborigine racism see anti-racism Rainforest Action Group (Brisbane) 279 Rainforest Conservation Society of Queensland 224, 229, 326 Ranger 318, 320, 321 Ratcliffe, Francis and ACF’s founding 42–4, 53 addresses Qld conference 63 on conservation 46 on conservation and development 72–3 endorses woodchipping 61, 144 and Lake Pedder 61 on language 53 views of contrasted with Judith Wright 89–90 reason 83–4, 97, 245 see also emotion Redwood, Jill 309, 323 Reece, Eric 58, 59–60, 116, 130, 131, Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs) 115, 306–7, 318, 323, 324, 326–7, 331, 333 Reiss, John 98–9 Rentoul, Laurence 100 Report on the National Estate 145, 164 Report on the Gordon River Power Development, Stage II (HEC) 187 Resource Assessment Commission (RAC) 275, 276, 291, 304–5 Resource Security Legislation 298 Richardson, Graham 241, 251,

INDEX 253, 256, 263, 267, 271, 274, 276, 299 rights 312–13 see also humanism and social justice Rio Tinto 322 see also Conzinc Riotinto Australia (CRA) Roberts, Noel 4, 9 Robertson, Margaret 246 Robertson, Peter 330 Robotham, Rob 153 Rocks Resident Action Group 132 Rolls, Eric 107 Rouse, Edmund 266 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 17 Routley, Richard and Val 144–5 Roxby Downs 222 Royal Society of Queensland 158 Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales 4 Rundle, Tony 298 Rutherford, John 120, 121, 123 Rutile and Zircon Development Association 46, 97 Salamanca Agreement 266–7, 297 Samuel, Peter 128 Sanders, Norm 179, 187, 190, 191, 210, 212, 241, 244–5 sandmining 44–5, 92–6, 134–7, 137–42, 162, 277 Santamaria, Bob 217 Sassafras Declaration 227 Save Colong Bulletin 99 Save Lake Pedder National Park Committee (SLPNPC) 59 Save Moreton Island Committee 257 Save Ningaloo 343–41 Save the Ridge 340–1 Save Our Bushlands Action Committee (SOBAC) 85–6 Save the Quamby and Tiers Campaign 238 Save the Reef Committee 91 Schultz, Beth 329 Scott, Keith 252 Scott, Ross 176, 185 Scott, Trevor 57 Senate Select Committee on South West Tasmania 205 Serventy, Dominic 25, 103 Serventy, Vincent 60, 103, 128 Setchell, Garth 39 Shelburne Bay 245–6 Sheridan, Greg 288

Shirvington, Phillip 319, 321 Shoalwater Bay 299–300 Silent Spring (Carson) 105, 107 Sim, Ian 134 Sims, Peter 31, 59, 61, 297, 303–4 Sinclair, John on Aborigines and conservation 295 Australian of the Year 163 backs population limits 181 in court over Fraser Island 140 elected ACF vice-president 162 and FIDO 137–9 at Fraser Island inquiry 148 and Fraser Island logging 277, 278, 279 lobbies IUCN on GBR 196 as a maverick 232 meets Cass 142 a Mosley supporter 236 sends photos to Malcolm Fraser 148–9 Singer, Peter 311 Smith, Joseph 309–10 Smith, Len 35 Smith, Paul 159, 188 Snowy Mountains HydroElectric Authority (SMA) 23–4, 29, 35–6, 349, 350 Snowy River 23–4, 348–52 Snowy River Alliance 348–52 Snowy River Protection League 23 social justice 165, 166, 311–13, 319 Social Responsibility in Science (SRS) 107, 111 Society for Growing Australian Plants 27 Soil and Civilization (Mitchell) 7–8 Soulé, Michael 338 South Coast Organization Opposing Pollution (SCOOP) 110, 111 South East Forest Alliance (SEFA) 270 South West Action Committee (SWAC) 131, 160, 163, 176 South West Book, The (Gee) 178 South-West Committee 39, 52, 58, 59, 115 South-West Forests Defence Foundation 157 Southey, Lady Marigold 350–1 Spate, Virginia 217 Specht, Raymond 63

