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RUBY:

Hey there, I’m Ruby Jones, welcome to 7am’s summer series: an exploration of big ideas with some of our favourite contributors and thinkers.

Deep in Australia’s oldest forests there are criminal gangs operating: illegally chopping down trees, and selling the wood.
Authorities know that it’s happening, but the problem is catching the perpetrators in the act.

The old growth forests are sprawling, and these gangs know how to evade rangers and police.

Today, author and contributor to The Monthly, Sophie Cunningham on the crime against our oldest and most precious old growth forests.

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RUBY:

So Sophie, earlier this year you went down to the Goulburn River, which is in northern Victoria, and I was hoping that you could just begin by telling me a bit about what that area is like, describing it to me and the reason for your visit.

SOPHIE:

I actually spent a bit of time there a couple of years ago, and that's when I saw it at its best. I spent time in the Barmah forest which is the largest stand of river redgum in Australia and therefore the world and just glorious. And I've often visited it over the years. And someone who knew that said perhaps you need to know a little bit more about what's been going on there lately. And she launched into a story about timber theft.

So I went to an area that I had visited, admiring the beautiful trees that were hundreds of years old and enjoying camping and enjoying it as a kind of relatively pristine landscape. But what I saw when I went back recently was an area that had been trashed, that had had hundreds of trees removed, had literal trash lying around, had trees everywhere, tire tracks everywhere. And there were several rangers standing around really distressed and angry about the damage they're having to deal with most days now, rather than do what used to be their job, which is look after national parks.

RUBY:

It sounds like what you were looking at, what you're describing, are really crime scenes.

SOPHIE:

Yes. It had that sense of shock because so many trees are cut. They cut in the middle of the night. And cutting trees is hard work. And these people are not necessarily experts. And so there'd be trees that had half crashed down that brought down a whole lot of other trees. When I was talking to the Rangers, they talked to me about often finding animals by the trees, rare possums, koalas, sea eagles nests. But it's kind of trash- it feels trashed.

RUBY:

So it sounds like a fairly large scale operation requiring someone to actually come in with machinery. And, you know, there'd be quite a bit of planning that would go into something like this. What did you discover about who is behind it?

SOPHIE:

Well, I was taken to the areas where it clearly was more organised groups who had a lot of equipment. They need trucks to get the wood out. They need winches, these logs are really heavy and there's a lot of track marks everywhere. The groups or the individuals who are doing the stealing, the cutting of the trees were often known to the police and known to the rangers, and they talked quite a lot about the relationship between timber theft and drug use. I don't know if they were just talking about drug trafficking or just a general, there's a big drug culture and there was a sense of people often on drugs when they were removing the trees. Which I think is partly because it's difficult work and you have to be pretty pumped up to be cutting trees down when you don't really know what you're doing and one thing that came up several times when I was speaking to people was the fact that this is a small town so everyone knows each other, which I think makes these things more difficult. So not only are the criminals known to the rangers and the police, but they were also neighbours or people you bump into at the pub. And I do think that there's something about trying to manage these issues in smaller communities that is really stressful. Apart from a sense of feeling personally threatened. It's just much harder, I think, to be put in the position of having to enforce these kind of things with people that you're going to bump into, during your working day.

RUBY:

Yeah, absolutely. And so it sounds like on the one hand, you have these groups of people, these gangs, which might have links to either organised crime or drugs who are taking wood. And it sounds like on a fairly large scale, taking wood from these forests. And then you have these rangers who. I mean, it sounds like they don't really have the ability to to stop what's going on. What did they say to you about their attempts to prevent this from happening?

SOPHIE:

It's an extremely large area. So in terms of numbers, they just can't be everywhere all at once, the theft is usually happening at night. And so it's very hard for them to get there and catch people in the act. And there're not that many rangers through the area. The area they are having to patrol is enormous. There's one enforcement officer. He lived several hours drive away, and the police also have to be available.

So before we went out into the bush. I was given a bit of a briefing because there was concern about our safety. I think the feeling was that in the particular place we were visiting, the theft had been so recent that people would likely to be back in there trying to get wood out because so much had been had been left lying on the ground. And we were told to step away if people were seen and the enforcement officer had capsicum spray, but legally, he couldn't do much else.
Even if people are caught. And when people are caught, they usually receive fines that are considered to be not substantial enough to really dissuade them from going back in. You just pay the fine, you go back in. It's the cost of doing business. But it has escalated dramatically in the last few months.

RUBY:

Why is that?

SOPHIE:

We talked for some time about that. And while there were various answers, energy rising, energy prices rising, the rise in the cost of living, poverty, drug use, but it was, I don't think, quite clear to anyone why it got so bad so rapidly, because there are literally entire areas, little state parks were being wiped out overnight and losing really big trees. And that escalation was one of the reasons they were so distressed.

They were most distressed actually about the habitat trees because the ecological implications of losing the last of the big old river red gum is really quite profound. And these are areas where you have the habitat trees, which are trees that could be five, six, seven, 800 years old. A lot of these trees have cultural value as well as supporting a lot of wildlife. So one of the things that said to me is that they're in danger of losing all the habitat trees and basically losing the forests if things keep going at this rate. And trees do take hundreds of years to really establish themselves so the damage becomes permanent if the landscape into which the trees attempting to regenerate is also changing as a result of climate change. So I think these crimes becomes much more distressing because of the context in which it's occurring.

