The heart-shaped island at world’s end Lutruwita
Let’s go back in time half a billion years. Imagine you are standing on Gondwana, the vast southern supercontinent that would subsequently break up to form Antarctica, Australia, Africa, South Americas, Arabia and India.
There is an unbroken carpet of forest that stretches to the horizon, in every direction, 360 degrees around you. Species include conifers in the families Podocarpaceae, Araucariaceae, and angiosperms such as the families Proteaceae, Griseliniaceae, Cunoniaceae and Winteraceae, and genera like Southern beech (Nothofagus), There are flowering plants and ferns, including the tree fern Dicksonia, Fuchsia, King Billy Pine (Athrotaxis selaginoides) and Pencil Pine (Cupressus sempervirens).
Fast forward and the slab of land you are standing on moves north with the Australasian tectonic plate, through the eras of the Jurassic, the Carboniferous Period and the Triassic and beyond. The fragment of ground beneath you splits from mainland Australia in the Cretaceous period, when the Bass Strait separating it from the Australian mainland floods.
Today you are standing on what has become a heart-shaped island, at 40 degrees south, off the south coast of Australia, in the vast Southern Ocean. Like Aotearoa (New Zealand) about 2,500km further east, both islands are regularly left off maps of the world, as if the popular imagination cannot stretch this far to the world’s end.
The island is called Lutruwita, which you may know by its English language name of Tasmania, Australia’s only island state. The name Lutruwita is palawa kani, the Tasmanian Aboriginal language, although most Australians call the place Tassie. The island is roughly the same size as the Republic of Ireland and Northern Island, but has a much smaller population of about half a million people.
Amazingly, the tree species listed above still carpets much of the island, an unbroken living link with Gondwana and this Gondwanan heritage forms vast tracts of the Southern Hemisphere’s only cool-climate rainforests, with some of these forest communities untouched for half a billion years.
Tasmania is home to some of the world’s oldest and tallest trees, true forest giants. Some Huon pines (Lagarostrobos franklinii) have been found to be more than 2,000 years old and there’s a stand of Huon pines (at Mt Read) estimated to be over 10,000 years old.
These giant tree species typically are Eucalyptus globulus, Eucalyptus viminalis and Eucalyptus regnans,, the last being the world’s tallest flowering plant. These trees can be 100m high with trunks more than 20 metres in circumference and can be as much as 600 years old, with the Styx Valley in southern Lutruwita / Tasmania a big-tree hotspot. A celebrated example is Centurion, which is past the 100 metre mark and still going.
The fauna is no less unique either. Lutruwita / Tasmania is home to the world’s largest freshwater Crayfish (Astacopsis gouldi) and the world’s only carnivorous marsupial, the Tasmanian Devil (Sarcophilus harrisii). No, they’re nothing like the cartoon character but they are endangered and suffer the only known form of contagious cancer, in the form of facial tumors.
Forest-dwelling animal species include Quolls, Swift Parrots, Wedge-tailed Eagles and Masked Owls. Most of these species are threatened and declining, some of Lutruwita/Tasmania’s more than 600 threatened species. Tasmania is playing its part in the global extinction crisis, which has Australia in the ignominious position as the global leader in mammal extinctions. An impressive feat given the island’s small population and 70,000 square kilometre area.
Thankfully, the value of this unique and still largely intact natural heritage has been recognised, with some areas protected. For example, Tasmania is the custodian of the 1.6 million hectare Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area (TWWHA).
Created in 1982 and expanded several times since, it is one of the last intact expanses of temperate wilderness in the world. It is also one of only two World Heritage properties that has seven out of the 10 World Heritage criteria. The other property is Mt Taishan in China, which boasts all six cultural criteria and one natural criterion. The TWWHA boasts all four natural criteria and three cultural so it is truly unique.
The World Heritage area covers about a fifth of the state’s land area but there are additional places beyond its boundary that are protected too in a patchwork of reserves and national parks that add up to about half of the state’s land area.
Touting the state’s environmental credentials, the government regularly claims that half the state is protected. What they’re less keen on talking about are their plans to log these very same conservation reserves. About 350,000 hectares of protected high conservation value forests open up to commercial logging from April next year.
The high degree of protected landscapes is an ongoing source of angst for conservative governments, whether state government or national governments of Australia, and their development-minded friends.
When the current conservative national Liberal Government assumed power in 2014, its first environmental act was to attempt to delist 70,000 hectares of newly-added reserves to the TWWHA, reserves that had been approved by UNESCO. Thankfully they failed, but there remains a relentless pressure to develop, exploit, clear and commercialise areas of wilderness, as if most of the rest of the island isn’t enough.
A signature tourism policy of the current conservative state government is to “unlock the parks” despite national parks already being publicly owned and accessible. (What the policy is really about is unlocking public parks to private profiteers.)
They say nature abhors a vacuum but it seems equally true that developers abhor wilderness. There is little economic logic behind this continual push. Tourism is the state’s largest industry and what brings people to the island is its unspoiled natural environment.
