You’ve possibly not heard of the Barakula State Forest although it covers 260,000 hectares and is said to be the largest state forest in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s of some interest to me personally because I grew up on a farm just to the west of the forest, although I’d have to say that it was little more than a part of a very large blank, ‘empty’ patch on the map to the east of us, where practically no-one lived. Certainly no-one ever travelled that way.
I have an anecdote, of which more later.
The pressing matter is whether it should be re-classified as national park. Opponents claim that the usual values associated with national park status would be better served by keeping it as a sustainable logging reserve, as it has been for over 100 years. OK, that claim is made by the current sawmill owner, but that doesn’t necessarily make him wrong.
Here is the Google map that locates Barakula State Forest:
Chinchilla is 290 km north-west of Brisbane. Barakula, which consists of a sawmill, some houses for forestry workers and a school (or did when I visited in the 1970s) is a further 32 km. I’ve marked the road from Kingaroy to Biloela as the eastern side of the large empty patch on the map. Mostly apart from around the edges it’s 4WD territory from there to the Leichhardt Highway to the west. While we are here we’ll zoom in a bit:
Barakula State Forest map
If you draw a line SE from Guluguba and NE from Gurulmundi the lines will intersect pretty well on my home turf. The Great Dividing Range ran through our place, although “The Range” at that point was maybe 30 metres high. About 25% of our property drained to the south into the Murray-Darling Basin, the remainder to the north into the Fitzroy Basin which empties into the sea near Rockhampton. The soil to the north is fertile brigalow country. To the immediate south it’s what we called “forest country” or “lizard country” with lots of pine and soil that lacked fertility for cropping. This forest country swung around to the east of us. There is a spot on the Dogwood Creek headwaters (drains past Miles to the south) where Leichhardt on his first trip camped for a few days while he killed a beast and dried the meat.
That’s enough of that little diversion. You can read all about it here if your library can borrow a copy.
The main thing you need to know is that Barakula is not much good for anything but growing cyprus pine, which it does very well. This site waxes lyrical about the acacias and other flowering species, but in all honesty I suspect it’s a bit over-hyped. You need to know also that the rainfall is reasonable. We used to say 27 inches (675 mm). It’s in the 600-800 band on this map:
So here’s the first issue. Bill Burrows makes a big thing about vegetation thickening in Queensland if you let it go in it’s ‘pristine’ state, whereas the Aborigines probably kept it in a more open state through fire. This is contested by some.
Research done by Rod Fensham and others, for example, found considerable tree death “in the drier half of the savanna biome” in dry spells (30% rainfall deficit for three years). Fensham and Fairfax also found that thickening of gidgee near Longreach required several consecutive wet years to establish, which was then quite marked. Later the thickening scrub tended to choke the mature trees which under stress died leading to eventual thinning out again.
None of that bears directly on cyprus at Barakula. By contrast Barakula is in the wetter part of the biome and cypress is subject to fire whereas gidgee is fire-retardant. A segment on Stateline on 17 July showed a stark contrast between an attractive forest of straight cypress pine trees where thinning had been undertaken to promote tree growth and a thick scrubby mess where it had been let go. The best I can do is show you the Longreach gidgee (from Fensham and Fairfax).
Gidgee scrub
The above image shows the result of a single recruitment event in 1974. Barakula cypress by contrast would have had more mature trees and multiple recruitments making, I thought, a rather featureless messy look.
I have no idea how the Aborigines managed the Barakula forest, but thinning by fire would have been quite plausible. In the Stateline segment Martin Taylor of WWF says:
The rich biodiversity of Barakula seemed to do alright for the last however many million years up to the point that loggers and cows came along. To try and spin the argument that somehow biodiversity needs logging is just spurious. There’s no real scientific evidence. There sorts of comparisons are very dubious. Scientifically, they’re very risky because you’re looking at small little postage stamps of land that have been closed off within a larger landscape that’s highly disturbed and you’ll never get a good indication in those kinds of comparisons of what the original forest would have been like.
Well, Barakula isn’t a postage stamp and there’s quite a bit of forest outside the formal boundaries. Also he doesn’t know how the area was managed during the last 60,000 years. The contra line is that the biodiversity is doing well now under a regime where there is rotational logging every 25-30 years. The current approach is working so why risk something else when we have no scientific evidence to back it up?
The usual argument is that the tourist will come. Personally I wouldn’t, 4000 jobs seems crazy and I’m not sure I’d want that many people crawling all over the area. There is tourist access now for the serious bird and flower watchers.