Spender, Percy 79–80 Spooner, William 35–6 Stanhope, Jon 340 State of the Environment 313–15, 345 State Planning Authority (NSW) 101, 102, 134, 135 Stead, Thistle 41, 60, 62 Stenhouse, David 40 Stewart, Donald 276 Storey, Peter and Shirley 198 Stradbroke Island 96 Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation (SLAPP) 341–2 Strehlow, Theodor 14–15, 17, 48–9, 165, 169 Stretton, Judge Leonard 9 Strom, Allen 47, 54 Study of the Conservation Significance of the Wet Tropics of North-East Queensland, A (Keto and Scott) 252 Sun 87, 100 Sutton, George 12 Swaby, Arthur 27 Sydney Cove Redevelopment Authority (SCRA) 132, 135 Sydney Morning Herald 69–71, 97, 99, 101, 125, 158, 172, 195, 216 Sydney University Conservation Society 71 Talbot, Frank 80 Tantawangalo 270–2 Tarkine 297, 298, 302–4 Tarkine National Coalition 302 Tarkine Tigers 303–4 Tarrant, Keith 140 Tasmanian Conservation Trust 114, 186, 238 Tasmanian Wilderness Society (TWS) 160, 162, 177, 178, 179, 186, 186–7, 188, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202–3, 204, 205, 206, 212–13, 214–16, 221, 237–8, 241, 242 see also Wilderness Society, The Taylor, Grant 35 Taylor, Ronald 140 Tennant, Kylie 102 Tenni, Martin 225, 228–9, 231 Terania Creek 151, 172–6, 192–3 Terania Native Forest Action Group (TNFAG) 172–6, 175 terra nullius 336 They All Ran Wild (Rolls) 107

INDEX Thomas Nationwide Transport (TNT) 262 Thompson, Peter 187, 198, 203 Thoreau, Henry David 17, 67 Thorsborne, Arthur 315 Thorsborne, Jill 294 Thorsborne, Margaret 315–16, 317 Threat to the Forests, The 145 Tierney, James 98, 99 Time to Care, A (Sanders, Brown, and Bell) 191 Tingay, Alan 236 Toohey, Tony 225, 226 Total Environment Centre (TEC) 119–120, 133, 175, 192, 193, 194, 270, 349 Toyne, Philip 242, 275, 288–9, 293, 346–7 Trades and Labour Council (QLD) 147 Triple J 320 Tropical Rainforest Preservation Committee 62 Truchanas, Olegas 30–1, 139, 188 Tuckey, Wilson 326, 333 Turley, Craig 330 Turner, S. T. 13 Tyrell, Murray 42 UNESCO 146 Ungar, Rudy 35 United Scientists for Environmental Responsibility (USERP) 255 United Tasmania Group (UTG) 114–16, 119, 131, 133, 159 University of Melbourne 56, 127 University of New England 41, 164, 107 University of Queensland 62, 63, 77 University of Sydney 29, 108, 111, 120, 126, 129, 158, 217 University of Tasmania 113, 145 Unsworth, Barrie 271 Uranium 152–3, 169, 191, 222 Uranium: Metal of Menace (Hill and Robotham) 153–4 Uren, Tom 129, 130 utopia 154, 219, 239 see also harmony Vallance, Keith 139 Vanishing Forests, The (Jones) 145 Very Fast Train (VFT) 262–4, 267