RUBY:

We’ll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Sophie when we talk about illegal logging the history is important, isn’t it. Because logging actually used to be legal in the area around the Goulburn river where you were and in other places in Victoria there was a logging industry. So how do you think that history really informs the way that people will think about logging now. Do you think that there is this kind of legacy mentality that it’s ok to take these trees and that’s perhaps part of the motivation for these groups of people who are now illegally logging in these old growth forests?

SOPHIE:

One of the things that became really clear to me when I was asking people questions and indeed the day I was out there looking at these particular areas, was that trees are just seen as a natural right bit like the air we breathe or the water we drink. And so I'm sure for some people they wouldn't really even understand why this was a big deal. And Ralph, the Yorta Yorta Ranger, who I spent quite a bit of time talking to, said that logging set up a relationship with the trees, which was that they are a resource. Another ranger said people look at trees and they think I could get warm. There's a whole mindset and relationship to trees, both as a renewable resource, which is a product of capitalism and a settler culture. But it's only a renewable source if your definition of renewable is, you only need 50 to 100 years to replace a tree, and it's only a renewable resource if the cultural or ecological implications aren't of concern because those things take hundreds of years to fix. So there's no real sense of the tree's place in the broader ecosystem and not a real sense that this was a crime. And the fact that logging was legal for so long probably makes it seem even less of a crime, I assume. But Neville, the one of the Rangers who was showing me around, he used to work as a logger and he was a very pragmatic guy, but he was nonetheless very distressed by what he was seeing and cared a lot about the kind of senselessness to the destruction. I researched trees more broadly, and it's not uncommon if you go and look at a stand of trees let’s say a 2,000 years old, I did this a couple of weeks ago red cedar and there's a sign beside it saying that the loggers themselves had actually campaigned to leave those trees standing because they'd seen them as so significant. And there was a sense that people who work with timber do actually have some respect. Despite what I was saying about seeing trees as a resource, that there was some connection between their work and the landscape that but that even that seems to be going with this theft, if you like, that even that emotional relationship with the landscape seems to have been severed.

RUBY:

And we've spoken a bit about the ecological damage that's being done by illegal logging. But you also mentioned the cultural side of this. Can you tell me a bit about that?

SOPHIE:

Yes. One of the things that was the most shocking moment was Neville took me to see a tree that was a cultural tree, was also called a scar tree, and it had a I don't know it was used to build a canoe, but there was a big canoe shaped piece of bark removed. The tree would have been four, 500 years old. And it had been cut right through the middle of the scar and just left there because those trees are so old, you can't really do much with the wood. And it just felt really shocking. It was like seeing a graveyard desecrated or a church desecrated. Something about the way the cut right through the scar. And then the Rangers, the Yorta Yorta Rangers arrived soon after I did. It just felt so private because I hadn't seen it. They'd been told about it, but they hadn't seen it. And so they sort of walked over and looking at the tree and I just went off and left them and I talked to Ralph about it. And he said a couple of things. One thing he said was he just described the scene that would have led to that bark being removed carefully to create some kind of object and said that these were my ancestors. And that, the worst thing about all this theft is actually the loss of the habitat trees and that a lot of animals live in these trees. And with the increasing number of extinctions, which is, current rates will be in the thousands. Every time a particular species dies, someone loses their totem. He talked about his totem being the fishing bat and they live in the crevices in these river redgum. And once all the habitat trees go, they will have no habitat left. And it is very likely that they won't continue to exist. So a part of him disappears. A part of his culture disappears.

RUBY:

And it sounds like the Rangers in general are feeling pretty powerless to stop this. It sounds like they're often arriving at the scene once the crime has already been committed and they're there and they find the stumps and the wood has been taken away. So what did they say to you about what they think could be done to stop this?

SOPHIE:

They all talked about the need for change in legislation and the importance of educating people so that they actually understood why this was a problem, because this is a crime that we're all involved in. So I spoke to lots of timber merchants and they talked about how difficult it was to know what to do about the problem, because even with the best will in the world, they couldn't always feel confident about where the wood came from. But some of these things could be helped by changing legislation. So at the moment it is not legal to commercially harvest timber without a permit.
But then how do you actually police people who just happened to remove some timber and happen to be selling it. And apparently there are thousands of Facebook marketplace timber merchants popping up. And that was one of the ways the police were trying to track down people who were stealing the wood. But there is just so little they can actually do.

RUBY:

And so in a way, I mean, the most kind of immediate thing that could be done is for people to kind of understand the wood that they might get on Facebook Marketplace isn't necessarily ethically or legally gotten.

SOPHIE:

And I think this is true in general these days. But if something is really cheap, not just think, oh, what a bargain and think, why's it so cheap? I can really relate to people seeing wood as a natural resource. I grew up thinking it was a natural resource, but I think that has changed now. And one of the things I wanted to achieve with this piece is by making clear how much it has changed because the context in which this timber is being stolen. Is so different to the context of logging 100 years ago. So logging obviously was not great for the forest landscape, but it was also a healthy landscape that had millions of trees. But we're now in a situation where those forests have been harvested for more than 100 years. Trees are dying because of drought. They're dying because of bushfire. There really aren't that many of those 5, 6, 700 year old trees left. They would be in the thousands and we're losing 200 of them a year. So we're not taking from an environment where there is a generous, abundant resources. Natural resources are really constrained and threatened at the moment. And if we don't think about that, we're all contributing to the problem. Nature is not nature anymore.

RUBY:

Sophie, thank you so much for your time.

SOPHIE:

Thank you.

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