We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 110
SPRING 2007
ESSAY
The Golden Mountain
Stephanie Green
Honourable Mention: 2007 Wildcare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize
Every day I look out my window and see a mountain of gold. It changes with the light from grim yellow to burnished clay. By day it is surrounded by the workings of the port, raw and prosaic, a stand of broken pyramids surrounded by a spiky tangle of pulleys and cranes. At night, the lights from the port make the woodchip mountain glow like treasure from the cave of the forty thieves.
I live in a house with a clear northern view to the sea. The front window overlooks a small port town on the northern edge of the island. All along this coastline are the workings of human habitation spread out against the land, hill surfaces scarred with roads and pylons, the fretwork of an open-cut mine, small towns and villages, little collections of beachside shacks beside narrow rocky beaches, mountainside houses with their backs to the westerly winds.
A highway tracks the northern coast, west and east of the woodchip pile. Here and there a jetty, or an outcrop of rocks staked with iron rings, invites investigation. It’s easy to pass the time among periwinkles and rock pools, wondering who might have set sail from one of these beaches, who perished, or never came back.
Australian beaches once seemed to me to be the last public space: where ordinary people could play freely, make their own patterns of pleasure and meaning, untrammelled by the digitised consumer practices that so strongly characterise our leisure time these days. But here, beside these island beaches, I am aware that the idea of any Australian beach as a space liberated from the by-products of globalism is deeply misguided. Glorious, as all coastlines are, these beaches have long been written over with the narratives of capture, exploitation and the necessary struggle to survive. Like the closed palm of a hand, these beaches are gouged with the marks of effort, repetition and emphasis. However often the waves smooth the sand over with sparkling scalloped edges, the stone and iron vestiges remain.
This is a working town, not a place of leisure, and its work has never been gentle or even greatly profitable to its citizens. In every way, this is a place where comfort has been slow to arrive. People have lived hand to mouth beside each other for generations, in bare weatherboard cottages on small sloping blocks of land. They tell each other’s family stories, the stories of their own fathers and mothers, how they came to this place and so on, backwards, for as many generations as they remember and forget. They know each other in the way that teaches how close it is safe to come, how far to stay away.
Remembered most vividly for the spectacular pollution of its former paper mill, the town now relies on the port, the so-called forest industries, local agricultural companies, small farms and businesses to sustain its livelihood. In a town that’s part of a region that has held the lowest school retention scores of any in the nation, the woodchip pile is among the few pillars of local wealth.
The golden mountain reaches the port in the form of many thousands of logs that have been ground into a mass of yellow saw-chips, ready for export interstate and overseas. Sometimes reaching the height of a multistorey office building, the woodchips are transported from where the logs have been cut and milled, to the port where they are poured onto the existing pile. Although ships come often for loading, and the pile is daily gutted and strewn by trucks and machines, the golden mountain never fully recedes. Every day it is poured and replenished. Every day the pyramids are remade.
I came here partly because of someone, and because I was in search of somewhere quiet to write. But although my nights and weekends are no longer regularly occupied with dinners and shopping, meetings and events, I can’t say that it is quiet. My noisy thoughts are always with me. And at night, particularly at night, I hear all kinds of sounds from the port below: the alarm of a ship about to leave the port, a reversing backhoe or truck, the clatter of cranes, the goods train scraping past with its sausage-string of containers.
In one sense those sounds are comforting. They are the sounds of jobs, fuel, food and income: the wellbeing of a community. They speak of productivity, profit, success. Because of those sounds people take their children for ice creams at the beach kiosk or ride a sailboat on windy days. Perhaps because of those sounds, or in spite of them, I saw a woman drag a nine-foot-wide paper glider onto the sand and attempt to launch it into the sky.
