BLICKS RIVER GUARDIANS AWARDED THE PRESTIGIOUS TOGA

 MEDIA RELEASE 

6 October 2025

 Blicks River Guardians has just been awarded the prestigious TOGA (Triumph Over Greed) Award from the North Coast Environment Council (NCEC) for their record-length successful forest protection actions (The Clouds Creek Glider Reviver) to protect the "Clouds Creek Greater Glider Sanctuary". 

The Glider Reviver stopped industrial logging at Clouds Creek for 420 working days (January 2024-September 2025) and ensured that these globally significant forests were protected from logging. This was the second biggest block of native forest ever attempted to be logged in this region by the Forestry Corporation of NSW.

 Blicks River Guardians protected these remarkable forests from logging and they were recently placed under a logging moratorium and identified for inclusion in the Great Koala National Park by the Minns Government. We warmly welcome this outcome and look forward to urgent gazettal of the National Park to allow the process of repair to begin and to commence the rebuilding of fauna populations decimated by massive recent logging across the Dorrigo Plateau.

Travelling from the highlands of the Gumbaynggirr Nation on the Dorrigo Plateau to the lowlands of the Bundjalung Nation south of Casino key members of Blicks River Guardians, Meredith Stanton and Mark Graham, were honoured to receive this award. This was particularly the case considering that the previous recipient (in 2022) was a leading conservation visionary, the man who first proposed the Great Koala National Park, Ashley Love.

“The NCEC's TOGA award recognises the efforts of every one of us who held space at the Glider Reviver over the 84-week campaign on beautiful Gumbaynggirr country... and all those cheering us on!,” said Meredith Stanton,

“It is not very often that grass roots community triumphs over corporate greed, yet in this instance, so satisfying to know that local koalas and greater gliders, our river systems and all future generations will be the beneficiaries of our sustained efforts to save Clouds Creek greater glider forests as intact habitat,”

“Unlogged, these catchments forests have a 15–20-year head start towards climate resilience. That's why we need to stop logging all our forests now and begin the restoration process inside the 476,000-hectare national park.”

 Blicks River Guardians extends the deepest gratitude and respect to all our many partners in our ongoing actions to ensure a healthy living future for the Blicks River. The Blicks River is the catchment draining the western parts of the Dorrigo Plateau, a major tributary of the Nymboida River.  This river provides drinking water to about 100 000 coastal residents between Sawtell and Iluka.

Mark Graham said, “Ending logging in the catchments will prevent extinctions, ensure our region and its economy will have the clean and adequate water needed for the survival of all industries including agriculture, fisheries, retail and other services and tourism industries, will provide generations of work needing substantial labour inputs over decades to come, to stabilise our regional climate and capture and store carbon in the landscape. Our forests provide us with the only path to a safe and viable future,”

 “Forests deliver water security, destroying them with industrial logging takes away the water security that we all need. We must now switch immediately from logging and destroying public native forests for a massive loss to taxpayers to the restoration and repair of forests.”

Blicks River Guardians hope all of the Great Koala National Park will be protected from mining too, but particularly the drinking water supply catchments on the Dorrigo Plateau which must be made into National Park or Nature Reserve because lower classes of reserves (such as State Conservation Areas) allow mining and there are growing concerns across the community about poisonous mining proposals under consideration on public lands in this catchment.

     - Blicks River Guardians

PROBLEMS WITH CLOUDS CREEK STATE FOREST LOGGING

Earlier this month a protest gathering in the Clouds Creek State Forest was attended by local residents, political candidates, and representatives from local environment and community groups. The action was called to protest Forest Corp's plan to log the forest early in 2019, including use of “intensive single tree selection” (aka virtual clear-fell).

Clouds Creek's forests are some the most fertile in NSW, supporting tall wet sclerophyll and rainforest communities which, unfortunately, have experienced dreadful over-logging for many decades. Old stumps measuring upwards of 2 metres diameter indicate what used to be, but today trees greater than 700mm are a rarity, with only widely scattered old or deformed trees remaining which were unsuitable for timber.

As part of the Regional Forests Agreement, signed in 2000, all rainforest and old-growth forest was mapped and protected. However, immediately prior to the signing, and knowing those old-growth forests would be “locked up”, the then Forests NSW moved into Clouds Creek and absolutely decimated them.

Protestors at the time managed to blockade and save some areas that are now part of the Nymboi-Binderay National Park, but much of the old growth was lost in that 1999 blitz.

In 2010 to 2012, Forests NSW returned for another round of harvesting, this time supposedly legally, but still managed to interpret the clause calling for a maximum 20% basal area logging rate, to allow rates as high as 80%, which after the trampling and destruction of smaller vegetation by industrial logging machines, is virtually clear-felling.

Following that old-growth logging episode, Koalas which were relatively common in the mid1990s, judging by the fauna surveys undertaken at the time, were found to be virtually non-existent in a 2017 survey conducted by the Office of Environment and Heritage.

Another previously common forest resident, the Greater Glider which was recently added to the threatened species list, also could not be found during the 2018 pre-harvest survey by Forests Corp.

With Government planning to extend the Agreements for another 20 years, and more logging planned, is it any wonder residents and the broader community are appalled by what is happening,

            - John Edwards

This article was originally published in the VOICES FOR THE EARTH column in The Daily Examiner on January 28, 2019.