Chipping away at past
Tourism entrepreneur and founder of the Wotif online travel site, Graeme Wood, is a tall man resembling one of Russell Drysdale’s gaunt outback figures on the veranda in the 1941 painting ‘Moody’s Pub’.
I am with Wood at the former defunct Triabunna chip mill on our beautiful East Coast. Like the blokes in that iconic Australian oil painting, Graeme casts a long shadow in the afternoon light as he gives me a tour of the rusting red iron carcass of the monster he had helped to slay.
Though in his opinion the woodchip industry “killed itself”.
I found Wood as spare with words as any of those taciturn bushmen Drysdale painted back in 1941 on the deck of Moody’s Pub in the old heritage Victorian village of Seymour.
It is widely reported Graeme has spent a fortune redeveloping the site of Australia’s biggest woodchip mill.
Initially the development plan had been priced at $50m on a location which is a monument to the forest industry’s worst economic and environmental folly.
When I asked the taciturn new mill captain how much he had spent, he raised his eyes. “Don’t ask,” he said.
As a savvy multi-millionaire and an environmental campaigner (‘Enlightened capitalism’ has more practitioners these days than you might realise) Wood’s avowed purpose is now to show Tasmania that there is a better future.
I saw that future last weekend and I liked it.
What was once cast in environmental infamy and known as Gunns Triabunna Woodchip Mill is now Spring Bay Mill, a vibrant and growing eco-resort.
Last week visitors marvelled at the field of huge sunflowers blooming alongside the resort’s organic vegie garden. And where once a mountain of woodchips dominated the view of Maria Island there is now an amphitheatre where guests were listening to a jazz band and drinking cocktails.
Later we retired to the luxury ‘glamping’ site where great bell-shaped yurts have sprung up like mushrooms. They have electricity and the most comfortable beds. I have never slept so soundly under canvas.
The enduring divisive legacy of the Forest Wars means there are some people who won’t like to read about this repurposing.
But they would have to be the lucky ones who didn’t lose money when Gunns chief executive, the late John Gay did a runner.
In 2009 when Gay saw disaster looming, he sold his shares leaving his shareholders stranded.
Honest John had done a swifty and unloaded over $3m worth of shares. He was consequently convicted of insider trading, a serious crime which undermines public confidence in the integrity of the stock market (imagine a smiling emoji here kiddies).
The Australian Securities and Investment Commission went after him for the full amount but Gay settled out of court by handing back $500,000 in exchange for a $50,000 fine. “Thrashed with a feather,” an ASIC contact complained to me at the time.
“He should have been tried in Hobart and done time.”
Gay’s trial took place in his (and my) hometown of Launceston where things are often done a little differently. The northern capital was long the happy home of strutting and popular robber barons who loved to ‘stick it to Hobart’.
In 1989 Gunns Ltd chairman and then Launceston’s most powerful citizen, the colourful media magnate Edmund Rouse was jailed for 18 months after attempting to bribe a Labor MP to defect to the Liberals and bring down the Labor-Green government.
He was of course just protecting his forestry investment.
Enough said, except to remember that Gunns was never a good corporate citizen of Tasmania and in the long term not such a good investment either.
In 2012 with shares worth only 16 cents the investors finally twigged and disgruntled shareholders began a multimillion-dollar class action against the company.
To cover costs Gunns started to flog off the furniture. Which explains how this week the celebrated greenie moneybags Graeme Wood was showing me around his Spring Bay Mill resort, rising phoenix-like from the ashes of Tasmania’s old growth forests.
There are many Tasmanians who would have preferred the mill site be completely flattened, just as more than a century ago the Tasmanian government seriously contemplated levelling Port Arthur to remove ‘the stain’.
Re-writing history is as old as history itself.
I was glad that Wood preserved this monstrosity.
It brought back vivid memories of when I was here with a film crew in the mid-eighties.
Wood-chipping purportedly was to reprocess ‘forest residue’ left behind after saw logging. But it soon became clear that saw logs were disappearing into the giant mechanical jaws of Triabunna.
While in country towns all over Tasmania small sawmills were closing due to a lack of sawlogs.
I went there at the invitation of a group of small sawmill operators who climbed all over the long queue of log trucks backed up and waiting for access to the mill.
The sheer scale of the operation was daunting. The angry sawmillers kept finding sawlogs on most of the trucks. “That’s a sawlog,” they repeatedly called working their way down a line at least 30 trucks long and growing.
“There’s another and another. And even that damaged chip log … I could run up fence palings from that.”
And so it went, all the way back down the road.
The awful truth was that wood chipping, introduced as an adjunct to saw-logging had become the main game. It seemed easier to churn Tasmanian trees into the cheapest chips on earth and export them to Japan where trees were sacred and could not be destroyed.
Wood-chipping has cost us a fortune. By 2016 Forestry Tasmania posted a $67m yearly loss. Subsequently, in an Orwellian masterstroke, the outfit changed its name to ‘Sustainable Timber Tasmania’.
Problem solved. Equally cynically, why didn’t they chuck a few million dollars at Graeme Wood to totally cleanse the mill site and remove all evidence of the worst financial, environmental and political disaster in recent Tasmanian history?
Wood wouldn’t take money anyway.
He plays his own game with his own money.
Nor will he deal with Tasmanian politicians.
“I ignore politics in Tasmania because it’s so insane and stupid and inbred.”
Wherever did he get idea?
Visit the Spring Bay Mill. It’s a beautiful location and I recommend the glamping. But make sure you take your kids to see the rusting old monster. They can get an idea of the size of the trees pulverised there by standing in the jaws of the giant log-handling machinery.
Then if you really want to break their little hearts take them up the Florentine, not much more than an hour from Hobart, to the Valley of the Giants to see both the devastation and the magnificent survivors. You will see the tallest flowering plants on earth, up there with the biggest trees on the planet.
Would it be too cruel to tell your kids it’s still happening? their
AS A SAVVY MULTI-MILLIONAIRE AND AN ENVIRONMENTAL CAMPAIGNER (‘ENLIGHTENED CAPITALISM’ HAS MORE PRACTITIONERS THESE DAYS THAN YOU MIGHT REALISE) GRAEME WOOD’S AVOWED PURPOSE IS NOW TO SHOW TASMANIA THAT THERE IS A BETTER FUTURE.
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— CHARLES WOOLEY