sally_niemann

This Blog entry is a little late, week 2 and playing catchup as I navigate the tech to start this course 1200kms from home, 70ks to the nearest town with a public library. My friendmade the comment that a mobile phone has the power to fly a rocket to the moon. This got me thinking that I might be able to access the course from my mobile phone. The house I am staying at has Starlink internet which I can access from my tent nearby. Miraculously yes, I can write a blog and access the course while hanging about in the bush. I have not blogged before but it seems like journalling which I do know about. I chose the DGIL because I was involved with a forest activist group in East Gippsland. GECO started in 1993 and celebrated the end of the logging in 2023. The closure has left behind 30 years of realia, documents and video footage. I want to learn how to archive this material as a recognition of all the brave and naive people who devoted their time and talents to a David and Goliath cause that in the end has not saved the forest. GECO began before social media and mobile phones, before the internet was widely established and the roads into the mountains were bitumised. Most of the people who arrived here in 1993 now have kids and grand kids. They left the forest movement and work either in health or environment. I feel the efforts of GECO occurred at a pivotal time, just before the cyberworld became a thing around the time climate change was beginning to be a public topic. My idea is to make a digital record of as much as I am able and learn to store and preserve the reality. The forest around the site where the potential archive are stored burned in 2014 and 2020. The reality is the archive may be destroyed by the next inevitable fire. I hope I can finish the archive project before this happens. There are also the issues of damp and insects to consider. I think it's an archive worth preserving as a unique grass roots movement that produced art, videos, documents, t-shirtsand banners. It affected many people's lives and proved a movement can be run on a shoe-string and that sometimes it's not the winning of a battle but the witnessing of a forest before it fails that counts.