Terania Creek: Rainforest Wars

I came across this book straight after my first trek through Nightcap National park in northern New South Wales. I read it in a day, and – absurd as it sounds – it had me gasping with excitement. Not bad for a book about trees, eh?
But, as Turvey tells, the trees of this region are far from ordinary. They’re the Gondwana rainforest ancestors of the eucalyptus and acacia forests the now define Australia – and they very nearly came to grief.

In 1979, Australia’s first forest protest broke out on the southern rim of the Tweed caldera. Turvey was then a young forester employed in Victoria.
For three years the rainforest wars waged. Until Neville Wran, then premier of NSW, ended the conflict. Turvey takes the reader on that thrilling – and globally significant – journey.

He begins with describing the origin and evolution of this ‘green, lovely world pre-dating the arrival of humans in this planet by about 85 million years’. Then, with uncompromising fairness, Turvey recreates the story of its preservation, adding maps and photographs to his diverse sources. The hardships and perspective of the political ‘losers’- the forest workers and sawmillers – are included but Turvey probably agrees with Wran that ‘when we are all dead and buried … [the end of logging will be seen as] the best thing the… Government did in the twentieth century’.

Dr Turvey has deliberately chosen to write for the general reader – for the sake of story he feels should be told – and there’s humour and pathos in Terania Creek, a refreshing change from the stodge and density of much academic writing.

On closing its appropriately green and ‘forestly’ covers, feeling moved and better informed, I pronounced it the best non-fiction book I’d read all year. This was the verdict of local publisher IP, because Terania Creek is IP’s Best Creative Non-Fiction Award Winner 2006. If you weren’t there in 1979, if you can’t easily experience Gondwana for yourself, this book is the next best thing.

-Lesley Synge (Writing Queensland, Issues 160)

I was not a participant in the rainforest wars at Terania creek – more of an observer. But in 1981-82, I became caught up in one of the subsequent battles of this long running war – the Washpool – from which I still bear some scars. This new book is a fascinating and compelling read. It resonates on many levels.

I’ve known Nigel on and off for about 25 years, sometimes when we were both academics, sometimes when we were both living and working in Indonesia. I have always had profound respect for his expertise as a scientist. One central pillar and dominant character of this book is the subtropical rainforests. Nigel’s knowledge of, and passion for, these amazing ecosystems permeates the whole. But one would expect no less from someone of his expertise and experience. Like virtually everyone who has studied rainforest ecosystems, he has been captivated, bewitched, seduced, by them.
So that element of the book pleased and reassured me, but did not surprise me.

But this isn’t really a book about beautiful rainforests and why they’re important. What I was unprepared for, but impresses me even more, is the story telling, the characterisation, the rich detail in the presentation of the minute features of the personalities involved, on both sides of the war. I knew some of the characters Nigel describes, but I could never have painted such accurate and enthralling word portraits of these people. The book is an oral history – a rich narrative about some exceptional people and some ordinary people doing exceptional things?

There’s the scientist’s eye for detail, combined with the narrator’s flair for painting vivid word-portraits. For example, some odd “forest fauna” are described, in the vicinity of the “rainbow army” camp.

A few cars sat awkwardly on the track, without wheels, as though beached on some alien shore; this was the first passive line of defence for the rainforest. Other vehicles stood among the tents dotting the paddock: a slab-sided and rag-topped Landrover, a rust-spotted ute, a white van, a gaggle of kombis, a surfie’s shaggin’-wagon, and a majestic FJ Holden with upright windscreen and a smiling big-lipped chrome grille.

But the book is also social commentary, generating insights into how society was changing in the late 1970s and through the 1980s, in ways that few had anticipated, and which those who found themselves caught up, didn’t really understand.

The struggle as celebrity
Not just the rainforest, not just the characters on each side who became famous or infamous, but the struggle itself became important and achieved the status of celebrity. The fact that there WAS a battle for Terania Creek surprised many people, in the media, among the public watching the nightly news in their living rooms, and of course the loggers, the foresters and the government agencies who’d assumed their “right” to log State Forests was unquestionable.

Terania Creek was the mother of subsequent battles – the Washpool, the Hastings, Eden and Coolungubra in NSW, the Daintree and later all the wet tropics in north Queensland, the Frankin and the Lemonthyme in Tasmania, and the Erinundra plateau, the Otways and others in Victoria – to name just a few. I suspect that many people, inspired by what had been achieved at Terania Creek, embarked on similar strategies to save the places that were just as locally or nationally significant to them. Of course the detail, the context, the names dates and places, of all the other rainforest conservation struggles were different. But Terania set much of the pattern for other disputes, which were usually of much greater scale and of much greater consequence. And how it was resolved (if indeed it was) was also something of a template, that extended through the Helsham Inquiry into the Lemonthyme Forests in Tasmania up to the Resources Assessment Commission Inquiry in to Forestry, and the subsequent RFA process when the RAC failed to achieve much.

The Commission of Inquiry
Chapters 12 and 13 cover the infamous Terania Creek Inquiry and its machinations. The book is worth reading just for the account of the Inquiry alone! But a mandatory health warning – it will raise your blood pressure. I had no idea, until I read these chapters and the selections from the transcript, how bizarre that process was. I was angered to read the attempts to belittle and humiliate one of Australia’s greatest rainforest ecologists, by a barrister who apparently didn’t –and did not need to – understand the substantive content of the evidence, but merely had to discredit the witness. The reality of public policy debates exists to me as shades of grey, often context –specific. The black/white, yes/no, true/false dichotomy of the courtroom seems to rarely be helpful in these areas.

