Return to Van Diemen's Land Indigenous Tasmanians Had A

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Return to Van Diemen’s Land

Indigenous Tasmanians had a relationship with the land that was finally and brutally destroyed in 1835 when they were finally torn from their roots and dumped on Flinders Island. White free settlers like Abraham had little conception of such a relationship; for them, the land was there to be exploited. Many convicts on the other hand had swiftly built a close relationship with the wilderness, for them it was their refuge and their larder.1 Alfred was more interested in the heavens above the earth and in what was happening beneath the earth rather than in what grew upon it. In Walter’s Scottsdale, farmers and people generally had developed a strong relationship, not with wilderness, but certainly with the rich chocolate soil on which all thrived and were sustainably inter-dependent. Walter himself had a ‘ranch’, as he called it, on nearby Mt. Stronach that was if anything his bush garden. Oscar appreciated the bush but was no bushwalker. I also appreciated the bush after my experiences at Chauncy Vale and after bushwalking around Scottsdale and in the Picton River area – and long before Forestry Tasmania erected its Meccano air walk there. The turn of the twentieth century saw writers and photographers such as J.W. Beattie and Frank Hurley celebrating Tasmania’s natural beauty, seeing it as there to be experienced and treated with respect, not to be turned into cash.2 By this time many Tasmanians had developed a strong and positive relationship with wilderness. The flooding of Lake Pedder transformed a general concern over the environment to environmentalism, a political movement. Max Angus, a Pedder activist, defined a fundamental Tasmanian divide: ‘the dreaming of wilderness and the dreaming of industry.’ 3 Industry dreamers see wilderness dreamers as perverse and incomprehensibly wasteful. And as the power relations almost inevitably favour the industry dreamers, they more frequently get their way. If Pedder defined environmentalism as the wedge that widened the gap in Tasmanian society, Pedder was also where the Tasmanian propensity for violence became the powerful electric surge that crackled dangerously across that gap.

During the Franklin campaign, a stranger with a beard and long hair walking through the streets of Queenstown was inviting a bashing from locals. On 7 th March 1986, Bob Brown was protesting the clear-felling of old growth forests at Farmhouse Creek in the South West when a logging contractor produced a shot gun and fired at Brown. Police charged the man with ‘discharging a gun on Sunday’, but Greens Senator Christine Milne called it ‘attempted

1 Boyce, James. Van Diemen’s Land, Black Inc., 2008. 2 Roe, Michael. The State of Tasmania: Identity at Federation Time. Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 2001. 3 Quoted in Millwood, S. Whatever Happened to Brenda Hean? Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2008, p. 37.

279 Return to Van Diemen’s Land

murder.’ 4 At that same demonstration, Brown was set upon by a group of timber workers who beat him into the ground. A Mercury photographer captured Brown, cruciform, arms stretched out by four loggers, while police stood by watching, under orders not to intervene in the event of violence. 5 Logging in the Weld, Florentine and Styx Valleys led to the most recent outbursts of violence. On the 22 nd October 2008, in the Upper Florentine, logging contractors, screaming obscenities, attacked a car with a sledgehammer while two protestors clung on inside. The car was trashed, one protestor dragged out and kicked, as recorded on a terrifying video that was placed on the Mercury website. 6 Two days later, another group of demonstrators were awoken in the middle of the night by screaming attackers who poured petrol over the demonstrators’ cars and equipment and lit them, to loud explosions. Forestry Tasmanian’s response was for more police to stop the demonstrators, a plea echoed by Premier Bartlett. He deplored violence, he said, but he blamed the protestors for preventing workers from going about their legitimate business. 7 As Peter Timms wrote, this is ‘the same argument put by the rapist: “It’s all her fault, your honour. She provoked me.”’ 8 The timber contractors, locked into debt for their expensive equipment, are passionate about their right to go about their living. Others are passionate about the irreversible damage being done to Tasmania’s most precious asset, our old growth forests. Both have reason to be angry; the blame lies not in the loggers, or in the protesters, but in government. Neither major party sees, or will admit, that the violence they affect to deplore is the direct result of their policies. Both major parties support plundering our old-growth forests because their thinking is in a rut:

the state needs to replace a twentieth century factory-led, development mindset with a twenty first century mindset that focuses on the development of small businesses and services. 9

