I do a little fundraising for my kids’ public school, because I think public education is one of the most important things I could support just now. I go to the odd demo. I would like to be helping the fight for our irreplaceable old-growth forests, too. But caught up in work, family obligations, and yes, cowardice – I know what the roads up there are like, and if I needed the old Mitsu-bashi pulled out of the mud, sure enough (in my overactive imagination) I’d be sure to find the only RACV bloke in the district would be fanatically pro-logging!

Meanwhile, in Gunbarrel Coupe on Sylvia Creek in Toolangi, people much braver than my pathetic self are locking onto machinery and going to jail to save this forest. Not all the action is on the coupe, either – the citizens of Toolangi are being subjected to spying and harassment from unidentified “suits”.

21 August 2011:

While we were winding up from the activities and most participants had left, a group of 4WD vehicles stopped 100m up the road and stayed blocking the road with 3 vehicles abreast with engines running and lots of shouting. It wasn’t clear whether their presence was intentional or coincidental but we sent out an alert and several friendly vehicles soon arrived, for which much thanks!. As the first few cars drew up the 4WDs left and then things became really bizarre!

22 August 2011:

At least two separate suspiciously acting individuals wearing suits and driving new SUV’s have been observed on 19.08.2011 loitering near mail boxes of Toolangi residents and looking through some documents. DSE vehicles have been observed parked discretely within eye shot of the suited individuals.
This coincides with mail irregularities reported by some residents. My phone bill with the listing of all calls made has not arrived this month (first time ever). Another person’s financial statement has been opened, evidently resealed and returned to the letter box during the night.

There is something we deskbound townies can do, besides publicise the brave Sylvia Creek protesters (or bring them food, water and supplies, if you live nearby). Remember recent events in Tasmania? A very important reason for the fall of Gunns as the bullyboy of the Tasmanian wilderness was the refusal of Japanese buyers to buy products which were sourced from old-growth woodchips. Activists did the hard yards there too, but the Japanese consumer helped bring the forestry industry to the negotiating table.

As Pia Perversi-Burchall of the Wilderness Society explains, “Toolangi’s forests are part of Australian Paper’s (makers of Reflex paper) concession zone. This means logs taken from the area are being made into Reflex paper, which is then sold by Officeworks.”

Attribution unknown

I’d add that Reflex has now lost its Forest Stewardship Council certification because it continues to use woodchips from native forests.

So, there is something we can do, here in the big city.

You can go to this web page and click on “Sign the Pledge” (for organisations) to boycott Reflex paper, or “Sign the Petition” (for individuals) to petition Officeworks to cease stocking Reflex paper.



Having done that, you should also go here, to let Officeworks know you’ve signed the petition or pledge, and why. Don’t let your action go unnoticed.

You can do all this before your cup of coffee goes cold. Just a little thing, but a whole lot of little things are better than nothing in this crazy world.

When I was a teenager my father and I used to go walking at Murrundindi, Toolangi, Mount St Leonard and the surrounding Mountain Ash country and I fell in love with that environment with its prehistoric flora and distinctive earthy, cool scent. It was once home, and inspiration, to the poet C J Dennis.

Year by year, week by week, VicForests rips out more of this treasured, dwindling habitat. Toocas at the Toolangi Castella blog sets out beautifully why we should not be clearfelling this forest at all. Most of the points raised apply to all cool temperate or “wet” native forest in SE Australia. (Contextual links are mine):

Summary of perceived issues:

1 – The area to be logged covers 2 large coupes, in forest that is high conservation value, mixed age and botanically diverse.

2 – This is an unburned area where surviving native wildlife have a precious refuge, following the Black Saturday destruction.

3 – The BAER Report (Burned Area Emergency Response Report), which was commissioned by the previous Government immediately after the bushfires, recommended preserving such areas for biodiversity recovery. It also called for caution and restraint in any proposed salvage logging.

4 – The forest block concerned is adjacent to Sylvia Creek Rd, and is intended to be clearfelled, right up to the roadside, thus despoiling a beautiful section of the forest drive to the popular Murrindindi Falls camping and picnic area. The cost to future tourism values of the area seems to be of no concern.

