By Yvonne Francis
In January small parties of residents and tourists made inspections of logging operations in the Otway State Forest on the south-west coast of Victoria between Geelong and Apollo Bay. One particular site, Henry Road on the Sunnyside Road, just north of Wongarra, caught our attention. The loggers were at work dragging the felled trees around for loading. Several trees had been left behind for habitat and seeds, but it looked as dreadful as always, the mud gouged around by the bulldozers, trucks and other vehicles.
Don Stone, who lives on the Sunnyside Road, was assured by the staff of the local office of the Department of Conservation and Environment that they had returned to the Henry Road log coup and cleaned it up. Why not go and have a look at the tidy up job?
So a group was organised on the Easter weekend. They were horrified. Cleaned up is the word — the earth razed level enough to start a farm.
The local ginger group, Save the Otways, has been monitoring logging near Apollo Bay for more than 10 years. It was told quite specifically by a previous minister for conservation, Rod Mackenzie, that the Otways would never be managed as a tree farm.
About half of the logging coups are in designated water catchments, and tree farming is not on. Disputes occur from time to time on the definition of rainforest, but there are patches of rainforest. Tree farming, which involves land clearing and burning in or near rainforests and remnant rainforest, is restricted but, as most agree, terribly inappropriate.
We saw evidence of young trees and split trees and trees like blackwoods and stinkyboxes chopped down — not just the timber industry's favoured blue gums, grey gums, white gums and mountain ash. We saw tree ferns bulldozed into windrows ready for burning along with the tree heads.
They say the woodchippers have been permitted to come along and save the trees that otherwise would have been wasted. Really? It seems they came and took whatever took their fancy — habitat trees and seed trees.
A lot of logs had been shifted around, causing horrendous soil damage, but they were still left there. After all this, and after the burning, and after the attempts at regeneration, will the diversity of species be maintained? Not remotely likely.
The party on Easter Saturday took off on a bushwalk along what was an old logging track. In the old days, they would have used it for selective logging: one big tree here, one big tree there, pulled up by cables and winched to a loading place. You can still see their ancient stumps with the holes in them where the timber cutter climbed up a wedge-shaped cut so expertly and fell it safely.
That track has now been viciously widened. In some places 30 metres of bush and trees have been dozed off into steep clay gullies. The reason is to allow in the sunlight so that the modern log trucks can drive right into the gullies for loading and to get better traction. Where the track hit a gully, there was no attempt at proper drainage. Just imagine the clay flowing in a rainstorm.
We saw magnificent tree specimens in there, hundreds of years old, some with their tops still healthy, others struck dead by lightning. These old growth giants are important not only as habitat trees but also as samples of what is now only too rare — the Otways rainforest giants.
Resident Don Walters, who works for the State Electricity Commission of Victoria, says that once he was directed to get up such an old growth tree and inspect it. Inside the dark hollow was a startled white face — a baby owl in its nest.
The party pursued its walk to the Nettle Creek waterfalls and were disappointed to see the creek fouled by silt and algae. The logging had already altered the life cycle for fish and other rainforest creatures. You don't expect to see that deep in a rainforest — usually the rivers are clear and sparkling, the pebbles shining like gemstones, ideal for a drink. Fresh water crayfish used to be found in Nettle Creek — will they even survive?
It is not just a matter of the soil erosion caused by the logging activities and the access tracks. The species change when the sunlight gets in — grasses, weeds and tangled blackberries.
Apollo Bay residents have argued loud and long about the changing water quality in the town. After many public protests, in 1984 a temporary moratorium was declared on logging in their water catchment forest, the West Barham valley. This has recently come under the control of the Colac Water Board, and since Colac is the home of the woodchippers, so the moratorium may not last long.
In December 1992 Apollo Bay was rewarded for its protests by an enforced chlorination plant. People have installed their own roof tanks and installed filters and gizmos to take the chemicals out. There have been threats of damage to the chlorination plant and lengthy articles published in the local paper about cancer risks.
Another response to the protests was the creation of the Old Tree Reserve in the water catchment. This reserve had little effect because the loggers did not want those trees — most were damaged and in very difficult terrain. Further, the reserve was advertised by the department in the only map used by tourists, and hoards of people went up there unsupervised to search for the trees.
If they were serious about making it a tourist attraction they should have done something about organising it and restricting access. After all, we do drink the water. After the inspections in January, numerous letters were sent to Prime Minister Keating, minister for the environment Ros Kelly and minister for resources Alan Griffiths. Kelly said we should put the question to the minister for resources, who after all was responsible for the woodchip licence. Griffiths responded that an election was imminent, and we should write again to the new minister.
So here we go again. More letters. People are utterly sick and tired of it, and that is how the bureaucracy has its way. We have written and submitted, attended and addressed inquiries on everything from sewage outfall to the timber industry, pines to flora and fauna, water inquiries to appeals against developments.
While it is good to have the public involved in decision making, we believe the government should make the decision to stop clear-felling the Otways forests. In the case of the chlorination plant, the public response was clearly "no", but it was ignored.
The latest turn of events is a series of complaints sent to the Shire of Otway about the behaviour of log truck drivers after a couple of near misses with tourists and locals. Locals pay dearly for their roads; it is a small council with not too much money to spare. Many people resent that Otway resources are simply taken without compensation — like the water for Colac and Geelong.
Surely we don't have to subsidise any further this really silly industry? The costs to the state of forest operations far outweigh the royalties from the logs. About 10 years ago the major Otway sawmill bragged that since it had been upgraded, the number of men on the bench had been reduced to only three. What a lot of money the Victorian forests industries spend to suggest the opposite.
If we must talk economic rationalism, we talk tourism. Tourism is the major industry in the region. Somehow the power of the export woodchipping mafia strangles the bureaucrats and the public interest.