Yet, they are also warning sounds, of dying forests, infertile land, declining plant and animal diversity, atmospheric and meteorological changes which could ultimately destroy our ability to survive. Every year approximately 1,108,554 mass tonnes in woodchips leave this port, mostly bound for Japan. The port also handles 170,000 tonnes in logs and 122 mass tonnes in generic ‘timber products’ annually. There are fluctuations in demand. Every time demand drops, there are calls for the government to increase its investment, to keep the industry alive, protect exports and jobs. We need livelihood, after all. Yet, in the face of the evidence of global warming, it seems absurd to ask the government to subsidise the felling of massive numbers of non-plantation timber.
There are other figures, other questions: how many trees do we need on the planet to sustain the amount of oxygen we all need to breathe? Will the plants in our gardens − all our gardens put together − in any way make up for the loss of stable heritage rainforests in Australia or Sarawak or Brazil? How much fuel is required to cover distances by road and rail that carry the woodchips from their forest origin to their final destination? I don’t know those things. We could know: estimates of how many hectares of old forest are left, how many units of ozone are destroyed every time a forest is mown down, or why plantation timber isn’t enough to meet the market’s appetite? We won’t say it, but we know this: even with plantation timbers increasing in productivity, some day soon there won’t be enough old growth forest left to meet the quotas.
What interests me is that we do know much of what is necessary. There are plenty of scientists and commentators warning us of the impact of weather change, polar melting, rising sea levels. Yet we resist change. This seems to be what humans do. Even in conditions of privation we tend to resist change. And right now we resist anything that might alter the sense of wellbeing we acquire from consumption. Our governments and industries aren’t helping us. Indeed, we are daily encouraged to spend and consume. The most recent federal budget was calculated to produce just such a result. All the measures of national economic viability rest on an expectation of increased consumption and industrial productivity. There are no measures of sustainability, of sharing, of making sure there will be enough for each one. I have heard deforestation described as ‘a slow-onset disaster’.
Peter Newton from the CSIRO recently completed a survey tracing Australians’ patterns of consumption and their attitudes to the environment. Newton’s survey results, quoted in The Australian (May 17, 2006, p10), showed clearly that while Australians know and are concerned about global warming, soil salinity, and other issues, their levels of response to this concern have dwindled away, while their consumption of fuel and goods has increased. The government has now posed the possibility of nuclear power as a solution, but this is merely replacing one dangerous and expensive energy source with another that is much more dangerous and much more expensive.
The port is part of our lives now. We make of it a kind of entertainment. If there is a big ship arriving we take out the binoculars and watch as the tugs nose in against prow and stern. The cargo ships come for loading, or for delivery of goods. They bear the names of towns and nations as far away from this place as it’s possible to imagine: Greece, Panama, Japan. Some of them are so large that it seems a feat of maritime mastery to dock them safely inside the port.
Cruise ships come too, in the warmer weather, enormous floating resorts that swell in size the closer you get to them. One sunny Saturday the Oriana suddenly appeared, blown in from southern New Zealand where the wind and the high, wild South Pacific seas had made for uncomfortable resort weather. A gigantic white edifice, the Oriana slipped into the dock as easily as any vessel half its size.
On such fine days, with visitors in town, the Mayor leaves his office and goes down to the port to welcome the visitors to the island, before they are loaded onto a tour bus that takes them into the mountains. The Mayor has lived in this place all his life and can remember when there were trees overlooking the bay, instead of houses. He’ll take you into his office and point out the house on the hillside where he lives, with a view much like ours. He could tell you about the many carcasses of ships, wrecked by urgent seas and rocky shallows, along a coastline too lonely to offer rescue. He could also tell you that there has been a port of some kind here since 1827, servicing the timber, wool and mining industries, tucked against the midpoint of a wide, shallow bay.
From our window at night, the black edge of the bay curving away towards Round Head is as glamorous as any Pacific island retreat. By day it is littered with used transport containers, metal street signs, industrial sheds and the cutaway tracks for the train. Some tell me that the town has changed a great deal in the last few years: that there are new measures in place, new visions and possibilities for cultural and economic change. Local industry has teamed up with councils and government to invest in the region. There are networks, support structures, opportunities. It’s a beginning, maybe, but the real change is yet to come. Some other towns along the north coast have moved forward more quickly, welcoming more cultural diversity and attracting new kinds of profile and investment. In our town, the woodchip pile remains a sign: that we are still taking out our priceless inheritance and sending it away.
