White Beech: The Rainforest Years (9 page)

‘Because I didn’t want it. There’d be no way I could restore it, because every time the Towamba came in spate, I’d get all the riverine weeds back again.’

‘What weeds?’

‘Willows for one.’

‘What’s wrong with willows? Willows are lovely.’

‘What’s wrong with willows is what’s wrong with all weeds. They’re plants in the wrong place.’

Jane raised her eyebrows, interested to see how much I had understood of all her careful teaching. I ploughed on.

‘The willow in Australia is not part of a plant community. It has no competitors and supports no suite of invertebrates or fungi or whatever. Its growth and reproduction are not limited by natural factors, so the willow can overwhelm all the niche plants growing in local ecosystems. Like lots of our worst tree weeds, it originally grew from cuttings imported by homesick settlers.’

‘They probably needed cricket bats,’ said Leon. ‘Without those willows we’d never have won the Ashes.’

‘Bat willow is a variety of
Salix alba
. It seems more likely to me that the early settlers thought they would need osiers, for baskets, and brought cuttings of
S. fragilis
. The worst willow in the Australian situation is
S. nigra
. It’s beyond belief that
S. nigra
was imported from America as late as 1962, as part of the effort to combat erosion.

‘The willows’ve been hybridising across the clones for a couple of hundred years. In their native habitats this kind of interbreeding would have been prevented by natural factors, geographic distance, different flowering times, and genetic incompatibility. In Australia bastard willows can breed with any other willow growing within a kilometre radius. And the hybrids can tolerate a vast range of cultural conditions. When they take over an area they obliterate biodiversity and flourish as a hugely prolific monoculture. Within a very few years of their introduction into Australia willows had spread through the south-eastern river systems, changing their patterns of flow.’

‘Can they be controlled?’ asked Leon.

‘Not easily. Any frond breaking off and falling into the river will root downstream. Fronds washed onto a bank will get a foothold in the mud. Seeds too are carried downstream, as well as on the wind. In huge quantities. Even if we ripped out or poisoned all the willows on the lower Towamba, within a year or two the willow population would be back close to maximum density. Eventually willows would immobilise the sandbanks and obstruct the course of floodwater when the river is in spate, increasing erosion.’

‘You made the willow problem seem insoluble,’ said Jane, as we undressed for bed.

‘I didn’t tell him the half of it. I didn’t talk about loss of habitat for native species, or what happens when billions of leaves are dumped in watercourses when willows deciduate, or about the loss of subterranean water in drought seasons. Anyhow, Leon wasn’t listening. He thinks it enough that he doesn’t turn the property into a golf course or a marina.’

‘I feel like going out there right now and setting fire to the Manna Gums with the Bell Miners in them,’ said Jane.

‘You wouldn’t dare.’

‘You’re right,’ said Jane and turned out the light.

Leon even liked the Bell Miners. One thing he was sure about: no wild creatures would be shot or poisoned on his watch. No fox. Not even a rabbit. His property had been cleared more than a hundred years ago. It was more than he could do to unclear it now. So he ran a few sheep, brought friends down from Sydney for restful weekends and did a little fishing at the mouth of the shimmering Towamba, where oysters grew on the rocks. If the wedgetails took his newborn lambs he blessed them. When I clicked my teeth because the only wildflowers in the pasture were Yellow Sorrel and Capeweed from South Africa, he accused me of rabid nationalism.

‘I’m an exotic,’ he said, ‘Purebred from Bialystok. And you’re a hybrid from everywhere but here. You might as well say we’ve got no right to be here.’

‘I have said that.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Leon.

