The Bendoc Log.

The 1 January 2024 not only marks the beginning of a New Year, but also marks the end of timber harvesting in Victorian State forests.

Some people will be rejoicing, but many will be angry and looking for explanations, or someone to blame.

However, the demise of native forest timber harvesting has been a very long time coming and is a complex saga that has taken decades to unfold. Forestry has always been a bothersome political issue and one day I’m gunna write a book.

But for today, I’m marking the occasion with the story of a log… just one log… but not just any old log… a bloody big log… the Bendoc Log…

More significantly, the Bendoc Log in far-far East Gippsland, sits at the very epicentre of environmental activism and years of argy-bargy over the future of Victoria’s forests. Bendoc has also been the scene of many bitter and protracted blockades with the ”cops and loggers” in the middle.

Bendoc and the remote Errinundra Plateau are about as far as you can get from Parliament House in Spring Street or Canberra, but they somehow came to characterise the complicated blur between federal and state jurisdictions. Probably, the most obvious example of this murkiness was the fraught Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) process in the 1990s, which was meant to resolve the matter… once-and-for-all.

The State forests around Bendoc, like so many other places, have suffered from the compounding effects, and slow incremental creep, of countless political and administrative “quick fixes”, often strongly influenced by the voting preferences of marginal and inner-city electorates, rather than informed by sound, long-term, forestry advice.

The Bendoc Log also perhaps signifies the endless and tortured debate over sustainable and renewable timber supplies; security of regional economies and jobs; a widening disconnect between urban and regional communities; forestry facts and fallacies; armchair experts and academics of all flavours; shifting public opinion and growing disquiet about forest preservation verses balanced multiple-use; National Parks verses State forests; old-growth verses regrowth; deforestation verses regeneration; sawlogs verses woodchips; plantations verses native forests; public land verses private land; the short and long-term impacts of major bushfires; widespread concerns about climate change and questionable claims of carbon offsets in forests; all influenced and over-simplified by a sometimes-biased or hostile media.

The latest and very effective tactic of “Eco-Lawfare” by tangling up VicForests inside an expensive legal system of court rooms and injunctions, needlessly arguing over some poorly worded government legislation or policy loopholes, in the end, had some far-reaching and unintended consequences. Leaving the interpretation of complex forest policy to judges and lawyers wearing funny wigs, was never going to end well.

And finally, this gigantic lump of wood represents the myopic forfeiture of a sustainable supply of strong and beautiful Ozi hardwood timbers, helped by a convenient consumer blindness to the globalisation of the timber trade with cheap imports sold in hardware stores which come from some far-away land, often with unsustainable logging practices and dodgy environmental, governance and social standards.

But… back to the Bendoc Log… the story goes that in 1981 Ken Hepburn, drove his 1976 Mack truck on a perilous journey from Wombat Track to Cuthbertson & Richard’s sawmill at Bendoc.

His load was a giant 60-tonne log which was said be the largest ever harvested in the Bendoc area. It measured 9.2 metres in length and 251 cm in diameter with a volume of about 45 cubic meters.

This giant Shining Gum (E. nitens) was felled by Steve Goodyear of Bombala which took him over four hours.

The D7F bulldozer on the coupe was incapable of pulling the massive log so the operator, Des Yelds, an experienced bushman, built an earth loading ramp next to the log and pushed it onto the truck.

With such a heavy load, the bulldozer then towed the Mack truck from the landing along the narrow coupe access track as far as the main Back Creek Road.

The short butt section of the colossal log was displayed outside the Bendoc sawmill for many years until it was donated to the town in 2004 by the mill owner, Alan Richards, and later moved to its current location in the Historic Park, which is opposite the iconic Bendoc pub.

It was a major logistical exercise to shift the log again and many townsfolk came out to witness the event.

The huge log is still in pretty good condition for its age after having been exposed to the weather for over 40 years. It is frequently photographed by visitors to the town.

The Bendoc Log now stands stoically as a fitting memorial to a once thriving and prosperous Victorian timber industry.