5 – Within this forest block is a treasure trove of different forest types, including senescent Mountain Ash old growth, mature Ash forest, cool temperate rain forest (a rare and threatened habitat in this region) and maturing regrowth Mountain Ash forest of varying ages – from pre-1900 to post 1939. Mountain Ash Eucalyptus regnans, is well known to be the tallest flowering plant in the world, but there is a strong argument that they are the tallest of all trees when given the centuries (and conditions) they need to grow to maturity (we still have a few remnant trees that are up to 500 years old). The giant trees of the 1800s have all gone, but leaving their progeny to grow on to maturity (instead of logging them for woodchips) may provide future generations with an experience of truly majestic old growth forest.

6 – The ‘understorey’ contains several plant species that live to a great age (centuries) if undisturbed, but are currently in significant long term decline in abundance after clearfelling and increased fire frequency. The species include:- Tree Ferns – Cyathea australis and Dicksonia antarctica, Musk Daisy Bush Olearia argophylla and Forest Geebung Persoonia arborea, small trees found in wet forest and cool temperate rainforest environments. The Geebung is locally endemic, and is peculiar in taking decades to reach reproductive maturity. Thus it is susceptible to being wiped out by clearfelling and elevated fire frequencies, in combination.

7 – The region is habitat for a range of native wildlife species including – Leadbeater’s Possum (our highly threatened State Faunal Emblem), Spotted-tailed Quolls (our largest, and very rare carnivorous marsupial) possums and gliders (including the now threatened Greater Glider) and the great forest owls – Sooty Owl and Powerful Owl. All of these species were hard hit by the 2009 bushfires and are now only remnant populations in the Central Highlands. Logging is destroying their remaining habitat.

8 – Climate change is beyond debate, and because of rising temperatures and reduced rainfall in south-eastern Australia, threatens the future existence of Mountain Ash forests. These trees are dependant on a narrow band of temperature, altitude, rainfall and soil structure factors for their continued existence. Clearfelling is drying out the region and contributing to regional climate change – thus further threatening the survival of this forest ecosystem. In turn, this tall and complex forest is a powerful modulator of local and regional climate. Consequently, logging it is a double negative that not only destroys forests and defaces the environment, but also adversely affects the future climate, water supply and fire security of regional towns and the greater Melbourne community.
[Details of a trip to Sylvia Creek road edited]
Remember, this is Melbourne’s own environmental treasure, only a bit over 1 hour’s drive from the GPO. So why should we not value it as highly as Sydney-siders value their adjacent National Parks?

If you have time this weekend, Victorians, please contact your local MLA, local MLC, and/or the AGE or your preferred newspaper editorial, to voice opposition to this slash and burn policy towards our irreplaceable Mountain Ash habitats. We’re told they’re replaceable, but they’re not. Not in their present form, unless you’re prepared to wait a couple of hundred years, and probably – given our drying impact on the surrounding environment – not even then.

I’m calling bullshit on the popular story that criticising McMansions is equivalent to sneering at the working class, and denying them the good things in life. In this narrative, the people championing the McMansion are the true socialists and stand with the working man and woman in their quest for a truly equal society. This is in no way peculiar to Legal Eagle – I’ve seen it all over the media.

It’s one of the endless riffs on the “elites” narrative. According to this variation, the heroic workers are approaching, under neoliberal capitalism, the egalitarian nirvana which they always sought, and the only truly authentic expression of this is a mock-Tuscan mansion of 215 or so square metres, built to the boundary on a treeless (except for pencil pines) quarter-acre block on a nodule-shaped development far from public transport, shops and services, a hotbox in summer and freezing in winter, costing squillions to heat, cool and furnish. But wait! Who’s this, crouching behind one of the two Yucca plants out the front? Oh, no! It’s those horrible “elites” again, throwing cold water on this wonderful social apotheosis, claiming that McMansions are really a bit crap. It’s because they just don’t want the heroic working class to have nice things!

Here’s the article which provoked Eagle’s reaction. It’s written by someone who knows his stuff. But I see the counter-narrative everywhere. During the last election, I saw a letter by a concerned citizen in our local newspaper complaining that the Greens bad-mouthed mcMansions and by association, ordinary Australians. I recognised the name on the letter as a Labor apparatchik (not local), so I know it’s spin.

Unfortunately for this story, its main premise is a fiction – McMansion owners are more likely to be up and coming IT workers and professionals or semiprofessionals as classic battlers. But let’s put that aside for a minute and consider the idea on its internal consistency alone.

