It was summer, 2019, and Tyla Bickley, a Canberra-based adventure cyclist and environmental studies major, was three days into a 10-day solo cycling trip through Tasmania’s west coast. Earlier in the year, she had organised and led a multi-day group cycle of the Tasmanian Trail for Radical Adventure Riders, a US-based organisation that promotes inclusivity among women and genderqueer cyclists. Tasmania was one of her favourite places in the country for cycle-touring, second only to Canberra, where she was well-known within the cycling community for organising bike-camping excursions to the alpine regions of the ACT.
Now Bickley was taking time before her final year at Australian National University to enjoy Tasmania’s isolated north-west corner. Under the crowns of giant trees, silence settled on everything like mist. Moss blanketed every trunk, branch and stone. Fungi rose from the deep green mulch in splashes of brilliant colour. Raindrops shimmered on the lacy fronds of towering tree ferns onto the road ahead as Bickley pedalled deeper into the rare, pristine beauty of takayna/Tarkine.
She had no way of knowing then that this cycle would change her life.
South of Smithton, at the edge of the Sumac Forest Reserve, Bickley came to a camp spread out across the road. This was the Sumac Blockade, set up by the Bob Brown Foundation (BBF), a non-profit environmental protection organisation founded by former leader of the Australian Greens, Dr Bob Brown. For nearly four years the blockade had prevented the construction of an access road proposed by Sustainable Timber Tasmania (STT), a road that would necessitate clearing swaths of the area’s 350-year-old eucalyptus trees. Known as forest defenders, these environmentalists conducted round-the-clock “tree-sits” for days at a time, suspended on platforms 30 metres in the air from the boughs of the eucalypts marked for destruction.
“Before I stumbled on the blockade, I had no idea that they still logged old-growth forest,” Bickley says. “When you’re driving [through takayna], you can’t see any destruction, but in many places if you walk 200 metres into the forest, you see that actually it’s all logged. I thought that by now they would have come up with better solutions.”
Forest defenders offered Bickley a cup of tea. A cup of tea turned into a decision to stay the night. It was New Year’s Eve. Tyla Bickley welcomed in the New Year stargazing under ancient myrtles and stringybarks.
“I was at the Sumac Blockade for a week,” Bickley laughs. “I had to race to catch my flight home from Launceston.”
Over the next two years Bickley returned multiple times to the frontlines of takayna, always by bicycle. The power of the region had taken hold; she knew this was a cause worth fighting for.
To experience takayna for the first time is to enter a realm shaped and buffed and nurtured by some of the most powerful natural forces in the world. Gale-force westerly winds – the Roaring Forties – blow the cleanest air and purest rainwater in the world across takayna. The region’s unofficially designated 495,000 hectares encompass the country’s largest old-growth temperate rainforest and highest concentration of Aboriginal heritage sites, intricate cave systems, rolling sand dunes and grassland plains. The wedge-tailed eagle, Tasmanian devil and Tasmanian freshwater crayfish make their homes across its diverse landscape. Myrtle beech trees found in its rainforests are a prehistoric genus left over from the Gondwana supercontinent that split apart 60 million years ago.
The region mystifies as much as it humbles.
Yet takayna is the largest unprotected wilderness area in the country. While sections, such as its coastline and the Savage River are protected, attempts to gain similar status for the entirety of the region have been foiled by decades of contradictory legislation, government interference and delays in heritage and environmental assessments.
Scott Jordan, who stood with Tyla Bickley and other forest defenders at the frontlines, and who has been the Bob Brown Foundation’s takayna campaign manager since 2012, laments, “Everything we’re facing now falls at the feet of [Australian Labor Party politician] Tony Burke.” In 2010, Burke, then the newly-appointed Environment Minister, allowed his predecessor’s emergency national heritage listing of takayna to lapse. Over the next three years, the Australian Heritage Council assessed takayna and found the region to be of outstanding historical, cultural and scientific value, recommending it be included on the National Heritage List. Burke rejected the council’s findings and refused to put the region forward for heritage consideration, claiming the need for job creation made it necessary to keep takayna open.
