Into the Woods, by Anna Krien

Anna Krien’s Into The Woods provides a multifaceted investigation into the fraught and highly-contested debate on how best to exploit Tasmania’s precious forestry endowment. With a novelist’s skill, she describes the key personalities, conflicts and factual grey areas of a controversial policy area, making Into The Woods a thought provoking book that provides no easy answers.

Anna Krien is a Melbourne based journalist who has published in The Monthly, The Age and The Big Issue, amongst other publications. Her first book, with its rather Bambiesque title, Into The Woods, follows a style of journalism made famous by George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). The author immerses herself in her subject matter, body and soul, and reports back at intimate length. This is not a facts and figures journalism, gleaned from picking over reports, official investigations and inquiries. Here the journalist to some degree also becomes the subject: personal prejudices, doubts, failings and misgivings are all candidly disclosed. These admissions of the writer’s fallibility goes someway to giving the over all work a greater feeling of honesty.

Journalistic works of this type (the other great recent example if Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man), do not pontificate from on high, but rather crawl through the mud to bring a more realistic picture. Complexity, contrary views and the general clamour of differing voices that make up contentious issues are all given an airing. The book format, with its hundreds of pages, makes this type of writing possible, where time and patience are needed to tease out ideas and explore various intellectual avenues.

It seems pretty clear from the opening pages of Into The Woods that Anna Krien is by and large sympathetic to the activists that are trying to conserve Tasmania’s forests and stop the loggers. Nonetheless, Krien soon gets fairly impatient with the campaigning style and doggedness of the activists, especially when she is confronted with a pub full of knockabout men who are sympathetic to the loggers and hostile to the ‘greenies’. She decides that it’s the activists who need to be out in the pubs talking to the enemy, learning a few things, and not sitting up a tree.

Into The Woods does attempt to look at the big picture, despite its author’s obvious biases. Krien does a fascinating job of interviewing activists, leading politicians, scientists, forestry officials and loggers, trying to get a true picture of just how fragile Tasmania’s ecology has become due to the demands of its economy: logging and wood chipping. The picture that emerges is of a state that is divided down the middle between conservationists and loggers, with neither giving way. You get the picture of a state that simply doesn’t know how to function outside of this dichotomy.

If we’re to believe former Tasmanian premier Jim Bacon’s last minute call to activist and garden show host Peter Cundall, two weeks before he died of lung cancer, urging Cundall to never give up the fight against the big business interests that he claimed ran the state, then Tasmania is a plutocracy run by powerful money interests. During that phone call Bacon told Cundall that there was nothing politicians could do to stop huge companies like Gunns. The politicians were simply the hired staff at a lavish party where they served Tasmania’s precious resources on a platter to the greedy and all powerful corporations.

There’s much to commend in Anna Krien’s finely written book. Her intimate attention to detail and well rounded portraits make for fascinating reading. Krien has the novelist’s gift for pacing, timing, description and evocative use of language, making Into The Woods a must-read.

Into The Woods: The Battle for Tasmania’s Forests, by Anna Krien. Published by Black Inc., 2010. ISBN: 9781863954877