What it comes down to is: we’re criticising a mode of planning and building, and being told we’re not allowed to claim one way of building is objectively better than another, in case we offend the lower/middle class (that is, most of us). Imagine if progressives had been the source of this idea. Political correctness! the media would cry. Po-mo relativism! Emotional!! (In Australia, the most devastating criticism possible.) Yes, built environments have political and cultural significance, but I am willing to go out on a limb and say that people who are fighting for the godgiven right of the Aussie Battlers to buy McMansions are speaking more from financial or political self interest than any warm concern for the battlers themselves.

I’m womanning the barricades, Comrades, for the right to say that McMansions are badly built and badly sited on badly planned developments. I’m not ashamed to say that building houses which regularly feature his and hers walk-in robes, home theatres and “powder rooms” as standard, but describing wall and ceiling insulation and smoke detectors as “luxury inclusion(s)” is doing it wrong. Furthermore, I’ll say these houses are poorly sited with regard to sunlight, lack eaves for shade, have thin walls, have little or no garden space, are built quickly and cheaply, will deteriorate rapidly and need expensive repairs in a relatively short time. I won’t be bullied into praising these white elephants by creative use of the Roveian/Howardian discourse of “elites”.

Now I know you’re going to say: “Yes, Helen, you can state your preference for one kind of dwelling over another, but saying that people shouldn’t want McMansions is telling other people what they ought to want, so, still elitist.” Which would be absolutely true, but don’t forget that there is an entire industry – advertising and marketing – whose job it is to tell people what they ought to want. Buyers aren’t just Choosing their Choice in a vaccuum. The building and development corporations (and the big box retailers who serve them, and the credit companies behind it all) are going to a lot of effort to appeal to aspiration, to snob value, to illusions of community and stability. Buyers adjust their “dreams” to fit whatever display model takes their fancy, while in reality the cookie-cutter homogeneity and cheapness of construction suits the developers and builders first and foremost. In other words, I think people are being told what they ought to want by the developers and the rest of the building/retail food chain, and unlike the McMansion opponents, they aren’t being called on it.

It doesn’t end there. The Big Box retailers love the bigger houses because they need to be furnished, and the pressure is on to furnish them a certain way, not just bring all your stuff from the rental house. There are more rooms, and you can’t just put a squeaky little sound system in that home theatre. Then, of course, there are the credit providers raking in their interest after that 24-month-interest-free period.

I have no doubt that if they had the will, the corporations and their advertisers could use the same lush, descriptive advertising to convince the punters they’d be happier and more comfortable (and richer!) in a smaller but better constructed and environmentally intelligent house. Swap the home theatre and his’n'hers walk-in robes for thicker walls, insulation and better basic construction. Use the Australian vernacular instead of the European, with overhanging eaves and shady verandahs on the western side. Use the space gained on the block to orient the houses for the climate. Have solar hot water and other money-saving goodies as standard, instead of “European tiles”, marble benchtops and such. Those can always come later with the money saved on power and other bills.

You don’t think they could sell this alternative vision? Of course they could. They’re the ones setting the agenda.

I dislike these houses because they are an embodiment of how individual buyers, society as a whole, and the environment on which we depend, are poorly served. I don’t dislike them because I don’t want ordinary people to have nice things. It’s because I would like them to have something so much better!

Update: The Melbourne Urbanist, Don Arthur on Club Troppo.

Update 2: Looks like a lot of people are changing their minds about house size.

As you read earlier, the Strzlecki Ranges (and Gippsland generally) were dense forest once upon a time, and home to Eucalyptus Regnans (Mountain Ash), the world’s tallest flowering plant. (The world’s tallest tree is always a lineball competition between Eucalyptus Regnans and Sequoia (Redwood), which is a conifer growing in the US.) Since European settlement, though, Gippsland has been home to many loggers and farmers whose dream it was to rid the lush rolling hills of all the pesky tall trees, and they probably would have succeeded if those damn greenies hadn’t agitated for national parks in the twentieth century. Note the sign says “the site of the world’s tallest tree.” Yes, they felled the thing, measured it once it was on the ground, said “Yup, that was the world’s tallest tree, all right”, and put up a weird thing in its place for people to come and look at.

In case you’re looking here and there in confusion wondering if there’s an actual tree, there’s a sign and a plaque.

