People

Ann Novek was once a medical student, but quit to work as a wildlife rehabilitator. She works mostly with birds, and has a special interest in helping birds affected by oil spills.

Here’s a picture of a swan being cleaned after an oil spill, Ann’s in the yellow jacket.

She’s also a Greenpeace Nordic volunteer involved mostly in ocean issues and a new reader and commentator at this blog.

Ann lives somewhere in Sweden and has her garden fenced to keep out cats making it a “little bird heaven”. I assume the fence also keeps out the the many roe deers which according to Ann roam around in people’s gardens in Sweden eating tulips and apple trees.

In Brisbane, in Australia where I live, it is possums that roam around gardens eating roses and destroying vegetable gardens.

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Ann, thanks for sharing the photograph and something about yourself.

Taz, who also uses the pen name Bugger, has an opinion on most everything. A champion of the anecdotal he can hold his own in discussion on forestry, energy – but I’m not so sure about salinity.

I’d been wondering how Taz spent his time between growing up in Tasmania and retiring in Canberra, so I sent him an email and this was his reply:

“Technical history – Fitter, Machinist, Mechanic, Scientific Instrument Maker, Engineer, Technician, Technical Officer

Before retirement 1996, The Spectrum Management Agency – frequency assigning, licensing policy, major network rollout, implementation of device interference and immunity standards.

Previous; AFP technical support only, mostly in radio communications for routine & covert operations, VIP protection, also supported with our gear some UN and offshore operations.

ANU John Curtin School Medical Research, electronic instrument circuits for the late Professor Peter Gage

Last industrial site as contractor; Cleveland Tin, cassiterite and associated mineral recovery and concentration plant at Luina closed down in 1986. Other Mines were King Island Scheelite, Savage River ion ores, Renison (Bell) Goldfields tin separation and metal concentration.

Other freelance technical support in Tasmania, Education Dept. scientific instruments in high schools and colleges, UMT (Bonlac) reverse osmosis whey protein filtration, cheese making, milk drying, Bakeries, Glaxo opium poppy storage, Tasmanian (Adelaide, Seini) mushroom crops Spreyton, Blue Ribbon smoked small goods Camdale, various vegetable processors.

Simultaneously I sold fire protection door to door in these industries for importers like Firemaster & CIG. In this manner I visited most timber and logging operations.

Melbourne industrial scene; worked all over, natural gas & fuel, oil refineries & petro-chemical plants, ICI research, paper mills, hospitals, breweries, food processors, appliance makers, MMBW water supply & sewage treatment plants, Pilkington’s float glass plant.

Some special fields in industry, Pressure and Temperature measurements, Ph control in acid treatment, flow of slurries, effluents, furnaces and boilers, natural gas & super heated steam, evaporation, freezers, vacuum, chlorination, fluoridation, floatation, continuous cellulose web production, hazardous environments, radio propagation and reception, induction furnaces, nuclear devices, x-rays.

Other long term interests; Australian military aircraft production and aeronautical research at Fishermen’s Bend, Bushfires, Civil Construction, Electricity generation and distribution, Industrial noise & hearing defects, Materials recycling, Hand tools, Soils, Timber, Streams.

Major industrial achievement – my retirement, mostly intact with ten toes and fingers.”

Thanks Taz.

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This post will be filed under a category titled ‘people’. As a reader and/or commentator at this blog you may like to tell us something about yourself. Contributions encouraged please email to jennifermarohasy@jennifermarohasy.com.

Alan Ashbarry has a deep commitment to people in communities that depend upon the sustainable management of Australian forests and acknowledges the pride that forest scientists, professional foresters and timber workers have in providing a renewable resource and in creating jobs that have long term benefit for society, the economy and the environment.

Alan was a researcher for the 15 branches of Timber Communities Australia (TCA) in Tasmania and describes himself as more of a people person than a technician. He has told me that he got involved with TCA intially through “helping a mate”.

If you are trying to find a forestry related statistic, I discovered some months ago that an email to Alan was a good place to start.

When I first asked Alan to tell readers of this blog something about himself he declined. He said he prefered to stay in the background. But he’s since decided to come out and tell us that he occasionally posts a comment at this blog under the pen name “Cinders”.