Unfortunately, the ‘factory-led’ mindset has become entrenched through vested interests, greed, stubbornness and puerile whatever-it-takes macho-politics. No influential politician in the major parties has either the wit or the inclination to see that clever development in the twenty first century needs a new political paradigm, a rethink that embraces the needs of all, not just the wishes of the rich and powerful. It needn’t be a matter of development versus the environment. It has been structured that way precisely to create confrontational politics in which the most powerful will win. Division is poison to a community, and backing one side of the divide against the other is

4Millwood, op. cit ., p. 253. 5 Buckman, op. cit ., p. 94. 6 http://www.themercury.com.au/article/2008/10/22/34071_tasmania-news.html 7 Sunday Tasmanian , 26 th October, 2008. 8 Letters, Mercury, 28 th October, 2008. 9 Buckman, op. cit ., p. 226.

virtually to sanction civil war. Unfortunately, creating division has become one of the mechanisms of political survival for the two major parties.

Antonio Gramsci used the term ‘cultural hegemony’ to describe how the rulers in society maintain their power and exploit those they rule with the consent of the ruled. 10 He distinguishes between ‘common’ sense and ‘good’ sense. These are not the same thing at all. Cultural hegemony works in modern Tasmania by stressing that the status quo is ‘common sense’, with which all clear-thinking citizens would agree. Those who don’t agree are the lunatic fringe, the far left crazies – never mind that what they are saying may well be good sense. A case made against forestry practices is ‘a Green stunt’, code for ‘no sensible person should give it a moment’s consideration.’ Greens are slapped with emotive labels, the latest and most dangerous in the light of the Federal draconian anti-terrorist legislation being ‘eco- terrorists’, the term used by Minister David Llewellyn to refer to a small group of protesters who closed Gunns’ Triabunna wood-chipping operation for a day. 11 An example. In May, 2009, under heavy questioning from the Greens, Minister Llewellyn finally admitted in Parliament that Hobart’s water supply was contaminated by the carcinogen atrazine – but ‘just a tiny blip’ – at which, on cue, Health Minister Lara Giddings accused the Greens of ‘blatant scaremongering’. 12 So if anyone is concerned about drinking Hobart’s water, it’s all the fault of those mischievous Greens. A more outrageous example occurred on 27 th August, 2008, when Green MP Kim Booth brought a bill before Parliament repealing the Pulp Mill Assessment Act and its appalling Clause 11. Here was the opportunity for the many politicians who had criticised Lennon’s trashing of the RPDC process to rectify matters, to show that they had meant what they had said. Many people urged a conscience vote: I did my bit by emailing all Liberal politicians to that effect. However, party discipline was imposed by both Labor and Liberals. No breaking of ranks this time – the previously admirable Lisa Singh voted for what she had previously put her career on the line to avoid voting for. Lennon’s critics could have kept themselves honest by repealing the old PMAA, then putting new legislation in place that reinstated due process, for example by referring the mill proposal back to the RPDC. But they didn’t. Here lies a familiar but puzzling feature of Tasmanian politics. A majority of Tasmanians, probably a large majority, would surely agree that the government should:

• increase spending on health, public education and public transport; • support small business, including farmers, over giant corporations; • act immediately and firmly against climate change;

10 Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks , New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. 11 Mercury, 18 th December, 2008. 12 ‘Greens cop water attack’, Mercury , 2 nd May, 2009.

• engage in greater public consultation and transparency; • increase public participation in political decision-making and to remove inequalities of wealth and power that inhibit participatory democracy; • legislate on the grounds of social justice; • establish a more labour-intensive, diverse and sustainable forestry industry, creating more jobs for specialist craftsmen, and stop clear-felling old growth forests; • adhere to established due process in policy making.

Yet many who would agree to the above would never in their darkest nightmare vote for the political party that stood for those things. Apart from the last, which should be in the charter of all parties, the remainder distinguish the Greens from the two major parties. Yet name-calling and assertions, no matter how absurd, strongly discourage ordinary people from voting for Green policies. What sensible citizen would vote for loony lefties who would legalise all hard drugs, make homosexuality compulsory and force us all to live in caves? Thus does cultural hegemony make people vote against their own wishes, their own interests, and their own good sense.

