Tasmania has had more than its fair share of such crony-capitalism, as Beresford’s account makes clear. (Lest we assume that isolation from Canberra, Sydney, and Melbourne is to blame for such impropriety, the recent revelations from the anti-corruption commissions in Victoria and New South Wales suggest otherwise.) Nevertheless, the Petri dish of Tasmania’s élite provided the ideal conditions for corruption and nepotism in the name of economic development. According to Beresford, the origins of the Tasmanian brand of developmentalism stretch back to the all-powerful Hydro-Electric Commission, which was established in the 1920s. With the full support of successive Tasmanian governments, its program for the ‘hydro-industrialisation’ of the state had by the 1970s become the template for ‘all future development in Tasmania’, including the Forestry Commission and the industrialisation of Tasmania’s forests.

North-west Tasmania, 2001 (photograph by TTaylor via Wikimedia Commons)

Founded in Launceston in 1875 as a building supplies business, Gunns grew to dominate the local building and construction industry for the next century. When the Gunn family severed ties with the business in the mid-1980s, the company was floated on the stock exchange. Under John Gay, the regional sawmiller underwent a transformation into the biggest timber company in Australia. By 2003, Gunns had become one of the top 150 companies on the Australian Stock Exchange, and the largest private employer in Tasmania. Central to its rapid rise was the company’s export of woodchips from native and plantation forests to Japanese buyers. Although its logging practices were attracting growing criticism, the strong support of government, business, and union leaders allowed Gunns to embark on its ill-fated pulp mill project in the Tamar Valley.

Opposed to Gunns and the greedy Goliaths of Tasmanian politics are the Davids of Beresford’s story: the greenies, whistleblowers, and farmers. Since Lake Pedder, they have tried to protect Tasmania’s forests and to expose widespread corruption in the state government and management of its natural resources. Despite Machiavellian manoeuvres, bullying, violence, and costly legal battles, they persevered to expose the environmental toll of the industrialisation of Tasmania’s forests. Beresford lays bare an appalling record: 1080 poison used to kill native marsupials; misleading audits; the failure of self-regulation; dust from woodchip piles; clearing of local farms; herbicides. The Davids took the fight all the way to Japan, where they targeted companies that bought woodchips from Gunns. Their greatest ally was perhaps the market: by 2009, enormous debt and mismanagement was crippling Forestry Tasmania and Gunns’s public image was well and truly battered. Despite the efforts of the Giddings government to sustain the company and its doomed pulp mill, Gunns collapsed just three years later.

‘Opposed to Gunns and the greedy Goliaths of Tasmanian politics are the Davids of Beresford’s story: the greenies, whistleblowers, and farmers’

From this telling, it is tempting to surmise that Gunns as well as its friends in government and the unions – to paraphrase historian Keith Hancock’s famous line – ‘hated trees’. The industrial production of woodchips from the wilderness only reinforces this conclusion. Likewise, Beresford is critical of the alignment of the Tasmanian working class with what he describes as ‘the elite view of hydro-industrialisation’. Reducing the fight for Tasmania’s forests into a case of ‘us versus them’ does little, however, to advance our understanding of the connections between work and nature – between Tasmanian mill workers, sawmillers, and logging truck drivers and the forests from which they derive their livelihoods. As American environmental historian Richard White observed in his seminal 1996 essay, ‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’, ‘Environmentalists so often seem self-righteous, privileged and arrogant because they so readily consent to identifying nature with play and making it by definition a place where leisured humans come only to visit and not to work, stay or live.’ Segregating these spaces as Beresford has done serves only to reinforce the ‘anti-environmentalism’ that he describes as a ‘defining theme of (Tasmanian) government policy since early colonial times’. But as White warned in his essay, ‘Without an ability to recognise the connections between work and nature, environmentalists will eventually reach a point where they seem trivial and extraneous and their issues politically expendable.’

The David and Goliath framing of the demise of Gunns also falls short of adequately comprehending the complexities of the coalition that formed against the company. Those interviewed for the book are all of the green persuasion, and the likes of businessmen Geoffrey Cousins and Tony Whish-Wilson, both vital players in this story, are hardly underdogs. Again, the issue of class simmers but is not brought to the boil, with Beresford only noting that few ‘born and bred’ Tasmanians became activists in opposing the Gunns pulp mill, compared to those who had either recently arrived from the mainland or returned after pursuing professional experiences elsewhere. Cousins is rightly lauded for taking the issue to the mainland in the lead up to the 2007 federal election, which helped to make the fight against Gunns a national concern. What goes unexplored, however, is the way in which this politicking fed the ‘us versus them’ sentiment of parochial Tasmanian politics. As Premier-Elect Will Hodgman told the ABC’s 7.30 Tas program just last year, ‘I’m sick to death of Tasmania being treated as the environmental conscience of the rest of the country.’

Although Beresford makes a case for Tasmanian exceptionalism, it would be more constructive to find common ground across Bass Strait. The fate of forest industries and the communities they support is remarkably similar to those in the nation’s ailing manufacturing sector. Both forestry and manufacturing have been heavily subsidised, but neither has prepared themselves or their workers for changing economic times. Why would they? After all, state and federal governments have also neglected to face these challenges in progressive ways, as declining educational standards, denial of climate change, and the end of the mining boom show. All these issues and more make Beresford’s book an especially timely and important one in an Australia that is ‘open for business’.