Thirty years ago a big American engineering company came here to deepen the harbour and build the breakwater that claims safe haven for the port from the ocean. The strait between the island and the mainland can be dangerous and unpredictable, even on a fine day. The old port was neither deep enough nor sufficiently protected from rough seas for the big ships to come close to land. It took a long time, but finally a way was found. The new port changed what was possible in this town.
The men came and stayed in the town for weeks. People here still remember them. The Americans were tall and friendly and, in this small town, they made a lot of noise. Every day they began work at 5am. They dug away sand to give the port depth and drove great pylons down into the rocky bed. Sometimes, in the afternoons when the wind blew up strong, the waves pushed them so hard and jerkily back towards the shore that they had to stop. That made them fierce with frustration. Then all they could do was to drink and fight. In the mornings they were bleeding, sore-headed and sorry. The wind would be quiet for a few hours then, and they could go back to their work until the troubles were forgotten. In this way, the Americans made friends and enemies. At the end they lifted the long cement platforms with the giant hoist and lowered them into place. Then they went back to their own kind and no one ever heard from them again.
From where I can see it from our place on the three-cornered ledge above the town, the port moorings remind me of balsa wood models. Down below, at the level of the port itself, they are solid metal trunks. One rainy day, a few weeks after I had arrived here, we drove down the hill, past the town and along the side road, right into the port precinct. The centre of town is half a dozen grid streets running down to the ocean esplanade, with the port wall dominating the eastern side of the town. It was Easter Sunday and the weather had been cold and wet all day, but around 4pm the rain stopped and we decided to go out. By the time we reached the highway, the rain had started again. We crossed the train tracks and turned right, following the road towards the dock. We pulled up beside the harbour-master’s hutch. No one was around. There were just three or four parked cars and a transport truck. The rain was heavy. A gigantic cargo vessel was moored in front of us with the word Panama painted on its bow in peeling white letters. We didn’t know what the ship would take away in the morning, or what it would leave behind. We wanted to explore, to investigate the maritime paraphernalia, muscular ropes, mechanical devices for hauling and loading, oil-stained wooden struts and fences, but it was too wet for us to leave the car. At one point we thought we saw a figure on the deck of the cargo ship but it was too far away to be sure.
I came to this place not long ago from Canberra, partly because I missed the sea. I have lived and worked in port cities before − Melbourne and Fremantle − where the ships, the great baffles and groynes, the scarecrow cranes and the clanking activity of the port linked the urgent life of the city to the giant ocean. Here too, the port carries the story of the town, and the wealth of its neighbouring lands. Logs of wood and mill chips have been brought and carried away from this place since the mid-nineteenth century. Mainly, I came because there was someone and we had already been apart for too long.
Perhaps my fascination with the port and its burden is to do with a kind of longing for the open sea, a desire to set sail without destination: a hope that the end cannot yet be in sight. Here, as elsewhere, I find my eyes seeking the horizon, trying to see past the edge of the sky. Often I don’t have the time to look, but I do anyway, snatching the sea with my eyes as I drive down to the inland valley where I work. Every time I drive back, over the curve of the hill towards home, where the sea rises to meet the road, I want to stop and stare, let my eyes take in the vastness, the curve of the globe, the absence of limitation.
From the picture window at the front of this house, I have that daily reminder of limitation: forests of more than a hundred years cut down in large quantities and sold for short-term profit. Without their own kind around them, the trees will not grow back and the water levels will rise. As we lose the trees, so we will lose the shore. That this seems inevitable is not surprising. It should be: yet the same process of deforestation, land degradation, rising water tables and soil salinity has happened all over the globe where people have used natural resources beyond the land’s capacity to replenish.