The commonality between the two major parties exists because the major powerbrokers in the timber, hospitality and other industries play the major parties against each other. The result is that politicians of both sides commit to commercial interests rather than to the general public interest. As an editorial in the Mercury put it:

those who fear environmental reform in the woodchip, gambling and fishing industries must be nervous … With an eye to the anti-Green powerbrokers, Mr. Bartlett must woo disgruntled Labor voters upset (that) the party is too cosy with big business … but stray too far from the interests of big business and it is possible he could face similar internal conflicts that saw premier Doug Lowe stabbed in the back by colleagues in 1981.13

And just to illustrate that very point, I suggested to a senior Liberal at a social function: ‘If the Liberals agreed to halt clear-felling old-growth forests, then come the 2010 election you’ll be in like Flynn.’ ‘I hear what you’re saying, John, but sorry. It’s locked in.’ He smiled and waved me on my way. I took that to mean that the Liberals would still, as in Bob Cheeks’ time, rather lose an election over an issue wanted by a majority of those who voted them in, than get offside with the timber powerbrokers.

13 Editorial, Mercury, 13 th September, 2008.

The all-but-total policy overlap between the two major parties is hardly likely to be based on brotherly love. Rather, they have both have been bought out by the same powerbrokers. When the differences between parties are not based on policy, party preference becomes a personality contest, a bitter competition between the leaders to see which personality appeals most to the electorate and which one the powerbrokers see as the more effective in implementing their interests. To date, that party has been Labor; since 1934, Labor has held power for more than twice as long the Liberals. Thus the two parties spar for attention like Tasmanian devils snarling over a rotting carcase. However, both hate the Greens even more than each other because the Greens are a threat to the two party system itself – and to the rewards of cutting deals with the world of big business. Liberal ex-premier and recent CEO of Gunns, Robin Gray of Franklin Dam notoriety, proposed in May 2009 that as there was so little difference between the Labor and Liberal parties, they should form a coalition and put paid once and for all to those pesky Greens and any chances of minority government. 14 On the 24 th May, 2009, Premier Bartlett was not ruling out forming a minority government with the Liberal Party.15 Next day he said: ‘“Let me be absolutely clear. I can categorically rule out any deal with the Liberals or Greens.”16 In August, Bartlett was admitting that as Labor would be most unlikely to be able to form a majority government in the 2010 elections, he was prepared to talk to the leaders of other parties. Treasurer Michael Aird, a ring-in from the Legislative Council and a relic of the Labor-Green accord of 1989, thereupon flatly contradicted his boss, saying he would never work with the Greens.17 At that, Bartlett again ruled out an accord with any party. 18 This incredibly confused react to Gray’s proposition, given his long association with Gunns, suggest that the ploy is all about a clear run for untrammelled forestry operations and any developments that powerbrokers like Gray want to put in place. And how easy that would be under the new planning system, which the Liberals supported! The last thing all this is about is the public interest. Here, in a nutshell, is Tasmania’s problem: government serves vested interests not the public good. It has been the case before Abraham Biggs disembarked here.

Are we then returning to Van Diemen’s Land? The differences between Van Diemen’s Land and modern Tasmania may be obvious, but the similarities are not and are more interesting. A major similarity is governance by serial autocracy. Early governors didn’t need the deviousness of cultural hegemony to maintain power; they had it by statute – and they needed it:

14 Examiner, 20 th May, 2009. 15 Sunday Tasmanian, 24 th May, 2009. 16 Mercury , 25 th May, 2009 17 Mercury, 14 th August, 2009. 18 Mercury, 17 th August, 2009

A company of exiles, overawed by dissolute soldiery, interspersed here and there with few persons of a superior class, could only be governed by despotism. 19

