WESTERN AUSTRALIA:
Action Alert for the Giblett Forest, southwest WA.
11/5/97
Sitting by the campfire at the protest/witness camp here at Giblett forest in the south west of WA. Guitar and didge drift over from the other fire, I guess there were 20 of us here last night waiting for CALM (the state government's Department of Carnage and Land Massacre - alias Conservation and Land Management) to declare the area a TCA (temporary control area) and try and move all the people out.
We pulled in yesterday after a session with Aboriginal healer and Earth lover Maxine Fumagalli after having completed a 6-day gathering of Earth Philosophies Australia at Denmark. This was held in a beautiful Karri and Jarrah forest within earshot of the wild Southern Ocean with the southerly wind straight from Antarctica, black swans, pelicans, spoonbills etc etc and more land birds too than I ever saw or heard in one place. The first two days of the EPA meeting Eshana and I conducted a Council of All Beings. It was really exciting, the first time we'd gone on from the incredible sense of community and devotion to Earth generated by the Council, to cerebral, cognitive work. Living philosophy - this is what universities should have been like. We only had 5 hours a day of classes and spent the rest of our time out in the woods or canoeing the inlet. Half the class time was spent in the woods as well with stuff like a blindfolded night-time walk thru dense scrub half a mile towards the sound of a drum.
There were three professional philosophers present - Patsy Hallen and Val Plumwood from Murdoch University, and Freya Matthews from LaTrobe University in Melbourne - author of The Ecological Self. The 13 point platform for Earth Philosophies Australia that they (and the rest of us) produced is a classic - I will have them up on this site (in the "Deep Ecology" section) before the end of May.
I guess there was 20 of us here camped in the Giblett Forest last night, a motley crew of young ferals and old hippies and Chris Lee up on his platform 30 m above us perched halfway up a massive Karri tree, his 7th night up there. They have a quaint habit in these parts called "scrub rolling" where they send in dozers and anything else they have that weighs a few tonnes to flatten the undergrowth, to clear the way for the chainsaws through the dense undergrowth. Ancient cycads, she-oak, snotty gobbles, bulich, tea-trees, lucepogan, isepogan, crushed carnage everywhere. Then they start cutting the big trees but this time they've been stopped dead in their tracks.
We got in late and slept on huge scar scraped bare for a log dump. Eshana's setting up our camp now, on the edge between the rolled and flattened scrub and the still inviolate ancient forest, grieving the desolation here. Pitching our tent beneath some of the obscene C.A.L.M. grafitti in bold white spray paint on the huge old trees, big "X"'s marking the edge of the coupe.
It's so disgusting, such a majestic, huge forest, most of it trampled into dust to expose the big trees, and then 85% of the volume of these turned into woodchips - really inferior woodchips at that. The Japanese have 8 grades of woodchips and these West Australian forests rank 7th, ahead only of "mixed Indonesian mangroves". What's more, the whole thing is heavily subsidised by the taxpayer (the stupid git!) - all the roads and port infrastructure and, in spite of the loggers and chippers vast profits, the workers get paid so little that they qualify for social security support to supplement their income. I'm so angry but what to do but pound it out on this poor keyboard and hope there's some action I can participate in here before I'm due to leave for the US in a couple weeks.
Chris spends lots of time on his treetop telephone and I can hear him up there on the platform with another radio-talkback station. The story is spreading quickly around the country, I guess it won't be long before the greenies start to arrive from around the land. The other day there was a victory in the Australian federal senate - they passed a motion condemning the WA state Govt and stated that this forest should not be logged.
-- John Seed
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>From "Urgent Threat" a colour glossy sheet put out by WAFA (West Australian Forest Alliance):
Giblett state forest near Pemberton forms the heart of one of the most beautiful old-growth forest areas left in the South-West of Western Australia. Professor Peter Attiwell in a report for the EPA stated "such an area of extensive and concentrated karri forest (Beavis, Giblett, Strickland and Beedelup National Park), should be of high priority for conservation."
Now local community groups and tourist operators have launched a proposal for the inclusion of all these in the GREATER BEEDELUP NATIONAL PARK.
This would serve as a refuge for endangered species including the red-tailed and white-tailed black cockatoos.
What You Can Do
* PLEASE WRITE TO THE PREMIER OF W AUSTRALIA, THE HON. RICHARD COURT, PARLIAMENT HOUSE, PERTH 6000 AUSTRALIA.
A POSTCARD IS ENOUGH, ASKING THAT THE SCRUB ROLLING AND LOGGING OF GIBLETT STOP IMMEDIATELY AND THAT WEST AUSTRALIA DECLARE THE GREATER BEEDELUP NATIONAL PARK.
* COME OVER TO WA AND JOIN THE ACTION. BUT FIRST CALL THE CONSERVATION COUNCIL OF WEST AUSTRALIA 09-220-0652 OR ROGER CHEESMAN OF FRIENDS OF GIBLETT - 097-761-401 FOR THE LATEST. BRING WARM CLOTHES AND A GOOD SLEEPING BAG.
* PLEASE SEND DONATIONS TO
West Australian Forest Alliance WAFA, 79 Stirling St. Perth 6000
for more info on the proposed national Park, contact Friends of Giblett, PO Box 250 Pemberton, WA 6260