Twenty years ago, a long and bitter campaign to end native-forest logging came to an end in Victoria's west. Against all odds, a motley group of conservationists took on power and industry and won.
In the summer of 2000, as the small Victorian coastal town of Apollo Bay was hosting its annual music festival, the lights flickered off and everything went dark.
But this was no ordinary blackout. Power poles ferrying electricity to the town had been felled with a chainsaw and graffiti declaring "OREN war" was scrawled across the fallen poles.
OREN was the acronym of the Otway Ranges Environment Network.
In the four years preceding the blackout, OREN had led a dogged campaign to end native forest logging in Victoria's Otway Ranges.
Intense stand-offs between protesters, police, loggers and the forestry department were taking place in the lush cool-climate rainforest and towering mountain ash canopies of the Otways.
Activists padlocked themselves to logging equipment and occupied "tree-sit" platforms high in the air.
Some buried their limbs in the ground to block logging access roads.
"Enviro-commandos" was how the Herald Sun once described the protesters, who used non-violent direct action to halt, or at least delay, clear-fell logging.
They were mostly young, intensely committed, and willing to put their bodies on the line.
"I've been scooped along by a bulldozer, I've been chased by somebody with a chainsaw, I've had an axe thrown at me," one protester told the ABC.
Was the "OREN war" graffiti which appeared in Apollo Bay committed by the so-called "enviro-commandos" or by supporters of the native timber industry who saw it as vital to the region's economy and identity?
"No-one has ever been charged in relation to [the incident] and each side still blames the other," the Geelong Advertiser newspaper reported some years later.
When OREN was formed in 1996, Simon Birrell was a plain-speaking engineering graduate who worked in shipyards and drove a Torana. His unassuming manner belied his ambitions.
Simon had been campaigning to end native forest logging in East Gippsland before turning his attention to the Otways, near where he'd grown up in western Victoria.
"I took the view that if you couldn't stop logging in the Otways, you couldn't stop it anywhere," he says.
Stretching along Victoria's rugged south-west coastline and into the hinterland behind the famed Great Ocean Road, the Otway Ranges were close to Melbourne and surrounded by other industries such as tourism and agriculture.
This gave the forests, and the creatures within them, more of a chance, Simon explains.
In East Gippsland, he says, he was attacked at a pub, followed, threatened with guns, had his car sabotaged, and saw other people attacked.
He was awake to the battle that lay ahead.
Simon says he never viewed the loggers as OREN's adversaries — his beef was with the forestry department and the government — but obstructing the logging would force those in power to negotiate.
Logging had existed in the Otway Ranges since colonisation, and as the industry became more mechanised and woodchip markets were established, selective logging gave way to clear-felling.
Clear-fell logging involves the removal of almost all trees from an area called a coupe. Once the trees are removed the coupe is often burnt.
To conservationists, the destruction was extreme and unforgivable. To the forestry industry clear-felling, or "full sunlight regeneration" as it's sometimes called, was necessary for the renewal of the forest for another rotation of logging in 60 or so years' time.
"The reason why there was such opposition to clear-fell logging was because it was systematically changing some of the last remnant native landscapes in Australia into an industrial kind of crop rotation," Simon says.
Dwarfed below mountain ash in an area he once helped log, John Marriner sees the forest which has returned as a lost opportunity.
"There's plenty of timber there," he says.
"It's only going to get burnt and eaten by white ants — it's a waste not using it."
John grew up in one of the small towns nestled in the Otways hinterland, and feels the surrounding forest, which is now protected from clear-fell logging, has been taken hostage by "greenies".
"It should have been clear-felled from day one, and replanted and replanted and they'd never run out," he says.
"If it wasn't sustainable, why is it still there?"
A long fight
OREN followed other conservation groups which had been campaigning against logging in the Otways as far back as the 1980s.
A long-closed coffee shop on Apollo Bay's main street still bears a handwritten sign saying "Save The Otways".
Shop owner Yvonne Francis, the first person on record to be arrested for protesting against logging in the region, says the issue divided the town.
Her own family pleaded with her to not speak out against the forestry industry.
"[My husband] didn't want me to create a fuss and embarrass everyone even though he passionately agreed with what I was doing," she says.
"Hostile" is how Rodger Hardley describes the atmosphere when anyone spoke up against forestry in those days.
Roger arrived in Apollo Bay in 1984 and settled on a small farm nearby in search of a quiet life.
He began campaigning soon after, when he discovered the forest around his farm was earmarked for logging.
"It certainly wasn't quiet and peaceful," he says of the years that followed.
Opposition to logging in those days was somewhat "naïve", Roger says, and too focused on arguing with local bureaucrats than gaining access to power.
Things changed with the formation of OREN, which brought together individuals and existing local groups with the singular ambitious aim of ending native-forest logging on public land in the Otway Ranges.
Just how OREN planned to do this was anyone's guess. The network had no rules, no orders, and no hierarchy.
