'We're blowing this thing into the harbour': 50 years since woodchip bombing

Two men are in the front seats of a stolen car packed with explosives. They have wires, a gun and a mission to blow a port in the southern Western Australian city of Bunbury to smithereens. It is July 1976, and Michael "Fud" Haabjoern and John Chester are about to commit what the then-premier called a "gross act of terrorism" in protest against the woodchipping industry. Fifty years on, the little-known event leaves a complicated legacy in Australia's conservation history. The story of the Bunbury woodchip bombing did not start with a bang. For Haabjoern, it began with the roar of a chainsaw. He describes seeing 20 men with chainsaws, cutting down massive karris trees in just 10 minutes. "You think, 'That tree has been there for 500 years, some bastard knocks [it] down in 5 minutes, and then within 5 hours it goes through a mill,'" he says. Conservationists were opposed to the logging of the forest for woodchips. In the late 1960s, the state government expanded the timber sector in WA's South West by introducing woodchipping as an industry. It agreed to export 750,000 tonnes of chips a year from Bunbury to Japan. Haabjoern and Chester were part of an informal conservation group that opposed the idea of old-growth forests being pulped for paper products. Schoolteacher Graeme Robinson was also in the same collective. Robinson recalls writing letters in protest against woodchipping native forests. "We would write letters to the editor of the local newspaper, and we made a big effort to have a letter each," he says. But those letters angered some parts of the community, because woodchipping was big business for these small towns. One night that tension came to a head in a hall in Manjimup, in the heart of WA's southern forests. The "beating" occurred during a meeting held by the conservation group, featuring speakers including academics and environmentalists. Thirty or 40 people were expected, but hundreds showed up. "Most of them were anti our group," Robinson says. He remembers scores of workers from a nearby mill arriving drunk to disrupt the meeting. "The manager offered his men a keg of beer if they could break our meeting up," he says. "The catcalls got worse, the noise, the shouting." Robinson says the third speaker was terrified when a drunk worker strode out to the front, snatched the microphone off him, and started shouting abuse. So Haabjoern walked up and retrieved the microphone, pushing the disrupter back into the crowd. The crowd turned physical, and the police arrived. Haabjoern says workers chased him and beat him up, leaving him cowering under a car. Robinson believes that night only strengthened Haabjoern's resolve. "It was the beating that led to the bomb," he says. The other bomber, Chester, was described in newspaper reports at the time as a "loose cannon" while Haabjoern was said to be calmer. Fifty years on, Haabjoern is still relaxed when he recalls the night of the bombing, a scene straight out of a movie. The two men stole a car from Perth and loaded it with a batch of the explosive gelignite that they had taken from a limestone quarry. Then in the dead of night, they hightailed it from Manjimup to Bunbury. "We were driving around the car full of gelignite and detonators and all wiring and the whole shooting match," Haabjoern says. "One mistake and we would have been minced meat, on our way to heaven or hell." Haabjoern said he and Chester acted alone, and their crimes were not associated with their conservation group nor with the broader forest movement. They would cut a hole in the fence to get into the port, set up three bombs by the port's loading machinery, write warning signs to keep people safe, and get out: that was the plan. "The aim was to drop the whole installation into the harbour and stall the woodchipping process."