The great Tasmanian story, right now, is the story of the forests.
It is a contest for the island’s soul and the forests are sites of drama, passion and,yes, pain. Will this wild and special island retain the free agency that entitles it to love and wonder, or is it to be reduced to the mere banality of artifact, no more nor less than every other absurd and broken scrap of the globe?
The outcome of this contest is not pre-ordained. It hangs by a thread…
A young man climbed into an unmanned government car in the forests of the Weld Valley, in the far south of Tasmania, and locked the doors. When asked by an officer to get out of the car, he replied, “Tasmania has a long history of passive resistance, I’m not getting out of the car”. For a considerable time the officer repeatedly pressed the button of his remote control whilst the activist replied by re-locking the car. Ultimately, with the help of a second officer, the door was opened and the young man arrested. He was polite and civil throughout the incident. As this was occurring, other activists locked themselves to heavy machinery and stopped logging operations for that day.
Nobody other than police and a few other activists were there to witness this small, but brave, act of a Tasmanian who hoped for a different future for his young daughter than the one big business and government had chosen.
Exclusion zones, designed to keep media and the public out of the forests, have been declared. Those exclusion zones have made it illegal to protest, and to record the act of protesting, in Tasmania’s forests.
For over a hundred years, documentary photographers have been recording events without the sanction of governments and away from mainstream media. Many documentary photographers, as do I, maintain a faith in the force of our collective acts of empathy and witness. History will decide the merits or otherwise of our work.
The young man, whose daughter and her generation will ultimately judge how we and our government perform, is currently being sued for his activism by a billion dollar company.
This is the history of Tasmania. It should be documented.
