April 2005
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Tree hugger
YES, I didn’t go fishing in April, many have tried and came back empty handed, even with the assistance of a guide – what else is new.
As you might have learned from my book, I am not a catch and release man (C&R). I can’t see the point in fighting a fish to his death and then say: “have a nice day anyway”.
Just imagine King Kong chases YOU across the paddock with a meat cleaver in his hand. You run for your life and when finally you collapse and can run no more, he says, nice going chum, have a nice day anyway. And unless you are a big blond with big tits or a fat arsed 300lb “Trophy” human, he doesn’t even take a photo of you before he runs after somebody else. You would tell HIM where to go if you ever recovered from your heart attack or your adrenalin overdose or lactic acid poisoning.
“I fish, I eat!” and let’s never forget “I fish, I vote”
If you look in March’s Diary statistics, you can see that my average cast to fish ratio was 700 casts per fish and things got much more ‘worserer’ or so I heard.
So if you expected a fishing story, click X now.
You still here? Thank you, read on.
Gripe session, I have my say.
There is something I feel very strongly about and a quiet April is just as good as any a month to air my grievances.
Like most States in Australia, Tasmania suffers chronically from a lack of road funding. So much so that the Lake Highway leading from Deloraine over the mountains to Hobart has officially lost it’s appendix ‘Hwy’ and is now appended ‘Rd’.
Yep, we don’t want to mislead tourists when travelling a dirt track looking for an ‘Hwy’. Another politically correct copout if ever there was one. It is much cheaper to rename a dirt track than to turn it into a Highway.
In the April/May issue of the RACT motornews magazine the GCE (Group Chief Executive) laments that the government has a ‘duty of care’ to provide adequate road funding and claims that road funding levels have not increased in Tasmania in 12 years. Apparently it seems more lucrative to spend $10 million (YES, $10 million) Australian Pesos on an advertising campaign to get Sydneyites to visit Tassie on the ‘Spirit of Tasmania III’.
$10 million buck-a-roos is quite a lot for Tassie. I know you can’t buy a decent outdoors dunny with harbour view for that in Sydney. But until recently you could buy Tasmania for that and got change back.
That this advertising campaign didn’t work – Spirit III still runs at a $2 million loss per year - doesn’t seem to bother any of the Vogons in government who approved it.
The one important and crucial word, that the "lexical decision taskforce" have as yet not discovered is INFRASTRUCTURE.
What happens is this; visitors pack up their kids, dogs and shackles and drive their cars, trailers, caravans or motorhomes onto Spirit I or II in Melbourne or III in Sydney and come to this state with the expectation to see something unique for their money.
What they say when they get home is, Tasmania is nice BUT…
It is the BUT which their friends will remember.
BUT we couldn’t find a decent caravan park.
BUT entrance fees into national parks are prohibitively expensive.
A 300% increase since last year.
BUT facility standards in national parks are dismal - to say the least.
Take Tasmania’s showcase St Clair for example. If YOU owned a private caravan park with the same toilet/shower facilities standard, the World Health Organisation would shut you down before the local councils health inspector had time to stop you from collecting the campfire wood.
BUT large rocks block all and every access to overnight by the river or lake site, forcing you to pay money somewhere else to stay for the night. Picture #4
BUT camping areas, where they exist, are hopelessly inadequate.
Take Tooms Lake as only one of many examples, where on weekends 250 fisher folks share one toilet. The rest uses the bush toilet, women and all. Picture #5
BUT Great Lake has about 100 km shoreline and not a single camping ground.
BUT petrol/diesel is 10c/l more expensive than on the mainland.
More BUTs? There is not enough room here!
The problem is you see, the Vogons want the visitors to come here and spend their money, but we have no infrastructure for them to enjoy it.
Whenever these issues are raised, the reaction of the local councils is: lets put big rocks across the track and stop people fishing and camping there altogether, that should shut the bastards up and teach them a lesson.
You think I’m kidding?
