ABPA - Australian Bush Poets Association

As many members will already be aware, 'The Singing Gardens', former home of CJ Dennis, is situated in Toolangi, a small hamlet in the forested hills 65 km east of Melbourne. People have speculated that the moist, cool environment and the tall trees of Toolangi helped to rejuvenate his spirit after he arrived there, something of a broken man, in 1908, and led him to write the books for which he ultimately became famous.

The forests around Toolangi, miraculously, escaped the Black Saturday fires. They have become known as the 'hole in the donut'. Now many Toolangi residents are very distressed to find these same forests to be the subject of clearfelling operations. Of particular concern is the endangered 'Leadbeater's Possum', whose habitat is confined to the Central Highlands of Victoria.

I was asked to read this poem at a public meeting held to discuss the logging at the CJ Dennis Memorial Hall in Toolangi on the evening of Thursday, 11th August.

Beaten Leadbeater’s?

© Stephen Whiteside 26.07.2011

A pretty little possum with a black stripe down its back,
It darts throughout the forest tops through depths of darkest night.
It forages for sugars, grabbing insects for a snack,
Then slips back to its hollow with arrival of the light.

It was named ‘Leadbeater’s Possum’ for a past museum worker,
A famous taxidermist (little creatures he would stuff),
But the story of this possum is a genuine tear jerker.
Oh, life has not been easy for this precious ball of fluff.

It thrives, you see, on forests, but its habitat is narrow.
From Marysville to Baw Baw, thereabouts, denotes its range.
It’s Victoria’s state emblem so, in part, we push its barrow,
But we challenge without mercy its capacity for change.

For we chopped and hacked the forest lands that were its sole dominion.
We plundered and we butchered and we put it on the run.
We reached the point where scientists were of the broad opinion
It was done for. Then it re-emerged in 1961.

Though we scarcely did deserve it, we’d been granted a reprieve,
A chance to right a wrong, to mend the errors of our ways
But, alas, we mended nothing, so we’re forced once more to grieve,
And face the harsh reality that crime just never pays.


A crime? Am I mistaken? You can check the regulations
And the statutes in the law books on the dim and dusty shelves.
You will never find it mentioned, though you search through many nations.
It’s a crime against sweet Nature. It’s a crime against ourselves.

For it seems we’ve missed our moment. It would seem Leadbeater’s Possum
Is living now on borrowed time, it’s fate forever sealed.
We could have ceased all logging and allowed the beast to blossom,
But a vision such as this, alas, shall never be revealed.

Then let us throw the dice once more. The odds, it’s true, aren’t pretty.
Let us do at last what’s right, and put an end to crime.
The human soul needs more than just the bright lights of the city.
Let us let the forests stand, and leave the rest to time.

Who knows what magic beckons if we put aside our blunders,
If we down the screaming chainsaws and revert to Nature’s dance?
What panoply awaits us, what array of shining wonders?
Perhaps Leadbeater’s Possum, too, still has a fighting chance!

such a small habitat to be saved to save one small possum - not such a big ask surely..............but I bet we stuff it up. Don'texport them to NZ or croc will be onto them, and don't sent them to Karalbyn or croc will be onto them

Poor little beggars don't stand a chance

Hope your poem raises the awareness Stephen - it is really good. Well done

Cheers

Maureen

It's a magical part of the world Stephen and a gorgeous little creature - both worth saving. Thanks for raising awareness of the fight.

Heather

Stephen.

I also like the poem and agree with the sentiment but you are up against the Government who are doing there best to foster the newer breeds and they’re across all states “The Money Grubber”
They are a tenacious breed and usually win in the end.

We have been in that part of the country a few years ago spent sometime in the Dandenong ranges, nice country.

TTFN

Maureen, Heather and Dave, thanks for your comments.

Oh boy!

I smell trouble....

I remember the first time I ever saw clear felling. We'd been going to a remote place on the NSW coast south of Eden for our Christmas holidays. On the second or third time there the forest driving in was all clear felled. I was about 11 or 12 at the time and could not believe the devastation. It was awful. Never forgot the impact it had on me.

No, I think you make a fair point, Marty. I've wrestled with the same questions myself over the years.

The point about the Leadbeater's specifically is that even if we stopped all logging in its habitat right now, it is probably already too late. I think I'm right in saying that the 2009 fires roughly halved its numbers. I have heard suggestions that the nature of our logging practices has changed the nature of our fires, but that's another argument.

I think, though, that biodiversity is an important principal to strive for. Losing a possum here or a fish there, as you say, probably doesn't make any difference - and I do wonder about the wisdom of spending millions of dollars trying to preserve the remaining hundred or so specimens of the northern hairy-nosed wombat - but once you lose 100 or 1,000 species, it does start to matter.

I don't regard myself as an expert on the subject, but I can't understand how, given the history of species extinction in this country since European colonisation, anybody can continue to defend the logging of old growth forests. A lot of the forests around Toolangi do not qualify as 'old growth' strictly speaking, in the sense that they probably have been damaged by fire, but it was a very long time ago, when the fire records weren't very well kept anyway. And a lot of those forests were last logged in the 19th century, which makes them pretty old!

Driving through the recently logged areas, you see occasional 'habitat' trees left standing in a sea of waste. Who's kidding who? How can anybody really believe this achieves anything? The trees themselves will probably not survive, let alone any animals that might be living in them.

Again, I've seen small pockets of rainforest on TV that have been left, while all the surrounding sclerophyl forest has been removed. How can anybody believe this is fair and sound policy?

I saw a government logging spokesman talking about what they did if they found a koala in a tree. They either left a few trees, or 'came back later', presumably hoping the koala had by then moved on, and they could remove the tree 'behind its back'. Meanwhile, koala numbers have dropped to perilously low levels - and even then, the numbers are deceiving, because, again, I think, most of the koalas in the wild now have been reconstituted from the French Island population, which means they possess very little genetic diversity.