BY ALEX MILNE
The Tarkine is the largest unprotected wilderness area in Tasmania, covering some 377,000 hectares of the state's northwest. It is a beautiful and dramatic region, with wild rivers, deep gorges and vast rainforests. Here, some of the tallest and oldest trees in the world are being logged for woodchips — irreplaceable virgin forests converted into toilet paper.
The Tarkine is Australia's only wilderness area that is dominated by rainforest, which is 70% of the total forest cover. More than 90% of this is old-growth forest.
Temperate rainforest is the rarest of the rainforests — existing only in fragments in New Zealand, Chile, western Canada and the US. It is more highly threatened than tropical and subtropical rainforests. The Tarkine contains the largest continuous tract of temperate rainforest in Australia, and the second largest in the world.
The Tarkine rainforest corridor is classified as tall (callidendrous) rainforest on basalt soil, and is home to the world's tallest flowering plants. Forests with basalt soils were the first cleared in Tasmania, as they provide the best agricultural land. Pristine basalt forests are therefore very rare, with less than 15% of Tasmania's original basalt forests remaining.
The 17,000 hectares of the Savage River rainforest corridor within the Tarkine is made up of callidendrous myrtle rainforest. Except for the pipeline road, this rainforest is in pristine condition.
Myrtles are especially vulnerable to disturbance because of myrtle wilt, a natural pathogen which occurs throughout Tasmania's rainforests. In normal rainforest conditions (closed canopy, low light, high moisture), this is kept under control. When the normal conditions are changed, for example by building roads or by logging, the disease spreads.
This section of rainforest has been protected by some form of moratorium on logging since 1982. The moratorium has been extended by subsequent governments. On June 4, ALP deputy premier Paul Lennon announced his intention to lift the moratorium.
The Tarkine contains 54 species of flora and fauna which are listed as either threatened or endangered, including the spotted tail quoll, the eastern barred bandicoot and the grey and goshawk bandicoots. It is a refuge in which many endemic, threatened, migratory and vagrant species can feed, breed, disperse and recolonise other areas where their populations have fared poorly.
The Tarkine is also home to the world's largest freshwater crustacean, which grows up to a metre long and lives up to 40 years.
Rainforest timbers have little value as timber trees. Current estimates put the amount of veneer and sawlog taken out of rainforest coupes at less than 10%, the rest going to woodchips. However, the rich basalt soils of the Tarkine make this a very attractive plantation region.
Rainforest is often clearfelled, then burnt and replanted with more commercially viable species. This process of converting unprofitable rainforest is the single biggest cause of species extinction in Australia. Logging pure rainforest on public land has been banned in all mainland states.
The Tarkine (Savage River) rainforests were one of the areas recommended for world heritage status by the regional forests agreement's world heritage expert panel. It was recommended that the appropriate conservation status for management of these rainforests was national park.
The Tarkine was first put forward for listing on UNESCO's world heritage list by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature in the early 1990s. Other organisations supporting a World Heritage listing for the Tarkine include the Wilderness Society, the Australian Conservation Foundation and the World Wildlife Fund.
Activists have been battling for years now to save the Tarkine through direct action on the ground. Tree-sits, lock-ons and tripods are just some of the methods used to thwart the logging companies. More people are needed to keep the campaign going.
More information on the campaign is available at <http://www.tarkine.org> or contact the Wilderness Society or Friends of the Earth.
From Green Left Weekly, August 27, 2003.
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