Stray mailer - 20Dec05 - II - Welcome to the Weld.

Oh yeah... guess I should validate that ‘of many’
thing.

I flew into Hobart with the intention of spending a
few weeks hitching and wwoofing around the state,
having a look around as I hadn’t been there before.
And everyone always goes on an on about Tasmania, it
was somewhere I’d wanted to go for a while.

I stayed in a hostel the first night, mostly in the
hope of talking to people about where I should go
next. I should admit that my real agenda on leaving
Melbourne was to spend time with foreigners. I’ve been
missing foreigners.
It’s been a while since I’ve stayed in a dorm room. I
forgot about the snoring.

It’s funny, really, there are certain sounds I can
just block out. And there are those I can’t. After my
first night in Istanbul I thought they’d maybe
cancelled the morning prayers (possibly out of
consideration to those trying to sleep), but I’d just
filtered it out (and them things is loud y’all), they
never woke me again. In the last few weeks I’ve gone
to a couple of festivals (more about them later) and
the bass thump if anything has actually put me to
sleep (back in the day I made a habit of napping at
raves, the first bus home was 8 a.m.) and even the
e-tards in the tent next door only kept me awake for a
little while.
But then there’s snoring.
And Wattle birds.
Fucking Wattle birds, man. There is just something
about the noise that little bastard thing makes that I
find real hard to sleep through. And I’m not the only
one. Every morning at 6.30 sharpish and for half an
hour thereafter, wakey wakey. Then back to sleep. But
after a month something clicked off and now I don’t
hear them at all. A friend of Dave’s is currently
weighing up between getting a gun or felling the tree
outside his window.

In the end (back in the dorm) I had to grab my
sleeping bag, pillow, and stumble out into the large
rambling hotel that was the hostel, trying doorknobs.
Eventually I found one unlocked at the end of a
hallway and let myself in. Hoped it would be empty,
turned out to be a four bed dorm with two sleeping
Japanese girls.
The fatal flaw in my –sneak into where I aint meant to
be sleepin, get gone fore nay cuns the wiser-
stratagem, and I do this a lot, is that I really,
really, really like sleeping in in the morning.

I don’t smoke, don’t drink to excess, eat well, try to
maintain a cavalier and amused perspective on life,
get my antioxidants – all that aint shit. Sleeping in
is by far my healthiest lifestyle choice.
Eeeeeeeeeezzzzzzzzz...
into the day.

So come ten a.m. when I should be a) checking out, and
b) certainly not crashing these girls little slumber
party, I’m starting to think about maybe getting up.
I roll over and peek down into the bunk below me,
seeing if girl’s awake, and she’s just lying there
staring back at me like What the _fuck_ are you doing
here?

One time, coming out of a hostel room in Frankfurt, a
little shakey from the amount of drinks this Irish
guy’d bought me the night before (ok, _sometimes_ I
drink to excess) I trip over at least a dozen Japanese
girls sitting in the hallway outside. ...ohio
gosaimas, I say. (Good morning being one of three
things I can say in Japanese. Well actually, after
doing Karate a while I do know several other words,
but they all pertain to beating the fluids out of
people), and as one, chorus in return: “Ohio
Gosaimas!”
So cute! I just want to pinch your little cheeks!

Facial, I mean. Obviously. Anyway, either way I didn’t
feel this tack would go down too well with the girl
currently clearly assessing my threat level, so I just
left.

The day before I’d been at the Hobart library, using
the free internet to try to find wwoofing farms and
other points of interest. I remembered a big thing
last year around the logging in the Styx valley, and
looked it up. I’ve been interested in blockades ever
since talking to a Californian guy years ago about a
village they set up in the Redwood national park to
save it from clearfelling.
Turned out the Styx thing had pretty much come to
resolution earlier in the year (semi favorable), but I
did find brief mention of something similar happening
just south of where I was, and so traipsed off to the
Wilderness society’s local headquarters for more info.

Long story short, I ended up staying out on this thing
for a while.

