There is a dark flipside to the great Australian seachange. Bushfire regulations are leading to the devastation of coastal forests, as city dwellers buy up uncleared land. Stuart Cohen grappled with this issue when he purchased a block on the coast. He discovered you can have your forest and a house too…

Story and pictures by Stuart Cohen

When plans for a building are approved in a patch of forest in Australia and people are given permission ( or not) to undertake the necessary clearing,  often the trees are just pushed over with a bulldozer into a big pile and then set alight. The result is devastating. The topsoil is badly disturbed or even removed. Weeds appear and a system which worked just fine for a few million years is ripped apart. Mostly everything is discarded or burnt. Some people have the good sense to keep a few straight poles for fence posts but generally that’s about it. While the media has had a big whinge about agricultural land clearing there’s quite possibly a bigger monster out there, the baby boomer making the seachange. I know – I guess I’m one of them.

To me clearing land like this just seems crazy and when my wife and I decided to build on five acres of forest on the far south coast we spent some time considering just how we would do it without causing complete mayhem. We bought the land because of the intact forest, something becoming increasingly difficult as developers carry out the process called “under scrubbing”, which means ripping out the understorey and replanting grass. This is followed by the charming real estate advertising line, “would clear to a lovely block.” We thought ‘lovely’ was the trees.

In deciding what we would build and what we could clear the first problem we faced of course were the current regulations regarding clearing for dwellings. After the horrendous 2003 bushfires new regulations came into force which would require virtually all vegetation to be cleared for a 40 metre radius. For my five acres it would have been the equivalent of dropping a small atomic bomb and the death knell for a small family of three Greater gliders, a species known to occupy a very small home range. My particular little glider family form part of a larger group which has since been listed as an endangered population.

Personally I find the idea of chopping down a 300-400 year old tree for something as temporary as a house under the premise that the house might come under attack from fire pretty hard to swallow but here I was looking at the obvious likelihood of having to do just that to make way for my home in retirement. In the end I decided a “shed” would be a much better option. It didn’t require nearly as much clearing and for the time being we’d only see it on weekends anyway. We’ll worry about the house later by which time hopefully some common sense might see some winding back of this draconian measure.

We camped on the block for more than a year over weekends, wandering around the forest looking for the best place to build a shed, a site that was congenial, provided good aspect and a minimum of disturbance. After deciding on a good spot the time came to choose which trees needed to be removed to make way for the slab. The key criteria for removal was simply – if it could fall on the shed it would have to go. It took months of hand wringing and strained necks and I have to admit to feeling a bit like Doctor Mengele when making the decision to wrap the pink marker tape around a tree. We chose 24 for the chop.

When the day came to do the job I insisted on being present. I’d heard too many stories of contractors letting their heads go and forgetting the clearing parameters set by the owner. I chose very deliberately not to use a bulldozer although this would be cheaper and picked a local tree feller, crusty old Pete. Turns out, though he’d never admit to this, despite cutting down trees for a living, he was a bit of a closet greenie and took great pride in doing his job with no more impact than was absolutely necessary.

The main reason for using a tree feller as opposed to a bulldozer, is that bulldozers do immense damage just by rolling on to your property. After a dozer has been it looks literally like a battle field after a battalion of tanks have fought to the death. Pete drove onto the block in a rubber tyred giant cherry picker. From a canopy high platform he removed the leafy tree tops of the select trees. Everything under ten centimetres was grabbed on the ground and pushed through a mulcher and turned into eucalypt chip. Then the leafless, branchless trunks were felled at the base. In the end I was left with a lot of big sticks and several tonnes of mulch with minimal ground disturbance. Later a back hoe put the sticks I’d decided to keep into neat piles for later use and the root bolls of the trees, which were in the way of my slab, were ripped up. The other root bolls were left. Ripping all of them up wasn’t necessary which meant the soil wasn’t disturbed and they could coppice and regrow from the roots.

I planned to reuse every stick and twig that had been cut down. A small bob cat trundled around spreading the eucalypt mulch to prevent soil erosion and weed infestation. Timber that was not suitable for fence posts or landscaping was cut up for firewood. I kept a couple of good sized logs for milling later on to provide some handsome slabs. The last challenge was what to do with a dozen remaining root bolls and associated debris. I was determined not to burn them because there was still enough to do immense damage. In the end a friend obtained a small Landcare grant and transported them to some large erosion gullies on his property, since nicknamed “Cohen’s crack” – charming! After this load had gone there remained a few dense piles of bark, leaf and twig litter full of seeds and a number of small hollow logs. This was spread around the disturbed areas to provide some seed for later regrowth.

We built our shed and two years later it’s almost as if the shed had always been there. Regrowth has been phenomenal, there are no weeds and we often see the Greater gliders as we sit around the fire at night. We do not spend weekends mowing lawns and I have a beautiful native garden rustling with antechinus, wrens and other native beasties. I cringe at the thought of a bushfire because there’s still a risk but I figure it’s small and because I’ve built the shed with fire in mind it will have to be a bad day and at the wrong time for it to go. There’s a much higher chance that my shed will survive many more decades and rot before a bushfire gets to it. In the meantime the gliders will stay and when it comes time to build a real house we may just say “stuff it” and leave it as it is. It’s that special.