Thirty Years of Creative Resistance - Friends of the Earth Australia

Action outside the state government forestry
offices , 1994
The campaign was launched with a
‘celebrate and defend’ forests gathering
in the Goongerah valley north of Orbost
and featured a summer of actions in the
headwaters of the Delegate catchment and
elsewhere on the Errinundra Plateau. Onthe-ground
blockades and campaigning
has continued in East Gippsland almost
every year since that summer and these
efforts have helped win considerable gains
in terms of forest protection. The early
years also featured the strong engagement
of Forest Network activists such as
Louise Matthiesson in the national anti
woodchipping campaign. This period saw
good collaboration with other green groups
that enabled intense campaigning and
lobbying of the Federal Government in the
buildup to the annual renewal of woodchip
licenses.
In 1996 John Fraser, some other activist
working with FoEM Forest Network, and
a group from GECO ‘discovered’ the
forests of the Goolengook valley in far east
Gippsland - a rare combination of cool
temperate and warm temperate rainforest
adjacent to the Errinundra National Park.
The following year Goolengook became
the focus of Australia’s longest running
forest blockade. While some of the
Goolengook forest has been protected
through moratoriums because of the
blockade and associated campaigning,
sections are still being logged.
In 1994, FoEM helped establish OREN –
the Otway Ranges Environment Network,
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now the highest profile green group in the
Otways and Geelong regions.
In 1996, it achieved the first prosecution
for a breach of a logging permit on private
land in Victoria at McCraes Creek, a
domestic drinking water catchment east of
the Dandenong Ranges. With the support
of the Environmental Defenders Office,
FoEM took a case to the Victorian Civil
and Administrative Tribunal, successfully
targeting a timber company with links
to a then State Minister in the Kennett
government. This victory highlighted the
scale of problems from logging on private
land across the state, an issue at that time
largely unmonitored by the environment
movement.
The Forest Network’s Anthony Amis spent
much of the rest of the decade working to
highlight often disastrous logging regimes
on private land. He also relentlessly
monitored forestry operations on the estate
of the Victorian Plantation Corporation
once it was privatised and sold by the
Kennett government to Hancocks, a
US-based insurance company in 1998.
Anthony’s work with community groups,
especially in the Strezlecki Ranges, has
produced some of the most significant
environmental outcomes achieved in forest
campaigning in Victoria over the past
decade.
As a result of campaign pressure,
Hancock’s, a major player in the plantation
forestry sector, eventually decided to seek
independent accreditation of their forestry
operations.
The use of pressure point tactics, 1994.
FoE 30 Years 56