One of my main purposes of coming to the island state was to visit and witness the Tarkine, this was my first time visiting the west coast and it didn’t disappoint.

At first sight, the landscape was dense and lush, alive in every way, driving through from the north, you start to work your way through plantation timber, as far as the eye can see.

Forestry has been apart of colonised Tasmanian culture, particularly up here in the north west, in an age where we understand the changing climate and our world wide collective effect on this planet, I was interested to hear more from the local perspective, is there such thing as susutainable modern timber harvesting?

Enter, the defenders camp.

Pieman river blockade

13th of May 2021

Cleared native forest, paving a road through pristine wilderness, there are over 100 active leases within the North west of Tasmania, constant threat from companies looking to extract whatever primary resources they are interested in.

Within any industry there is a smoke screen in effect to minimise their impact or inflate their social and community economic value.

Witnessing the destruction first hand was definitely confronting.

Giant eucalyptus stand towering above, separated from the rest of the forest, sitting alone without the strength of its friends and family, it is just a matter of time before the wild weather take them down.

This Myrtle Beech was magnificent, surrounded by much larger trees tragically cut down to make room for a road, for machinery to bulldoze through, to food the landscape for a mining tailings dam.

The sheer size of this tree made it very difficult to recut, this was the largest tree I have worked with todate.

The landscape looking like Nebulous.

This process was incredibly slow, there is a trade off between cutting horizontally like this or recutting a tree that has fallen over and is laying on its side.

Here the saw blade bends and binds, jamming with most movements, working between both saws to make my way through.

I was so blown away and the beauty and intense colour of this Myrtle, the pink tones were something else.

I had made a mess from my initial saw cuts, I had to fillet high sections to clean up the surface.

The weather in the west will change in an instant, after stopping and starting I decided to set up a more robust and semi permanent space which would allow me to work for longer, this was day 4 into the process.