And What Do You Do Mr. Gable?

by Richard Flanagan

  There is in all this a constant thread: the Lennon government’s and Gunns’ real mates are not workers, but millionaires. Behind the smokescreen of statistics, beyond the down-home cant of ‘timber folk’ peddled by the woodchippers’ propagandists, past the endless lies, is a simple, wretched truth: great areas of Australia’s remnant wild lands are being reduced to a landscape of battlefields, in order to make a handful of very rich people even richer.

  Yet giving away such an extraordinary public resource as Tasmania’s forests now threatens Tasmania’s broader economic prospects. A growing weight of financial analysis suggests that the economics of plantations (with which native forests are being replaced) are not assured but rather are a huge gamble for Tasmania. The industry’s future prospects depend on global pulp prices rising; the government, as the Australian Financial Review put it, has ‘tied the state’s economic future to the success of Gunns and its tree farms’.

  If the future looks dubious, the present is already a failure. The reality is that logging old-growth brings little wealth and few jobs to struggling, impoverished rural communities. While Gunns makes its profits primarily in Tasmania, the great majority of Gunns’ shares are owned by mainland institutions. It has been estimated that less than 15 per cent of Gunns’ profits remain in the island, where the largest individual shareholder is John Gay himself.

  As a consequence of the forestry debate, Tasmania is an ever more oppressive place to live. Just six days after conservationists had gone public about arson threats in 2004, the historian Bruce Poulson, a prominent opponent of plans to log the historically significant site of Recherché Bay, had the study behind his Dover house, containing decades of research, burnt down in what police described as a ‘malicious’ attack. Ray and Leanne Green had displayed Wilderness Society posters calling for an end to old-growth clearfelling in the Styx Valley in their Something Wild Wildlife Sanctuary, half an hour’s drive from the valley. They received numerous informal threats, and then had their business burnt out. Cameraman Brian Dimmick was bashed by a log-truck driver who objected to Dimmick filming his vehicle. So it goes in the clearfell state.

  It has never been suggested, nor do I wish to imply, that Gunns is any way responsible for such acts. But the workings of power are not always reducible to orders or even intentions. When a society becomes entrapped in a growing coarsening of public rhetoric, evil finds succour. When vilification is commonplace, when lies are the currency of the day and followers seek to rise through the vigorous anticipation of leaders’ unspoken desires, where all are disenfranchised and the most powerless feel what little security they have will be destroyed by those who merely disagree, acts of dubious morality and even of violent criminality become justifiable and appear honourable.

  Despite a few years of economic upturn between 2001 and 2006, Tasmania is once more technically in recession, and it remains the poorest Australian state, with the highest levels of unemployment, and around 40 per cent of its population dependent on government welfare. New key industries, such as tourism and fine foods and wines, trade as much on the island’s pristine image as they do on the products they sell. There is growing concern in all these industries—in which job growth is concentrated—at the relentless damage being done to Tasmania’s name by images of smouldering forest coupes.

  It is little wonder that many Tasmanians now worry that the woodchippers’ greed destroys not only their natural heritage, but distorts their parliament, deforms their polity, and poisons their society. And perhaps it is for that reason that the battle for forests in Tasmania is ever more about free speech and democracy—about a people’s right to exercise some control over their destiny, about their desire to have a better, freer society—as it is about wild lands.

  Of late, Gunns’ fortunes have suffered. Its share price has dropped by over a quarter from its record highs of 2005, a reflection of having lost 20 per cent of its market share to South American plantations. At the same time, woodchip prices have dropped and a global woodchip glut beckons, all of which leaves Tasmania ever more dependent on uneconomic woodchip production.

  A recent rally in support of its pulp mill attracted just fifty people, including Premier Paul Lennon. Gunns’ own research shows only one in four Tasmanians support the island’s biggest company. Meanwhile, its pulp-mill proposal meets with growing fury throughout Tasmania. The once timorous Tasmanian media has begun showing courage in questioning Gunns’ activities; the Gunns 20 writ has been rejected three times and Gunns’ projected legal costs—including damages it must now pay—run into millions. On throwing it out a second time, Judge Bongiorno described the lengthy writ as legally ‘embarrassing’. Still, Gunns persists with a fourth suit. Eminent QC Julian Burnside, one of the defence counsels, has said, ‘It leaves you wondering if the purpose is simply to terrorise.’

  Yet the hope for many Tasmanians of years past—that one or other of the major parties at a national level would act to end the madness of old-growth logging—vanished with Kevin Rudd’s Labor Party green light to Gunns. No one could look to a political system now so hopelessly frightened by—and enmeshed with—the woodchipping lobby to effect change. After a decade of the most pro-corporation national government Australia has ever had, neither major political party has the courage or integrity to stand up to a rogue corporation.

