Sawmiller Geoff Correy, Barmah Forest, Murray River, Victoria (Picture Gregg Borschmann)
The People’s Forest:
A Living History of the Australian Bush
The National Library of Australia Oral History Collection
The People’s Forest documents the last of the pioneering days powered by steam and oxen and a new era of pioneering at the dawn of the 21st century as people looked again at the Australian bush with different visions and hope.
The collection contains 88 interviews recorded by Gregg Borschmann in all six states between 1992 and 1997, totalling 242 audio digital tapes. The strength of the collection is its great diversity. As well as foresters, axemen, sleeper cutters, logging contractors, sawmillers, nurserymen, farmers, graziers, conservationists, botanists, native landscape regenerators and writers, there is an engine driver, a riverman, wood merchant, plantation manager, forest ranger, photographer, teacher, botanical illustrator, artist, wood craftsman and historian.
From axes to iPads
In 2015, Gregg Borschmann was able to update the story told in The People’s Forest when he visited the native forests of the NSW North Coast for ABC RN’s Background Briefing.
He found that forestry had moved on from the chainsaw and was now as good as fully automated, with fallers operating in the airconditioned comfort of harvesting machines and the logging guided by a LIDAR radar-like map on their iPads.
Nick Roberts and Dean Kearney from Forestry Corporation NSW, Bruxner Park Forest, Coffs Harbour. (Picture Gregg Borschmann)
After 20 years of uneasy peace, the forest wars are back
The Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs) signed in the 1990s with the West Australian, Tasmania, Victorian and NSW Governments were designed to remove forestry from Federal environmental protections and give legal certainty to industry over wood supply. Mostly, the agreements did manage to deliver guaranteed but reduced timber volumes for industry. However, they failed to protect forest biodiversity as promised.
In 2018 as the 20-year agreements started expiring and were about to be renewed for another 20 years, Gregg Borschmann was commissioned to produce a series of reports for The Guardian’s ‘Our Wide Brown Land’ project.
The National Library of Australia The People’s Forest Collection