The woman who’d picked me up hitching out of Hobart
and took me into Hounville (the blockade is in the
nearby Lower Weld valley) warned me straight off that
this was not something to be taking lightly. People in
Tasmania tend to take this shit pretty god damn
seriously, one way or the other, and I should be
careful what I say to whom.
Her property backs onto a lumber plantation, she’s had
to fence her land so her dogs can’t get in and eat the
1080 and other poisons the logging company puts down
to kill any native animals that eat sapling trees.
Most of the companies have dispensations whereby they
can legally kill protected wildlife.

The Hounville environment center is the fairly large
back room of Grandma Lu’s Café. I set about trying to
fix their computers while I waited for a ride out to
the camp.
Nice kids. Late teens to mid thirties, reasonably
feral but they’d take it as a joke if you called them
that. Man, a lot of Tasmanians have babies. They’re
all currently being sued for (sixty thousand? I can’t
remember) as part of the Gunn’s 20 libel case I
mentioned in the last mailer.

Some good news on that; I’m not sure if it’s still
just proposed legislation or if it’s currently going
through, but there should soon be laws passed in
Australia to make it much easier to defend a libel
case (like, if you’re telling the truth for example)
and harder to press a slapp litigation. I like good
news.

It was raining when I arrived at the blockade, and
dark. The camp turned out to be, well, pretty much a
fortified pirate ship straddling the end of an
unfinished logging road.
I think first they entrenched the car; drove it in,
parked it across the road and removed the wheels, then
sank it into concrete somehow, wrapped the whole thing
in rebar and installed lock-on points inside for
people to handcuff themselves to when necessary.
Then in front of that was built a V wall facing out
like the prow of a ship, and a deck coming back from
it, giving cover to the car and a small living space
behind. We painted the prow red and white, called her
the Spirit of Tasmania, and made a papier mache (how
the hell do you spell papier mache?) mermaid
figurehead for the prow. Which kept breaking.
Looked cool though.

Behind all this was another wall across the road, and
backing up on that the kitchen.
You can see some photos at:

http://huon.green.net.au/weldvalley/media.html

The amount of structures in the camp pretty much
tripled in the time I was there. They’re prodigious
little buggers them kids, like ants.

Spread out through the trees were people’s tents and
three or four platforms up in the canopy for people to
occupy, each attached by cable to a biiig tripod
across the road, which if messed with would drop the
platforms. People were roped to the tree, obviously,
but the police still can’t take action that will
endanger lives.

Rednecks, on the other hand, are another matter
altogether.

There where only about four others at the camp when I
first arrived, but some days this number went as high
as twenty and usually hovered around ten.
But, first night, just the five of us.

I’m awoken around 2 a.m. by Jess saying a bunch of
locals has turned up, and that I should drop my tent,
and run.

A little historical context here.
At a recent blockade on the Australian mainland the
camp was raided in the night by armed men. One
Canadian guy was dragged from his tent and beaten with
baseball bats, they reckon the only thing that saved
him was that he kept yelling ‘I’m Canadian!’
It was all caught on film, and those responsible were
arrested, but for some reason were charged under the
riot act rather than the criminal act, and each walked
away with six weeks community service.
I’m thinking their idea of community service is
probably what brought them there in the first place.
I’m also thinking if I start yelling ‘I’m a New
Zealander! I’m a New Zealander!’ it’s probably not
going to make things any better for me.

Also, the week before I arrived some people had driven
into the clearfell on the road before the blockade and
started letting off shotguns.
This actually worked out quite well for us though, as
before that the road had been gated two kilometers
from the camp, and people’d had to walk in. But after
some mad yokels start shooting holes in the sky, it’s
thought this aint exactly safe in the eventuality of
an emergency. Which, of course, it isn’t.
So we get to drive in. Yay. Thanks mad yokels.

I’ve just dropped my tent when Jess comes back to tell
me she thinks they’ve left. We walk up to the front
(there’s a covered area in front of the ship) to check
it out.
They haven’t left.
There’s four youngish guys, they’re drunk, and they’re
having a beer with us.

