Hiballer - December 1979

Over the last few weeks, while not living in 1860s New Zealand with Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries or WW2-era France with Michelle Young's The Art Spy, I've been in the even stranger land of my own place's past.

More precisely, I've been working in British Columbia's logging industry in 1979, via the stories and advertisements to be found in the December 1979 issue of Hiballer Forest Magazine. This was the first issue under the editorship and sole ownership of the complicated Michael Siddall (RIP, 2024), after the retirement of Cy Young, whose book of poems Gulf of Georgia Crossing apparently didn't quite qualify him for ABC Book World inclusion, and whose name means he's almost impossible to look up online at this point, and I've been kind of enthralled.

(If you need to know what flavour of nerd I am, this is one of the flavours, though I contain multitudes.)

A good chunk of the issue's writing was by the indefatigable Ken Bernsohn, with one article by Eli Sopow, and cartoons provided by Len Whalen. All of it's very much a product of the time, but there are more complications here than you might expect.

The profile of Frank Beban, for example, runs predictably to include a complaint against closing parts of Haida Gwaii to logging. He argues that it should remain open because, "far from being a pristine wilderness, the area has been a centre of resource activity since the turn of the century, with mining, fish packing, sawmilling and extensive logging, including harvesting of the Sitka Spruce for the famous World War II Mosquito bombers" (p67). Crown-Indigenous relations can't be dedicated to sustaining past settler use patterns, period, but it's telling that after two of Beban's comments, the article's author uses the descriptor "Frank snaps" or "he snaps," plus two versions of "what annoys Frank."

On the other hand, Bernsohn's article about the proposed Pulp Area #6, which is organized around an interview with Tom Waterland, then the province's forests minister, writes explicitly about what companies need to be doing in order to generate the social licence that should accompany their entitlement: "You have to demonstrate what you're doing for the community you're in, with things like hiking trails, gifts to the United Way, or other community ventures" (p117).

Similarly, Bernsohn's piece about automation within the forest industry is thoughtful and humane, explaining some ways that companies can collaborate with unions in order to sustain local employment, care for current employees, and minimize negative social disruption.

Or there's the summary of Peter Woodbridge's presentation from earlier in 1979, about the coming decline in available logging in British Columbia, which you could still find companies describing as fiction some decades later. There are a few mentions elsewhere, too, that logging is having to change because the companies are running out of readily available trees of the right dimensions.

And the advertising! Classic, in every possible way.

Overall, this has been one of my favourite reads of the year, and I'm looking forward to dipping back into it. If I can figure out how to screen some of the ads onto t-shirts, too, well, wardrobe sorted for the foreseeable.