The next day we went downstream in the tinny for a look at a parcel of land that Leon was willing to sell. This was unimproved old-growth forest, opposite Boydtown, one of the few sites on the south coast of New South Wales that Aboriginal people have been able to repossess. The site, overlooking the mouth of the Towamba, was bordered with rocks encrusted with delicious oysters that I would have been happy to live on, if only the walk up and down from the river’s edge had not been quite so steep. That steepness gave me a vantage point from which I would have been able to watch the whales that visit the bay in October–November. The forest was healthy, though not undisturbed. The only serious infestation I would need to get rid of was
Pittosporum undulatum
, an Australian native that is classified as a noxious weed in California, Hawaii, New Zealand, South Africa, Lord Howe Island and Norfolk Island, as well as in much of eastern Australia. It was outside its range in this dry grass forest understorey, where it had become dominant because of changes in the fire regime. Controlling it would have been a doddle. But there was another problem. Under pressure from the insurance industry, new regulations for fire damage limitation have been brought in all over Australia. The New South Wales government would have required me to undertake to clear the forest for a radius of fifty metres around any house I intended to build, before planning permission would be granted. I wanted a house surrounded by native vegetation; there was simply no way that I would buy a piece of forest only to destroy it. The case probably could have been argued, specially as I wanted to build a fireproof house, but there were other, equally weighty reasons for not going ahead.

I couldn’t make Leon see that the serious environmental weeds, the willows, the Smilax, the blackberry, the sweetbriar, the pines, the exotic grasses, had to be tackled. He thought it was enough to plant the occasional tree. A free load of whips had been supplied by some agency or another, and planted directly into the rough grass in front of the house, where they languished for lack of the water necessary to get such little trees started. If the tags that still fluttered on them were any guide, few of them were true natives of the area. No botanical survey had been done of Leon’s properties, nor could one have been particularly helpful, for practically every form of vegetation on most of the properties was a feral exotic. Some of the native species he selected would become feral in their turn. I tried to make him see the beauty of the Cherry Ballarts growing on the undisturbed sandbanks at the river mouth, and the cloud shapes of the Melaleucas along the low shore, but he was not inspired to act. I talked to him about endangered dry grass forest communities and the importance of keeping robust competitors out until the trees and the grasses have had a chance to re-establish, but he didn’t listen. It would have taken hard work, a lot of money, and rigorous mental discipline to have restored even a modicum of the biodiversity of his consortium’s string of bits of land; without consensus we couldn’t even begin. Meanwhile, beyond the boundaries of the property, the area was losing its amenity with every day that passed.

Twofold Bay has been in trouble ever since it was visited by Bass and Flinders in 1798. In July 1803 Her Majesty’s armed tender
Lady Nelson
fired cannonballs into the cliffs for no particular reason. Sealers who used the bay to flense their catches had no scruples about removing the Kudingal women for their own use and shooting Kudingal men who presumed to object. Such is the reverence felt by Australians for their own brief history that the old whaling station, where the fat was boiled off the great beasts, so that the stench of rotting whale meat hung over the bay and decaying matter choked it, is now a carefully manicured tourist venue. The town of Eden popped up on the shore when more and more hopefuls arrived by boat to try their hand at panning alluvial gold at Kiandra in the 1850s. There were grandiose plans for a city, but by 1866 the gold had petered out. At one point the citizens of Eden got very excited when their town was considered as a possible site of the Federal Capital, but Canberra was chosen instead. Eden remained a backwater, logging for railway sleepers and fish canning its only industries. In 1999, after fifty years of operation, the Eden fish cannery was finally closed because it was not ‘globally competitive’, throwing 12 per cent of the total population of the town out of work. Eight months later the site was sold, for the building of a tourist resort. Meanwhile the beauty of the bay had not been advanced by the building of a fuel storage depot on Lookout Point, smack in the middle of the two lobes of Twofold Bay.

Eden has been described as a town forever waiting to be saved by the next major development. In 1970, when the Daishowa Paper Company of Japan, which had been logging in the old-growth forests of south-eastern New South Wales and Gippsland, opened its woodchip mill on Munganno Point, most of the citizens of Eden were convinced that prosperity would follow. Opposition to the demolition of the forests came from outside, from middle-class greenies who lived in the cities, who became more vocal as more and more old-growth forests were logged. The state government’s only response was to guarantee ‘resource security’ to Daishowa; each year the quotas were increased and the royalties reduced, to offset raised transport costs as Daishowa had to go further afield to find the trees to fell.