Another line is the carbon sink one. It seems obvious to me that by incorporating cut wood into structures you are keeping the carbon out of the air for at least a time. Through harvesting new trees can grow whereas a live forest much reach a limit. Furthermore, if you don’t use Barakula cypress you presumably use something cut somewhere else, perhaps less sustainably.
I don’t know enough to resolve the issue one way or another, but it seems to me that if you think of biodiversity, aesthetics, economics and global warming there are reasons on all counts not to change the present regime.
The anecdote:
In 2004 the local district out there organised a Leichhardt weekend to celebrate the famous man’s 190th birthday. It included a picnic lunch at the spot where Leichhardt camped at the Dogwood headwaters. After lunch my brother and I and our wives headed back to the big smoke, that is initially west, whereas the rest of the mob were going to head north and then west.
With my brother at the wheel it soon became apparent that we had a problem. We should have been back onto the bitumen, but we weren’t and the road was getting rougher instead of smoother. Being super observant I pointed out that the sneaky old sun had swapped sides and was now on our left instead of our right.
It took me a while to convince the others that we were in fact heading east rather than west. Just had to be. It’s along way to Murgon and we weren’t in a 4WD. The forest at that point was not under management, was quite thick and in fact featureless.
Anyway my brother remapped what he’s done in his mind and had us out of there with greater facility than I could have managed. I had a new appreciation of the bushcraft of the explorers, who were always scouting ahead or going back to retrieve the cattle who would take off for the previous camp overnight. Or maybe the bush was a bit more open then, just maybe.
Update: Experienced forester Peter Lear says says no to the idea of a national park.
“I had a new appreciation of the bushcraft of the explorers…”
A fine turn of phrase. Interesting post, Brian, thanks for writing it.
I just can’t help observing that, depending on where you put the accent marks and the stresses, “Barakula” is a pretty funny bit of political humor. Accurate, too, sad to say. Anyway enuf of that. I would think a place the size of QLD would have an enormous amount of park/forest acreage. Hope so anyway.
Another line is the carbon sink one. It seems obvious to me that by incorporating cut wood into structures you are keeping the carbon out of the air for at least a time. Through harvesting new trees can grow whereas a live forest much reach a limit. Furthermore, if you don’t use Barakula cypress you presumably use something cut somewhere else, perhaps less sustainably.
I don’t know enough to resolve the issue one way or another, but it seems to me that if you think of biodiversity, aesthetics, economics and global warming there are reasons on all counts not to change the present regime.
Brian, you don’t say whether this “harvesting” is in the form of sawlogs or woodchipping? That’s an important difference. And does “harvesting” mean selective logging, or is it, as in Victoria, a euphemism for clearfelling/ Sorry if you’ve touched on these matters, I am reading very fast on my way to work!
The Barunggam People were successful with a native title claim some years ago. http://www.nntt.gov.au/Applications-And-Determinations/Registration-Test/Documents/qc99_5_27011999.pdf I think the claim covered part of the forest? If the Barakula is part of their traditional lands, perhaps someone needs to ask the local communities about their held knowledge of previous Indigenous land management practices. AS the CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems division has found, immense knowledge and skill is held by local Indigenous communities, even those some would see as having a tenuous relationship to country.
But it also raises the problem that we often fudge about reserving country – it is a myth that wilderness is best outcome; that wilderness means no management. We have an appalling habit of ignoring the fact that most of the Australian biota has been under human influence for at least 40 000 years. For those of us who walk into national parks what we see as pristine eco-systems are not; they are the result of 150-200 years of regrowth, interference and increasing isolation, representing enormous disruptions in previous rhythms of management. To assume that by reserving the Barakula will allow it to revert to a pristine state is simply not true. As Brian points outs, heavy regrowth leads to cypress pine death; ecological evidence that a fire regime had been practiced for millennium.
Helen, definitely sawlogs. Cypress is brilliant building timber, in part because white ants don’t eat it. I imagine they take the whole crop, but with sufficient care that the seedling grow.
I gather the residue is turned into garden mulch but there are plans for other products including biofuel.
j_p_z, the similarity in names didn’t occur to me.
It’s interesting that I gather from the book that most of the exploring party were pretty raw on bush experience. I guess they had to learn in a hurry.
