Stereotypical images of forest blockaders often present them as head-in-the-sand hippies who are probably better at smoking dope than stopping forest degradation. Louise Morris (among countless others) proves it isn’t true. Forest blockaders, particularly where she’s from in Western Australia, are some of the most organised and tactically smart activists around.

Louise has been involved with the WA forest campaign since 1998, as “media liaison (media slut), police/industry liaison, and lock-on wench”. Over that period of time, public support for conservation in Western Australia has grown enormously.

Anti-logging activism in WA concentrates on four kinds of forest, the most well-known being Karri forests and Jarrah forests. With few people relative to the amount of ground they need to cover, forest groups have had to utilise the power of media as much as possible. “We had to become very good at manipulating the mainstream media,” says Louise. “Learning how to do the thirty-second sound byte, writing media releases that journos could regurgitate straight into their column.”
The campaign was aided unexpectedly by celebrity visits – among them Liz Davenport, a fashion designer from Perth. “She drove up in this beautiful car and got out very regally,” Louise relates. “She decided that she’d go for a walk to commune with the forests, and didn’t tell anyone that she was disappearing. It was hilarious and scary at the same time; the loggers were actually cutting down trees pretty near us, so it was quite dangerous not to tell anyone where you were going. The police were called, and all of us: media, cops, blockaders, are just everywhere, yelling ‘Liz! Liz!’”

Although the anecdote is amusing, it also highlights an increased incidence of ‘liberal’ support for conservation in Western Australia, an outlook that could easily miss the connections between, say, rural unemployment and unsustainable forest management. Louise stresses that making those links was very important, and that without the support of rural communities, they might not have achieved the same effects.
Public support heightened during the state election campaign in February this year, when the campaigners introduced Nell the Nervous Numbat, a friendly forest blockader in a furry animal suit. Nell followed Richard Court around. Louise explains how the media coverage shifted from Court to Nell herself: “Finally we put Nell up this gigantic eucalypt outside parliament house, two days before the election,” she says. “The fire brigade turned up, heaps of media turned up, and we got front page coverage.”

Richard Court was successfully voted out of office and a Labor government was voted in. Although this didn’t necessarily result in better conservation policy, media attention brought the old-growth forest issue to the wider public, who rallied in support.

“One of the most important aspects of the WA campaign is that the media releases that accompanied our actions, whether city or forest-based, were always linked to some current forest issue,” Louise explains. “We made a concerted effort to have members of rural communities put their name to the releases in forest actions. Another tactic that worked well was getting lots of community and professional groups that were prepared to support us independently – Doctors for Old Growth Forests, Darlington’s Adopt-A-Block (Darlington is an affluent suburb in Perth) and various forest town communities who established Friends of the Forest groups and were very vocal and active.”

One huge difference from forest actions on the east coast, particularly in Victoria, is that independent media-making about forest issues has been thin on the ground until recently. But like numerous other campaigns, video cameras routinely get stolen, ‘borrowed’ or confiscated as evidence. “At one stage,” Louise relates, “the police had six of our video-cameras. We had to negotiate to get them back.”
Which is why having lots of independent media-makers present during actions is so important, Louise says. “It’s the ability to put out uncorrupted, non-commercial accounts of what goes on, allowing the people who are involved to actually shape how things are represented. It also allows them to present their campaign world in its entirety and not have to adhere to restrictive sound bites, bad editing and cliches. Not that we don’t adhere to our own in-house cliches within independent media,” she says with a grin, “but that’s a whole other issue.”