"Stuff just happened," Roger says.
As Roger sees it, there were three key pillars to the campaign — community support, an ability and willingness to engage with those in power, and a strategy of non-violent direct action.
Camped in the forest during protests, Jade Forest spent nights lying awake watching yellow-bellied gliders fly above her.
When the gums were flowering, the forest smelled like honey and the gliders leapt from tree to tree.
It would bring her to tears.
"Once that environment is gone, you know those creatures won't be there anymore," she says.
The list of threatened and vulnerable flora and fauna living in the Otways forest is long: spotted-tailed quolls, long-nosed potoroos, powerful owls, the peculiar carnivorous Otways black snail to name a few, as well as varieties of orchids, ferns, and lilies.
Jade says she wanted to protect them from logging, but was sceptical of non-violent direct action, which she saw as a pursuit of rich kids with degrees who could afford to take chances.
"I thought it was a kind of betrayal of my heritage to go and stop people from working … something definitely very class-related," she says.
Her first foray into direct action was with a local nurse from Apollo Bay who stepped in the path of a logging truck and didn't move until it stopped at the tip of her nose.
Jade says she didn't expect "40-year-old women who work as nurses and looked really normal" to be at the frontline of a logging blockade.
"That blew my mind," she says.
From the late 1990s, protesters came and went, spending days, weeks and sometimes months occupying coupes during the Otways logging season, which usually ran from November to April.
Non-violent direct action was seen as a strategic part of a broader anti-logging campaign, something the government couldn't ignore — "the loaded gun on the table", as one activist put it.
But sometimes it was met with violence. In 2000, several activists were hospitalised after what they say was a night-time attack by loggers with baseball bats and axe handles.
The loggers, in contrast, told ABC TV the raid — to reclaim their equipment which was being blockaded — was peaceful, and nobody was injured.
On another occasion, loggers stopped activists from leaving their camp in the forest — the stand-off lasted days. Various court cases and counter cases lasted much longer.
Some OREN members say they received threatening phone calls and other forms of intimidation.
"I never thought I'd be ready to kill someone," logging contactor Barry Dent says.
"There's places to argue [about] the logging business but it's certainly not the workplace — that's what was wrong with the whole thing."
Almost everyone involved agrees the loggers were the meat in the sandwich.
"I'm standing there with the saw waiting to fell the tree, surrounded by all these police and greenies," tree feller John "Bluey" Andrews says.
"The greenies were saying, 'Don't do it, Bluey, don't do it', and the boss at the time was saying, 'Fell the tree, fell the tree'."
Bluey says he might be the last of the old-time hardwood fellers still alive on the ridge in the Otways. For him, logging was "a dream job".
"The feeling of being super fit … of taking pride in your work, felling the tree so they weren't damaged and getting a big income," he says.
Unusually, Bluey made friends with some of the protesters who stood on the other side of the police lines in the logging coupes. He believes they made some valid points.
"The coupes to get the mountain ash were so steep and so hard to work — all the mountain ash was gone, they were still looking for more," he says.
"[The industry] just killed it themselves. The greed gets going and it just sort of smothered itself."
Today, at the age of 75, Bluey is building himself a new house – part of it made from imported timber, which he laments.
He's not anti-logging but he believes the emphasis today should be on using native-forest timber for high-end products and value-adding the leftovers, not sending it away in the form of woodchips.
In the 2020-21 financial year, VicForests says it sold about 505,000 cubic metres of pulpwood – used to manufacture paper products — compared to about 376,000m3 of sawlog.
What a forest is worth
Outside of the forests, in an office in Melbourne's CBD, the environmental impacts and economic structures of native forest logging were being dissected.
Chris Tipler, a business strategist who owned property in the Otway Ranges, was bringing to the campaign the same data-driven analysis he employed in boardrooms.
After witnessing the aftermath of clear-felling near his farm in Carlisle River, what he calls "a scene of complete devastation — smoking ruins, broken and dead trees — like somebody's dropped an atomic bomb", he wanted to act.
Logging coupes in the Otways.
Supplied: Svea Pitman, Jenny Mitchell
He and Simon Birrell — who Chris supported financially as a researcher for several years — produced documents which showed how clear-fell logging within water catchments reduced water yields.
Next, they set out to prove the economic forces steering the industry.
"We were able to prove that logging was absolutely woodchip-driven, not only by the volume but economically," Simon says.
At the time, state government policy and forest management plans outlined that logging was to focus on the supply of saw logs, with woodchip to be a way of using trees deemed waste product – not the economic driver of the industry.
"Not once did the industry or the department find a logical hole or a data hole in anything that we presented," he says.
Chris threw the resources of his business open to the OREN campaign — the office photocopier was particularly handy.
His colleagues in Melbourne were dismayed when young "ferals" would "trudge into the office, dressed in all sorts of different clothing", Chris says.
"But the point is, even if they came from different backgrounds or had a different role, we all wanted the same thing."
