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Outside Magazine, June 2005

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The Hard Way
Bush Bashing (cont.)

TASMANIA, THE SMALLEST of Australia's six states, lies 150 miles south of Melbourne across the Bass Strait. Aborigines had lived on the West Virginia–size island for 20,000 years before Dutch seafarer Abel Tasman arrived in 1642. In 1803, a penal colony was established on the southeast coast; within a lifetime all full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigines were dead.

Tasmania's economy, like the rest of Australia's, was originally based on sheep ranching, agriculture, and extractive industries like mining and logging. But this frontier mentality was challenged in 1979, when the Labor-led state government announced plans to dam the Franklin River, one of the island's last large, free-flowing rivers. This galvanized a small cadre of proto-environmentalists who in 1976 had formed the Wilderness Society, Australia's first high-profile environmental organization. In 1983, a year after the Franklin River and several other wilderness areas in Tasmania were listed as a World Heritage Area by the United Nations, the Wilderness Society's Franklin River Campaign stopped the dam project, a landmark victory for Australia's nascent green movement. Over the next two decades, through one battle after another, the group secured protection for almost 25 percent of the island.

One-tenth of the Styx catchment became part of a national park, but much of the rest was left in the hands of Forestry Tasmania, a for-profit state corporation charged with managing all of Tasmania's public forests outside the parks and World Heritage regions. Many of the tallest hardwood trees on earth, 400-year-old Eucalyptus regnans, endemic to Tasmania and Victoria, lie in the Valley of the Giants, a proposed national park composed largely of an unprotected section of the middle Styx Valley. Roughly one-third of the entire Styx Valley has already been clear-cut.

"It's heartbreaking," said Richard Flanagan, 43, internationally acclaimed author of the novels Death of a River Guide (1994), The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997), and, most recently, Gould's Book of Fish (2001), "to be here, and from here, and watch your own country being systematically destroyed—the soul of the land clear-felled, poisoned, and sold for nothing."

Flanagan lowered his close-shaved, bouldery head, studied me with unwavering eyes, then took a swallow from his pint. It was my first night on the island, and I'd gone to Knopwood's, a notorious harbor pub in old Hobart where Flanagan and his pals—all accomplished kayakers—hang out. He introduced me to his friends: Matt Newton, landscape photographer; Craig "Swarz" Chivers, fireman; and Matt Dalziel, four-time downriver kayaking champ and marketing director of an Australian outdoor-equipment company.

On this island drenched by storms and surrounded by ocean, three of these men had done first descents; when Flanagan was 16, he became the first to kayak the 25-mile Class III–IV Styx River. They know water and weather, tides and trees—and politics. It was here, in 1972, that the world's first Green party was formed. Bushwalkers and boaters, environmentalists and literati coalesced into a single, vocal force. In the last state election, some 51,000 Tasmanians—18 percent of the island's population—voted Green. Forestry, fishing, farming, and mining now represent just 7 percent of the state's economy; tourism employs twice as many people as logging does. Tasmania is poised to become the next New Zealand, luring adventure travelers with its rugged shores and giant trees—that is, if they're still standing.

"Industrial logging is ugly business," Flanagan continued. "Tasmania's natural heritage—our last giants, which exist nowhere else—are being logged and sold to Japan as wood chips. It's obscene."

Flanagan is known as an outspoken advocate for Tasmania's wildlands. In December 2003, the Australian magazine The Bulletin published his exposé "The Rape of Tasmania," which highlighted the logging industry's attempted corruption of the Tasmanian government in recent years. Although vilified by state politicians, Flanagan brought the subject to an international audience in 2004 through his articles in the UK Guardian and The New York Times Magazine. With the help of Flanagan's campaign and thousands of volunteers, the Wilderness Society made saving Tasmania's old-growth forests a key issue in Australia's 2004 elections. Prime Minister John Howard declared that, if reelected, he would protect 420,080 acres of Tasmanian forest; Howard's conservative-coalition administration has yet to make good on this promise.

Flanagan hunched his thick shoulders and looked at me hard. "But the only way you'll really understand what's going on is to go have a look for yourself."

It was my shout. When I brought back a round of pints, Dalziel, 34, the smallest and quietest of the men, with high cheekbones, a strong nose, and penetrating blue eyes, offered to go with me.

"I could use the exercise," he said, and the table cracked up.

Two days earlier, Dalziel—a classical scholar and father of a baby son—had won the Cradle Run, a 53-mile mountain race that takes hikers at least four days to complete. As Tasmania's mountain-running champion, he'd done it in eight hours and 20 minutes.

"A wee bit of bush bashing is just what I need," Dalziel said.

"Bush bashing?"

"Tasmanian specialty," he replied.

I've hiked all over the world—from the slide alder of British Columbia and the bamboo jungles of Burma to the rainforests of West Africa—but I had no idea what I was in for.

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