Thousands - estimates ranged from 7 to 15,000* - packed out State Parliament House lawns today to hear:
* Duncan Kerr MP reveal that his city centre chemist had worriedly discussed with him yesterday the clearfelling of Tasmania's old-growth forests, then put up rally-for-the-forests signs in his shop ... indicative said the federal Labor MP of the tidal wave of sentiment against current logging practices, with increasing numbers of ordinary Tasmanians now joining with declared activists.
* A Japanese Global Rescue Station campaigner send a message to his homeland; a Greenpeace campaigner talk about the rescue station Styx protest and its worldwide impact.
* Bob Brown praise Labor Leader Mark Latham for his decision to visit the Styx Valley this week with Brown to see, and hear the arguments against current logging practices (as well as listen to Premier Lennon's assertion of the status quo). Latham would hear that Tasmanians and Australians were demanding the end of these Dark Age practices. Brown also challenged PM John Howard - who the Greens MP said had signed the forests' death knell in 1997 by signing the Regional Forests Agreement - to now lift the death sentence from the forests.
* Rising Tasmanian-born theatre and movie star Essie Davis (Girl with a Pearl Earring) tell of her horror at hearing from fellow actors in London of the death of Australia's largest tree - El Grande - in a Forestry Tasmania regeneration burn; their disbelief that this could be allowed and her embarrassment that her homeland permitted such Dark Age practices.
* Sympathy for and a defence of Tasmanian forestry workers - especially log truck drivers -
by gardening guru Peter Cundall. These workers, said Cundall, were the most exploited in
Tasmania. He asked - as a unionist - what unions were doing to help them; he said the workers were being
exploited for the enormous benefit of a few rich men.
It was, said Cundall, all about greed ... a subject he has spoken about
with impassioned fury at rallies, and to the National Press Club:
The Seductive Power of Greed
The rally concluded at the Hobart Cenotaph after an hour-long, snaking march through Hobart city centre streets ... the biggest show of defiance and protest since the anti-Wesley Vale pulp mill rallies and Franklin River marches of the early to late 1980s ... (*Writer Richard Flanagan said it was the biggest rally he had been involved in since the early 80s Franklin River marches). (Forestry industries' Terry Edwards, who did not attend, said he had been told there were 6 to 10,000 who were largely "misinformed").
THE BIG ISSUE:
The Rape of Tasmania ... etc
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Saturday, March 13, 2004, 2003