Bernice, thanks for that. I wasn’t aware of the native title claim. It’s strictly not relevant, but my father, who came to the district a bit further west about 1914 told a few stories that he’d heard from the old-timers when he was young dating back to conflict with the tribes in the 1870s, including the Hornet Bank massacre, which was west of Wandoan-Taroom.
Bernice, are you seriously suggesting that there has been indigenous land management in that area (or indeed, most of Qld) within the past 4 generations?
Possibly a bit late for living memory. The generation of stockmen who remembered what you seek (a rough guide to indigenous “land management”) finished passing on about 20 years ago.
#6 – to quote:
“ask the local communities about their held knowledge of previous Indigenous land management practices.”
which is not inferring active land management, but knowledge. It may be gone, but as innumerable native title claims have shown, huge amounts of Indigenous knowledge is held, even where inter-generational disruption might suggest otherwise.
helen, if you knew about forest ecology, you’d know that clearfelling is conducted to allow the forest to properly regenerate. Delegatensis and regnans are monocultures that like a bit of open space. Selective harvesting would not allow adequate (any) regeneration to occur. Also, more importantly, selective logging requires proportionately far more roads, and anyone who knows about actual as opposed to perceived threats to forest values knows that water quality from badly maintained roads is the biggest risk.
As for Barakula, I’m not fathoming the argument in favour of making it a national park. What conflict is there that needs to be resolved between the harvesting and conservation? Sounds like a reasonably well-managed forest, why on earth would some inner-urban greenie and politician want to sack a bunch of people and start importing tropical timbers in order to get a two second feel-good glow? This is so 1970s thinking, can’t they do better than that?
It’s a bit analagous to the river red gum national parks that are about to be created. the Victorian Environment Assessment Council doesn’t seem to know how to do anything but recommend new national parks, with totally spurious assertions about their economic benefits and downplaying the social impacts on the actual comunities that live there. Red gum forests are decidedly crook, but that’s because they’re desperate for a drink, it has almost nothing to do with harvesting rates. Just for an ironic joke, in order to make the new parks healthier they’re having to go in and chopping trees down, only this has to be managed by park rangers with no skill or interest in the job, rather than employing the 80 people who’ve been working at it for over 100 years.
Huh. I went to Barakula for a uni field trip,
harassingstudying the behaviour of ants. Fun times, 20 of us camping in one forestry hutI don’t remember the natural bits we were in looking anything like the picture you posted; the veg was far more structured, more diverse, and taller. Hardly a ‘mess’ (and btw, massive issues with applying aesthetic judgements to natural ecosystems), but amazingly difficult to navigate. It seemed like fairly open woodland, but walk twenty feet in one direction and suddenly all your mates were invisible. The pine stuff, by contrast, was like pine forest anywhere – a relative biological desert. Economically useful, though, I agree. I think the odds of getting enough rangers to manage the place employed are far lower than the odds of getting enough loggers out there. Give them some extra cash and training to handle feral pests and leave them to it.
Now, I think whoever suggested the place as a tourist mecca must be on the good stuff, but dismissing the natural value of that scrub is unwise, I think. And just because something’s been managed in the past doesn’t mean management must continue. If it ceases, a new system will emerge, but collapse is far less likely in the absence of human interference. Its pretty arrogant (nothing personal, though) to state that any ecosystem that isn’t actually a farm can’t survive without us.
I think a lot of the green-inclined, even experienced environmental managers, have this idea in their heads that natural ecosystems shouldn’t change. At all. Its even built into legislation in some places. Bewilders me, because I know they know about evolution and climate change (the normal type as well as the accelerated). What’s it going to take for people to connect the dots?
Grumphy, I thought I made clear in the post that the gidgee in the photo is nothing like the pine forest, but I put it up to illustrate the principles of reruitment, thickening and tree death, and in the dryer areas, eventual thinning.
Agree about issues with making aesthetic judgements on ecosystems, but it is better to acknowledge it as a factor especially where a burgeoning tourist industry is touted. I haven’t been in the Barakula forest apart from the anecdote recounted, but there was plenty forest country nearby outside the boundaries where I have been. I imagine there is actually a fair bit of variety across the area, but it gives the impression of sameness at any point.
I’m aware also that a carefully chosen shot on a TV program might not be representative.
Just on one topic, the aboriginal fire management was cool burning in mosaic pattern (to grossly oversimplify) rather than the hot burns razing everything which is what a lot of rural people are wanting. Different story.