Alan is concerned that the people who know the forest best and depend upon it for their daily family income are often dwarfed by the media coverage of well orchestrated campaigns.

Cinders posted the following comment last December at this blog:

“For those interested in propaganda icons by the extreme green movement this boastful extract from one of their books is worth a read.

THE REST OF THE WORLD IS WATCHING GREEN IMAGES
by Richard Flanagan and Cassandra Pybus

Innovation has been a hallmark of the Tasmanian Green movement, not only in its political orientation, but also in its appropriation of the marketing methods of capitalism to win its battles. Long before any other radical movement in Australia, the Tasmanian Greens were using market research, sophisticated advertising techniques, direct-sell catalogues and photographic images of the highest quality to sell their message. “We have grabbed ideas from wherever we could,” Bob Brown explained in a 1983 interview. “We looked at the way other people who sell cheese and paper tissues, how they do it, and thought that if that sells an idea then how much more important that [it] be grafted by us into saving wilderness”. In an era vaunted as the age of communications (and all the contradictions that this implies) the Tasmanian Greens have been a measure of their time.

… The campaign to protect Lake Pedder brought forth a range of aesthetic responses which drew from the Romantic tradition and also the newer modernist abstract aesthetics. The most potent expression of the beauty of Pedder was in the work of Lithuanian-born bushwalker, Olegas Truchanas, who regularly packed the Town Hall with his slide shows. Truchanas’ magnificent collections of photographs of the Tasmanian wilderness had been lost, along with his home, in the 1967 bushfires. He determined to rebuild his collection to show people just what it was that would be destroyed by hydro schemes in the south-west.

Truchanas returned again and again to the southwest. In 1972 he lost his life in the Gordon River he wished to save. “He had been destroyed by biblical simplicity by two of the elements: fire and water,” wrote his friend, artist Max Angus. “Classical mythology affords no stronger example of the drama of the incorruptible man who passes into legend.”

Olegas Truchanas became the Greens’ archetypal hero: the man who returns from of the wilderness with an aesthetic and a political vision which challenges the established order, and then is returned to the wilderness in the most profound and final way. It is a reincarnation of the great Romantic figure: the artist as hero, the essence of which is starkly captured in Ralph Hope-Johnstone’s photograph of Truchanas taken days before his death.

The posthumous publication of Truchanas’ seminal work in The World of Olegas Truchanas (1975) was an impressive beginning to the Greens’ role as a major cultural interpreter. Books, films, photographic ephemera poured out of the movement during the late 1970s and early 1980s. These were the nub of a political-commercial-aesthetic nexus which the Tasmanian Greens skillfully nurtured, creating their own national distribution through the very successful Wilderness shops. The Greens made wilderness a commodity whose commercial nakedness they clothed in the Romantic aesthetic borrowed from Piguenit and refined by the wilderness photographers who followed in Truchanas’ footsteps.

The leading exponent of this school was Truchanas’ student and disciple, Peter Dombrovskis. The political Romantic vision has its apotheosis in his photo of Rock Island Bend, the most famous photograph ever taken of the Franklin River. It was used to illustrate a full-colour supplement in all major newspapers on the eve of the 1983 federal election. The ALP judged the Franklin issue to have been critical in the outcome of that election. In 1990, when once again Green issues looked to determine the federal election outcome, Rock Island Bend was prominent in glossy advertising promoting the ALP as the environmentally responsible choice.
Amanda Lohrey has suggested that in Tasmania the Greens have fused the Utopian and Romantic visions of Tasmania into a new vision that is greater and different from both of them. This new vision finds eloquent expression in a well-publicised photo of Christine Milne taken at the height of the Wesley Vale controversy. This high Romantic image – a solitary woman on a blasted heath – became charged, in the context of a highly charged environmental and political battle, with a whole new array of rich meanings.

In this image is also the idea of the Green leader as a solitary prophet, remote from the movement which creates and sustains such leaders. Images of mass action, such as the 20,000-strong rally in Hobart in 1983, have never fascinated the media in the same way as the image of a messianic leader.

Long-time Green strategist, Chris Harries, has written of the problems and contradictions of using the media during the Franklin campaign. Faced with a media “which demands superstars and which has conditioned society to think in terms of hierarchies and heroes … Bob Brown played out The Life of Brian. His pre-eminence in the media campaign was always understood as a means to an end, not an end in itself, and he was painfully aware of the contradiction”.

