PERTH logging contractor Kevin Williams sits at his kitchen table and slams hands the size of meat plates down on it in despair.
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"We're finished. That's the end of us now," he says.
Mr Williams has just taken a call from a mate in the industry telling him that conservation- minded entrepreneur Jan Cameron is buying the Triabunna woodchip mill from Gunns.
The Triabunna mill had been touted as crucial to the forestry industry after Gunns shut its Long Reach and Hampshire mills.
Carting logs from the forests to Northern woodchip mills has been the mainstay of the Williams family business since Mr Williams started hauling for the Long Reach mill in the early 1970s.
It was owned by Associated Pulp and Paper Mills then.
Gunns took over the Long Reach mill from Boral in 2000.
Mr Williams and his sons said the news of the Triabunna mill purchase by Ms Cameron and her business partner Graeme Wood, the Wotif.com co-founder, had destroyed the little hope they had of survival.
They still hold a contract to haul 244,000 tonnes a year of chip timber for Gunns and had hoped that it might have some value once the state's forest peace talks were settled.
Mr Williams is 58. He started working at a sawmill when he was 11.
His sons Shannon and Shaun joined him in his 42-year-old forestry contracting business as soon as they were old enough.
They had expected the five sons that they have between them to continue the business.
But Mr Williams and his sons believe the Triabunna sale means they have moved from a precarious position where the finance company was prepared to stick with them a little longer to probably losing their houses to cover machinery debt.
Since Gunns started moving out of native forests and shutting the associated infrastructure, Mr Williams and his sons have faced a working life in limbo.
The drawn-out statement of principles forest talks initiated by the state government had only added to that situation.
The family business had 16 log trucks - including four subcontracted - on the road at its peak.
Now there are nine of the huge vehicles struggling for space in their various backyards while they are lucky to still have four working for a time.
"We are lucky to be doing some work for Forestry Tasmania, which means four on the road but that will drop to two when the contracted volume with Forestry finishes at the end of July," Shannon Williams said.
There was still a little work hauling for a couple of smaller timber exporters such as the Arnold family's Artec Pty Ltd.
Mr Williams said the hardest thing for his business was the speed with which his working life changed.
He said that forest cartage contracts had traditionally been for five years with three by two "evergreen".
That meant that if employers decided to cut contracts, they had to give two years' notice.
Gunns wrote to its contractors giving them that notice but there has been no work or compensation.
"That two years would have seen me out of the industry," Mr Williams said.
"I wouldn't have had any debt and it would have fallen in line with paying off the trucks."
Mr Williams believes that the dire situation in which he and other Tasmanian forest contractors find themselves could have been avoided with better industry control.
When he first started in the trade, contractors had to have cart licences.
And, like the abalone or taxi industries, licences for new people entering the industry could only be secured by buying them from an existing operator.
That meant that the numbers of operators were controlled.
"Gunns oversupplied the market with contractors during the boom time and now there are too many," Mr Williams said.
"Cart licences gave us security but they were scrapped."
WHAT THE FOREST
CONTRACTORS SAY
About 2000 Tasmanians are employed directly
in forest contracting, including timber haulage,
harvesting, silviculture and vermin control.
The industry is made up of about 200 businesses,
of which 90 have already gone broke or are
expected to in the next two to three months.
Cumulative losses to the industry in the past five
years are estimated at $150 million.
There are 66 hardwood harvest-and-haul
contractor businesses that are idle.
More than 500 harvest-and-haul workers are idle.
Seventy other forest contracting businesses
outside the harvest-and-haul sector are either idle
or working at 10 per cent capacity or less. More
than 1000 employees are involved in that sector.
Without change in the industry, it is expected that
another 40 harvest-and-haul contracting
businesses will fold along with 32 sawmills -
Source: Tasmanian Forest about 3500 job losses in total.