The VNPA submission to the Vic bushfires makes this point. Anyone here who wishes to pretend that “greenies” are “against all forest management/burning” are parrotting what they have heard and have not read the materials actually put out by orgs like the VNPA. (Not referring to anyone who has already commented in particular, just preempting the Inevitable Talking Point.)
there are plans for other products including biofuel.
Biofuel – be afraid, be very afraid. wrong way, go back.
Biofuel’s up there with tourism in the pipe-dream stakes. Not gonna happen, folks. Tourism in that location is a hell of a niche market (you’ll get a few birdwatchers and grey nomads, but forget busloads of foreigners), and the climate’s too variable for regular fuel supply I think.
You’re right, Helen, mosaic burning is capable of maintaining scrub in the open fashion that makes hunting and gathering easier. It is surprisingly labour-intensive, though, so its almost never done at all anymore. Control burning around cities kind of tries the same approach sometimes, but doesn’t quite hit the mark IMO – the patches are still too big and the scheduling tends to be ad-hoc at best. And I have to wonder why we need massively managed semi-natural systems tailored to hunting and gathering activities when most of us do neither.
In some of the wetter parts of the country, there’s an ecological succession to non-fire dependant forest that can occur when fire is excluded for long enough – its just tricky at this stage in history to get to that point. No idea what the unharvested Barakula scrub would be like in the absence of intervention.
I understand what you’re saying with the pic Brian, but I did still want to describe what I remember of the place. It wasn’t pretty, but it was certainly an interesting ecosystem. Way more diverse than I expected from somewhere so water-poor.
Interesting post Brian. I’ve spent a bit of time out that way myself (Dad lived in Chinchilla for a year, many school holidays spent driving around that whole area), and without dancing around, I think we’re all on the same page here: The place is a shit hole by almost any definition.
I do wonder about the utility of proposing a park here. So far as I understand, this kind of environment is hardly uncommon in Australia (or in QLD), and – again, so far as I’m aware – doesn’t harbour any endangered or particularly unique bioforms (hardly surprising given it’s been plantation for a looooooong time).
When they made Meroo State Forest a National Park (on the NSW South Coast), one of the local parkies came by to check on our camping activities, & sarcastically stated her joy at having ‘a big paddock full of weeds’ to look after.
For a second I thought Obama was lusting for blood.
Cut down a tree and you create opportunities for the species that take advantage of newly created open area. We seemed to be a bit obsessed with OLD GROWTH FORRESTS and pristine areas while forgetting the species that need disturbed areas to survive. You may actually help biodiversity by working your way around a forest pie. Means animals disturbed when a slice is harvested have almost as old country to move into.
More of a problem if we insist on harvesting isolated patches of forest over a few years then leave it for a long time before the next spurt of harvesting.
Moziac burning by aborigines had a similar effect to the pie approach – there was room for species to move into similar areas.
*wince*
Species who need disturbed open spaces to survive are frequently pest species, and species that require the niche microenvironments only found in old growth forests are frequently rare and threatened, so YMMV there John D. I get the sense that you may be trying to comment on events like senescence or storm-related treefall in rainforests (where everything goes nuts around the sudden gap in the canopy), but that stuff doesn’t really translate too well to forestry practice, where nobody just cuts a tree or two. And forestry’s definition of old-enough-to-harvest is generally a few dozen decades short of ecologically valuable old growth.
Btw all, are my citykid sensibilities causing me to dismiss this tourism thing too quickly? I mean, I really get a strong sense that there’s not enough Pretty Stuff and certainly not enough infrastructure around Barakula to support much tourism, but I did only spend a few days out there before fleeing back to the coast.
Grumphy: You say
YMMV is a new one on me so perhaps you could expand. There are Australian species that are old growth specialists, Australain species that are specialists of freshly disturbed areas and Australian species that like country in between.
I was actually thinking of the spinafex country where I used to live. In this environment the end of firestick farming has put numerous Australian species at risk. The spinafex plants now expand until the plants are close enough for a lightening srike to cause a widespread wild fire. What is left provides no cover for animals that use spinafex cover. It takes years to build up to the point of fire risk again. When there was the firestick moziac there were places for animals to escape from the fire and habitats that suited a whole range of plants and animals. Now there are large areas dominated by spinafex at the same stage of regeneration.
Enviromental diversity actually requires environmental diversity and some of this diversity occurs during the regeneration after disturbance.
Ah, sorry. “Your mileage may vary”. Basically acknowledging that you could have a point but that I wasn’t confident that it always applies. Your examples are interesting, but there are lots of counterexamples too, especially in the spread of plant pests. Mesquite, for instance, reacts very favourably to disturbance-by-pig – pigs are actually its main vector for spread. Quite a problem in the north.