Up to this point in the book, I had enjoyed reading and better understanding the people and events that I had only ever known before from TV and press reports. I knew no more or less about whatever had been happening in Northern NSW than any other layman interstate. I was thinking to myself, “thank God I wasn’t involved in all that!”

But Chapter 14 introduces the next battle, the Washpool, and Chapter 15 introduces my small role in that battle. Now we’re dealing with people I met, and issues I personally grappled with – this is oral history come alive! And I still have a few scars and raw nerves (though much less so than many others, on both sides of the debate).

I realised at the time, that we were a small part of a much bigger debate/battle/war, but I did not fully appreciate then, just how big the big picture was, or that our small 2 month consultancy would be pivotal in that big picture. Forestry Commission wanted to log, refused to consider alternative sources of supply as required by the legislation for Environmental Impact Statements; we documented the feasible alternatives; the EIS was rejected; logging was stopped; and soon after, the State Forests became National Parks. But that’s enough about the Washpool saga, and the Hastings saga that immediately followed. Same story, same outcome.

There were serious fears that without the timber industry (5 sawmills and a plywood factory employing about 200 people, mainly women) Grafton would become a ghost town if the industry was denied access to the Washpool forests. Well the Washpool wasn’t logged, and Grafton is still there too, and Big River Timbers, the ply mill, appears to have been at least as successful as it was before, even after it was denied rainforest logs.

What of the Forestry profession?
The abstract states that this book was stimulated by Nigel’s passion to find out “what happened to the once-noble reputation of the forestry profession.” So do we eventually discover, through reading this oral history, some insights into that? Were they simply old dinosaurs who were out-manoeuvred by nimble and switched-on, media-savvy, ex-hippies with great political connections?

I don’t want to spoil the mystery by revealing “whodunit?” but I think I can safely say that the foresters and industry people had not realised that the world had changed considerably since the 1940s and 1950s (not just since 1900-1916 when State Forestry agencies around Australia were being created to ensure future supplies of essential timber for the rapidly expanding society and economy).

They perhaps naively, put their faith in “due process” – they’d been doing everything “by the book” and expected government apparatus to not only support them, but to prevail. They could not feel how strongly the winds of change were blowing!

As Turvey writes
“ From a broad perspective, it is a story of the forestry and timber industry under siege from growing environmental activism. At a narrower focus, it is a story of slow-moving institutions outmanoeuvred y small flexible and proactive groups who managed the media and the message with alacrity”.

And what of the rainforests, the central character of this documentary/oral history?

There was no national recognition for the bush crews, foresters or sawmillers who took part in the conflict. But 205,000 ha of moist forests, including logged areas in the Washpool, the Border Ranges and the Nightcap Range, together comprising the New South Wales part of the UNESCO Central Eastern Rainforest Reserves of Australia, received World Heritage status in 1986. Many in the timber industry consider that there could be no better recognition for the generations of forest workers of the north-east than to have the forests they managed and harvested to be still found worthy of recognition by international conservationists, an award more lasting than a medal.

But it still hurts, professionally, that after demonstrating how to manage forests sustainably for almost a century, society concluded that foresters could not be trusted to continue that stewardship for another century or two.

— Neil Byron, Dr Neil Byron, Commissioner of the Productivity Commission

Terania Creek: Rainforest Wars strikes a brilliant balance between artful story telling and objectively woven historical fact. Nigel Turvey’s book is a successful crafting of literary journalism’s tried and true methods of total immersion and scene sculpting, with echoes of beloved Bruce Chatwin and Truman Capote’s juicy, creative non-fiction narrative style.

And like all of the best works of literary journalism, the ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ are not apparent. That’s not the point anyway. The real issues are far more complex and Turvey arranges opposing views with care.

The author’s timely angle of one Australian rainforest’s “spiritual landscape — the living archaeology of Gondwana,” reflects the contemporary struggle and surrounding political climate of many. Terania Creek stands as a model for forests everywhere, and Turvey explores this representation skillfully with a work supported by a rich, thoroughly researched perspective.

The historical montage begins 45 million years ago with a glance at a primal volcanic era, reflecting on a system that has evolved to survive drought and fire for eons before the emergence of humanity’s political climate.

The womb-like basin of Terania Creek with its narrow cervix of an entrance faces south. In its cool embrace is a rainforest little-changed for more than 45 million years. On the eastern-most part of Australia, it survived the drifting continent’s climatic shifts and 150 years of timber-getting. In 1979 some claimed it was the last un-logged rainforest and should be saved, but for the foresters and sawmillers it was the last rainforest they would plan to log. This story is about the people who fought over the rainforest, but the enduring player in the story is the rainforest itself.

We glimpse James Cook and Joseph Banks as we vault over 150 years before Turvey sets us down in 1979, when “a war broke out in this most peaceful of landscapes; it was the Rainforest War. It started with a battle over the rainforests of Terania Creek, the forests just across the Nicholsons’ boundary, and it spread to rainforests across the whole State of New South Wales.”

With the rainforest of Terania Creek as his main character, Turvey asks us to think and to observe for a moment, to plumb our current understanding of environmental issues, despite deeply polarised political pulls, labels and arguments. Terania Creek asks the audience to work a little harder on an inner level than most non-fiction books, but it’s worth it. The result of our efforts can foster a broader consciousness actively regarding the larger forces at work within our world.

– Lauren Daniels, for the judges, IP Picks 2006