The World’s Tallest Tree
375 Feet or 114.3 Metres
If the tree grew here at this monument and was felled easterley < - along the road, the top of the tree would be at the white post near the fence on the south side of the road. Please take a walk to the white post. You will not believe a tree could be so tall.
Mr Stan Pethybridge.

Got that? If the tree was still there, and if they felled it again (still having difficulty not automatically associating “tree” with “fell”/”chop”/”remove”), It would go all the way along the road to.. this.

There was a very bemused German family sharing this moment with me. I reassured them that there were some big trees left in Victoria, and suggested Powelltown or Tarra Bulga.

There’s a plaque, as well:

The World’s Tallest Tree
375 feet (114.3 metres)
This mountain ash grew about 160 Meters south from here on Mr Bill Cornithwaite’s property. [So, not actually "here", either.] Felled by him in 1884. And officially measured by his brother George, a govt surveyor. This plaque and adjacent Post erected as a Rotary project for the Thorpdale centenary, March 1976. Unveiled by hon. Jim Balfour, minister for fuel and power.

Awesome!

So, what have they done with these rolling hills, once they’re denuded of their tall timber? Well, Thorpdale is the potato capital of Gippsland. They even have a potato festival.

And of course, if you keep driving to Trafalgar and turn left to end your road trip and drive back to Melbourne, you’ll see that absolute staple of Australian Tourism: the Big Thing. Or rather, the Big Things. Gippsland: Beautiful one day, daggy the next.

The guy in the linked site goes on quite a bit about the difficulty of it all but having grown up driving old shitboxes around narrow, soft shouldered dirt roads, I wasn’t too worried about my 1994 Mitsu-bashi. We – the car and I, that is – made the distance without breaking down, driving into a ditch, plummeting to our doom from the high goat-track sections, or getting lost.

At Tarra Bulga I got to feast my senses on the quiet, wet, cool temperate – rain – foresty goodness which bores my family shitless, but I can’t get enough of it.

This is one of the remnants of

forests so impenetrable that Strzelecki’s overland expedition from Sydney to the settlement at Western Port Bay in 1840 was in places unable to advance more than three kilometers a day. Having abandoned their horses and supplies further to the east, they were at times obliged to physically throw themselves at the thick walls of scrub in order to make any progress, and came perilously close to starvation

which is strangely different from the story we get from anti-conservationists, who claim that thick forest didn’t exist before European settlement because the indigenous people of Victoria kept the environment open and park-like by non-stop controlled burning, so as to maintain their traditional hunting, as well as their traditional logging trucks, their traditional SUVs and traditional trail bikes.

Suggestion for a new tourist slogan: “More epiphytic ferns than you can poke a stick at!” No? Oh well.

Staying at Mirboo North was the usual terrible drudgery of red wine, food from the garden and wood fires, and this time, naturally, easter eggs and hot cross buns. Here are two more murals, this time from the supermarket.

Yes, congratulations Karen, who and wherever you are!

Although I haven’t got it together yet to bring my bike, there’s a Rail Trail – that is, a bike/walking/bridle path which used to be a rail line – from Mirboo North to Boolarra, which is useful to walk off some of the easter eggs and hot cross buns. Boolarra was badly affected by the Churchill fire on Black Saturday. You can see the trees here, about half an hour’s walk from Mirboo, regenerating after the fire.

Coming soon: Part 2 – exciting tourist attractions!

More here and here.



To quote James Bradley of City of Tongues on Twitter, “The level of casual misogyny directed at the PM is truly appalling, and says a lot about those who endorse it.”

There is a well-defined legal process for such projects, developments or activities in a place of national significance, under section 68 of the Environment Protection, Biodiversity and Conservation (EPBC) Act. In early January, before they sent the cattle in, the DSE was supposed to notify the Federal environment minister, Tony Burke. After that, the Minister is required to publish the notice on the internet and invite public comment. After “consultations with the public and relevant ministers”, the Minister is required to decide whether the activity is a Controlled Action under the EPBC Act.

The impacts must then be assessed (and there are already reams of information on the damaging impact of hooved grazing animals on the Alpine environment, such as the 2005 Alpine Grazing Taskforce report and the 2006 CSIRO study into the Alpine ecology, grazing and fire.) Following assessment, the Minister then may determine whether or not to allow the Controlled Action under the EPBC Act.

