1 March 2006
The hands that clutch the kettle aren’t what they were. As Hedley Hoskinson freely admits, at 70 years of age his body doesn’t quite resemble the youthful figure it once cut.
Born in the midlands of Tasmania, the island state off the southern coast of Australia, Hoskinson is the oldest original leatherwood honey collector still working the state’s south. For 40 years he has collected one of the world’s most prized and rarest honeys from trees that are often centuries old. The unique Tasmanian leatherwood understorey doesn’t produce flowers for 75 years, and it’s only trees that are aged over 175 years that produce a marketable amount of the distinctly aromatic, truly unique Australian nectar. Much of the forest currently utilised is over 350 years old, and most of the accessible forest is traditionally in coupes earmarked for logging.
Hoskinson wasn’t always a beekeeper, he trained as a shepherd. It was always expected that Hedley would follow the family in sheep. His dad was a shepherd, as was his granddad and great granddad. But Hedley had honey on his mind, from the time he’d watch and catch bees while waiting for the school bus.
Hedley always had a thing for bees. He discovered his first swarm while still wearing short pants. He’d been out swimming a semi-permanent local creek (“two kicks and a breaststroke across”) when he found the swarm in a prickly box tree. The bees had only just left their original home with a new queen looking for a new home and, luckily, “when your tummy’s full, and you’re content, it’s hard to bend and sting.”
Being too young to know how dumb it was, he wrapped the swarm up in his wet towel. “They were getting in and out as they pleased,” he says. But he didn’t get stung.
“My mother was a great panicker,” Hedley says of his mum’s less than enthusiastic response when he arrived home with towel abuzz, “and she’s screaming at me to put it down.” His mother tipped the junk out of a benzine box, took it to a concrete slab while Hedley undid the knots in the towel, and popped the swarm in the box, an uncannily perfect place for a hive.
“One fella brought his first swarm home in a Gladstone bag,” says Hoskinson, also pointing out that the bloke was actually a timber cutter. In the 1950s there were lots of beekeepers, just very few professionals; most farms having one hive or more to help fertilise crops.
Hedley has a calm face broken by two strong vertical creases, and a small almost elfishnose and features. A waft of soft grey hair stands up above his small frame, which is wrapped in an aqua marine knitted jumper over a red chequered shirt. He sits with his back to the woodfired stove, in this, the third house he has built in the pristine rolling hills above Woodbridge, a hamlet half an hour from the state capital of Hobart. He makes tea the old fashioned way; warming the pot on the side of the stove, using tea leaves and a tea cosy - though he makes a concession to changing times with the use of “skinny” low fat milk.
Leatherwood honey comes from one of two native species of Eucryphia, in this case Eucryphia lucida. It’s usually a secondary canopy, with the trees growing at reasonably high altitude but flowering only in the warmer months. A good stand of leatherwood will produce an enormous number of blossoms for about six weeks a year, but many of the remaining stands are too high up for bees. Bees don’t really like the climate above 600 metres in altitude, they don’t like it cold, and they don’t like rain. They don’t like wind, either, and yet cold, windy, rainy country is now virtually the only habitat of the leatherwood.
At 30, Hedley wasn’t yet a beekeeper. After working with all aspects of running sheep for half his life, he decided to get into bees for a living, but first he had to convince his wife.
In the 1950s Hoskinson worked with beekeepers while holidaying from shepherding. While a much smaller, less revered industry then, even in those days the leatherwood was esteemed, with 4 gallon containers of the prized golden elixir being sent to the UK.
In the 1967 bushfires, Hedley lost his house, his poultry shed (it was a poultry farm) and almost everything else. He describes the air as filled with fire, as vapours from giant eucalypts caught alight high above their heads. The fires left Hedley with little except the honey house, which survived probably because it sat on kerosene tin “stilts” filled with concrete, rather than on timber.
“I look back now and that fire was a blessing,” says Hoskinson, referring to the fact it got him out of chickens and into bees full time. Problem has been the clearfelling of old growth forests, which has long been the policy in Tasmania.
Hedley, despite his meek looks, comes across as a stirrer, his conversation peppered with plenty of barbs for Forestry Tasmania. That’s the mob who are charged with responsibility for managing State Forests for all users (those public forests not designated National Parks or World Heritage areas). But loggers, who continue to clearfell magnificent old stands of forest, are the biggest money earners and so the management of the forests has always favoured the cutting of trees rather than the wellbeing of a few hundred beekeepers. Even the Tasmanian Beekeepers Association admits that the leatherwood honey industry is only worth, directly, about $2 million a year. That, however, isn’t the full worth of the industry. Tassie beekeepers make 70% of their money from the leatherwood, while the crops they pollinate – often for free or negligible money - for others in agriculture are worth closer to $200 million a year.
“We’re losing our resource,” says Hedley, with sad eyes. “Just about lost it here in the south.” Hoskinson, who set up the Hobart branch of the Tasmanian Beekeepers Association, has seen a lot of damage done to the forests in his time and has purposefully looked to get access to preserved leatherwood in World Heritage sites. It’s his livelihood, after all.
“It’s got to the stage as apiary sites in national parks and world heritage come up I made applications,” he says “and let my forestry sites go to other people.” Hedley’s nothing if not wise to the fragility of the industry, and protective of its future.
Hoskinson once organised a strike action, where beekeepers would refuse to pollinate regular crops (worth the aforementioned $200 million to the state, but often not paying enough money to make it worthwhile to beekeepers). “They treated me like a sheep killing dog,” he says of others in the beekeeping industry who couldn’t see the resource disappearing from their vantage point in the state’s more fertile north. An agreement the others entered into “didn’t save one single tree,” Hedley claims.
“My son wasn’t happy to come into an industry where there’s no future,” says Hedley. “Everything is felled, right into the creeks. Right over the creeks, leaving nothing.”
Two and half years ago Hedley and the beekeepers marched in the street with placards. He’s hopeful of a change in policy, as the current one is clearly unsustainable.
“We’ve been onto these pollies for years,” he says about his dealings with numerous state ministers responsible for forests. “But it’s only in the last six months they’ve started to listen.”
Hedley still works over 400 hives, all of them in the south of the state. It takes an hour and a half to get to his nearest stand of leatherwood, down at the infamous Farmhouse Creek, site of a well known environmental blockade or three. It takes two and a half hours to get to most of his hives on the leatherwood, at Strathgordon.
This year Hedley managed to get about 30kg of leatherwood honey per hive, though in a good year it’s closer to 80 or 90 kilograms. But there hasn’t been a good year for four years, and he has to leave some leatherwood honey in the hives for the bees to winter on.
Hedley hopes to retire soon. If he can find someone he trusts to take over the business.
A week after this interview was conducted, the website Save Your Leatherwood had this news which bodes well for the future of Tassie’s unique Leatherwood honey: “”The Minister for Infrastructure, Energy and Resources, Bryan Green MHA, had, through the Forests and Forest Industry Council, initiated a process whereby the Leatherwood rich forest coupes in the South of Tasmania would be identified and then deferred from clearfelling.”
From beekeepers website;
“First motion at the 1946 meeting: "that this association requests that the Forestry Department take into consideration the interests of beekeepers and the honey eating public, in the preservation of Leatherwood areas, and further that this Association urges the Department to make it an offence to fell any Leatherwood tree of diameter less than 9 inches at the butt"