Newspaper archives kept by Simon Birrell.
ABC Ballarat: Rhiannon Stevens
Chris and Simon presented their research to local councils, local members of parliament, business and tourism associations, and at public meetings.
As local councils and tourism and business associations joined the campaign, it became mainstream, Chris says.
The list of local environment organisations and individuals aligned with OREN grew to include lawyers who would work pro bono to represent protesters in court, ALP members agitating for policy change internally, a local water authority, and all manner of fundraisers and letter-writers.
Of the several hundred members OREN had at its peak, Simon says about 100 were very active.
By 2001, OREN claimed its successes included Kleenex ceasing to use Otways timber in its paper products, the dropping of various charges against protesters after it was proven the logging they were protesting about was occurring illegally, and the cessation of logging in a number of coupes.
In November 2002, Simon says he received a call from a minister's office of the then-Victorian Labor government.
"Congratulations Simon, you've influenced government" is how he remembers the conversation going.
He was told of a plan to create the Great Otway National Park and put the Regional Forest Agreement — which oversaw native forest logging on public land in the Otways until 2020 – on ice.
Logging would be phased out by 2008, when the licences which allocated wood to sawmills were due for renewal.
For Simon, the call was bittersweet as it unleashed internal upheaval in OREN from members with allegiances to The Greens, who didn't want OREN to endorse Labor's policy, which they took into the 2002 state election.
Several days after the call, then premier Steve Bracks stood beside a waterfall in the Otways and announced the policy.
After Labor won the state election in a landslide, the legislation to create the Great Otway National Park and end native forest logging on public land in the Otway Ranges was eventually passed.
But Bracks says it wasn't easy.
"There was an internal tussle within the Labor party," he recalls now.
"Clearly the forestry union was affiliated to the Labor Party … so we had to drive through that change internally."
Maybe the forests of the Otways were easier to protect than other parts of the country — tourism, proximity to Melbourne, and a premier who owned a holiday house in the area were on their side.
But Bracks says similar legislation could happen today.
"I think it's about political will," he says.
"It's about your commitment to drive through change, and to make sure you've got the right ingredients for that to happen and that's what we did."
OREN was one of those ingredients, he says.
Bracks says he didn't see the often-contentious tactics of non-violent direct action as a deal-breaker.
"That's hardly an issue. From my point of view, we had a group that was committed to preserving the Otways … [and] we wanted to work with them, and we did," he says.
These days the ex-premier likes to ride his bike along winding tracks which snake through the Otways forest.
"This could have all been destroyed if we hadn't made this decision," Bracks says.
"We had to cancel the regional forest agreement, we had to set about supporting and compensating the communities for the loss of the logging industry … and that's exactly what's happened."
At the time, voices in local papers warned such an upheaval would be the end of timber towns across western Victoria.
But the contractors and sawmillers moved on – some retired, others found employment in plantations, and the identity of the Otways continued to shift.
From a spacious living-room overlooking Colac, where the forest gives way to the pastures and farming towns of Victoria's west, Mick Murnane shakes his head.
Twenty years hasn't changed his mind — the former sawmill owner still believes clear-felling of native forests in the Otways should have continued.
But he doesn't deny that his children, who worked in the industry, easily moved into other employment, and the towns around him still exist.
Some, like the former premier, declare these towns are now thriving.
With a little bush bashing, some OREN members are trying to find a patch of forest they fought to protect.
They have reunited to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the announcement to end native-forest logging on public land in the Otways.
There are laughs but also whispers of the trauma associated with the violence and stress of protesting.
Tom Crook, now a councillor on the East Gippsland Shire and a conservation manager, goes in search of a tall gum which once housed his tree-sit.
He says the kind of non-violent direct action which formed the backbone of OREN's campaign is getting harder to mount today.
"The new legislation that we see being introduced successively, by state and or federal governments, is an effort to try and take that tool out of the toolbox for those seeking social change," he says.
In August, the Andrews Labor government passed laws to protect forestry workers from what it called "illegal protest activity".
Under the law, which will come into effect next May, protesters found obstructing logging activities face a maximum jail sentence of 12 months and fines of around $21,000.
Tougher anti-protest laws have already come into effect in other states.
In 2019, the Andrews Labor government announced a policy to phase out all native-forest logging in Victoria by 2030 and transition the sector to plantation-only logging.
Tom says the same arguments against a clear-fell native forest logging industry which were being made in the Otways are still being made today in other parts of the country like East Gippsland.
For many of the old OREN members, the Otways success is tempered by the ghosts of other unfinished conservation battles.
But they still recall the relief they felt when the last of the logging trucks rolled out of the region.
Or, as one activist put it recently, the win was a shock.
"Because the environment loses all of the time."
Credits
Words, photos and digital production: Rhiannon Stevens
Archival protest photos: Jenny Mitchell, Svea Pitman and Simon Birrell