In a submission as part of the drafting of the TWWHA’s Management Plan, the state’s peak tourism body, Tourism Industry Council Tasmania (TICT), said that the TWWHA “is a major [tourist] attraction, and source of destination brand and appeal underpinning the Tasmanian tourism industry”. The same TICT report goes into more detail about the potency and value of the World Heritage Area to the tourist industry:
“The economic value of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, from the impact of visitor spending alone, was estimated at $721.8 million in the year ending June 2007 – supporting approximately 5,300 jobs in the state. Tourism Tasmania research has also shown that ‘wilderness’ is integral to Tasmania’s brand and appeal as a total tourism destination: ‘wilderness’ is the greatest trigger to influence intention to visit Tasmania, and respondents across market segments consistently rank ‘wilderness’ as having the highest appeal and being a uniquely Tasmanian experience.”
But despite the TWWHA being the green beating heart of the island’s booming tourism industry, the TICT and others still want more access, more development and more public and protected land handed over for private profit. There is reportedly a pipeline of 40 or so private tourism developments lined up to be built in the TWWHA. If they all get built, it would irrevocably weaken Tasmania’s World Heritage Area.
Just as you can’t build a road to aroadless area, you can’t develop wilderness and it still be wilderness. The inability to grasp this inconvenient fact seems either deliberate or because of lack of understanding of wilderness values and character.
The pressure to exploit the area comes from beyond just the tourism industry. Like a real-world version of The Lorax fable, the island’s logging industry has destroyed 80% of the state’s leatherwood honey trees. Leatherwood is critical to Tasmania’s booming agricultural industry because they flower when nothing else does. As the beekeepers often say, “No leatherwood, no bees”. The last remaining stands of leatherwood are left in the TWWHA and now the beekeepers want access there too, driven by the government’s plan to dramatically expand the agricultural sector with the aim of it becoming a $10 billion industry by 2050.
There remain a number of special places in Tasmania in need of protection such as the West Coast Range, Macquarie Harbour, the Spero-Wanderer Wilderness and Recherche Bay. But perhaps the most evocative and highest profile is the fight to protect the magnificent Tarkine region in the state’s north-west.
Known as Takayna in palawa kani, the takayna / Tarkine constitutes 450,000 hectares of the largest single tract of temperate rainforest in the southern hemisphere, home to more than 60 species of rare, threatened and endangered species. These include unique animals as the giant freshwater lobster, the Tasmanian wedge tailed eagle (Aquila audax) Australia’s largest eagle, and the Tasmanian devil. The area’s high concentration of Aboriginal sites led it to
be described as “one of the world’s great archaeological regions” by the Australian Heritage Council. Despite this, the Takayna / Tarkine remains unprotected and exploited. Accompanying the Savage River mine, an ugly wound across its heart, the region is peppered with mining licenses. Old growth high conservation value forests are also being logged by the state-owned logging company renamed from Forestry Tasmania to Sustainable Timber Tasmania. Land clearing for agriculture and other developments make the need to protect this magical place urgent.
To some degree, people living in the sparsely populated north-west feel neglected by Hobart-centric Tasmanian society and tourists generally flock to the south and the pretty east coast. The Wilderness Society would like to see the Tarkine added to the existing Wilderness World Heritage Area. This would create one of Australia’s largest World Heritage properties and create the north-west the tourism icon some say it needs.
Although Tasmania’s economy hasbtransitioned away from extractive industries, it retains a state-owned logging company, Sustainable Timber Tasmania, which is taxpayer subsidised and which continues to log high conservation value forests, home to endangered species like the swift parrot. At the turn of the century, Forestry Tasmania as STT was then called, generated the best part of a million tonnes of woodchips for export to Asia. Imagine trees like Centurion going into the chipper to be turned into Reflex Paper or mixed with diesel to be turned into boiler fuel. That was happening every day. Chipping Tasmania’s Gondwanan forests led to widespread forest blockades and market-focused campaigns aimed at ending the forest destruction. This conflict came to be known as the ‘forest wars’.
Independent of government, this globally unique combat saw unions, conservation organizations (including the Wilderness Society) and the logging industry come together to try and end the conflict. Out of these deliberations came the Tasmania Forests Agreement, which saw 600,000ha of high conservation value landscapes protected. Forestry Tasmania’s quota was more than halved from 330,000 cubic metres to 137,000c/m. And notorious Malaysian logging company, Ta Ann, was brought in to be a customer supplied by STT. For conservationists, this was the bitterest pill to swallow but they did so in exchange for the promised protections.
The current state Liberal government tore up the agreement. Since then, a second notorious Malaysian logging company has arrived in Tasmania to set up a veneer mill, reportedly because the ‘big six’ Malaysian logging companies have logged Sarawak on Borneo, that there’s next to no resource left.
What could this mean for Tasmania? A return to market campaigns, calls for Sustainable Timber Tasmania to be privatised or sold off and logging companies refusing to end the logging of forests that, in the current climate and extinction crises, should be left standing.
