by Meagan Patroni
At 77, Chris Degan may be retired from work, but she hasn’t retired from the fight for native forests. Sitting with a D-lock secured around her neck and attached to a logging harvester in Gladstone State Forest, the Knitting Nannas Coffs Harbour Loop member is turning a quiet, everyday presence into a powerful act of resistance.
“Our forests are our lifeline to clean water, clean air, and the conservation of koalas,” Chris says. “Our Mid North Coast forests are an ancient link to Gondwana. They are precious and sacred for Gumbaynggirr People, and they are critical for a liveable future.”
Driven by that urgency, forest defenders are refusing to back down.
“No one is going to stop resisting the foolish policies of the Minns government,” Chris adds.
Week after week for three years, the Knitting Nannas Coffs Harbour Loop and fellow forest defenders, young and old alike, have gathered outside the Forestry Corporation head office in Coffs Harbour. Their demand is simple: for Premier Chris Minns to finally deliver on his party’s promise of a Great Koala National Park.
For over a decade, local communities were assured that NSW Labor would secure this vital sanctuary once in office. Yet three years into government, that promise feels less like a plan and more like a political game.
Behind a labyrinth of government-appointed committees and endless bureaucratic delays, an ugly reality unfolded: logging was drastically accelerated within the proposed park’s footprint. Entire stands of native habitat were clear-felled while politicians debated boundaries. Worse still, much of what is being logged is written off under technicalities that exclude complex, regenerated native ecosystems from protection.
“Tuckers Nob and Pine Creek are both designated plantation,” Chris explains. “They are the absolute heart of the Great Koala National Park and contain the highest density of koalas across the whole park. Yet right now, Forestry is clear-felling compartments of those forests, and koalas are being killed.”
Chris is equally critical of modern offset mechanisms like the Improved Native Forest Management (INFM) scheme.
“It goes beyond the forests for us,” she reflects. “It’s enabling polluters to keep on polluting by buying phony credits… It’s a false debate that we’ve been wedged in, and we just have to fight on.”
For Chris, the fight is fueled by a mix of deep exhaustion and burning anger. After decades of activism, from protesting supersonic airliners in her youth to opposing coal and gas expansion, she admits her optimism has waned. She has no children or grandchildren of her own, yet her commitment to future generations remains unbreakable.
When asked how she keeps going through the anger, the arrests, the fines, and the sheer absurdity of wearing waterproof pants to hold a line through an eight-hour blockade, her stance is unwavering. The Nannas don’t fight because winning is easy; they fight because the alternative, surrendering the lungs of our planet, is unthinkable.
“We are but one little blue dot in a vast cosmos,” Chris says softly. “It is still bloody beautiful. It’s still worth fighting for.”
The government may rely on delay tactics, bureaucracy, and cynicism to wear down public resistance. But they have severely underestimated the grit, humor, and bloody-minded determination of Australia’s grandmothers, the Knitting Nannas Coffs Harbour Loop.