Do I need to remind you of the problem solving capabilities of the Vogons when it comes to public children playgrounds, REMOVE THEM, that’s stops any problems.
Just like the Lake Highway, substitute ‘Hwy’ with ‘Rd’, voila, problem solved.
If you spent a grand or so for a trip to Bali with great expectations and then find yourself sitting on the beach cooking your own meal you wouldn’t recommend Bali to your friends either, would you now!
In case you are a Vogon reading this (because normal people know this already) the way to do it is you build a three or four star hotel on the Bali water front first, then you invite the people to come and relax on the beach or surf or whatever, that’s called creating infrastructure. Because infrastructure allows the ‘little’ guy to hire surfboards, canoes bikes or what-have-you and earn an honest crust so he doesn’t need to make a living pushing drugs.
Tasmanian Vogons invite visitors to substandard facilities and wounder why they don’t tell their friends ‘go visit’. And how many overseas tourists do come? Well, as I learned last week from a pertinent TV item, 100 000 visitors each year from China alone, expected to rise to 1million in the next 10 years. Now they don’t come with campervans – thank God, but they come to see Tasmania.
Many are hikers. The St Clair – Cradle mountain track suffers from severe degradation, so much so that some sections have disappeared in knee-deep mud (so the TV story). 5000 visitors trudge through the sludge each year bringing $500 000 per year to the States and or National Parks coffers from walking this track alone. ‘By shank's pony’ it will cost you $100 per person to hike this track. And there is no money to build an elevated food path through the affected areas?
Vogon's solution? Introduce the ‘man-day system. Increase the user fee so that fewer but wealthier visitors can afford the trudge through the mud or limit the number of hikers per year. The idea is to introduce a ‘man day’ system (‘person day’ system?).
The Man-Day System.
It works like this: a track through a pristine and beautiful area is designated say 20 man-days per year. That means that the track can be walked on by an individual hiker 20 times a year or four times by a party of say five (4x5=20) or once a year by a party of 20 hikers before it has reached its access limit and is closed for the rest of that year. That applies of course if you are a Tasmanian taxpayer or if you are an interstate of overseas visitor for a few days.
The Vogons hope that locking up the wilderness and keeping folks out, will help ‘worshipers’ to appreciate the beauty of the wilderness and encourage them to protect it. Tracks are and will be signposted: ‘no access past this point without a permit…penalty… blah, blah, blah.
That’s not building infrastructure, that’s ‘Vogonisim’.
Do I digress or am I doing my block? Just bear with me for a minute it can’t get worse, or can it?
So what do people really come to see in Tassie?
Hobart? Let me tell you it looks positively tired and in a recent survey it has been voted the “most boring capital city in Australia.
Launceston? – a large village with pop. 100 000.
What are we advertising and “selling” to our visitors then, a national monument, Ayers Rock perhaps or Sydney’s Harbour Bridge or Melbourne’s Yarra River site? Sorry, got none of those.
The TV adds promote and market what Tasmania has plenty of, country, highland lakes (over 4000 of them), forest and trees. I like trees, I hug one every morning when ‘they’ let me out (can’t you tell). When I started talking to them, that’s when ‘they’ put me into special care.
Honestly folks, trees are the lungs of our environment (how I hate clichés). Anyone remember that guy Bob Hawk, he pledged to plant 2 billion trees and “no child will live in poverty by… when“? How many trees did HE plant and how many have been cut down since?
Don’t start me on trees and the Amazon forest;
Papua New Guinea cuts down rainforest trees each year in an area the size of Switzerland think about that, is that sensible?
Indonesian and Thai Tsunami victims need 1 million cubic metres of wood to rebuild their shacks, houses and boat ramps. Are they going to get pine plantation trees from Australia or NZ in this $1 billion aid package? No, they cut down their own rainforest trees and destroy the very trees the Orangutans live in.
We can make just about anything from recycled stuff, yet we’ve got to cut down trees? We stopped whaling, is there a shortage of anything because these beautiful animals are not slaughtered anymore? I’ll bet ye there are more people employed in the whale watching industry today than there were in killing them.
