Thirty Years of Creative Resistance - Friends of the Earth Australia

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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, ................................................................................................................................................................................................... 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
In 2003, they became the first large land manager to gain independent certification of forestry operations in Australia through the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). FoEM continues to monitor this process and the broader timber trade. In the first few years of the 1990s, FoE also started working on arid zone issues in a new way, with a stronger emphasise on land management rather than just localised impacts, largely at the instigation of Stephen Baker in Adelaide and Clive Rosewarne in Melbourne. The January 1993 FoE national meeting proposed the creation of a national arid lands coalition, which planned to help co-ordinate campaigning on the management of Australia’s extensive arid zone rangelands and the Lake Eyre Basin. The years under the Victorian Kennett State Government (1992-99) marked a time of significant community politicisation and unprecedented resistance at the grassroots level in Melbourne and across the state. In the early days, much of the community sector was overwhelmed at the sheer number of destructive social and environmental projects put forward by the Government. There were a series of remarkable ‘general strikes’, but these dissipated after the key organisers of these rallies, the leadership of Trades Hall, wavered. In the next few years, what started as a variety of local campaigns against specific government projects, cut backs to services or policy decisions, increasingly merged into a broad-based and well connected movement. Campaigns were everywhere, from opposition to the siting of the Grand Prix car race in a public space at Albert Park, to the successful struggles against the proposed hazardous waste facilities at Niddrie and Werribee, and the occupations of Northlands and Richmond secondary colleges after they were ‘rationalised’ by the government. FoEM played a significant role in many struggles, both in terms of physical involvement of staff and members in picket ................................................................................................................................................................................................... lines and campaigns, and also in behind the scenes training in non violent action, police liaison, facilitation skills and other aspects of community organising. FoEM produced the booklet Environmental Justice: Community Campaigning in Australia in 1999 as a contribution to the development of this new stage in Australian environmental politics. In 1994, FoEM acted as a focal point for community opposition to the extension of the eastern Freeway into the inner northern suburbs of Melbourne. The Coalition Against Freeway Extensions (CAFÉ), consciously named to honour the earlier CAF – Citizens Against Freeways struggle of 1977, was formed after a transport seminar organised by FoEM and Greenpeace and drew together a range of individuals, students and public transport and local residents’ organisations. CAFE activists blockaded road making operations on Alexandra Parade for over FoE 30 Years 57
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Up to a few decades ago, many peopl
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It seemed like a simple idea: to pr
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The optimism, courage and creativit
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Over thirty years, FoE has develope
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decades. In Australia, FoE is commi
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Page 23 and 24: egan to jostle for access to Antarc
Page 25 and 26: Keith Suter The future is never as
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Page 47 and 48: Ila Marks Dave Sweeney talking at t
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Page 74 and 75: Kathleen McCann In 1996 I was in Ja
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Page 78 and 79: Dave Sweeney From its earliest days
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genetic engineering and techno-indu
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East Gippsland (CROEG) to launch th
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1994. VicRoads was planning to wide
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Lee Tan “Let’s chuck in some co
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Friends of the Earth in Sydney (FoE
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Herald Sun Columnist, Andrew Bolt P
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change. Mark Carter, co-founder of
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Australia given Indigenous manageme
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Their final edition, in the year th
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FoEA is a federation rather than an
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input to national decision making f
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are independent. A secretariat base
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lead to some form of wisdom: a know
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Anon (1987); Know your FoE; the Coe
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Page 5 • ‘U Mines’ - Through
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1990s Page 46 • Image from Chain
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• The march that followed the ‘
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Page 116 • FoE ran a food stall a
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Thirty Years of Creative Resistance - Friends of the Earth Australia

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