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De Grebner
Project Manager
Tree Project began twenty years ago when the visionary Maggie Macleod made a pledge to plant a million trees. The current total is 1.4 million native shrubs and grasses across rural and urban Victoria. The premise was simple yet revolutionary. Connecting country landholders with people living in the city through trees. Landholders collect seed from their properties and those seeds are grown and cared for by people in the city who have some garden space and sunshine. Six months later the seedlings go to the landholder to plant. Many landholders want and need to revegetate their properties, but at a cost of $1.50 or more per seedlings - and they often need thousands - 'its not going to happen,' says De Grebner, who is now the Project Manager. 'We provide the seed kits for the backyard growers. It can be easily done.'
Tree Project is a not-for-profit non-government environmental organisation, but is not an advocacy group, as De explains: 'we are not presenting issues or getting into arguments.' just getting on with the job. It is misleading to think that De would shy away from an argument. In 1979, an argument arrived at her peaceful subtropical rainforest campsite at Terania Creek, 65 kilometres from Byron Bay. In her words, 'a blockade landed in the valley and it lasted a month. It was one of the most profound things I had ever seen.' This pioneering forest blockade saved parts of the forest, inspired a generation of individuals to action and made inroads for Government accountability and processes to protect Australia's remaining precious and pristine eco systems.
"Terania Creek, and the men and women who fought for it, played a critical role in shaping my views and the views of the Government of the day in relation to conservation. Indeed, there is no doubt that Terania Creek was a milestone in the history of conservation in Australia." Hon. Neville Wran AC QC: former Premier of New South Wales, Australia.
De was born in Washington DC and came to Australia as a contract teacher to Port Macquarie in 1976. She was part of: 'Pretty much the last plane load of teachers to come to Australia, just after Whitlam has been ousted.' When she got off the plane, reporters asked her, 'How do you feel about taking jobs from Australians? Can't you get a job in your own country?' Hardly a welcoming tone, but a precursor to the confrontations that she would experience in the coming years.
When De decided to try something new, she turned to crafting with recycled material from opportunity shops and upholstery fabric, making guitar straps, pillow cases and travelling around the markets selling her work. On arrival to Terania Creek, she was told a bulldozer was expected soon and to keep a look out. After three weeks the blockade arrived and, she says, 'it was like the circus had come to town. Hippies are going to take on the Government. People were running around with dead trees on stretchers, helicopters were overhead, the police camped in amongst the lantana and of course the media came.' In retrospect she says that the blockade 'wasn't something I would have understood or gone to. I would have watched it on the news and through it was really weird.'
After Terania Creek she was part of the North East Forest Alliance and the use of blockades was effective in demanding Environmental Impact Statements. 'While (the case to log an area was) in court the only way to stop the loggings was to blockade. Every time the Forest Commission was taken to court it lost, except once when they negotiated (out of court settlement).'
De's role in this fateful adventure was to be the conduit between the opposing sides, 'I was trying to find agreement and trying to find common ground' between all parties. At this time De built relationships with the local saw millers, the small operators who were under threat not from the 'greenies' and their blockades, but from the large logging companies. There was illegal tendering of contracts between large companies and Government, and their clear felling techniques were putting small operators out of business. Previously, small operators could go in to a coup and clean up timber left on the ground after an operation. At that time, there were areas in the State Forest that had been logged years earlier with a lot of spare timber laying around. The Forestry Commission would rather let it go to waste than administer the clean up process. There was too much revenue coming in from the large logging and chipping companies doing clear felling to bother with old rotation logging and clean up practices. Now the big companies just burnt the area: 'they were burning instead of utilizing. My main aim was to keep the small operators in business because for them (their work) was their family, their culture, their business.'
The advantage of the small operators is simply an ethic of sustainability. Wholesale clearing of forests by big operators will take 40 years to regenerate. 'But with proper rotation you can go back every ten years.' De says, 'there are saw millers who do beautiful work, you wouldn't know they had been in there (the forest) after a couple of months with selective logging. We would take the unions and industry on bus trips and the logger would say things like, if you were a farmer you wouldn't shoot your best bull, why would you cut down your best seed tree?
In the face of opposition, this tough and intelligent woman asked questions, challenged statements from the big and the burley. I think the big companies and unions and even Government were bamboozled and confused by this well-informed, blue-eyed woman with an American accent who snuck her way into meetings. She often heard, 'Where did she come from? How come you know so much?'
De is still working with trees, but today they are small seedlings and they are growing relationships between farmers and city folk. She says this job is calmer than her previous advocacy work in forestry and she enjoys living in Melbourne, exploring its 'nooks and crannies' and working with people 'who understand the need to repair the environment as very important.'
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