I’m just not entirely sold on the notion that human interference is always required to maintain optimal biodiversity. Systems may have become dependant on us, but I don’t think that has to be the final word. Once humans start interfering, are we really stuck with more and more meddling just to fend off disaster? That prospect doesn’t suggest good things about the quality of our work…
This is what the Stateline program said while it showed images of undisturbed country:
It would have been better if they had gone into this aspect more and got someone with expertise to comment on it.
I talked to my younger brother about it tonight, the guy driving the car in the anecdote. He’s seen a lot of country and has done a lot of travelling as a tourist. He can’t see the tourist potential either. I think the description given by patrickg @ 13 is about right.
Back @ 9 Grumphy said:
I think that approach could apply to farmers and the whole woody vegetation management issue. If we want them to retain bushland for the public good, give them a role in looking after it and pay them to do it.
Interesting! After the 2nd WW, my Dad worked in the Baracula Forest cutting the pine,and other hardwood for sleepers (for the railway tracks). There were laws back then and one of the most important ones was: Leave the biggest, best and most healthiest trees as their seedlings were the best for regeneration. The logging was cut so that the trees had good access to the sky and therefore grew better timber.
In this type of country the trees come back thick and fast. Baracula has been logged for many years and is surviving very well. Mill owners are the first ones to protect the new trees as that is their income. The early mill owners fired the country with just small patches being burnt out, and lighting the fires in the safe months of the year, and the fire did not spread very far. Then if a major fire happened in the heat of summer, these small burnt out areas provided the fire breaks, thus saving a disaster.
The aborigines knew how to care for it too, as they only burnt small areas at a time.
Lyn
Yes, AKA “cool burn” as opposed to a “hot burn”.
It’s one thing to recommend a system of forest management based on our best knowledge of Aboriginal firestick farming, incorporated into national park management. It’s quite another to conflate that with the modern system of clearfell woodchipping, with its bulldozers, hot burns using firebombing and the destruction of all vegetation in the clearfelled area (erosion is another problem which hasn’t been mentioned.) This may not apply to Barakula as I’m thinking of the example of Victoria where I live. But the forestry industry does do this ideological pea and thimble trick to try and make its activities seem natural and in tune with ecological values.
Hi Lyn!
Kathy Mc Leish, the reporter in the Stateline story said:
Tony Moxon, the logger, in response to Ron Boswell’s question as to when a particular area, logged five years ago, will be logged again, said:
And goes on to say that they thin and control burn as necessary. The logging tracks would segment the forest and provide fire breaks.
So it is likely that the pattern of logging and management is still similar to what it was in your dad’s day, Lyn, no doubt modified by modern forestry practice if applicable.
My brother said last night that in country that had been cleared further west where it is drier, you can end up with a thicker forest through regrowth to his certain knowledge, depending on species and soil types, weather conditions etc.
So, Grumphy, it may be arrogant to think that nature won’t do better than humans intervening. In general that might be true, but in this case the loggers say the forest is internationally recognised as high value because they’ve made it that way through the practice of 100 years. The evidence seems to be (remember some areas of the forest have been left untouched), that it would do less well if left to the tender mercies of a skeleton staff of park rangers, when for example, fires are likely to be involuntary and hotter and less likely to be brought under control. The logging tracks, for example, are almost certain to grow over in places.
Helen, I guess my concern is to see policy in the case of Barakula made on the specifics of the case. At the end of the Stateline segment they said the loggers, conservationists and the Govt were in discussions over the future of Barakula. The last two of those three parties declined to comment.
My worry is that decisions will be made by people with generalisations formed out of experience gained elsewhere and without adequate knowledge of the specifics under consideration. There are blunter and ruder ways of expressing the meaning of that last sentence.
Personally I don’t have enough knowledge to have a final position on the matter.
Re tourism, it does seem to get trotted out whenever we close down a productive industry. The people who make things will take holidays, and we can serve them coffee!
Lyn,
There are similar laws in NSW now, observed by the Riverina woodcutters I know (knew), but their observance didn’t save their jobs/families/homes.
Yeah, that forestry method seems pretty sound to me, and probably what the area needs to stay as. Bear in mind that I’ve expressed continual opposition to national-park-ising the place; let’s not conflate that with my caution about overmanagement of natural systems. Park rangers still manage, just not very effectively thanks to not having any resources.
