Margo Kingston

Margo Kingston

Co-publisher and editor-in-chief at No Fibs
Margo Kingston is a retired Australian journalist and climate change activist. She is best known for her stint as Phillip Adams’ ‘Canberra Babylon’ contributor and her work at The Sydney Morning Herald and #Webdiary. Since 2012, Kingston has been a citizen journalist, reporting and commenting on Australian politics via Twitter and No Fibs.
Margo Kingston

“The decision to move from covering protests to joining in was important to the author, and her experience of lock-on and arrest revealed the courage that direct action requires.”

Lock on: from reporting on protests to joining them
Abridged version published in The Saturday Paper

Jesse Witney, Jane Watson, Knitting Nana Bronwyn Vost and I at Taree local court for locking on to a giant harvester to help #SaveBulgaForest. And campaign leader and my friend Susie Russell and I. Thank you to supporters outside the Court. My first bluesky post, what’s The best tutorial?

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— Margo Kingston (@margokingston.bsky.social) November 26, 2024 at 9:30 AM

MY FIRST SHOCK, being handed a nappy and a Gastrostop tablet before driving an hour or so along gravel roads to a lonely spot in the bush. Head torch to negotiate some precipitous slopes and muddy tracks in cold rain until we see the giant tree harvester in a clear-felled area piled with logs.

A bike lock is placed around my neck and attached to the machine, the harvester tray looms above. I’d been told that everyone is anxious before lock-on, when they feel clarity and empowerment. But I’m shaking with cold and fear and trying to work out why I am doing this, and that’s the vibe of my lock on videos. 

I have a ‘buddy’ who is not locked on but sits nearby. Jane Watson has campaigned to protect her local Bulga State Forest for decades but has never been arrested or been a buddy. She did it for me.

Before light she names the bird songs I hear – shining cuckoo, lyre bird, boobook owl, yellow robin, rosellas, parrots – and notes a koala grunt. We are without phones because police might confiscate them, and as a screen addict I’m surprised to experience intense stillness in the total loss of control, waiting. 

Daylight, and a man and a woman in flouro vests stamped ‘Forestry Corporation’ approach and ask us to leave. As they depart, the woman tells us two loggers would ‘snig’ around us in machines, but they soon leave and Jane says we called their bluff. The woman returns with her ‘authorised officer’ credentials and orders us to leave or police will be called. Jane says she’ll stay with me but will leave if police ask her to.

More than an hour later two police officers and two big Police Rescue men in white overalls arrive. The police arrest Jane and take her up the hill. Detective Belinda Johnson returns. A rescue squad man says he’s an hydraulic engineer and the machinery above me could fall down and crush me in response to the angle grinder cutting my lock off. The other says I must take off my raincoat or sparks from the angle grinder will set me alight. They say there’s a significant risk I could be killed or calamitously maimed if I don’t tell them where the keys are. They say that when I bend my head forward it must stay completely still or I could be cut. I ask to see Jane to ask her for advice but one of the men says, “Let’s do it”. He says they will do their utmost to ensure my safety and, shocked to my core, I reply that it hadn’t occurred to me that they wouldn’t. 

As I bend over crying, hands shaking, focused on keeping my head still, I wonder why I’m prepared to die for this cause. All I can think of before the angle grinder efficiently removes the bike lock without incident was that if I died the logging would have to stop for longer. 

We’re put in the dog box on the back of the police wagon, no seat belts, nothing to hang on to for the hour long drive on winding pot-holed gravel back roads to avoid going through Elands, where there might be protests. At Taree lock-up, the holding cells are little white booths in a row, front glass facing the police desk like Amsterdam prostitute’s shop fronts. My best friend Susie Russell, a leader in the decades long struggle by Elands locals to protect the Bulga State Forest, is in one. She’d locked down solo the day before because after so many days delaying the months-long logging plan no-one else was available.  

Police did something new – refuse Susie bail. She had to stay in the cells overnight before a magistrate granted her bail on the usual conditions. 

All my belongings are taken and I’m fingerprinted and photographed. The custody manager lets me have my book for a pillow to lie on the narrow bench. She gives me two cups of strong tea as the hours roll by waiting for “Upstairs” to decide whether to give us bail, and has to get Upstairs permission to give me a nicobate.

When I’m let out to sign something, Belinda Johnson approaches. She says she’s not recording and I believe her. She’d looked me up on the way down the mountain and thinks I should stick to words, that I’m not suited to doing what I did. I burst into tears in agreement, saying I’d done my act of conscience and would never do it again and please let me have bail.

She says that’s not up to her, noting that I was also arrested in 2014. 

I tell her I’ve only been voluntarily arrested once before, at 18, and never wanted to do it again. She’s too young to remember Sir Joh Bjelke Petersen, so I explain that he was our Trump and while my peers at Sydney Uni marched for women’s and gay rights at Queensland Uni we marched for the right to march. I joined in at the climax: 5000 people in King George Square, 700 police facing us down the street, and thousands of Brisbanites creating an amphitheatre for the spectacle. 417 people stepped onto the street and were arrested. 

My 2014 arrest was a terrible shock. I’d embedded in the Maules Creek protest camp hosted by a local Liverpool Plains farmer and attended by people across Australia for our nation’s first coal mine blockade. Former National Party leader Mark Vaile headed Whitehaven Coal, which got permission to clear the endangered Leard State Forest on the plains food bowl for a coal mine. I reported the actions via Twitter. Greenpeace organised a mass night walk into Whitehaven’s operations on the understanding that the police would ask us to leave the few who had decided to be arrested. Instead they arrested everyone, ignoring my incensed plea that I was just there to report the event. 