It is an offence to carry out activities which may be Controlled Actions without the consent of the Federal Minister for the Environment.

According to news reports on January 12, the (Victorian) DSE claimed to have sent a letter to the Minister, but this letter appeared to have mysteriously disappeared en route.

The Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment has written to Mr Burke’s office advising it of the trial and has offered a full briefing, but it has received no reply.
But the federal Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities has not received the letter.
”Under national environment law, the onus to refer an activity falls on the person carrying out the activity,” a spokesman said.

The cattle are already in the park, so they were in breach of the law already by mid January. I haven’t seen any calls for public comment by Tony Burke for assessment of a Controlled Action under the EPBC act – anyone else seen it? At any rate, the legal process has hardly got to square one.

It’s wrong. And don’t fall for the argument that as a city dweller, you have no right to oppose it. For one thing, this is a Heritage area which belongs to all Australians, not just a handful of families. For another, it’s your taxes at work.

The $5.50 per head fee paid by the graziers when the practice was stopped in 2005 (calves born while up in the high country travelled free) represented a massive subsidy by the taxpayer to a privileged few families, since the tiny fee went nowhere near to covering the damage caused by the cattle. If the Baillieu government is hell bent on allowing these people to do their damage, will the new agistment fee be set at a more realistic level?

Also, when Alpine grazing was ended by the Bracks government, an ex gratia payment was made by the Victorian government to the tune of $100 per head of cattle for the three years after that, up to $100,000 per license holder. (H/T Wilful.) So we were still paying for them.

Now that Alpine grazing has been brought back, will they be required to pay back that money?

You or I would be sent to the wall if we attempted to do something like this, but for the macho men of the Liberal and Country parties, the law is for the little people. We saw the damage that favours for “Labor mates” did to Victorian governance under Bracks and Brumby. Stand by for government by Liberal / Country Party mates. Plus ca change.

I’ve never been a swinging voter. From the time I was old enough to vote I was a rusted-on Labor voter. Rusted on. Here are just a few of the reasons I won’t be voting for them in the next State election and why I haven’t been able to do so for some time.

Because they won’t commit to a properly funded and resourced public education system and instead, they tinker around the edges instead of fixing the structural problems that our public system faces. This seems to be because they aren’t in their own system’s corner. Instead, they allocate an extra 40% of funding to private and Church schools – a huge slap in the face to the parents who are sending their kids to public schools. And while developers and real estate agents and “consultants” buy new BMWs, they treat our teachers like shit.

Because they have set city against country people by building a pipeline from the already overstressed Murray Darling Basin to Melbourne, which many city people don’t want and which is an environmental disaster from start to finish. Because they are building a huge white elephant in the form of a desalination plant which will be run at least in part on fossil fuels such as coal and gas. Because when the rains came recently, instead of keeping water restrictions, they eased them and then published a photo of John Brumby happily washing a car. Way to make country people hate us.

Because they have signed a memorandum of agreement allowing their police force to pass confidential details of protesters to the consortium building the desalination plant.

Because their “planning” minister, Justin Madden, gives a tick to any project which the consortiums and developers want, over the objections to any informed protest, destroying priceless environmental and architectural treasures as he goes. They plan for sham consultations and then add insult to injury by trying to paper over this by starting a “department of respect”, headed by…? Justin Madden!

Because they are so much in bed with the Roads lobby that they can’t see beyond the construction for roads, roads and more roads, especially freeways. Oh, god are they in love with freeways. As well as the social and environmental damage caused by poorly planned developments there’s the opportunity cost of all the money that isn’t spent on public transport.

Because, speaking of public transport, they spent $775-850 million on the MYKI project, which still isn’t working properly. Rolling stock and infrastructure, meanwhile, is run down and neglected and many Melbourne suburbs limp along with only unreliable and infrequent buses. Those of us lucky enough to live near public transport are still packed in like sardines and subject to train cancellations and random system malfunctions. Meanwhile, our taxes are pissed up against a wall with nearly $50 million spent on a car race.

Because all these bloated projects are carried out through Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) which represent an orgy of profit for developers and unions with sufficient muscle to extract a fair share of that profit. Because they accept donations from the people who profit. Because this is a symptom of how your “party of the workers” has adopted neoliberal, corporatist, managerialist values. As the title of the linked article says, they’ve become a Labor party in name only. Because these are steps down the disastrous road of privatising our most basic needs, like tap water.

