Here’s an extract from a speech Greens Senator Bob Brown made to the Senate in June this year.
On 12 April this year a regeneration burn by Forestry Tasmania took place which burnt to death the biggest known flowering plant on the planet. Forestry Tasmania calls the tree El Grande – that is, ‘the big one.’
Along comes Forestry Tasmania. I’m not sure what they did on this day. They light fires by hand but they also have a habit of dropping fire from planes with hundreds of incendiaries. The incendiaries are dropped from the plane onto a logged coupe and when they hit they ground they explode into flame. The idea is to create a firestorm to kill everything on the block – to not leave any seed or any root which might come up from the rainforest species which are mixed there with the eucalypts. This creates the death of the natural ecosystem in that region of forest.
El Grande sits atop a ridge. That day the whole hillside exploded into flame and the nation’s grandest tree firestorm swept up the hill and burnt our nation’s greatest tree as if it were sitting on top of a bonfire. There were still burning remnants of the coupe on the floor, but at El Grande itself great branches half a metre thick had been ripped from the tree. These branches begin about 50 metres up in the tree. Can you imagine that? That is half a football field in height up the tree before you get to the first branches. These large branches had been ripped from the tree by the power of the firestorm and scattered on the ground. The trunk of the tree – and remember, trees live through their living inner-skin – was seared right around, up to 40 – 60 metres, by the ferocity of the fire. On the branches high up in the tree, not one green leaf was left.
Vandalism like this is an unforgivable failure of duty by the authorities involved. What other national icon could be vandalised like this at the hands of officials and not immediately have this chamber in uproar with a demand for an inquiry? Would the daubing of Uluru not lead to that? Would the looting of the Opera House not lead to that? . . . "