Lieutenant-Governor Arthur turned a colony that was falling apart with inefficiency, lawlessness and public immorality into a model of rectitude. His society worked, albeit with hideous discomfort for many. But of course he never claimed he was in charge of a democracy. The Tasmanian demography today is radically different from West’s description, but the mode of government is not – and we do claim to be a democracy. Modern day powerbrokers share with their predecessors the common factor of top-down rule that is not accountable. Social constraints prevented Gray and Lennon from hobbling the Greens with the short chain, so they used the strategies of cultural hegemony instead. Arthur’s top priority was the maintenance of a military society reliant on convict labour, despite the wish of the free settlers for transportation to cease. The Lib-Lab top priority is correspondingly to give forestry and associated industries untrammelled freedom to do virtually what they like, in the full knowledge that majority public opinion is against that. If anything, strenuous opposition seemed to energise Lennon. One assumption of both Arthur and contemporary major parties is that individual self- enrichment is the main driving force in society, with today’s refinement that includes corporate self-enrichment. A corollary is that in becoming rich, and in helping selected mates do likewise, you may with impunity ride roughshod over due process. The only structural difference between a Lennon, say, and an Arthur is in the process of their establishment: Lennon was elected and Arthur was appointed. What went on in between establishment and disestablishment was according to the autocrat’s will, not according to democratic processes. Reece, Gray, Groom, Bacon, Lennon and Bartlett operated top-down as serial autocrats, with the backing of caucus. 20 Lennon stated that he had a mandate to do whatever he thought best for Tasmania and if Tasmanians didn’t like it, they could chuck him out next election and give someone else open slather. He had confused democracy with serial autocracy. None of these leaders, or their parties, seem to possess any conception of the role of due process in a democracy, or even what a representative democracy is. Instead, politicians today are acting as rulers over those who elected them. They have arrogated to themselves a power to which they have no right to in a properly functioning democracy, because participatory democracy requires accountability of the executive and a government that serves community, not sectional, interests.

19 West, John. History of Tasmania, Launceston: Henry Dowling, 1852. (Facsimile edition, Libraries Board of South Australia, 1966). Volume 2, p. 339. 20 Peter Henning, ‘Caucus Curse: A Blind for Labor-Liberal Corporatism’, Tasmanian Times , 31 st March 2009.

Is this ‘a re-run of the 1820s dispossession’?21 Just as Arthur richly rewarded his own cronies with land and convicts, thereby forcing out the Tasmanian Aborigines and pushing small holders and labourers to the margins, so do recent governments steer large amounts of public money into favoured private companies and grant them monopolies. Massive tax shelters for timber plantations are forcing farmers off their land by economic pressure, as were the aboriginals forced by physical violence. Perfectly good farms, and the once-thriving communities they created, have been and are being destroyed, particularly in the north east and the north west of the state. Arthur unashamedly appointed his favourites to high public office, so too did the recent Labor governments appoint friends, relatives and failed political candidates, whose incompetence wastes millions of taxpayers’ dollars, as ex-staffer Nigel Burch pointed out to an Upper House enquiry.22 Equality before the law was not recognised by Arthur, neither is it in contemporary Tasmania. One side of the industry-wilderness divide is regularly prosecuted but very rarely the other. Inequality became law in July 2007 when the infamous Clause 11 in the Pulp Mill Assessment Act was enacted giving one party in the community, Gunns and any person or body representing Gunns, protection from legal redress. This is a privilege unavailable to ordinary citizens.23 Arthur’s ignoring the will of the free settlers saw to his downfall; exactly so with Reece and Lennon. While caucus and the powerbrokers had approved most of what Reece and Lennon had done, they got rid of them when their abrasive style made them public liabilities. 24 The party machine defines the policies for the premier to enact, but if they are so enthusiastic about it that they antagonise the public, they are replaced with a premier with an apparently softer image – and the party line continues unchanged. It is not unlike rule in Imperial China, when a succession of emperors ruled within a dynasty for as long as they had a Mandate from Heaven. When they went a step too far, or when a man-made or natural disaster occurred that suggested that the current emperor had lost his grip on matters, the Mandate was withdrawn; the next dynasty took over, to repeat the cycle of autocratic rule, corruption and violence. For dynasty read ‘major party’ and for emperor read ‘premier’ and you have a template of Tasmanian politics, scaled-down from centuries to years. Van Diemen’s Land and modern Tasmania have another striking feature in common: a level of hypocrisy that borders on schizophrenia. Abraham, along with his fellow

21 Tasmanian Times , 16 th Feb 09 22 Mercury , 17 th October, 2008. 23 Federal Parliament however beat the Tasmanian Lower and Upper Houses at abolishing equality before the law – and habeus corpus to boot – in its anti-terrorism legislation of November 2005. Individuals could be secretly gaoled, with no legal representation, on no better evidence than the gut feelings of the Attorney- General, who at that time was the bloodless Phillip Ruddock. 24 Yet in 2009 Wayne Crawford writes that a Tasmanian Bicentenary Survey found ‘Eric Reece to be the most popular, most influential identity … more than 25 years after he left politics, the late Eric Reece was still rated by Tasmanians as number one.’ ( Mercury , 26 th December , 2009). It is intriguing to speculate if, after 25 years after leaving politics, time will sweeten memories to the extent that Mr. Paul (17 per cent) Lennon will be remembered as fondly.