A media that creates a messiah must logically have its tale told in full, replete with a crucifixion. When forestry workers at Farmhouse Creek dragged Bob Brown (one of many protesters) away from the bulldozer, they were enacting their set roles in a passion play cum photo opportunity par excellence- The powerful image of this photo, shown over and over again across the nation and across the world, is full of falsities, not the least of which is the idea of the prophet being destroyed by a stupid and vicious common people.

The Farmhouse Creek photo does also point to a change in the political aesthetic in Green promotion in the late 1980s. Forests do not lend themselves to Romantic vistas in quite the same way as do wild rivers, but images of the violence done to majestic native forests do, and these became more prominent than the images of the forests themselves.

Stark monochrome vistas of burnt-over clearfells became the staple of Green publications throughout the forestry battles. Likewise, as the forestry industry and government strengthened their armoury against the Green protest, images of confrontation loomed large, both in the media and the Green press. The workers, not the bosses, are portrayed as the enemy in graphic close-ups of chainsaw-wielding forestry workers or alarmed police cordons.“

Alan left TCA at the end of 2007 and now is an independent consultant specialising in Tasmania’s forest and natural resource management sector

Alan Ashbarry lives in Tasmania with his wife and four inspirational children.

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This post will be filed under a category titled ‘people’. As a reader and/or commentator at this blog you may like to tell us something about yourself. Contributions encouraged please email to jennifermarohasy@jennifermarohasy.com.

This post was updated on May 14, 2008

I’ve observed that comment threads following blog posts can be a bit like forests. When just a few people post lots of comments, they tend to crowd out others, and you end up with a less diverse thread.

There is an old fellow who comments every so often at this blog. He tends to make a useful remark or observation here and there.

Once he dominated a very long comment thread, but it was on a topic he knows so much about. Boxer knows a lot about forestry issues and how to grow a healthy native forest.

In the beginning Boxer used his real name at this blog, then he started signing off ‘Boxer’. He has said that he can relate to Boxer the hard working old horse in George Orwell’s classic novel Animal Farm.

But what a fate befell Orwell’s Boxer. He was working hard trying to get the windmill build for the good of all the animals, but he slipped, and while he was down, the pigs had him carted off to the local glue factory. No state funeral.

Orwell’s novel is about a revolution gone wrong.

Our Boxer has made the following comment about revolutions:

“I think revolutions are not my favourite events because they develop their own momentum and purpose which is not related to the original reason for change.

I don’t trust myself either, when I latch onto an idea, because proving myself to be right very quickly becomes the object of the exercise.

I am interested in the choices we have to make to manage the state of the environment, where all the options, other than eliminate humans altogether, are compromises and we have to choose the least worst course of action.

I follow your blog because you have a tenacious way of pursuing the evidence, which I admire. Only by sticking to the evidence can we avoid the worst pitfalls of picking a side for emotive reasons and then defending that position at all costs, even if one of those costs is worsening environmental fallout somewhere else.”

At this blog, and on the issue of a dead platypus Boxer once commented,

“At least he shot it and then boiled it; he could have brought it to the boil and then shot it.

And on the subject of climate change,

“As soon as someone says ‘the evidence is all in, no further debate is necessary’ I become confident their argument is too weak to survive rigorous analysis. This accusation can be levelled at both sides of this debate at times.

And on forestry,

“Most forest scientists are public sector people, and public servants are not encouraged to discuss their work in public forums. You may be aware that the principal function of the public servant is to NOT embarrass the Minister under ANY circumstances. My minister was part of the public campaign to crush the local forest industry. So I’m not likely to participate in this sort of debate in a more public place using my own name am I?

Somewhere in the public service act there is the power for my employer to put me in a corner to sharpen pencils for the next decade for writing this.”

No. We don’t want our Boxer carted off to the glue factory. We value his insights, appreciate his pen name and we look forward to his next insightful contribution.

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This post will be filed under a category titled ‘people’. As a reader and/or commentator at this blog you may like to tell us something about yourself? Contributions encouraged please email to jennifermarohasy@jennifermarohasy.com.