I do think there should be some sections left fairly well alone just to see what happens with succession in the long term (and also to act as a biodiversity source – the ants and critters I remember from the study area we were in didn’t hang around the pine stands much).
Its worth pointing out that pine forests are kind of a special case; their habit is always to crowd out other species through growth pattern and root alleopathy. Northern-hemisphere conifer forests are very dense and near-monocultures, and I think the only thing that prevents them being a fire hazard is the snowy climate.
John, Grumphy, you’re both in a sense correct. Old-growth is not the be-all and end-all of biodiversity, though it is very important. A 100% old-growth forest would be an unhealthy forest (providing less habitat for species), but a 100% regrowth forest would be an even unhealthier forest. Different strokes for different folks. Australia’s forests were not pure old-growth when europeans turned up, they were a mosaic. Because there’s a lot less forest around these days, and proportionately a lot less old-growth,we should protect what’s left, but we shouldn’t think that it’s the final word in biodiversity protection.
Helen, you might be interested in this. Just spin, I’m sure you’ll say, but in reality, the facts about why clearfell is a reasonable, if imperfect, mimicry of natural cycles of disturbance. There’s no such thing as cool burns in mountain ash forest.
Accountig for carbon storage gains at Barakula from enhanced silvicultural practices would be very difficult to account for, and under current rules probably not eligible for an ETS – not Kyoto compliant. Which is not to say additional carbon storage wouldn’t happen, just you could never get a formal dollar out of it.
I wouldn’t be so dismissive of biofuels, except there are no obvious consumers out there. I’m sure small electricity generating plant could be fed sustainably, but in terms of dollars/kilowatts, it’s probably about the same as wind power (i.e. why bother).
They said biofuels and other products, as compared to burning the waste and more recently garden mulch. I have no idea what what the “other products” might be.
I’m not keen on pine bark for garden mulch. It looks good, but I understand that a general forest mulch is way better for the soil. That said, my experience of general forest mulch is that you can import some interesting weed seeds at the same time that you’d rather be without.
Hello everyone, just found this posting. I am a neighbour to the Barakula State Forest & have travelled across it many times; it is my backyard. I firmly believe that it should not be made into a National Park.
Some points that come out the previous comments –
Logging in Barakula is definitely not clearfell or for woodchip. The management of harvesting the forest is considerably different to the likes of Victoria. Logging is conducted on a mosaic pattern across the Forest, rotating every 25 to 60 years depending upon species harvested. Viewed on a long timeframe impact upon conservation values are relevantly low.
It is burn off season right now. Fires lit within the Barakula Forest are done with the forest as first priority. Even outside the State Forest boundaries in the same type of ecosystem rural landholders don’t wish for very hot fires.
As for tourist potential, I will agree with the comments that have said is very low. Best Tourist potential would be for isolated cabins for people to come into the bush & de-stress. No mega bucks in that market I would assume.
Thanks, still@downfall, I was hoping you might comment. Best local knowledge so far.
wilful if you go here and look at the maps on p.51 and p.30 you’ll get some idea of the tree coverage of Qld, which I think is definitely better than in SA and Victoria and probably NSW as well, the recent conflicts over tree-clearing notwithstanding.
NB. I’m not saying the present situation is satisfactory, at least not everywhere in the state.
Thanks for that Still@Downfall, it seems you don’t treat your forests as violently in QLD as we do in Victoria.
I get the impression that Barakula is quite a mixture of different forest types including plantation which does make it difficult for a casual reader to understand what would be appropriate.
Helen, it’s my impression just from reading some of the links I googled that there are hard ridges as well as softer country. There would be quite a few eucalypts. My bro says the pine likes deeper sandy soils.
Helen I think the one thing you won’t find there is plantation timber. I think they rely on regrowth. We have some plantation pine in the coastal areas north of Brisbane.
Subject to confirmation or correction by someone who knows.
Heaps of plantation pine (caribaea/ellotti hybrids are the fashion of late) around the sunny coast, although Qld Forestry seem to be downsizing at the moment. They’re being privatised too, so not sure where that industry will go. They harvest in a sort of mosaic, but its generally based on blocks 1km or so on a side.
Definitely worth repeating that the entirety of the Barakula reserve isn’t just pine; the scrub I worked in was very different, and like someone said earlier, the geol and soils vary across the site and therefore so will the veg.