Methodists and the other good citizens of Hobarton, erected a Pollyanna fantasy land of a morally pure, transplanted England when the reality was quite different. The powerbrokers of modern day Tasmania hide their bogeyman by screening a clear-felled smoking ruin with a thin layer of intact trees, while for years the government kept the Tarkine off official maps so people wouldn’t know this treasure trove of timber existed. Thus was propagated the fantasy of a clean, green and pristine Tasmania, with its flourishing and unique flora and fauna, when the reality is that the environment is being trashed at an ever-increasing extent, the waterways poisoned with carcinogens, our remaining wildlife – the spotted quoll, the wedge tailed eagle, the giant crayfish, the Tasmanian devil itself – being pushed to extinction through loss of habitat and other collateral damage from forestry operations. 25

Is Tasmania’s polity worse than that of other states? Looking at contemporary NSW, for example, it hardly seems possible, but there is a difference in the nature of the corruption. Tasmanian corruption is situated in a small population, where local issues dominate and where anyone who is anyone knows everyone else in the same club, to wit, the Tasmania Club in Macquarie Street. 26 You don’t worry about an abstract idea called ‘due process’, you fix things up for your mates and they’ll do the right thing by you. Corruption in the big states is in many senses worse, because it is on a larger scale, more organised and often involving a criminal underworld. But in one sense the Tasmanian version is worse because it is more entrenched and enduring, more part of a cosy system in which due process is for mugs. Whereas Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland, say, straightened itself out with the fresh leadership relatively quickly, Tasmania has had a string of very different leaders from Reece onwards, from both major parties, yet policies and procedures on major issues have remained the same. It doesn’t matter which party you vote for, deeply unpopular policies remain in place. When both major parties stand for much the same thing, it cannot be in the public interest. A Lib-Lab accord after the 2010 election would be a disaster for democracy, with corporate interests completely smothering the public interest. An important way of avoiding this is for more candidates to stand who do represent the public interest; the very thing that Robin Gray is trying to prevent. At the present time, the only viable candidates who do that are the Greens and Independents such as Andrew Wilkie.27 Wilkie was the intelligence officer who blew the whistle on the quality of intelligence used to justify Australia’s

25 ‘Herbicide pollution shocker’, Mercury , 26 th October, 2009. Triazines, which include the carcinogens atrazine and simazine, were found in 139 samples of Tasmanian river water due largely to forestry and farming operations. 26 For a fictional account of how this works by someone who should know (he was in the Lowe and Holgate Governments during the Franklin River crisis), see Terry Aulich’s novel, The River's End , Balmain: Kerr, 1992 27 Other minority parties include the Socialist Alliance who have yet to win a seat; and the newly formed Ethics and Sustainability Party. There are also now non-party political groups: Now WeThePeople (http://www.nowwethepeople.org/ ); Tasmanians for a Healthy Democracy (http://www.tashealthydemocracy.com/ ); Tasmanians Against the Pulp Mill (http://www.tashealthydemocracy.com/ ); Our Common Ground ( http://www.ourcommonground.org.au/ )

involvement in Iraq, for which public service he was persecuted and vilified by the Howard Government. 28 Minority parties and courageous Independents holding the balance of power in a minority government increase dialogue and negotiation to take more views into account and thus encourage thoughtfulness in policy-making. Thoughtfulness and accommodation is what this state so badly needs, not a caucus serving sectional interest imposing its will through force of numbers. How can bullying have a place in a democracy? Henry Melville wrote of the eleven years under the rule of Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur:

Blessed as Van Diemen’s Land is with the finest climate – ordained by Nature to be the gem of the Southern Ocean – with the means of procuring every comfort that man can wish to enjoy, it is lamentable to see that a system of Government has so reduced the Settlement to misery …29

Is it possible that he would write in similar vein about the system of government Tasmanians have had to endure in recent years?

28 For that story, see: Andrew Wilkie, Axis of Deceit . Melbourne: Schwarz Publishing, 2004. 29 Melville, Henry. History of Van Diemen’s Land , 1824-1835. Australian Historical Monographs, Volume XXVII, p. 54.