Conservationists hoped that the chip mill would close in 1997. When it showed no signs of doing so there were public demonstrations which resulted in its temporary closure in 2000. Harris-Daishowa, since 2003 called South-East Fibre Exports, is once more running full-bore, though in June 2005 work stopped for a day when activists entered the mill and lashed themselves to the conveyor belt between the chipper and the stockpile. In 2004 observers from the action group Chipstop counted the number of trucks bringing timber to the mill, an average of 163 per day; 79 per cent of the loads contained old-growth trees, many of such girth that they had had to be split before loading.

I wondered whether it might not be my destiny to be caught up in the struggle to preserve the forests of the south-east. It wasn’t as if I could ignore it, if I became a landholder in the area. The mill and its wharf and the container ships are visible from all round the bay. The noise from the mill carries way up the river, augmented by the constant noise of the timber transports turning off the main road and along the purpose-built road through the bush. Not to fight against the destruction of the forests would be tacitly to support it. I couldn’t see the activists letting me stay out of it, come to that. I didn’t have the stomach for so hopeless a fight.

There was even worse in the offing. In 1999 it had been announced that Twofold Bay was the site chosen by the Australian government for a new naval munitions wharf and storage facility. A 200-metre-long wharf in East Boyd Bay was to be connected to the shore by a jetty seven metres wide; the bay would be dredged to a depth of 10.5 metres to provide the berth and turning space for the munitions ships. A new access road was to be built from the shore to the roadway and on to a storage depot fifteen kilometres away in the state forest, amid fire-prone sclerophylls. The Nature Conservation Council of New South Wales objected to the proposed construction, citing the effect it would have on the protected seagrasses, and on the rare Weedy Seadragon (
Phyllopteryx taeniolatus
), on the likelihood of polluted run-off and the importation of sea pests, the change in patterns of tidal flow, deposits of sediment and erosion. They could have made a more convincing case if they had been given time, but it would have made no odds.

The port, which in my innocence I thought would never be built, opened on 17 October 2003. All arguments against its siting in Twofold Bay had failed, mainly because all the other suggested sites were too close to centres of habitation. One of the benefits of the remoteness of the area and the depression of the rural economy was that local opposition was minimal, and apparently further afield nobody cared. The local MP Gary Nairne declared, ‘The Navy Wharf project has been an enormous boon for the Eden and Bega Valley Regions, creating 112 local job opportunities and potentially attracting millions of dollars of private investment to the region.’ Whales may no longer play there, and the oysters on the rocks may be too dangerous to eat, but everyone will be, potentially, richer.

Environmental degradation spawns its own inevitability. When it was suggested that Eden’s mussel farm be extended from twelve hectares to fifty, it was argued that fifty hectares of bobbing buoys could hardly detract more from an area of great natural beauty than the chip mill, the fuel tanks on Lookout Point, and the munitions wharf already did. On 4 April 2004 a toxic bloom of the dinoflagellate
Dinophysis acuminata
was discovered in Twofold Bay. This organism infects shellfish, rendering them toxic at very low concentrations. Not for the first time, oysters, pipis and mussels from Twofold Bay were declared inedible. Yet in 2005 the state government signed off the permission for the mussel-farming project to proceed to its second stage. This may not be as stupid as it looks, because one way of reducing the overabundance of nitrogen that favours the proliferation of mixotrophic algae is to have mussels filter it out of the water. If I had bought Leon’s parcel of forest, I’d have had a munitions wharf and storage depot, a chip mill working twenty-four hours every day, and 163 timber lorries a day, and fifty hectares of mussel farm to look at and listen to, as well as several losing battles to fight.