At my request the Media Alliance got a legal opinion on whether the Constitution’s implied right to free political speech could protect the right to report. No. They funded my lawyer and charges were dropped because police had breached trespass law requirements.

“So why did you do this?”

Well, early last year I reported via Twitter and my citizen journalism website No Fibs, the #SaveBulgaForest campaign to try to convince either the NSW Coalition Government or Labor to pledge to ban native forest logging before the election. A protest camp at Elands’ Ellenborough Falls campsite grew so big that Forestry Corp postponed Bulga Forest logging and began stripping the nearby Lorne and Yarratt State Forests, where there was little local resistance. Until we did an action at Yarratt I’d naively thought ‘sustainable logging” meant selective felling of trees, but it was clear felling, gravely disrupting the ecosystem. A police inspector ordered us to leave, stating that Forestry Corp had just officially closed the entire forest to all traffic and walkers, and we’d be arrested even for driving through. It published an official closed forest map on its website, but  it was fake – the public, media, local council and NSW Parks were not advised.  In reality, it was closed only to people police thought might be protesters. But that’s lawless!, I exclaimed. They do it all the time, old timers replied. A week later 100 people walked in. 

I told Belinda I’d angsted for a week about whether to risk arrest by joining them, and decided to because, like in Sir Joh’s Queensland, the rule of law had collapsed in the NSW public’s forests. I wasn’t arrested that walk-in day, but I’d made a commitment and the right time was now – there was on one else available.

Most urgently, the Bulga Forest is a haven for the officially endangered greater glider, yet Forestry Corp surveyed for greater gliders only by day, when the marsupials only begin emerging from their tree dens at dusk. So citizen scientists, including former Treasury Secretary Ken Henry, who now runs an ‘accounting for nature’ project, spotlight regularly, documenting many glider dens so Forestry Corp is required by law to add them to logging exempt zones. 

It seems senseless to me for the NSW Government, which owns Forestry Corp, to log public forests at a loss, despite the risks to water catchments and habitat for endangered species, especially after their devastation in the 2019 bushfires. Oh, and trees turn CO2 into oxygen – climate change action, anyone? The product – native woodchips for suburban gardens, firewood, pallets and a few high end hardwood boards. FFS.

But the politics is stuck. The Nationals back the timber mills and contractors (the Coalition extended logging contracts just before the election with no review of the impact of the fires) and the CFMEU won’t let Labor stop it. It seems so easy to fix – make State Forests into carbon offset areas, earning money for the State, buy out the logging contracts and offer employees and local contractors generous severance packages and retraining. 

But the federal environment minister Tanya Plibersek effectively admitted she was powerless to act at the first Global Nature Positive Summit  “to accelerate collective action to drive investment in nature and strengthen activities to protect and repair our environment”, held in Sydney as #SaveBulgaForerst arrests mounted. 

“We are at the start of the road when it comes to nature positive and turning things around. Our job is not just to do the work, but to take others along with us. To build coalitions, with unlikely allies as well as our traditional partners.”  

Nice words, no action

So it’s a war on the ground, between citizens and Forestry Corp, in league with police constantly diverted from normal duties. Victoria and WA have stopped native forest logging on public land, but the NSW Labor Government delays by appointing a Forestry Panel to assess the industry’s future.

So while the big players summit-talk the frontline is on its own. We need help! And maybe a gofundme could ask for donations to pay for the transition – I’m skint but I’d donate, and the rich, hell, what a legacy to spend your money on. Naming rights? 

After my release on bail activists told me Police Rescue routinely does a version of what it did to me, and that they’d never heard of a lock-off injury. As a last resort lock-oner I didn’t know the rituals of the ground war, and hadn’t been pre-briefed because Susie, who knew me, was in jail. I think my treatment was extreme because I was vulnerable, and they tortured me, in a way, to try to find out details of our operation. I don’t blame them – they’d prefer to do their regular job. 

I feel my psychological near death experience might change how I do life. Still in shock the next day I suddenly realised why I had done it. Susie Russell has fought for decades to protect NSW native forests. It’s her life’s passion. Along with my mother, she saved me when I broke down physically and mentally after the Sydney Morning Herald rejected my work in 2005. Susie also showed me how to see and appreciate nature and I think of her house on the Bulga plateau as my second home. 

Campaign leader and my friend Susie Russell and I at Taree local court for locking on to a giant harvester to help #SaveBulgaForest.

My father told me that if you have one true friend you’re fine, two you’re lucky and three you’re blessed.

I’m proud that I’ve proved to myself that I’m a true friend of  a true friend. And I’m relieved that this 65 year old childless dog lady didn’t break when she did something way outside her comfort zone for younger generations, not just report others doing it. 

Maybe clarity and empowerment sometimes takes a while. 

The #SaveBulgaForest support team outside Taree local court today, and with the four in Court today – Jesse Witney, my lock-on buddy Jane Watson, Knotting Nana Bronwyn Vost and me. Here we go…

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— Margo Kingston (@margokingston.bsky.social) November 26, 2024 at 9:37 AM

Further reading: No Fibs #SaveBulgaForest archive