Turns out they’d been at the pub and thought they’d
head out in their trucks (we call them utes here, but
most of you aren’t Australasian) to, quote: ‘Start
some shit’.
But when they arrive our cultural ambassador (we’ll
call him Seth, because his real name I’ve forgotten)
charges up to them, yells ‘I’m drunk, how bout yous
cuns? You want a beer?’ and that was the end of that.
Man they were drunk and stupid, but we had a laugh and
they went away happy.

I like to think, when asked about it later, they would
say of us; Nah, fukn, look, oi, them cuns is, fukn,
look awright? Them fkn cuns iss ok. Fukn. Yeh.


All this, in the way of the structures I’ve mentioned,
is still only the base camp. There’s a whole nother
thing a kay and a half into the forest: the Ewok
Village. A.k.a. the Triangle, a.k.a the Jirangle
(named for its sort of founder and head honcho, Ji.
A.k.a McJiver, a young local who speaks with a thick
German accent and says One MiiiiLLion! a lot. Good
guy)
This was another cluster of canopy platforms, but more
developed and higher up than those around the road.
Averaging about forty meters up, in fact. That’s
thirteen stories for those of you playing at home.
This is where I spent my third through fifth nights.

Ji (a.k.a Team Tasmania), Dawn (a.k.a Team Canada),
and Peck (possibly not his real name) were in the
process of setting it up as a Greenpeace research
station, collecting data on ground and canopy level
fauna. It also happened to be at the intersection of
two planned logging roads. Funny that.

Actually I just recently ran into Peck at a festival
(later, later) and from the first month’s collected
specimens alone, have already discovered at least two
new species. Pretty cool, huh?

I (by this stage a.k.a. Team New Zealand, and later,
for some reason, a.k.a. Kidaniel) helped Ji lug a
solar panel in (which really wasn’t easy, in absence
of a track) and hoist their fourth platform into a
nearby sixty meter tall old growth gum tree. Which,
not surprisingly, also was not easy. In presence of
gravity.
Ji, in his habit of roping people into the cause,
convinced me to make a navigatable 3d model of the
area for a website, but to date I’m still waiting to
hear from him with the survey data.

Now, I’m not afraid of heights. But I am afraid of
falling.
The difference being, if I’m securely roped into gear
I trust, I’ll quite happily dangle over any precipice
you like. The only thing is, it takes a while for that
trust to earned.

I’d used mechanical ascenders once before in Canada,
also to climb a tree, when me and Nancy tried to pitch
her tree tent. This was basically the same, but the
gear was a little more advanced and the tree was four
times taller.
Basically, you’re wearing an industrial climbing
harness, which is like a rock climbing harness cept
bigger and you can sit into it quite comfortably.
Attached to the front of the harness is ‘Mr Yellow’,
who can slide up the line, but not down. Above this on
the rope is ‘Mr Blue’, who can also only go up, and
has a handle for your hands and a footstrap to stand
in. Slide up Mr Blue, sit into your harness held up by
Mr Yellow, slide up Mr Blue, etc, etc.

Etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc,
etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc,
etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc,
etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc,
etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc,
etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc,
etc, etc, etc, etc, etc for forty god damn meters, the
whole time held away from screaming plummety demise by
technically nothing more than friction, as the gear
you’re on isn’t really attached to the rope, just
hanging onto it reasonably firmly.

The first few times were a little hairy, the next few
quite enjoyable, after a dozen or so ascensions I was
feeling pretty much over it.

But coming down, ah coming down was exquisite. All
you’re doing is roping in a descender and slipping
down, in silence, through the canopy of one of the
tallest and most beautiful old growth rainforests left
in the world.

But the whole setup was a little bit ghetto, and most
of the time I was on my own to sort my own harness and
gear. My big phobia was that on reaching the bottom
someone would take one look at my rig and just scream
GOOD GOD MAN! You came down like that!? WHY AREN’T YOU
DEAD!?

