DEBBIE McLACHLAN FIGHTER FOR THE FORESTS

Forest and Bird, Issue 268, 1 May 1993, Page 38

DEBBIE McLACHLAN FIGHTER FOR THE FORESTS

Fourth-generation West Coaster Debbie McLachlan has been a forthright and articulate advocate for an end to the clearfelling of native forests in South Westland. EUGENIE SAGE went to meet her.

T OKARITO TRIG, nature’s famous canvas of wild sea coast, mirror-like lagoons, verdant forest, and mountains arching white against the sky has been defaced by the ugly strokes of logged forest in the middle distance. For Okarito nature tourism operator, Debbie McLachlan, the ragged scar in Waitangi Forest epitomises the disdain with which government, the stateowned Timberlands and the milling industry is treating the West Coast Forests Accord. "The spirit of the Accord was not to clearfell every stick of timber that was available — it was simply a measure giving industry a volume of timber and a length of time in which to get their act together," McLachlan says. * Angered that the Accord’s December 1992 deadline for an end to clearfelling has not been honoured and at the thought of loggers ransacking the pristine Poerua Forest, this saw-miller’s grand-daughter is galvanising local opposition to the clearfelling juggernaut which the Accord unleashed. Over the last three and half years McLachlan has been lobbying Ministers and MPs, speaking out in the media and on public platforms, and fronting up to Timberlands. Even if her photograph has been used for dart practice in the Whataroa pub, McLachlan commands local attention and a certain good-humoured respect. McLachlan is more familiar than most with the rich character of South Westland’s small communities and they with her. For two and half years she operated the Westland Bank’s mobile banking service, travelling the 430 kms from Harihari to Haast and back again each week in a camper van. McLachlan drove all the way, completed transactions for everyone from whitebaiters to overseas tourists, and balanced up at the end of each day, doing business up gravel driveways, at the roadside and at school gates. In an area bereft of post offices it was a busy job and no place for the timorous. During the whitebait run and in the holiday season when garages, hotels and motels were enjoying good takings, there were generous sums of cash on _ board. "People said they used to sit and dream about how they could bump the van off but you knew they’d never do it — they relied on the service," she says.

CLACHLAN’S West Coast roots are deep and strong. The Ross gold rush brought her Irish forebears to the Coast in the 1860s and early this century Grandfather Minehan tackled the lowland forest on the fertile Poerua River flats near Harihari to establish the family’s sheep and cattle farm. Except for her secondary school years, when she was forced to exchange the warmth and support of a boisterous family of seven children for the austere and restrictive regime of the convent boarding school in Hokitika, McLachlan has lived most of her life in Harihari.

In 1991 McLachlan and her partner, forestry consultant Ian James, moved to Okarito to begin a small nature tourism business. Rows of colourful kayaks at their front gate and a small, jet engined runabout for the less mobile, tempt many European and North American backpackers and cyclists and occasional kiwi family groups to wander on water as well as land. Okarito is New Zealand’s largest unmodified wetland and on a rising tide it is an easy paddle up the main channel to marvel at kahikatea swamp forest, oyster catchers gorging themselves on cockles, and the languid elegance of kotuku, or white heron, in flight. In the late 1970s Okarito’s kotuku and the threatened destruction of their only New Zealand feeding and nesting habitat were a potent symbol for the successful public campaign to prevent the logging of South Okarito and Waikukapa Forests and have them added to Westland National Park. For McLachlan, married at 18 and with three children before she was 21, white nappies were a more pressing concern than white herons. Divorced and solo parenting at 25 meant life was a hectic blur of domestic responsibilities. McLachlan says five years as a "mill worker’s wife", living with her first husband in a mill house and washing clothes filthy with mill dirt, gave her little first hand experience of what was happening in the nearby forests. Apart from occasional weekends collecting firewood, most women in the timber town had scant contact with their husbands’ work. "Women led their own lives with the kids and had their own companionship, and men had theirs at the pub," she says. Interest in forest issues and the ability to tell a rimu from a kahikatea came later after meeting Ian James. Editing his reports, encircling trees with tape measures, and kitchen table conversations with visiting politicians, scientists and students all keen to talk forestry, helped provide McLachlan with a rich cache of information on forest dynamics and the theory and practice of managing forests for timber. But South Westland forests really have gold mining to thank for her conversion