Because they encourage urban sprawl, ignoring boundaries set out by wiser governments and destroying the Green Wedges, urban boundaries and city parklands that made Melbourne livable.

Because they broke their 2006 election promise to protect the last remaining significant stands of old-growth forest in Victoria, gazetting acres of low-value vegetation for “protection” while continuing to chainsaw Victoria’s old-growth forest, like the cool temperate forest of Brown Mountain. They mouth platitudes about “sustainable” forestry while leaving areas a smoking ruin which a Supreme Court judge, Jack Forrest (heh) compared to the battlefield of the Somme.

Because although they got rid of Stephen Newnham, they have kept their dirt unit under the new guy, Nick Reece, doing stupid stuff like this. “Super Attack”? How old are their staffers, twelve?

Because “don’t criticise Labor because the Liberals might get in, and they’re worse,” doesn’t really inspire me, and that’s pretty much the best their supporters can come up with.

Now I’ve run out of time, but not out of reasons.

See you at the polling booth tomorrow.

You may be confused if you’ve had the impression that I live in the inner city. Have I moved? Do I live on a property somewhere in the country? There are no sheep, cows or horses on the grassy paddock; a man comes every month with a ride on mower to keep the grass down. Am I some millionaire landowner?

No – I’m about 8 ks from the city centre, as the crow flies. I’m lucky enough to live in the last house on the end of a street which abuts on one of Melbourne’s linear parks, resurrected and revegetated from an old bluestone quarry in the 1970s and 80s. If I’m standing at the kitchen sink, I can just barely make out a house or two and the corner of a car park on the opposite side. If I’m sitting down, I might as well be somewhere in Gippsland.

I quite enjoy washing dishes when I can gaze out at the park. It’s especially beautiful in the slanting light of the mid-late afternoon, where the sun’s a golden pollen giving everything that Dutch Old Masters glow, even in winter. The suburb comes out to play – Dads with little daughters on their shoulders or kicking footballs, old men with impromptu bocce, the Adidas-and-lycra runners and the older migrant women who jog or power walk in their skirts, stockings and sensible shoes. Friends who I wave to from our window as they walk. Groups of kids renewing the tyre swing in its time honoured position on the creek (we’ve had our turn with that). Lots of prams, and of course, the dogs. Labradors and retrievers goofing, pugs and Lhasa apsos huffing around with great purpose, kelpies and heelers grinning and leaping high after a tennis ball. So much happiness.

We moved in in April 1994, after a massive coup by the SO, who found the house in the classified ads, whereupon I was all, “Get with the times, SO, it is all about the internet these days”, but we drove out here to see the house, and I was all, YOU DO NOT MEAN TO TELL ME IT’S THIS HOUSE, and anyway we are never going to get it because people are going to pay megabucks for a house in this position despite it being a 50′s weatherboard*, but as it happened people didn’t want to pay megabucks for it in 1994 because the suburb’s next to Footscray and that was still the most Terrible place Ever, according to people who had never been there. So that was a huge win for SO and for the rest of us.

Over the last decade and a half I’ve circumnavigated the Park at least once a day and gazed out over the grassy creek and sat on the back verandah watching the honeyeaters and fruit bats in the trees. I’ve done planting days and watched the changes that have happened over that time. The biggest change, of course, is the Big Dry.

In the early morning, my usual walking time, I’d see a resident cormorant and a resident grey heron perching above the creek. There were a couple of ducks who came and went, and the occasional flock of Sacred Ibis. The creek was loud with frogs. A few years later, the rain was all but gone and the pain in the landscape was increasing.

Of course, every summer the green grass slopes will fade to yellow and white as they always do here. But those summers, the grass faded to yellow in spring and blew away in summer, revealing the silty black soil underneath. And the wind! Spring is always windy but I couldn’t remember gales like these, extending into summer now and blowing the naked soil off the earth. I’d look out of my window and see the trees leaning, birds and animals hidden. Some of the gusts were so violent and- it seemed- malevolent, I wondered if our little wooden house would be torn from its stumps and Maggie and I would end up, like Judy Garland and Toto, somewhere far from here. Fortunately that never happened, but I heard accounts from other suburbs of SES workers covering roofless houses with tarpaulins and sawing up fallen trees.