  And it is Gunns’ determination to do whatever it must to continue old-growth logging that may just condemn both it and Tasmania to a savage vortex: given the history of dependence on government subsidies and the alacrity with which both major parties grant them, Gunns’ ability to always shift losses on to others—the government, its workers—means that the company may well continue to prosper. But the price of maintaining the necessary political support is high and ever higher: it demands an ever more determined manipulation of public opinion, an ever more ruthless treatment of public opposition, and an ever more determined duchessing and policing of political parties.

  For that reason, more Tasmanians are demanding a royal commission into the Tasmanian old-growth logging industry and its relationship with both major political parties. It may find nothing untoward has taken place. It may find something criminal has occurred. It may even find at heart something far more disturbing: that the boundary between what is illegal and what is unethical has now vanished in Australia, and that the spectre that now haunts Australia is not that of an omnipotent state but of a ruthless corporation, beholden to nothing but its own bottom line, inhibited by nobody, liberated by the failure of contemporary politics.

  Nothing less than a major investigation with special powers can now clear away the stench that surrounds this industry and shames Australia. Without such an investigation nothing will change except for the worse, and this rape of Tasmania will continue until one day, like so much else precious, its great forests will belong only to myth. Tasmanians will be condemned to endure the final humiliation: bearing dumb witness to the great lie that delivers wealth to a handful elsewhere, poverty to many of them, and death to their future as the last of these extraordinary places is sacrificed to the woodchippers’ greed. Beautiful places, holy places, lost not only to them, but to the world, forever.

  And in a world where it seems everything can be bought, all that will remain are ghosts briefly mocking memory: a ream of copying paper in a Japanese office and a man fern in an English garden. And then they too will be gone.

  The Telegraph (London)

  April 2007

  The Monthly

  May 2007

  ‘THEY CALL IT FIRE FREEZE,’ she said.

  I looked up at the tree branches bowed and twig ends extended, the leaves forced horizontal as though a great gale were blowing. Yet the air was still. And the charred tree was dead, and had been dead since the apocalypse of Saturday.

  Then, as the furnace breath of the fire roared through the trees, such was its ferocious heat that it sucked all moisture out of t
he branches and leaves, freezing them in this final position of life. And yet the leaves didn’t burn.

  Four days later, as we climbed the road to Kinglake, the landscape appeared not so much incinerated—as might be expected—as irradiated. As though some death ray had passed through at incomprehensible speed, blobs and runs of aluminium knuckled the bitumen of the road leading into the town that was being described in the media as having vanished in the firestorm.

  And yet not everything was dead. Fifty metres down the road from the burnt-out wreck of a dual cab was a green, living tree. Three white goats pocked a black paddock.

  The town was still closed off to all bar residents, emergency services, forensic investigators and some media. To get there, you drove up a range through a forest of charred trees rising like an endless nail bed, occasionally broken by yellow-coated CFA volunteers putting out smoking stumps, repairmen clearing roads of fallen trees, replacing power lines and poles, and a quickening rhythm of charred houses and burnt-out cars.

  Nothing was as you might expect. Next to writhing twists of ash-white tin that were once homes were houses still standing, with large trees a few metres from their doorway. And at the heart of the destruction, the centre of Kinglake had somehow survived.

  Here, the atmosphere of a country show seemed to prevail, with what seemed excessive activity: sprawling parking, container shopfronts and barbecues, the endlessly dividing and reforming circles of people. But it was not a country show.

  The smell of onions and burgers frying threw a fatty blanket over the pungent ash of the air, but only if you stood close. The container offices housed government agencies, insurers, emergency services. The people were CFA volunteers, emergency workers, families, old friends near and distant. Survivors, mostly. Their talk was not the squeals and screams of the fairground, but the low murmur of something else. And they moved slowly, as if in wonderment.

  ‘Everyone,’ said one woman, ‘knows someone who is dead.’

  The small run of shops in the town centre had opened their doors and beneath the verandahs were palettes of potatoes, watermelons, tomatoes, cordials and signs saying, ‘FREE FOOD. TAKE WHAT YOU NEED.’

  Not everyone did. A woman tells me that some whose homes were not destroyed feel they shouldn’t help themselves. Everyone feels something, but no one can say what it is, and all seem marked by some odd tenderness of being.

  People greeted each other not cursorily, nor quickly, but in what seemed slow awe. An emotion as large and incomprehensible as the ash-strewn world itself seemed to engulf them. People stopped, looked at one another, held each other in—what?—gratitude, relief, grief, love? Whatever it was, if you came from elsewhere it felt wrong to try to pretend you could enter it.

  The media were looking for the tragic death story, the heroic survival story, something that might do some justice to that terrible hushed emotion that seemed to swallow up everything. They ringed one couple telling their dramatic story of escape, of how they passed cars already burnt out with bodies inside. But they did not want to talk about it.

  The journos did it because it was their job and they were trying to do their job well, and they did it because they needed a single story that might speak of all these other things: the luck, the serendipity of life and death, the feeling of a world no longer controllable. But no story would do.