“Any one of the last six environment ministers could have picked up [the council’s] recommendation and with the stroke of a pen declared the area heritage listed,” continues Jordan. "Not one of them has had the courage to do it.”
The situation in takayna was becoming dire. Sumac Blockade activists inadvertently discovered a new threat in MMG Limited, a Chinese-owned mining company that was using STT’s existing access roads to scout out coupes for a mine tailings storage facility. The proposed facility would include a dam big enough to hold 25 million cubic metres of toxic waste material from the company’s Rosebery mine, as well as pipelines and a vehicle bridge over the Pieman River at takayna’s southern border.
In response, in late December 2020, the Bob Brown Foundation established the Pieman Blockade across the access road leading to MMG’s mining coupe. Five months later, shortly before dawn on May 18, about 30 police officers, including riot police, stormed the blockade, forcibly evicting forest defenders and making one arrest. Bickley, who had returned home from the blockade only weeks earlier, remembers, “I felt so helpless in Canberra. I did not want to be there while I knew what was happening down in that forest.”
The blockade was re-established the following morning and commenced what would become Tasmania’s longest continuous environmental activist picket and the BBF’s largest frontline action campaign. Every day, forest defenders entered MMG’s tailings dam worksite and held lockdown protests, locking themselves to gates and machinery, and disrupting operations.
A week after the raid, Bickley returned to the blockade. So did police. On May 25, she was one of three forest defenders arrested for delaying MMG’s logging crews for more than seven hours. Locked to an excavator, authorities had to use an angle grinder to free Bickley. She was charged with trespass with vehicle, failure to comply with police direction, and use of a closed forest road. As a condition of her bail, she was banned from returning to the region. Back in Canberra, Bickley stayed positive, planning group rides again around the ACT, and it was the support of the cycling community that inspired her to create the Lorax Route.
“The cycling community is a really giving space,” says Bickley. “I wanted to share [with it] this cycle that I had done, but it was also a really great way to write about takayna and get that to an audience of people who are always riding through beautiful, wild places, but may not necessarily be connected to the activism that’s going on over there.”
The route, named for the Dr Seuss character who speaks on behalf of the trees, is an 850km loop ride that begins and finishes in Launceston, following the Pieman River into the Corinna wilderness region before heading north along the coast, back into the heart of takayna. It also goes directly past the Pieman blockade site. By integrating physical endurance with social justice, Bickley believes the Lorax Route provides awareness of takayna in a therapeutic way.
“With any kind of activism, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed because change happens quite slowly,” Bickley says. “You always put a lot of energy into causes, so if you’re doing it in a way that you’re getting energy back out of it, I think it’s a bit more sustainable on a personal level.”
In response to setting up the Lorax Route, Scott Jordan speaks glowingly of Bickley and her advocacy. “She’s an inspiring young woman,” he says. “Last year, at the point when we were looking at packing down our camp and thinking the forest was safe was exactly when MMG started trying to roll their machines in. People like Tyla turned up again in the winter to come down and defend those forests.”
“To me, it makes a lot of sense that there should be some kind of acknowledgement that a lot of the places we’re riding in are threatened,” Bickley says. “If we can we should play a part in helping protect them. There really is amazing old growth forest that could be lost.”
Tyla Bickley’s Lorax Route can be found on the Desire Lines Cycling Club website at desirelinescc.com.au.
Bonnie Nicol is a freelance writer and experienced bikepacker who has been cycling Australia since 2019. She has been published in The Calvert Journal, Atlas Obscura, Desire Lines Cycling Journal and Lonely Planet. More of her writing can be seen at muckrack.com/bonnie-nicol-1.
Adrian Guerin is an Australian photojournalist based in Melbourne. His work with remote communities in North Africa has been featured in The Guardian, Wired and Musée. His photography from Mauritania won the Travel category of the 2020 Sony World Photography Awards. After many years travelling the globe, he now focuses on Australian stories. More of his work can be found on his Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adrianguerin/