On another island, years ago, I was impressed with the height and drama of the mountains there, bare rock softened only by a haze that made the cliffs glow blue. The island was Crete and my travelling companion told me that those ancient mountains had once been covered with forest. It amazed me to think that the peoples of ancient times had been able to destroy so many trees, and that they had been foolish enough, as it seemed to me, not to be more careful with the source of their own sustenance. Even if one were inclined to discount the advent of global warming, it seems obvious that our present rampant consumption, with its degrading effect on our land and water, cannot be sustained.
I read about the effects of global warming and the demise of the desert dwellers. How those communities who have lived for centuries by subsistence farming in Africa and South America simply will not survive. Increasingly there are forecasts of humans and animals left clinging to the peaks and polar lands, fighting each other for space and survival. A future that is perhaps only fifty years away.
The woodchip pile is red-gold today. It can’t be myrtle or radiata. They say there’s hardly any blackwood left. Will I have learned the names of the different types of wood by the time their stands are all gone? The local politicians say that the town could not survive without the woodchip industry. At the moment that’s true. Without confidence, education and industry innovation, nothing will change. A recent article about logging techniques in the local newspaper noted that a smaller percentage of old growth trees are now being logged due to plantation timbers becoming more productive. But the quotas still have to be filled, even when the Japanese demand for woodchips has fallen. Every day the golden mountain grows.
The woodchip pile functions in a variety of ways: as a town icon and eyesore, deflector of tourists, symbol of loss, local source of income and occupation, and, I imagine, as a resource that the local people might claim as their own. There are many houses with gardens in our street, covered in woodchip mulch. No doubt the people buy most of their mulch from the local nursery, but with the great pile in full view, it could be hard to resist, especially for impoverished retirees devoted to gardening, with time on their hands. I have some glee in imagining a handful of elderly hoodlums, men and women, wearing black balaclavas late at night, climbing over the fence and creeping into the portside compound with buckets and bags into which they scoop, from the mountain, small golden piles of their own, like children collecting sand for a beach castle.
The hillside descends steeply below our house. A concrete path, known by locals as the goat-track, runs from here to the town with a branch to the left. The branch path leads to a footpath below an angled side road, which can be reached via some steps built into a retaining wall. The main path to the town runs in a sharply sloping zigzag, past the branch path, to another turn. The long concrete steps are bleached and gritty, packed with tiny grey stones. A green railing offers a place to lean and stare at the view, and an excuse to rest.
In summer, when I first came here, I followed the path without any purpose, just to see where it would go. I passed a few staggered houses dug back into the earth, attached to little grey concrete garages perched at the edge of a street so steep and narrow that there was no space for a vehicle to turn. At the end of the path I struck a road that led me further down the hill, past a hawthorn tree and a bench beside some gravestones from the 1880s leaning against a wall. The road continued on to a garage and some traffic lights. Ahead of me I could see the top of the woodchip pile and the battlements of the port. It occurred to me then that there is a kind of war going on. Not a war of terror or extremity, but a war of indifference.
On my way home that day I passed others going in the opposite direction, an unshaven man smoking a cigarette, an old woman with a stick and a boy with a dog. The man nodded and might have spoken. The woman smiled shyly and looked away. The boy ran off along a weedy trail from where the old bush must have been cleared long ago. The dog bounded over the weeds and followed the boy. I wrote these occurrences down in my notebook because they held a kind of recognition: of how, with the busy passage of daily life, so much goes unseen. Breathless, climbing the steepest part of the hill, I stopped to lean on the railing, at the corner where I could angle my elbows comfortably for the view.
A steel-grey cargo vessel had backed out of the harbour and was turning towards the north, carrying away the massed shards of a forest. Those golden trees will not grow again.
STEPHANIE GREEN has published short fiction, poetry, essays and academic studies. Her collection of short fiction Too Much Too Soon was published by Pandanus Books in 2006. She has a doctorate from the University of Western Australia where she taught literature and writing for over ten years. Recently she has worked as a publisher and cultural program manager and is now based at the University of Tasmania’s Cradle Coast campus.
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