So what do we do with Tasmanian trees, water them, protect them, admire them, and hug them? No, we cut them down and turn them into woodchips and then ‘add value’ to the chips and turn them into paper. Do we need all that paper?
Coz not, we just make sure that the Japanese got something to write on or wipe their collective anal cavity opening with.
So what are we doing? We’re cutting down old growth forest and turn it into toilet paper for Japan. Well it makes perfect sense if you happened to be a Vogon
So lets say that again, we cut down the old magnificent trees which the tourists come to see, turn them into woodchips, put it through a pulp mill, turn it into paper so that the Japanese tourist can wipe their bums before they come here to see the pristine Tasmanian forest [which we have advertised on their TV] and which we just cut down to turn it into toilet paper so that they can wipe...
You’ve got to be a politician or anal (hey! hey who said it’s the same difference?) to see that doesn’t work very well.
If you want to see the environment we’re going to be left with, google: ‘Queenstown Tasmania’. Ask your self why you only see thumbnail size photos of the town’s grotesque surroundings? This is why, and I quote from a website:
Queenstown, its hills stripped of timber to fire the local copper smelters and permanently denuded by the noisome sulphurous fumes which belch from the smelters, is a surreal nightmare. Then the topsoil was eroded, leaving the bare, coloured rocks and odd deserted moonscape. Its river is polluted. By any measure Queenstown is one of the wonders of the world. It is a profound reminder of humanity's capacity to destroy and pollute and, in that sense, it deserves to be seen by everyone.
YES, Queenstown is a MUST SEE for all and everybody and their children because it shows you what our land will look like if we don’t change our attitude to old growth forest. So if you ever going to fish Lake Burbury take a closer look at Queenstown, wounder and weep. Well you might say it took 100 years to denude the place, that’s right but don’t forget that’s all done with axe and horse. Today with chainsaws and bulldozers we can wreck the rest in 10 years.
We are not talking about the pine plantation trees, we’re talking about the trees which are 50, 60, 100, 200, yes and even 1000 years or older. They were rooting before Columbus destroyed the ‘flat earth theory’ by discovering the Americas.
We are turning trees into toilet paper and call it value-adding and ‘proudly’ proclaim we’re creating jobs!
But wait, I’m not done yet, there is more.
How do the trees find their way to the wood chip pile? Well, by special limousines called log trucks. Picture #6
These chauffer driven trucks are on the road 24/7, well 24/6 at least.
They been driven with reckless speed and you better believe it. Picture #7 They don’t tell us anymore how many loose their load picture #8 or how many tip over or crash, unless they put some innocent road users into a coffin and it hits the TV evening news. It is bad for tourism you know.
A return trip from the ‘harvest’ area (what a joke – should be called the ‘killing Zone’) to the chip-mill takes about 7 hours. The log-trucks have to make two trips a day. One to pay the rig off and one to pay for the diesel, tyres, maintenance and that ‘crust’, which allows him to ‘make a living’. That’s 14-hour days at least six days a week. Even God rested on day 7 to have a beer or two or so the story goes and after all, the nipples need greasing. Even God wasn’t self-greasing or was she Teflon coated?
How fatigued would anybody be, driving a log truck for 14hours a day six days a week?
And we do all that in the name of progress or creating jobs? Give me a break.
We’d be better off digging a big hole and fill it in again. At least we would have the “Y” factor on our side [Why are they doing that?] and would attract worldwide attention/visitors.
But seriously folks, if we bought the truckies out [as we did with fishing quotas], payed them to pick up cigarette butts in town, we keep trucks off the road, stop tens of thousands of litres of diesel and exhaust to pollute the planet, stop the road from getting damaged and, dig this, keep the trees alive. Wouldn’t that be a win, win, win, win situation and maybe I missed out on yet another win.
NO, I am NOT a political activist, NO I don’t belong to any political party; secrete society or organisation of any kind - except the fly fishing club.
