By Pip Hinman
One of Australia's leading jazz musicians, Vince Jones, has condemned the logging of East Gippsland's old growth forests. What the so-called selective logging really amounts to, he told Green Left Weekly, is mass destruction. And the Victorian government looks set to extend logging beyond 1995.
"The old growth forest and the river systems are truly fantastic", Jones said. "About 60% of Victoria's wildlife and 30% of Australia's remaining rainforest can be found in East Gippsland." Yet about 16 coups are currently being logged — and not for seasoned or kiln-dried timber, or for further value adding. Between 70% and 80% of these 250-year-old trees leave the East Gippsland forests as low grade woodchips or pulpwood.
For over 10 years, conservationists have been campaigning to preserve this part of Victoria. Mass protests in both the old growth forests and Melbourne have resulted in many hundreds of arrests, a national park declared at Errinundra, and a state-federal East Gippsland Forest Agreement in 1989 which imposed a six-month logging moratorium and allocated $10 million to investigate logging alternatives.
With the money largely misspent on the construction of new roads to assist the logging operations, logging of the old growth forests resumed in 1990 after the industry was given 15-year timber licences. This was despite the National Estate Review Committee's findings that there was sufficient timber of the required quality in other state forests in the area to supply the timber industry for the next two years without logging the National Estate forests.
Victorian minister for conservation and natural resources Geoff Coleman recently notified the Wilderness Society that logging of old growth forests would continue after 1995, regardless of the National Forest Policy agreed to last year, which stated that all logging in high conservation forest would stop by 1995. According to the Wilderness Society's Fenella Barry, Coleman has given an undertaking to the timber industry that the "allowable cut" will not be altered.
Jones has seen the damage done by the Japanese logging giant Daishowa. He described the scene from the air. "They pretty well mow the whole lot down. There is no selective logging — perhaps because they have so much to choose from." He mused that as the forest diminishes, perhaps their techniques would become a little more refined.
"I've seen the coups, and it doesn't take a genius to see that 50 hectares turns into 500 hectares very quickly. Once the loggers get in there, they just go for it. And the more remote the area, the more licence they take."
Jones believes that Harris Daishowa is moving in to log as much as possible before the more expensive plantation timber comes of age.
As for Daishowa's regrowth policy, Jones described it as "primitive". "They come in helicopters and drop off the seeds and hope for the best. I've noticed that the only place they are growing is where there are about a thousand seeds in a bunch, and they get some rainfall."
Jones made the point that the loss of jobs in the industry was being caused by the restructuring of the timber industry, and that logging contractors could easily be redeployed into value-added industries.
Even from a financial point of view, logging in old growth forests doesn't make economic sense, Jones said. According to a report from the Federal Planning Advisory Council, the Victorian government lost $39.9 million on logging in 1989.
In December, the plans for the East Gippsland Forest Management Area will be released. The Wilderness Society say that the draft proposals make it completely clear that industry is driving the agenda.
Jones is optimistic that there is still a chance of saving the East Gippsland forests, and urged everyone concerned with old growth forests to continue the fight. To join the protests this summer, contact the Wilderness Society.