Tom M. Wilson

I was down on the north mole this evening when a massive ship slipped through the water past me. I live in a port town, so quite often I see the vast steel architecture of these structures float accross the top of Fremantle’s streetscape.

Ninety per cent of all trade between countries is carried by ships. There is something romantic about seeing a huge ship glide past you a few metres away and off on the four and a half day trip north to the tropics and to Singapore. On the other hand, there is nothing romantic about the fact that that ship will have its hull painted in a paint mixed with organotins – highly toxic chemicals which kill anything that attaches to the ship and which leach from the paint into sea water, and are absorbed by marine organisms and humans who eat them. There is nothing romantic about the fact that if cargo levels are low the ship will load up on local sea water, and then release the water when they pick up new cargo at the next port, introducing stowaway organisms that can become invasive, and potentially ruin entire ecosystems. Then, you all know about the spectre of the big oil spill, but did you know that many ships illegally discharge bilge oil before they enter port to save the money they’d have to spend on legally getting rid of the stuff?

Despite the efforts of the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service, we have the known marine pests the European Fan Worm and the Asian Date Mussel around Fremantle thanks to ship’s ballast. And although they are planned to be phased out by 2008, organotin-based anti-fouling paints can still be found in plenty of the hulls of the ships in Fremantle. Actions are being taken to deal with these problems by national and international agencies. These actions are happening about as quick as the response time of a mighty but stupid behometh of the sea. The night is gathering, but now I’m seeing more clearly.

Jarrah is a eucalyptus tree with long, grey striated bark. Today I’ve been in the Jarrah forest south of Mundaring in the Darling Hills east of Perth. I went out there in the hope of finding some old-growth Jarrah forest to walk amongst. I talked to a local fire officer with Conservation and Land Management, a guy who would know, and told me that he only knew of the odd old jarrah standing about the place and of no virgin forest. He was right, the whole forest I made my way through had a feeling of unhallowed youth about it. There were no groves of four hundred year old trunks to be found. How dissapointing.

The fact is that only two per cent of jarrah forest remains which has never been logged (karri is doing better in the south-west, where two thirds of old-growth remains). I am not against the harvesting of timber. Quite the contrary: it takes ten times the amount of energy to produce an iron girder as to produce a wooden beam, and as long as forests are selectively logged and not clear-felled, all those who care about the planet should very firmly support the harvesting of timber and see wood as the building material of the twenty-first century. However the Australians of earlier years went much too far in their chopping jarrah down and shipping it off around the world.

Here jarrah lies on the Fremantle dock in 1899. What the people of this era called ’swan river mahogany’, a superb building material for its extreme hardness, went off in massive quantities to lie under the pavements of London, amongst other places and uses (actually in this photo they were building the docks with the wood but you get the idea). In few places in the world could you have found, in the early 1800s, such a huge swathe of mature hardwood forest standing on such dry and nutrient-poor soils, as the jarrah forest of the Darling Range. A pity these dead men and women didn’t appreciate this fact.

The actions of the dead loggers of earlier years left me wandering around the Jarrah forest today, feeling nonplussed. I was unable to find a bit of ground where the grey trunked elders of the forest towered over me. Well, at least I found this transient forest floor dweller amongst the winter leaf litter. That was some kind of compensation.

In An Old Look at Trees: Vegetation of South-Western Australia in Old Photographs, compiled by Robert Powell and Jane Emberson (1978) you can find the following photograph of virgin jarrah forest near Jarradale, south of Perth.  It was taken in 1896. This is what the jarrah forest used to look like:

It is the birth-right of all people who live in Perth to go into the hills near our city and walk through big, beautiful jarrah forest like this.  We have been deprived of this birth-right by the blasphemy of dead men.

All the lighter areas in this satellite image of south-western Australia have been cleared for European agriculture, mainly the growing of wheat. For those Perth citizens naive enough to think endless Aussie bush lies beyond the edges of their sunny city, this photo is worth dwelling on.

The South-west Botanical Province accounts for only 0.23 per cent of the earth’s land surface but it supports 12.6 per cent of the world’s rare and threatened flora. This is because we live in quite a special place, and around 93 per cent of the vegetation communities in this special place have been cleared for agriculture. Over previous millienia each afternoon’s sea breeze dumped layers of salt on the land. The native flora kept the salt below the water table, but now it has risen back to the surface, killing everything in its way.

Putting it simply, life around here is very biodiverse, and the land east of Perth, the so called ‘wheat-belt’, is a mess. There are people doing something about this state of play. For example, The Australian Bush Heritage Fund has bought a massive conservation reserve in an area called the Charles Darwin Reserve. You can read about it, and also find out a bit more about life in these parts, at the Charles Darwin Reserve website.