to their cause. In 1980 when gold prices hit $US800 an oz, a small black-sanding claim at Green’s Beach north of Harihari seemed an attractive way to boost the family income. On some West Coast beaches fine alluvial gold which has been

washed down river and out to sea can be deposited again near the high tide line, clinging to grains of black sand. When and where it is found depend on recent weather and coastal erosion patterns. The family worked the claim on and off for nine years. They now have access to a similar beach claim at Okarito and McLachlan believes many tourists would be keen to try their luck should favourable seas expose the yellow glister again. From the State Highway much of the West Coast appears an ocean of untouched nature, thanks to the former Forest Service’s practice of leaving narrow strips of roadside forest as scenic or amenity corridors. Seeing the carnage of clearfelling in Ianthe Forest, every time they drove out to their Green’s Beach claim, took McLachlan behind the

"beautiful facade of the show along the road’. Flying over Ianthe in a plane piloted by Ian during trips north was another shock. "The landscape created by clearfelling is like looking at pick-up sticks or something akin to Hiroshima." ISBELIEF at the scale of the devastation hardened into action in late 1989 when a Timberlands logging gang ventured over the skyline in Wanganui Forest and began to flatten part of the forest backdrop to the Harihari township. The whine of chainsaws and crashing trees was uncomfortably close. A phone call from local farmer Lindsay Molloy prompted McLachlan to poke her head up from out of the shy and silent majority. She and Molloy spent two days door knocking with a petition calling on Timberlands not to allow clearfelling over the skyline near the town or in other identified vista areas visible from the State Highway. Around 70 per cent of the town’s adult residents signed and the

logging gangs retreated. These days when McLachlan speaks out she still does so as an individual but one who knows that a sizeable local constituency also cherish the forest landscapes which distinguish South Westland. At a

recent meeting with Timberlands several residents from each of the Whataroa, Waitaha Valley, Harihari, Franz Josef and Okarito communities were loud in their opposition to the possible clearfelling of Poerua Forest. "As local people have become aware of how the Accord is being twisted to justify large areas of forest being clearfelled we re seeing a real body of opinion come out 1n opposition." Despite their best efforts, McLachlan knows that locals on their own cannot end clearfelling in South Westland. In the spate of lobbying before the Accord was signed, "the loudest voices" on the West Coast were those of industry. At that time McLachlan welcomed the letters written from "off the Coast" in defence of the forests and believes they are just as necessary today. She is delighted that Forest and Bird has made the campaign a national priority. McLachlan sees a legitimate role for a long-term milling industry on the West Coast which operates under sustained yield prescriptions to produce small vol-

umes of high-priced native timber for the domestic market. Her passion for the forests is not just for their antiquity, beauty and the web of life they support but for the "huge waste of a resource which could have been used on a small

scale to provide long-term employment and wood products". "We’re cutting so much rimu it’s going rotten sitting round in the yards and they have signs out which say trailer-loads of firewood for $5.00 — that’s for our 500-year-old trees." There’s a catch in her voice as she describes the vandalism which clearfelling in Poerua Forest and the remnant stands of trees in Waitangi and Ianthe Forests would involve. The lively warmth and generous hospitality which make her paddling clients feel more than welcome give way to a formidable blend of emotion and concentrated determination. The listener realises that it is not just the natural taonga of the forests which are at stake but the identity and sense of place of South Westland’s human inhabitants.

Eugenie Sage is a freelance journalist based in Christchurch and secretary of Forest and Bird’s North Canterbury branch.