Almost every day a new tree would fall and I would spot another beginning to die. The cormorant and the grey heron slowly faded away. The ducks still visit occasionally. I rarely hear frogs now, even the pobblebonks who live under the sandy soil.

We have just had a rash of deaths of trees for which the rains came too late. The melaleuca right next to the kitchen window, where I would watch the wattle birds swinging and bickering and doing acrobatics, has gone. There has been an uproar of chainsawing and mulching. It’s pouring down now as I write, but a few days ago I put in some broccoli and silverbeet seedlings and the spade turned dry earth. Even after all the rain we’ve had it’s as if nothing can quench its thirst.

The local park Friends group holds a planting day every few months. If it had been up to me, I’m sure it wouldn’t have happened. My pessimism would have taken over; I wouldn’t have wanted to plant young trees and shrubs only to watch them die slowly. But they got me out there, and not everything has died. In fact, I’m seeing some of the young trees start to grow to maturity. There’s something to be said for optimism, but we’ve been told to expect the Big Dry as the beginning of a new normal, and the pessimism is hard to shake.

This post was supposed to be for World Environment day, but then when am I ever on time for any World Day. Our position in urban bushland means that as a city dweller, contra the usual stereotype, I can’t just retreat into my world of home and TV and escape from nature. It’s there, right on the other side of my kitchen window. I can literally say that there hasn’t been a day in the last ten years where climate change hasn’t nagged at me.

I worry that we’re at the beginning of desertification. That’s not to say deserts are worthless. Who’s to say what fascinating dry-land vegetative and wind erosion-sculpted geographic forms might be here in the far future. But I liked our South-Eastern environment as it was and if this will be the new normal, if the current rains are a statistical blip rather than a recovery, I’ll mourn its passing.
 
 
 
 
*Another blow to the fiction that I live in a Victorian terrace with a cast iron balcony like Hal Porter’s.

The words Harvest and Harvesting are freighted with positive associations. Although on an intellectual level we know that it’s mostly about combine harvesters and pea pickers these days, they’re still words which evoke the warm glow of late summer and autumn. Haystacks with horny lads and lassies in them drinking cider at the end of a long day. Heaped cornucopias of pumpkins, squash and sheaves of corn at the altar at Harvest Festival. Pagan and Christian rituals of joy and thanks. Baskets of apples as red as the cheeks of the pickers carrying them… Baisakhi, Gawai Dayak, the Moon Festival…

As opposed to this.

A Supreme Court judge has compared images of a felled forest with a World War I battlefield before ordering a temporary ban on logging in a hotly contested part of East Gippsland.
Environmentalists claimed a historic victory after winning an injunction over logging of two zones of old-growth forest at Brown Mountain, seen as a symbolic battleground by greens and the timber industry.
The injunction will stand until a trial to test whether the logging would pose a threat to endangered species, particularly the long-footed potoroo.
Justice Jack Forrest said the case had been strengthened by photographs showing the ”apparent total obliteration” of a nearby site during logging and subsequent burning off.
”To put it bluntly, once the logging is carried out and the native habitat destroyed, then it cannot be reinstated or repaired in anything but the very, very long term,” he said.
Earlier, Justice Forrest told the court: ”I know what it was like before and I know what it was like after, and I’ve also seen pictures of the battlefields of the Somme.”

More pictures here.

In bygone days, the defenders of logging were at least honest enough to call it by that name. In South-Eastern Australia, “logging” of old growth forest means “clear felling and woodchipping”. “Clear Felling”, as practiced here, means the removal of all trees from designated areas, in mountainous regions where the soil is highly suceptible to erosion and runoff without those trees. The residue is then burned (firebombed) using a substance similar to napalm. Bulldozers, logging trucks and other machinery criss-cross the area, leaving deep ruts and compacted soil. The forest is then expected to regenerate “naturally”. The firebombing is compared to indigenous mosaic burning of the forest before European settlement.

Attempts to locate evidence of indigenous bulldozers have so far been fruitless.

No wonder the Judge saw a comparison to a war zone rather than a “harvest”. Next time you see that particular weasel word in the newspaper, in relation to Brown Mountain or any other remnants of our ancient old growth, remember that picture up there.

More background and action alert here.