Woodford Bay on Sydney’s lower north shore, its exclusive white mansions and quaint boat sheds nestled into gnarly, urban bush abutting the harbour, has the type of serenity only lots of money can buy in Australia’s most ostentatiously wealthy city. Birdsong – of currawongs, magpies, kookaburras and gulls – is the bay’s bucolic daytime symphony, interrupted occasionally by the jarring cough of an outboard motor or car ignition.
By night you’d hear the metaphoric pin drop. And yet, confoundingly, nobody seems to have heard whoever, under night’s cover, recently illegally cut down almost 300 trees and hundreds of other plants on public bushland. Among the destroyed mature trees are eucalypts (including angophora), banksia and casuarina.
The stumps of the removed trees punctuate this small piece of felled bushland like broken teeth. A pair of plovers bounce about their newly cleared habitat, their home transformed into the site of the worst act of environmental vandalism in local Lane Cove council’s history.
Who would do such a thing?
The culprit is unknown, but look inland and upwards for clues, perhaps. It’s easy to speculate that the newly enhanced harbour views – and the value they add to some of the nation’s most exclusive property – may hold answers.
This act of vegetative vandalism comes months after a similar episode at Castle Cove, also on Sydney’s lower north shore. Between January and June this year 265 trees – including century-old red gum – were poisoned and cut.
You don’t need Holmesian powers of deduction to figure that public trees right across Australia, not least in Castle Cove and Woodford Bay, are more likely than not killed by those seeking to enhance views and, accordingly, property values.
Thanks to education campaigns by councils nationwide, would-be perpetrators know their actions would be illegal. And yet something – a disjunct between weak punishment and the crime, a colonial-settler impulse to control native bush, an overriding sense, perhaps, that public property has less value than private – impels them, regardless, to vandalise majestic trees.
“This is happening all over the country, all of the time,” says Greg Moore, an arboricultural scientist with the University of Melbourne. “But the illegal removal and poisoning of mature, public trees is most commonly associated with water views. Which is probably why Sydney is seeing this on an almost unprecedented scale at the moment.”
While Lane Cove council announced a “person/s of interest” has quickly been identified in its still ongoing investigation, council knows prosecutions in the New South Wales land and environment court, where the maximum fine for tree removal by an individual is $220,000, are notoriously hard to achieve.
Councils can issue on-the-spot fines for illegal tree removals of $3,000 for individuals and $10,000 for businesses. Moore says such fines are paltry compared with the value (perhaps tens – or hundreds – of thousands of dollars) that an enhanced view can add to a house price in parts of Sydney.
Moore says: “You’ve just got to up the fines. The fine shouldn’t be less than the value of the tree. And some of these trees will be worth (using the methods that we use in Australia) maybe $20,000 or $30,000. If you are looking at some of the big old specimen trees [Moreton Bay figs or oaks, for example] … you could easily be looking at a value of $50,000 or even $100,000.
“You’re not talking about just the loss of the tree but a community asset that’s been nurtured, managed and looked after for a long time.”
In the Woodford Bay case, an appropriate fine would, by this rationale, easily be millions of dollars.
Trees are a public asset. The physical, psychological, community, environmental, spiritual and climatic benefit of trees are multiple and profound. Up to 50 other species – birds, reptiles, mammals, fungi and soil microorganisms – also depend on a mature tree.
“People think, ‘Oh I’m only removing one tree.’ But when you do it over and over again and on the scale it’s happening in Sydney, they are having a bigger impact than they realise,” Moore says.
“People think of trees in gardens and streets as essentially being decoration. They don’t think of them as being functional … but the impact of illegal vegetation removal in terms of the urban heat island effect and local temperatures is enormous.”
Socially, therefore, the illegal killing of trees is a contemptuous act of theft from community; a criminal offence that should be pursued with the legal and law-enforcement vigour of other property and wilful damage crimes.
In terms of its criminal pathology, tree vandalism would appear to be rooted in narcissism and entitlement, suggests Moore: “It’s all about entitlement. Simple.”
Cristy Clark from the University of Canberra law school specialises in the intersection of human rights, the environment and law. Her recent book with John Page, The Lawful Forest, traces the social history – dating to pre-Norman England – of tensions between communal and relational property, and the “private, commodified and enclosed” opposite.
She, too, speaks of the entitlement of offenders.
“We have the regulatory framework that says it’s a criminal offence to harm a tree. And yet it keeps happening. People, I think, feel quite comfortable with doing it because they hold to this framework whereby their private property right is supreme. It’s the most important thing. You know, ‘I bought this property for its water views and this damn tree was never meant to get this big and now I can’t see it, it’s affecting my value that I am entitled to. So even if it’s against the law, I feel entitled to protect or even enlarge my private property rights because that’s my way of viewing the world’,” Clark says.
“It’s probably no mistake that this [mass Sydney tree vandalism] comes at a time when interest rates are rising and people are really feeling the crunch. There is this kind of increased defensiveness around gain that could be lost.”
Local government authorities across Australia have been developing counter-strategies for decades. Many councils are becoming more novel in their responses to – and discouragement of – illegal tree removals.
Councils in Victoria including City of Port Phillip and City of Bayside (where trees have been illegally removed to enhance views of the bay) have erected view-blocking billboards in front of poisoned or removed trees. Other councils stack shipping containers where trees once flourished.
Similar strategies are used in Sydney, rural NSW and Queensland to multiple ends: to deny the awarding of a prized view for an illegal act; to discourage copycats – and to publicly shame perpetrators.
Jane Lofthouse, the manager of sustainability and environment at Tweed Shire in northern NSW, says that in response to episodes of “vegetation vandalism’’ since 2016 the council has erected large signs in front – or in place – of the canopies of damaged and removed trees. Nearby residents are also letter-boxed to inform them of – and encourage them to report – vegetation vandalism. Poisoned, dead trees are left in place, safety permitting.
She says this strategy “may act as a deterrent” to “potential copycat vandals” who will see that poisoning or cutting down public trees may actually result in a less aesthetically pleasing, impeded view. Some councils grow vines over poisoned trees to help secure the trunks – and deny the sought-after view.
Lofthouse says that beyond several culprits who have confessed to vegetation vandalism when confronted, prosecutions are rare because evidence is so difficult to garner.
The novelist and celebrated nature writer James Bradley says the “hatred of trees” is a settler-colonial legacy of the desire to impose order on the natural landscape and a symptom of increased alienation from nature.
“Trees have helped shape and sustain human cultures for hundreds of thousands of years. Many Indigenous cultures recognise this with systems of reciprocity that connect them to trees, within which trees are not just living beings, but actually relatives or kin. That connection has been disrupted by the processes of extraction that have seen most of the world’s forests cleared, and the hostility to trees you hear when people complain about their messiness, or them blocking their view,” he says.
“The more science learns about trees, the more we realise that even though they exist upon quite different timescales to humans, they are beings, with the ability to communicate and learn. And that they aren’t just good for the environment, they’re good for us, and just being around them makes us calmer, improves our mood, and makes us feel more connected to the world around us.”
The urban historian Paul Ashton agrees that an enduring colonial-settler impulse to control nature underscores the entitlement of those who kill trees that impede their views.
Ashton talks of the long “botanical colonisation” of Sydney, referencing the introduction of European species and the removal of native plants and trees – which happened on a large scale, for example, when Sydney’s Centennial Park was planted in the late 19th century.
In that context, the violent killing of native trees today to further enhance one’s amenity really does carry a sinister white colonial resonance.
