By Vanessa Johanson
MELBOURNE — Apollo Bay, Cape Otway, and Lorne are beautiful beaches many Victorians associate with summer holidays. Yet these coastal forests are used for things other than sunning and surfing.
For 150 years the forests of the Otways have been exploited for their wood, particularly for their stands of mountain ash and other eucalypts. There has been a pattern of regrowth and then continued logging throughout this time. Now there is a new proposition for the Otways — woodchipping.
The Otways National Park protects only a small part of the region's ecologically significant sites. The rest are in state parks or local reserves and are not protected from logging.
The management of state park forests, which cover over 100,000 hectares of native forest land, is currently under review. The Forest Management
Plan to be released shortly will detail how the area is to be managed
in the next 10 years. It seems unlikely that the new management plan will
protect the remaining old trees.
To coincide with the review, the forest industry has launched an expensive publicity campaign. Pictures of forests adorn the sides of Melbourne's trams, and the pages of the city's newspapers. The advertising campaign is based on the fallacy that clear-felled forests can grow back with the help of planted eucalypt seedlings.
However, regrown forests in the Otways are logged when they are 60-70 years old, giving the wildlife and undergrowth no chance to recover. With continued clear-felling, more plant and animal species could become extinct.
Further logging of the area would also affect the water supply of a quarter of a million people. The Otways are the water catchment area for Geelong, Apollo Bay, Lorne and other settlements. Logging will affect the quality and quantity of water.
The two most significant types of forest in the Otways are the old growth eucalypt forests and the cool temperate rainforests.
The old growth forests contain trees 100 to 400 years old. They are home
to much rare flora and fauna, the latter including the yellow-bellied glider, the tiger quoll, bats, the sooty owl and several species of fish in waterways within the forests.
Many animals depend on trees over 100 years old for their survival. The tiger quoll, for example, is a rare carnivorous mammal which needs fallen and rotting trees to nest in. The burning off of logging waste jeopardises the quoll's survival.
The Otways also contain the largest area of cool temperate rainforest in mainland Australia. However, the Victorian Government last year redefined rainforest, and much of the Otways temperate rainforest is now under threat because it does not contain exclusively rainforest plants.
All Victorian rainforest is supposedly protected by legislation passed in 1987, but logging in the Otways continues, and 10 new logging sites have been proposed.
The state environment minister, Steve Crabb, has indicated that woodchipping will be expanded in the near future, breaking his 1986 promise that no area, apart from East Gippsland, would be woodchipped until the effects of woodchipping had been fully researched.
Although research into the effects of woodchipping has not been completed, existing mills are being expanded, and there have been proposals for new mills.
The Otways are ancient, dating back to the time when Australia was part of a southern hemisphere supercontinent, and much of Australia was covered in rainforest. The Otways' myrtle beach trees, some as old as 1000 years, are remnants from this time.
There are viable alternatives to woodchipping, to protect this precious natural heritage. In the Otways there are large areas of forest previously harvested for sawlogs. Many of the old trees in these areas could be woodchipped, rather than destroying untouched forest.
Plantations in the Otways provide nearly half of the timber harvest, and seem like the best option for the future, to ensure the survival of the area's fragile ecosystems.