Brian, while I understand the justification in the report for reporting trends rather than possibly inaccurate area figures, it still made it hard to get a take-away figure. In one sense it’s good that Queensland retains lots of native vegetation, but in another sense it’s really disturbing that clearing rates remain so high. Native veg clearance in Victoria has essentially stopped – the only strong concern are native grasslands on the peri-urban fringes, which the Government is doing far too little about. But for most forest types, they’re at worst stable, more generally are increasing (subject to bushfire fear induced lunacy). Vic has 7.8 M hectares of native forest (warning large .pdf), out of 22.7 M ha. = 34% left.
erm, not a large pdf actually.
Helen# 32, no there is no plantation timber within Barakula. It is totally a native forest. The vegetation types vary greatly, Grumphy’s recollections are largely correct. The cypress pine would be the timber that is most harvested from Barakula. Although cypress isn’t everywhere in Barakula there are very significant areas of it & when we are talking about an area of 260 000 ha the cubic metres of mill log harvested is huge. This is providing a not insignificant financial benefit to all people living in Qld.
Where it does grow Cypress pine dominates other vegetation types. I believe that its leaf drop actually contains a chemical that suppresses other plants. As a live tree Cypress also has a resin that acts like a fire retardant. It can come up in thickets that can never develop into viable timber product. To think in thinning it that it can be used as garden mulch is wrong; it is highly unsuitable. There are I believe other possibilities. Cypress sawdust used as bedding for dog kennels stops flea activity. Therefore there is a possibility to develop an organic product for the very large pet market.
still@downfall @ 30:
I’ve heard about some nice cabins up around Maleny and other places in the Sunshine Coast hinterland that would be heaps more attractive, in part because you can easily rejoin in the broader stream of life if you wish.
Well there you go, Brian. The isolated cabins at Maleny are going to win out. Although I do believe that there is a rugged beauty to an inland scrub, maybe it’s just in the eye of the beholder.
Just to elaborate on how the cypress pine stands are harvested. A contractor can’t go in & fall any tree they wish. Before they get there a forester (State Forest employee)‘crowns’ the trees to be felled. This is done by walking through the stand & applying a ring of paint with a pressure spray can on the trees to be harvested. I don’t know the exact methodology but it goes something like this. Trees below a certain size can’t be harvested. Out of every 10 trees so many must be left standing. There must be some of the best, bigger trees left behind.
That resin in Cypress Pine (White Cypress Pine) takes a lot of the fun out of life in a sawmill.
Steve ATP, too right & I can relate a humorous tale to illustrate your comment about the resin from cypress.
Some years ago the owner/operator of a small bush private sawmill in the summer heat worked without a shirt on. Now this man had a good amount of hair not only on his chest but also his belly. He was acting as the benchman, the one who pushes the log into the blade & with a larger log was using all his weight including pushing the log with his belly. Upon approaching the bench he realized that the resin had stuck to his body hair. He was yelling & coo-eeing out to the tailer-out (the person taking the log after it has gone through the saw) to stop. The tailer-out thought it was a great joke & pulled the log through. The mill owner had to pull himself off the log resulting in a body wax job.
Just to elaborate on how the cypress pine stands are harvested. A contractor can’t go in & fall any tree they wish. Before they get there a forester (State Forest employee)‘crowns’ the trees to be felled. This is done by walking through the stand & applying a ring of paint with a pressure spray can on the trees to be harvested. I don’t know the exact methodology but it goes something like this. Trees below a certain size can’t be harvested. Out of every 10 trees so many must be left standing. There must be some of the best, bigger trees left behind.
As a Victorian, this description makes me envious. If Victorian foresters adopted this kind of logging in State forests and used the wood for high value-added products, as the industry spin makes out that they do, instead of knocking all living matter over with a bulldozer, firebombing the cratered wasteland and sending the “harvested”* matter off to Japan as woodchips, the industry wouldn’t be in the odium it’s in today.
*A nice weasel word which has sprung up in the last couple of years to replace “clearfelling”, which was getting a bit, you know, on the nose. “Harvesting” sounds so much nicer!
Helen, I don’t know enough about the Vic. Situation to comment on it. Also I will not pretend that in the Barakula forest there is no impact upon the landscape. Being a natural forest of diverse vegetation types the impact is not over 100% of a given area. To illustrate this point say that a block of 100 ha is being harvested for cypress, depending on the geography the cypress within the block to be harvested could range from 20% to 60% of the total vegetation. (Very rough figures based only upon my personal observations) Therefore the machinery isn’t going over the entirety of a given area. Then if you consider the selection methodology I outlined in my last comment, you can imagine that the trees removed from this 100 ha we are using for the sake of illustration, could range from 5% to 30%.