405 Victorian Association of Forest Industries (VAFI) 347 Victorian National Parks Association (VNPA) 24, 27, 28, 85, 87 violence 206–7, 215, 238, 240 Wagerup 170–1, 173 Wain, Barry 64 Walkabout 58, 73 Walker, Kath 243, 244 Walling, Edna 25 Walsh, Bill 139 Walsh, Maximilian 112 Walsh, Peter 274, 300 Walshe, Bob 119 Walters, Brian 324, 341–2 war 12, 17, 20–1, 26, 86 see also conquest Watson, Chris 181, 290 Waud, Pam 200 Webb, Len and ACF 43 appointed to National Estate Inquiry 130 co-authors National Estate report 145 on conservation 46 on ecology 53 edits The Last of Lands 107 on forests 57, 62 joins WPSQ 38 links conservation and patriotism 149 protests sandmining 45 rainforest research of 158 on wilderness 164 Weeds and Their Control (Bradley) 68 Wesley Vale 254–7, 265, 285 West Australian 332, 333, 344 West, Jonathon 242 Western Agricultural Industries (WAI) 328–9 Western civilization 17 Western Mining Company 347 Westpac 321 What can I do? (SRS) 107 White, Frederick 43 White, Mary 346, 352 White, Patrick 163 Whitelock, Derek 41, 46, 53, 107, 127 Whitlam, Gough Coombs advises 165 election of welcomed 138 federal focus of 149 on Fraser Island 141–2 and GBR 75–6, 146, 161 government of dismissed 148

406 and Kakadu 153 on Lake Pedder 130 launches Habitat 141 and the national estate 129 offers hope 146 and World Heritage 146 Whitlam, Margaret 141 Wiangarie State Forest 150, 158 Wilcox, Murray 136, 196 Wild Life 3–4, 24–5, 41 WildCountry 337–8 wilderness 163–4, 168, 246–7, 299, 335–7 Wilderness Action Group (WAG), 225 Wilderness in Australia (Helman et al) 164, 193 Wilderness Society, The (TWS) 246, 250, 251, 253, 255, 256, 266, 273, 274, 279, 297, 298, 304, 307, 319, 321, 322, 326, 335, 337–9, 342, 343 see also Tasmanian Wilderness Society Wilderness Working Group 247 Wildlands Project 335, 338 Wildlife 40–1, 53, 58 Wildlife Preservation Society of Australia (WPSA) 41, 47, 71 Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland (WPSQ) 38, 44, 58, 62, 74–5, 78, 80, 91, 93, 137, 246, 278, 294, 347 Willey, Mary 199, 200 Williams, Keith 315–17 Wilsons Promontory 2, 8, 35 Wimmera Regional Committee 39, 42 Winton, Tim 343–5 Wong, Andrew 337–8 Wood, Bill 341

INDEX woodchipping 61, 83, 143–6, 156–7, 178, 251, 238–41, 267, 269–72, 298–9, 304–9, 329–33 Woodchipping: The Real Impact (FAN and TWS) 238–9 Woodley, John 316 Wooldridge, Michael 277 Wootten, Hal 242, 289–90 World Heritage 140, 201, 216, 229, 251, 252, 253–4, 266–7, 277, 279, 297, 298, 302, 316, 319, 321 World Heritage Commission 196, 208, 322 World Heritage Convention 146 World Heritage Properties Bill 208, 216, 316 World War II 5, 165, 263 World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) 287, 343, 347 World Wildlife Fund (WWF) 42 Worrell, Eric 57 Wran, Neville 157–8, 173, 176, 193, 194–5, 202, 247, 280, 339 Wright, Judith on Aborigines and nature 41, 47–8, 165, 244, 292, 295 on the ACF 62 appointed to National Estate Inquiry 130 and Australian identity 22, 37 background and poetry of 18 and Campaign to Save Native Forests 144 cited by SMH 70 co-authors Report of the National Estate 145

on conservation 41, 44, 65, 66, 89–90 on ecology 65 edits Wildlife 40–1 on emotion 89–90 founds WPSQ 37–8 on Francis Ratcliffe 73 and Fraser Island 139, 142 and the GBR 77–8, 79, 90, 92 on John Sinclair 163 and Lake Pedder 58 leadership of 221 life of 327 links conservation and patriotism 149 as a maverick 232 moral stance of 54 and romantic traditions 122 and sandmining 45, 94 sees dump-heap trend confirmed 93 and Terania Creek 176 uses term greenie 133 and Whitlam government 146 on wilderness 164 Wright, Keith 299 Wyvill, Lew 95, 138 Yeates, Lisa 208 Yencken, David 61, 130 Your Garden 27 Zable, Benny 207, 222 Zero Population Growth 126, 129 see also Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population Zubryzycki, George 183–4