Carnivorous Nights (43 page)

“We've got such a great wild intact island compared to the rest of the world,” he said. “Yet we're looking at the greatest slaughter of Tasmanian ecosystems in history. This year 150,000 logging trucks each carrying thirty tons of our forests will go to the wood chip mills to export what's left of the great Tasmanian forest to the Japanese paper mills. The utilitarian view is still there. If you can get £1 for the tiger, do so. If you can get wood chips from an ancient tree, cut it down.”

Bob handed us a copy of a small book he had written about a wilderness area just an hour and a half's drive from Hobart called the Styx Forest. It was home to the tallest trees anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere. Yet it was being subjected to heavy, industrial logging.

“It's called the Styx?” we said. “How did it get that name?”

No one knew exactly, Bob said. The river through the valley had been marked as the Styx on maps as early as 1826. Whoever named it had a “fear of shadows” and a little knowledge of Greek mythology.

But the Styx had more than just big trees. This area was one of the last
known homes of the Tasmanian tiger. “The last six thylacines trapped in the wild came out of the headwaters of the Styx, Tyenna, and Florentine rivers,” Bob said. The wild mountains from which these rivers flowed down had been a refuge for tigers. “A trapper named Elias Churchill caught them there in the early 1930s. And that included the last one that died at the zoo not far from here.”

One of the last places where Tasmanian tigers were known to have lived was being clear-cut. Talk about adding insult to injury.

We glanced at the clock. Our time with the senator had long run out. His aides kept popping their heads in the door and glaring at us. Bob ignored them.

“I have something to show you,” he said. The senator opened one of the drawers in his desk and found a photo of a captive Tasmanian tiger. The picture was slightly grainy and a significant portion overexposed. But it didn't matter. The total number of photos of live thylacines was limited. There were none from the nineteenth century, and only a handful from the early part of the twentieth. This was one we had never seen. On the back, the scene was identified: “Battery Point Zoo, 1913.” It had been taken in Hobart. The photo showed a thylacine behind a makeshift chicken wire enclosure putting its nose up to the obscured face of a man squatting outside. The tiger looked powerful, the muscles in its hind legs rippled. It had twelve broad stripes across its back and cast a near perfect shadow. “I bought this at a local market two years ago,” Bob said.

Once again, the picture raised more questions than it answered. “Where was it captured in the wild?” Bob wondered. “Was this animal sent to a zoo overseas?” Although the senator's search had officially ended decades before, he was still collecting and sifting evidence.

A
few days later, still mulling over the fate of the tiger, we headed west out of Hobart with Suzi Pipes, a campaigner for the Tasmanian Wilderness Society. She was driving us to the Styx valley—the one Bob had told us about—in her Nissan Bluebird station wagon. And while relieved to let someone else take the wheel for a while, we were not entirely comfortable with her laissez-faire motoring style. She seemed to think the road was a distraction.

Suzi was about five feet two inches tall, with a short blond bob. She was bonding with Alexis over the topic of pets. He had shown her the boudoir photo of his cat, Beatrice.

“I really miss my puss'ems,” he said.

“I know how you feel,” said Suzi. “I already miss my rats.”

Suzi kept Norway rats as pets. They roamed freely through her house. Recently they had staked out territory in her bedroom and were biting holes in her bedsheets. While telling this story, she was looking over her shoulder at Alexis in the back seat. Meanwhile, we were trying to alert her that we were rapidly approaching a car stopped in our lane.

“Uh, Suzi … there's a car … watch out!”

She turned around and slammed on the brakes just in time. “Sorry,” she said cheerfully. Next to the stopped car, a man and a woman were crouching on the highway and examining the pouch of a dead wallaby, presumably looking for a joey that might have survived the crash. Little did they know how close they had come to becoming roadkill themselves.

As she slowed down to observe them, Suzi told us she had always wanted to look after an orphaned marsupial. “If you're caring for a joey, you can take them to work with you. You can take them to the cinema. You're allowed.” We wondered whether young Ruby, the wallaby who hopped through our motel room in Arthur River, would have enjoyed going to the movies. Perhaps Ruby would have appreciated marsupial exploitation films like
Kangaroo Jack
and
Howling III: The Marsupials.

The Wilderness Society, Suzi told us, was heading the crusade to preserve Tasmania's old-growth forests. The Styx Valley was home to some of the tallest trees in the world. Yet half the valley was designated as “production forest,” which meant that large swaths of old-growth trees were being chopped down.

Suzi drove off the highway onto an unpaved logging road, and we crossed a wooden bridge over the Styx River. We paused to consider the implications of crossing a real river with a mythological name and watched the dark water curve off into shadows beneath ancient trees. The bridge's supports were made with whole, unfinished logs of astonishing size. The thylacines that had once drunk from this river had truly lived among giants.

Our first stop in the valley was the Big Tree Reserve. Ironically, we had to pass by ugly clear-cuts and tree plantations to get there. The reserve is home to what has been dubbed “The Big Tree,” a
Eucalyptus regnans
that is eighty-six meters (282 feet) tall. We walked along a gravel trail lined with informational signs that had been laid down through the forest.