I am just a surprised voter. Surprised? I’ll bet ye, I am constantly surprised how stupid and short-sighted self-opinionated and self-righteous the politicians are we vote into power. Maybe that says more about us than the ones we elect to represent us. But then large [timer] corporate donations into both parties’ re-election funds are a powerful argument and more important than our future.
As for me, I was just hoping to leave this planet a better place than I’ve found it. But it’s up hill all the way because the human race never ceases to disappoint me. But mark the word of an old trout whisperer, nothing gets unpunished, someone will have to pay for it, our grand children will, just visit Queenstown Tasmania.
I don’t tie myself up onto the trees, I am too old for that, but I respect the right of the people who do, and they do it for all of us, if we appreciate it or not, they do it on our behalf and for our grand children’s sake.
Well I differ in my method a bit from the ‘greenies’ that sit for days in trees to stop the chainsaws and the bulldozers. I think the word is more powerful than the sword, and what is more powerful that the word – you guessed it, my/your/our vote.
Vote is a four-letter word, even Vogons understand its power!
So if you think I lost the plot, let me remind you why do I write this?
Well, firstly I hope it makes you think about humans and huwomen’s stupidity and corporate greed, which makes us to care more about the cricket or football score than our trees.
Secondly, I hope you want your grandchildren to see what a tree looks like, what a wallaby looks like and what a Tasmanian Devil looks like.
Because the way WE’RE going, your grandchildren will only see a Tassie Devil the way they see the Tasmanian Tiger, in a book, on a DVD or “the rare footage” of the idiot who shot the last one dead because it tried to stay alive by eating his ‘native’ sheep. Get it? Native ‘sheep’? Two shillings worth of wool and five shillings worth of meat for an entire species that is now extinct?
Thirdly, you can’t change what you don’t acknowledge – says Dr Phil and I don’t want to be guilty by apathy and silence.
The planet WILL recover if we keep loosing cricket matches or football matches or whatever matches, it will not recover if we keep loosing old growth forests or rainforests or whatever forests.
So what I am asking you is this: Don’t belong to the silent majority and get silently screwed by big business and Vogons.
Because if you remain silent, you complicit!
Scream, have your say, call or e-mail a politician today. Ask him/her what their party is doing to stop the senseless dilapidation of our forests. Tell them that there full of bovine excrement if they tell you they need to protect jobs. If we protect trees we create jobs, only better jobs, jobs which do not demand that some poor bastard has to drive a truck for 80hrs a week. There will be more jobs in the lodging industry than in the logging industry.
Don’t know the Vogons e-mail address? Go to any of these websites below and tell them that they should take THEIR children and grandchildren into the old growth forest and hug a tree each morning or YOU (WE) vote them out of office. Tell them that YOU care, even if they think that corporate donations to their re-election fund is more important than trees.
Let me close with an Cree Indian Prophecy I quoted in my book:
Only after the last tree has been cut down
Only after the last river has been poisoned
Only after the last fish has been caught
Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.
Well, I had MY say.
If you feel strongly about this one way or the other, or any other environmental issue write to me (nicely please, I am really a sensitive soul) and I will put your comments on my website under a new heading called: “Have your say”
Next month we will talk trout again and look at the ‘milking’ of trout at the ‘Liawenee open day’ in the Tasmanian highlands.
Parliament:
http://www.aph.gov.au/house/members/index.htm
http://www.aph.gov.au/house/members/Email.asp
http://www.aph.gov.au/house/members/mi-party.asp
Senate:
http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/senators/index.htm
http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/senators/email.htm
http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/senators/homepages/si-alpha.htm
* Vogons (click here to view Vogons)
Vogons are extremely ugly, extremely officious, and generally not much fun to be around.
They emerged from the seas of the planet Vogsphere, and gave up on evolving there and then. Only their stubbornness allowed them to survive.
They generally become bureaucrats in the galactic government. Their unpleasant demeanour makes them ideally suited to such employment.
If you would like to contact me for comments or contributions click here: thetroutwhisperer@bigpond.com