Melbourne Writers Festival blog

Anna Krien’s book, Into the Woods: The Battle for Tasmania’s Forests has just been released.  Her work has appeared in The Monthly, Going Down Swinging, The Age, Colors, The Best Australian Essays, Frankie, The Best Australian Stories, Griffith Review, Voiceworks and Dazed & Confused. I spoke to Anna about writing the battle over Tasmania’s forest in Into the Woods.

Anna, the focus of your book Into the Woods is the battle over Tasmania’s forests. What first drew you to this divisive issue?

Actually it was this footage that first drew me to Tasmania’s forest issues. A warning – it makes for some ugly viewing.

The video (filmed by a forest activist hiding in a tree) shows Tasmanian logging contractors smashing a gutted car that is blocking a forest access road in the Florentine valley with sledgehammers. Two young activists are inside the car. The loggers are yelling and grabbing them through the broken glass, trying to pull them out of the car.

An activist friend of mine working on the island sent me the footage and I booked a ticket within an hour of watching the video. I intended on staying only five days – I was still there a month later.

In such a longstanding and multidimensional dispute, there are sure to be multiple viewpoints. What did you want to find out about the forestry war, and what did you unearth?

Yes – there are multiple viewpoints. At times it seems like everyone has an opinion on the island’s forests. And if we’re going to refer to it as a forestry ‘war’, then like all wars, a significant proportion of the fight is propaganda and spin. So in short – I ‘unearthed’ a lot of bullshit. I found that I had to create a few ‘touchstones’ to return to when people overwhelmed me with information and obscure terminology. One of these touchstones was simply ‘woodchips’. I had to remind myself that this was the main product that had divided families and towns; the entire island was torn to its core over a low value, high volume product. The way people spoke, the drama as they described impending economic doomsdays and starving families – it was easy to forget that the problem was woodchips, albeit cargo ships laden with the stuff.

You spent some time at the Camp Florentine blockade, which is 90 minutes west of Hobart. How long did you spend there, and what did you learn?

I learned that it doesn’t matter what kind of camp you’re at – be it school camp or a long-running forest blockade – the worst job is always the same. Digging the shit pit. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times I go camping, I always return to the porcelain dream – the bathroom – with a renewed sense of awe at the genius of plumbing. This was doubly so when I learned my second blockade lesson – that eating food rescued from the dumpster is bound to give an amateur like myself gastro. Now that was a fun few days.

But enough with the poo, what else did I learn out there?

I learned that the Sassafras tree is a kind of bush milk bar – the leaves are sweet to chew and considered a ‘pick me up’ by the Tasmanian Aborigines. I learned that Australia has its own special type of Robin – the Pink Robin bird. A male with a hot pink chest visited the camp daily to flirt with some plain brown female robins.

I also learned that trees will fall down if you cut everything around them – that they lean on one another and that a forest is like a house, buffeting its inhabitants from the wind. One of the last times I visited the blockade, it had just been busted by police, many of the activists had been arrested and about 40 hectares had been cleared. The trees that had been left on the edges of the coupes were just falling over. They weren’t able to stay standing on their own.

In an article you wrote for The Big Issue in April, you wondered if Tasmania’s forests would be missed by those who had never seen them. How did seeing these famed forests affect you?

It’s funny – but I’m not really a ‘forest’ person. People wax lyrical about Tasmania’s Tolkienesque trees and Middle Earth forests while I am far more likely to be moved by rugged plains, beaches, hot bushy scrub and vast red deserts.

But having said that, I couldn’t help being affected by Tasmania’s forests.

Victoria, the southernmost mainland state of Australia, is my home state and it’s not hard to imagine Tasmania breaking off from the Victorian coastline all those thousands of years ago. It’s as if the spectacular southern wilderness I grew up with (such as the Sherbrooke forest in the Dandenongs Ranges, the Otways and Wilsons Promontory) flourished on the small isolated island.

At one point during my journey, I was driving along the highway after an interview with a local who had pleaded with me not to use her name and I realised just how hard it is for a local to speak out in such a small community, let alone write the story I was aiming to tell about Tasmania’s timber industry. Things like getting a job, a government grant, feeling safe and welcome, all of these things would be at risk. I had to pull over and have a little cry on the side of the road at that point – because I realised that I too, was risking my relationship with the island and even though I wasn’t dependent on the place, I had definitely fallen in love with it.

You’ve written about diverse social issues, including ‘white collar’ drug users, women’s prisons and Australia’s ‘dry’ communities. What is your approach to journalism and to story?

Bizarrely, I found the most difficult place for me to get a story was when I worked at The Age. For me, there was something about being cooped up in a newsroom that stifled my journalistic sense of smell. For example, the women’s prisons story you mention came about when I was waitressing and a group of interstate prison officers came into the restaurant for dinner. Being the highly unprofessional waitress that I am, I got involved in their conversation as the night wore on and ended up swapping contact details with them.

My approach to journalism is unfortunately the antithesis of making money. I write a story because I want to understand the issue and the motives of the key people involved. I rarely line up an editor or a publication until I’ve completed it because I’m wary of outsiders trying to shape a story before it has taken its own form. So I tend to work backwards – I follow a story, live it, talk to everyone, read everything I can get my hands on, write it and then ask for the green light from an editor. I’m a publication’s finance department’s dream and my accountant’s nightmare.

Anna will discuss Tasmania and its stories with Amanda Lohrey and Nicholas Shakespeare in Small Places, Big Ideas at 1pm on Sunday, September 5.