After a few years from an area being harvested the snig tracks are re-vegetated naturally with grass & new seedlings. After 10 years to a causal glance you would not know that logs were removed from this part of the forest. After 25 years when the process is repeated you would have to look hard for the old stumps.
Barakula has been used as a working forest since 1907, if it now has high enough conservation values to be a national park, something must have been done right. Why remove a well-managed, valuable renewable resource from providing a benefit to all people within this State?
I’m just back from a conference on Ecological Restoration that was happening in Perth. There was a lot of information presented on fire management, and there is certainly a lot of science being done on the issue of biodiversity loss in ‘unmanaged’ landscapes.
It is, of course, not productive to generalise, because it seems that often in Australia, those landscapes that are burnt, are burnt too frequently, and those that are never burnt probably need to be. There is also a lot more [newer] science happening to measure the carbon storage capacity of ecosystems, comparing burnt and unburnt landscapes.
The issue in terms of tree-felling in old-growth forest is most problematic in regards to habitat trees. Indigenous fire management did not create the same issues simply because there was a greater quantity of forest for arboreal species to move into.
Forestry also creates problems as logging tracks become vectors for the spread of weed species, as well as Phytophora and other pathogens. None of these issues were present when fire was used by indigenous people to manage landscapes.
I spoke to a scientist from the US who is involved in measuring forest canopy density and he suggested there is already a global trend that suggests that the integrity of forest ecosystems across the planet are suffering in a changing climate.
We need to be very careful about using past data to determine future management of forests.
Are they doing anything about clearing on privately held land up there in God’s Country, Brian/still@downfall? If the state govt are finding it politically difficult, maybe it would be helpful for them to be able to say “But look at the huge national park we made!”
fb #44, the fire regime inside Barakula is heavily managed IMO they are possibly burning too infrequently. In regards to habitat trees it isn’t as big of an issue with cypress because they are a species that is less likely to develop hollows. Back at my comment #39, I described how the trees to be felled are marked by a forester. When they are doing this habitat trees are left alone, this is more applicable in the case of one of the commercial eucalypt species. As to weeds the soils of this type of country are that infertile, there aren’t too many weeds that are a problem.
Sean, there is no more clearing of remnant vegetation in Qld; it is a done deal. The current debate is about the clearing of regrowth, which is under a moraturium. So it isn’t borne out of a frustration of “finding it political difficult”, rather the reverse from my point of view. But it doesn’t stop a political expediency to proclaim, ““But look at the huge national park we made!” In fact the previous premier Peter Beattie boasted about the possibility of a million ha of new national park.
The image the general public & possibly the more uninformed politicians have of the timber industry is the clearfell, maximum impact upon the landscape as practiced elsewhere. It would be too much trouble to explain the actual situation as I have upthread when as a politician you can parade as the great environmental warrior.
ahh, okay, thanks for the info still@d. very interesting.
i’d just like to say i’m glad i’m not the only person who thought this was a post about the right’s latest attempt to stigmatise barack obama by calling him a vampire.
carry on.
I haven’t had time to read every comment, but I believe that part of the push to make Barakula a National Park could be political (and not really based on science). IIRC, Bligh made a pledge, when she was handed the reigns of power, to increase the protected area estate from just under 5% of the land area of the state to approximately 7% by 2020 (at least that’s what my colleagues were telling me at the time).
Bligh seems to be in the habit of making rash promises. The “their dreaming trail” (as some like to call it at work) is another one. It is in the vicinity a thousand kilometres of walking track through croc, snake and wild pig infested country between the Daintree and the tip of Cape York (althought I suspect some of the humans you would come across may be more dangerous)… perfect for naive European back-packers.
According to the brochure, the new Carnarvon Great Walk is going to be closed every year between November and February (because of safety concerns one would suspect), and that’s only 86km long.
Experienced forester Peter Lear has provided an extended comment on the notion of turning Barakula into a national park. I’ve decided that the best way of handling this is a new post.
You can get commercial permits for activities in state forests.
Since we’re reminiscing, once with a school group I did a 40 metre free-fall abseil off a fire-tower in a State forest. Pine so the view wasn’t that great, but at the top of one of the four pylons, underneath the boards of the platform, very tightly coiled was a large snake that we were expected to not disturb as we stepped off the edge.