When we reached the Big Tree, we looked up and thought, Living things aren't supposed to get this big. At its base, the Big Tree was fortythree feet around. It would have taken an army of tree huggers to embrace it. Next to it Alexis looked like a termite standing underneath a chair leg. It was impossible to get the tree in perspective. It was eighty feet taller than the Statue of Liberty. We leaned back, arching our spines as far as they would bend. The Big Tree shot up like an Apollo rocket and exploded into a burst of green fireworks high in the sky.

“It looks so sparse,” we said. The Big Tree was all trunk for more than half its height, and the first branches didn't appear until 180 feet up.

“That's because the canopy is so far away,” Suzi said. “If you climbed up to where the leaves are, it would be like a jungle.”

Eucalyptus regnans
means the “reigning” eucalyptus tree. Currently,
the only trees in the world taller than
Eucalyptus regnans
are California's coastal redwoods. The redwood champion, the Mendocino Tree, reaches a height of 367.5 feet. But according to the
Guinness Book of World Records
, the tallest tree in modern history was actually a
Eucalyptus regnans.
In 1885, loggers on the Australian mainland purportedly felled a
Eucalyptus regnans
that measured 470 feet.

Next to the Big Tree, a sign put up by Forestry Tasmania read:

A chart showed that in the 1950s, the Big Tree was ninety-eight meters (321 feet) tall. Now at eighty-six meters, the Big Tree is just above the eighty-five meters that Forestry Tasmania had designated as the minimum height of a tree worthy of saving. Not eighty-four meters, not eighty-three. Once this tree “shrank” below the cutoff mark, we suspected it would be headed for the chopper—no matter if it was four hundred years old and growing when the explorer Abel Tasman had first sighted Tasmania.

Suzi and the Wilderness Society wanted to prevent that from happening. They proposed turning 37,000 acres of the Styx valley into a national park. It would be called “the Valley of the Giants.” Then these old-growth forests would be preserved in perpetuity. But Forestry Tasmania had other ideas.

We looked for a sign that might give us some facts about
Eucalyptus regnans
trees. What did the flowers look like? How much oxygen did each tree produce? Instead, we found this one:

It was good to know that the wonders of the world could be of use instead of just sitting there looking pretty. We imagined a sign posted next to Michelangelo's
David
on the industrial applications of marble:

From the Big Tree Reserve, it was a surprisingly short drive to where Suzi took us next.

“This was Olivia Newton-John's coupe,” she said. For a brief moment, we imagined Olivia dancing in black leather pants, hugging a big mossy eucalyptus, and singing “You're the one that I want. Oooh-ooooh-ooh, honey!” The pop singer had filmed a TV spot in the coupe (the name given to areas designated for logging) to advocate its preservation. Since then, the loggers had gotten physical with her forest. The area had been cleared and burned, and it was covered in huge stumps that looked like rotted, black teeth.

Alexis sucked in his breath. “Look at the size of those.”

We walked across charred ground, past chunks of smashed-up, ashcovered wood toward one of the biggest stumps. It was taller than we were. What remained of its bark was black and crumbling. We grabbed on to handholds and hauled ourselves on top of it. Twenty-five people could have stood up there with us. From this perch, we could see the Maydena Range—about a mile off. It was thickly covered with
Eucalyptus regnans
and myrtles. A single slash ran through it for running hydroelectric wires, but otherwise it was twenty thousand acres of uncut, old-growth forest. “It's got no roads. No tracks,” said Suzi. “If you go over there you need a compass. That's the heart of our proposed national park.”

As we stood there, we contemplated the enormousness of the stump and the size of the tree it had once been part of. We hoped it had been used for Shakespeare and not toilet paper.

Actually, Suzi said, some of the wood hadn't been used at all. “With the old-growth, they're often more interested in the land than the trees,”
she said. Once the virgin forest was cleared, Forestry Tasmania could turn the land into a tree plantation. Behind the clear-cut was a plantation of young trees not native to Tasmania, growing in neat soldierlike rows.

Suzi said that to prepare the land for replanting, the clear-cuts were burned at extremely hot temperatures. Helicopters flew over the stumps and dropped packets of petroleum gel that exploded on impact. They worked like napalm. After the scorched ground had been reseeded, forestry workers laid out poison baits to stop native animals from browsing on the plantation trees. Weirdly, the poison—called 1080—was put in carrots dyed the color blue. When possums, wombats, pademelons, and wallabies came to graze on the young shoots, they also dined on the blue carrots—and ended up dying slow, painful deaths from the poisoning.

The use of 1080 poison in Tasmania was highly controversial—pet dogs sometimes scavenged on dead animals that had eaten the blue carrots and then died in horrible convulsions. And animal lovers didn't like to see so many native creatures knocked off for the purpose of enriching corporate tree farmers. Suzi positively shuddered as she described it.

Suzi drove on to another coupe, this one old-growth forest that had been marked for the chainsaw. She parked on a logging road, and pointed out a small trail that Wilderness Society volunteers had blazed through the woods and marked with little flags. It led through moss and tree ferns to an unusual double-trunked eucalyptus tree. At the base, it was fifty-six feet around. About fifty feet up, the trunk separated into two trees. Because the slope was so steep, one of the double tree's massive roots actually shot through the air, forming a bridge we could walk under, before embedding itself into the soil.

Suzi was trying to come up with a catchy name for the double-trunked tree to get people to rally around saving the forest. We racked our brains to think of something Classic that would fit in with the theme of the Styx. The Pillars of Hercules? Jupiter's Salad Tongs?