The Weld was supposed to be world heritage listed. It
went through the submission process, got approved and
was tagged for preservation. But when the areas of
southern Tasmania not to be logged came back, the Weld
just wasn’t there. And no sees to know why.
And it is a particularly choice little piece of
logging crumpet, it must be said.
How strange...

Once felling commences, here’s a quick rundown of what
you can expect:
-First the area will be divided into coops, big square
areas.
-One by one the coops will be clearfelled with
chainsaws and bulldozers. Nothing will be left
standing.
-Most of the timber will be towed out, but the stumps
and root structures (about half the tree) and anything
not readily mill-able will be left behind.
-The area will be napalmed by helicopters. Which,
sure, may sound like a brilliant idea at first, but
there have been problems with fires getting out of
control and spreading into nearby national parks, and
more than a couple of hikers and protestors in the
past have had to run for their lives from raining
flamey death. It’s also a little rough on the soil.
-The majority of the timber will end up as woodchips
or pulp, which is worth about twelve cents a tonne.
-The cleared land (and remember, this is public land)
will be given to the logging company for plantations.
-Poison baits will be laid to exterminate any wildlife
staunch enough to have survived.

On the way in I was pointed out the woodchip power
station they’ve just built up the road. They still
need an investor to fund the running of the thing, but
once operational it will be generating electricity by
burning old growth rainforest.

I shit you not.

Australia finally found something worse to burn than
coal. And they’ll be selling it as Green energy,
because technically old growth forests count as a
renewable resource. Every five hundred years or so.

As said, I slept up a tree, in Team Canada’s tent. She
had to sleep on the deck outside and get molested by
mosquitoes.
It was due to me not really wanting to sleep by the
edge (her platform’s about two meters square) because
although I’m not in the habit of falling out of bed...
We were harnessed of course, but only with a single
nylon strap looped around the soulders and attached to
two prussics. It’d catch you, but roughly, and all up
if you fell it’d be a really sucky experience. So I
got the tent. And look, as soon as I realized the
mozzies were out I did insist that we swap back, but
she just lit a citronella coil and wouldn’t hear of
it.
Little trooper.

Those mozzies were rough, man. Big, and really hard to
kill. Like if you clap your hands on one and roll it,
most of the time they’ll just fly off unharmed.
Probably giving you the finger.
It was cool in the forest at dusk though. Hundreds of
little bats come out and eat them. It’ll be just too
dark to really see them, but you’ll hear the flap of
their wings and the tiny death screams of the
mosquitoes as they’re snatched from the air around
you.
Wheee.

David Attenborough (Attenbra, Attinburgh, Atenbra...)
was interviewing some bat guy once, in the same
situation, and the bat guy was saying No, they’re
expert flyers and you never have to worry about one
hitting you and then BAM! One of the little buggers
smacks right into the back of his head.
But that didn’t happen to any of us.

Might leave it there for now, tune in next, well, year
at this rate, to hear about me hauling politicians up
trees, sharing beers with boiler mechanics (while
driving!), being saved from hypothermia, my first
vomit in seven years, and taking too little ecstasy.
I’m off up to the Woodford folk festival (near
Brisbane, I’m safety teching for Jo and Dave’s fire
troupe) sometime this week, the exact day of departure
depending on work type stuff. I’ve been doing the
animation on a music video for Australia’s best loved
heavy metal band; Alarum, which I’ve never heard of
and neither has anyone I know, but apparently they’ve
won all the right awards. I’m getting paid a bottle of
Baileys, but the vid’ll be on MTV in the US, UK and
Germany, and the band’s DVD. Mostly I just did it for
fun.
Somewhat more interestingly though, I got a call from
the director of a documentary that Julian Lennon’s
involved with. It’s either something about whales, or
Aboriginal dreamtime stories, or both. They want some
3d work done and it pays, so here’s hoping that goes
through.

Aroha nui

Daniel.