(header photographs by Harry Waite 1912-2011)

The Myth of the Sacred Brumby

 

 

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Contents

Contacts


Cashing in our Chips

The multi-nationals came to the bush
They had their own ideas to push
For the forest industry was in a bind
One of the most perplexing kind
They'd felled the best trees years before
And were short of logs for the hungry saw
But the multi-nationals came up with a solution
Then set about its execution
They'd put in roads both far and wide
Loggers and woodchippers working side by side
The loggers of course would get the best
And the woodchippers why they'd use the rest!
But of course things haven't worked out that way
And the loggers have learned to their dismay
That woodchippers own all the concessions
And that sawlogs too are now their possessions
As the lack of logs is closing sawmills down
And the dole queues grow in the country town
A log truck goes roaring past
He's got to make his delivery fast
He's a contractor who hauls the freight
But they pay him at the lowest rate
He's locked into the final phase
working 18 hour days
Desperately keeping his head above water
just to feed his wife and daughter
They say that woodchipping is the answer
Abetted by the beaurocratic cancer
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
If woodchipping and heavy industry is the way
Then why are we in such a mess today,
We have 100,000 hectares of devastation
And the highest unemployment in the nation
The rate of destruction is getting faster
A certain recipe for complete disaster
IF concern is what they want to show
Stop cutting trees faster than they can grow
The concessionaires grow rich and fat
From dozing Tasmania's forest flat
When we ask about jobs they look quite blank
Then drag their profits off to the bank
And the tourists they all stay away
They've no interest in the clear felling display
They want to see our last native stands
Undesecrated by the corporate hands
 
But alas that is not to be
So wave goodbye to the native tree
And wave goodbye to our native fauna
And all endemics of the Tasmanian corner
For without trees they're doomed to die
To keep those corporate profits high
As the saw-miller goes to collect his dole
They're pulling a log truck out of a hole
The no-doze couldn't keep our driver awake
Even though his life was at stake
And as the possum's corpse decompose
And the Banks for-close on the blokes with dozers
The Tasmanian economy shudders and dies
And regeneration burns blacken the skies
The conservationists just stand and weep
For all those people who were lead like sheep
White the Corporate Executive sleeps in his bed
Unperturbed by our Tasmanian dead.
 
Alec Marr
from "Forest Echoes & Other Verses for the Tasmanian Bush", 1980.