  ‘It’s the same story,’ whispered a frustrated TV-news reporter to his cameraman. ‘We’ve had all this already.’ And maybe it was and maybe they had. But no story, no detail, no utterance summed up any of it.

  The woman who smiled at me so beautifully, who held my forearm as though I was the one in need of solace, comfort, said, ‘I’m all right. You shouldn’t talk to me. I feel so —’

  She halted, as though the next word were somehow wrong to say.

  ‘Guilty,’ she then said. She clipped the end of the word. ‘We survived,’ she said. ‘We’re all right,’ she continued more quickly. ‘There are others over there you should talk to.’ She pointed down an alley where clothes were being distributed. Her hand was shaking on my forearm. She forced a smile, excused herself and walked away.

  There was already a lot of expert opinion in the media on why the fires had happened. That it was the fault of greenies, or people who had left too late or had no fire plan. But in Kinglake there seemed few certainties. Why some had died was as unexplainable as why others had lived. Other than luck, which was the word that came up again and again.

  The man who had been fighting a fire away from the town on Saturday told me he did not know if his wife was safe until the day after, the three plastic cups of instant coffee he held beginning to tremble as he spoke.

  ‘That’s her,’ he said, motioning with a bowing head over my shoulder.

  ‘We were lucky,’ he said. And he walked over to two women, and one put her arms around his neck and burst into tears and could not stop crying, as though they were seeing each other again for the first time after that dreadful Saturday night.

  Everyone knew someone who had lost someone, and everyone had a story, and every story was the tip of something huge and beyond any telling or hearing. It all made as little sense as the way day had turned to night, the roar beyond description as the fire approached, the tar melting, the trees falling and cars smashing, the people panicking, the people even more puzzlingly simply watching, the sight of the dead; the inexplicable, even ridiculous, way you might live.

  There was the couple who ran across the road and took shelter in the Kinglake West milk bar—a brick building—as the fire barrelled down the main road toward them, only to look down in their relief and see gas bottles. They turned, ran back across the road to their house, and just as they made it to the other side the bottles exploded, blowing out the back of the shop.

  Everyone had a story, even those who were not there, like the man who said he’d had a blue with his wife. She’d left on the Friday, and he decided midday Saturday to go down to Melbourne to work for the day. Now they were alive, reunited, and aware of the irony that had allowed this to be so.

  ‘I was a street kid for most of my life,’ said another man. ‘Moved here four years ago and it’s the best place I’ve ever lived. I felt part of a community, first time ever, such a good place.’

  I saw a moment of fire freeze, one world trapped in death, another yet to start.

  ‘You know what I mean?’ he said. But I didn’t really.

  All around us were people frying onions and hamburgers and sorting clothes, people ash-smeared and fire-exhausted, people still to grieve and people unable to be grateful, people reaching out to each other, people looking out for one another and discovering the extraordinary in themselves.

  ‘Such a good place,’ he said again. ‘You know?’

  Beyond us the police teams were turning over tin, turning up more and more dead, yet everywhere I looked I saw only the living helping the living, people holding people, people giving to people. At the end of an era of greed, at a time when all around are crises beyond understanding and seemingly without end, here, in the heart of our apocalypse, I had not been ready for the shock of such goodness.

  The Monthly

  March 2009

  This recipe could not be simpler, requires no kneading, and makes a beautiful loaf. It is a version of the ciabatta loaf, a seemingly old- fashioned crusty and holey bread reputedly invented by a Venetian baker in the 1960s. The heart of the recipe is a wildly wet dough (80 per cent water as opposed to the more traditional 60 per cent) and a long proving time. The lengthy rising is what gives this loaf great taste and texture. To simulate a steam oven it makes use of a cast-iron casserole in which the bread bakes in its own steam. This produces a most lovely crust, so difficult to otherwise obtain with a domestic oven. You can use a French-style Le Creuset or some such, but a $40 camp oven does the job better and you run no risk of destroying expens
ive enamelled cookware.

  The Ingredients

  500 g plain flour

  400 ml cold water

  1 tsp salt

  1/3 tsp dry yeast

  The Work

  1. Mix the yeast, salt and flour together in a bowl.

  2. Add the cold water and mix with your hand until you have a thick batter.

  3. Cover the bowl with cling wrap. Leave to rise for between 16 and 24 hours.

  4. Thickly flour a bench and pour out the dough. Lightly flour the sticky mass and then push and prod it into the biggest square you can. Pick up the corners, stretch them out and fold them inwards, one on top of the other until you have a lump-like loaf. Leave for an hour.

  5. Place the cast-iron casserole in the oven and preheat to 240°C.

  6. Carefully take the very hot casserole out of the oven, remove the lid, dust the base with flour, and drop your dough into the centre.

  7. Replace the lid and bake for 30 minutes.

  8. Remove the lid, and bake for another 15–20 minutes until the bread is well browned.

  9. Cool on a rack for an hour before cutting.

  10. Find a kitchen table. Fill it with friends. Bottles. Stories. And share. With or without a breadknife.