There are two things that Tasmania has more of than anything else.
We've noticed a great many things that are different about Tasmania. The diversity of farming is amazing - here we saw our first hops and poppies. The wood piles outside every house are a clear sign of how cold the winters here are.
Hydro Tasmania proudly proclaim that they have the largest water storages in Australia. Despite this, most Tassie towns are on water restrictions. They should have enough water for all of Tasmania, and Melbourne as well. (What about a pipeline across Bass Strait?) Unfortunately, none of it is used for drinking!
There are two things that Tasmania has more of than anything else.
Weeds and logging trucks.
Weeds
One of the down sides of the mapping projects we have done, is that we are able to identify a degraded environment.
The key factor for the prevalence of weeds in Tassie seems to be the climate.
Nowhere else in Australia are there such large expanses of land so similar in climate to England.
From what we've seen, nowhere else in Australia is there so much willow and blackberry.
There is blackberry everywhere. It lines almost every road, rail line, and river. There are huge hillsides of it. More even than the western slopes of Victoria's share of the Great Dividing Range. The birds love the fruit, and spread the seeds. Roadside blackberry is mown, not killed. Given so little evidence of significant control, we can only conclude it is a lost battle.
Another prolific weed of similar stature is gorse. Again there are huge paddocks and hillsides of it, but it is yet to get a strangle hold on the riparian corridors. Perhaps it prefers more well drained soils. Perhaps the other weeds just out-compete it.
In the next size group is hawthorn. It was quite clearly used by the early settlers as hedges, but has spread through the paddocks and rivers. We're told it looks great when it's in flower, but to us it's just a blight on the landscape.
Willow, like blackberry, is everywhere. It seems to have infested most of the river systems. In some, it and hawthorn, are the only vegetation along the riparian corridor. Unlike blackberry, it seems as if control could lead to elimination. Unfortunately, there seems little will for this to happen.
Willow, hawthorn, and poplar even line the verges of some major highways, as if by deliberate planting.
And thus we conclude that Tasmania is Australia's weed capital.
Logging
Tasmania has more logging trucks than any non-Tasmanian could possibly imagine.
They run through the streets of every town.
Often in both directions.
(Pine goes one way, and eucalypts go the other. Then the planks and woodchips criss cross back.)
And of course, like a wheat filled road train, a loaded log truck has right of way.
And they know it.
Tasmania's timber industry is exempt from the normal freedom of information laws. This single fact is the most clearcut evidence that the industry and the politicians that control it are corrupt. The total timber output of the local industry appears to be a state secret. Why should that be so?
The timber industry has a regulatory body. It is staffed predominantly by industry representatives. It has never prosecuted any transgression of the logging regulations. Our fears of rampant corruption remain unabated.
No one could possibly dispute that we need timber to build our houses, or paper for our books.
But do we really need to clear fell thousand year old trees to sell wood chips to Japan?
Do we need to replace old growth forests with monoculture plantations?
Do we need to poison every animal that wasn't killed during the clear felling so our single species seedlings don't get nibbled on?
(Are fences really that much more expensive than poison?)
A significant percentage of the timber in old growth forests is uneconomic to remove.
The post-clearfell burns add most of it to the global warming problem, and the rest ends up fouling the rivers and beaches.
Tasmania is renowned for its wilderness. The definition of wilderness appears to be "anything that can't easily be logged, farmed, or mined". Even the wilderness is not exempt from past environmental vandalism. Parts of it have been logged, poisoned by mine tailings, infested with weeds along old stock routes, and invaded by feral bees, wasps and other nasties.
In the run-up to the forthcoming federal elections, both sides have declared that Tasmanian logging is not an election issue. The jobs of a few hundred old growth loggers and the profits of their masters are more important than any amount of environmental impact.
The participants are getting smarter though. Now they leave a narrow band of timber along the roadsides, so the tourists have a convenient illusion to indulge in.
The existence of rampant corruption appears conclusive.
Thank god for those willing to make a stand on the issue.