MEMBERS of Launceston’s Tran family are counting their blessings after recieving a ministerial intervention to avoid deportation and will continue doing what they love – living in Tasmania and cooking delicious Vietnamese food.

LANA BEST reports:

SINGLE mother of three, Dan Thi Tran, recently found herself in a position where she could lose her beloved Yorktown Square restaurant, Mekong, due to a Visa card bungle. 

Less than a month off having to pack up her family, home and business and move back to Vietnam, the Trans were given a reprieve by Immigration Minister Andrew Giles thanks to the political pressure and endorsement of an entire food loving community.

 An online petition attracted 19,500 signatures and letters of support came for many quarters in an effort to keep them in Australia. In a lesson for all immigrant business operators, finding the right migration agent was also key in staving off deportation. For eight years, Mekong has meant everything to Ms Tran. 

It’s provided her family’s livelihood, funded her children’s education, provided a meeting place for friends and been a training ground and handy casual workplace for university students and young people wanting to work in hospitality. 

Following a marriage break-up, the savvy business woman, who ran a successful import/export business in Vietnam, moved to Tasmania with her children for a fresh start. Since then, the family has assimilated into the Launceston community, the children have excelled at school and Mekong has gone from strength to strength, winning the Australian Good Food Guide Readers’ Choice award three times. 

The Tran family paid thousands of dollars to an agent to assist them in navigating the intricacies of immigration law and visas so they could extend their stay in Australia until they were eligible to apply for permanent residency. 

It wasn’t until they applied for a business visa extension that they realised they had been going through the wrong process from the start and it was too late to re-apply. They claim the former migration agent did not tell them they must have officially owned and operated their business for two years to apply. 

By the time they were aware of this crucial criterion, it was too late to apply for another visa and they were struggling, like all restaurants, to stay afloat during the pandemic. Years of to-ing and fro-ing with government agencies, multiple appeals and rejections, has weighed heavily on the family. 

Ms Tran’s daughter Mia Vo, who is in the final year of a marketing and business management degree at the University of Tasmania, said she has watched her mother take a flailing business, introduce her signature style of home cooking and build a loyal customer base. She said there was no way they were going to give up without a fight. 

“She’s so passionate about what she does – she’s here early in the morning, she does all the food prep,she’s here every evening and prepares every single meal herself – she just won’t let anyone else cook!” Mia said. 

Mia’s brother Dat Tien Tran Vo is also completing the same degree as Mia, one year behind her, and together they’ve been able to put what they learn into action – developing a website and working on a social media profile. They never expected they would have to engage in political lobbying and an online petition to save their family business. 

Along with their little sister Liah Tran Phuong Vo, they all work in the kitchen and front of house at Mekong where diners can BYO drinks, feast on curries, seafood, stir frys, noodles and rice dishes and go home full to the brim for a reasonable price. 

“We are so grateful to be able to stay, and thank all of our customers who wrote letters of support to ministers and signed the petition – they are in our heart,” Mia said.

Proof of concept will be the icing on the cake when Kim Booth fulfils a lifelong dream of building a house made of trees grown himself, and he hopes others will follow his example.

LANA BEST reports:

KIM Booth may be 72 but is not even thinking about retirement as he borders on realising a life goal of building a house from trees he personally planted 40 years ago.

Everything that can possibly be made from timber will be – and if it wasn’t a fire hazard, he’d have wooden shingles instead of tin for the roof.

“Not many people believe that you can plant a tree and harvest it in your own lifetime and produce a quality building product, but I’m going to demonstrate that you can,” he said.

“This is the future – sustainable plantation timber, not the rip and tear mining of old growth forest that it still is today.”

The former Greens leader and owner of Timberworld, which operates two sawmills in the Meander Valley and a timber wholesale outlet in Glenorchy, is pretty used to raised eyebrows around how he straddles two worlds.

But during the forestry wars of the 1980s and 90s, and to this day, his allegiance could not be any clearer. Conservation, sustainability and preserving Tasmania’s native forests for future generations is at the core of everything he does.

“I’ve sold a lot of timber to a lot of people, but Timberworld is not your average timber mill,” he said.

“The majority of our timber is salvaged macrocarpa, redwood, poplar, radiata pine and other varieties that are generally bulldozed and burned on farms – the old landscape elements planted by the pioneers or windbreak trees that were planted 150 years ago and now have to make way for pivot irrigators and the like or are simply too old and dangerous to leave standing.

“We do our best to make sure the majority of our timber is plantation based, and sometimes that means buying it from overseas from places where it’s grown sustainably.

“It might be hard to swallow, but Tasmania can’t compete with the cost of growing trees, produced from eucalyptus seeds sold by Forestry Tasmania, from countries like South Africa, South America and Asia – it’s actually cheaper to import the timber.”

Kim has been proactive in finding a market for the many plantations of fast-growing nitens that never reached their investment goals for Landowners.

He debunks the belief that nitens are only good for woodchips and he does it while resting his arms on a large and beautiful dining table in the Timberworld staff room made from nitens.

Since 2010, Kim has been working with Western Australian joiner Stan Samulkiewicz who has been making beautiful chairs from the unpopular eucalypts.

“The timber is so light that the chairs weigh less than 3kg each, but they have a higher strength to weight ratio that traditional timber use in furniture making, and the result is stunning – there’s one on display in the Launceston Design Centre.

“Timber barons in the industry still use the argument for slaughtering our native forest that you can’t use the nitens for anything other than chips or pulp and that’s simply not true.” 

The Booth’s timber business, now managed by eldest son Bronte, evolved from a time when Kim and his wife Kerin needed an extra room for their growing family, so they decided to build a house from the trees on their own land just like their Forebears. To do this, Kim had to build his own saw bench, with the saw hooked up to an old tractor to drive it.

Before he knew it he was inundated with requests from other people in the district wanting their timber sawn into boards so he bought the old church grounds in Meander and set up a mill in the 1980s.

As Kim delved deeper into the forestry industry he realised more and more how little protection there was for the big trees and the native Forest.

He said he saw it as a microcosm of how humans in general fail to manage their natural environment from rural farmland to urban sprawl. So he decided to try to make a real difference by running for parliament on the Greens Tasmania ticket.

In 2002, he was elected to the House of Assembly representing the seat of Bass and for the final two years of his political career in 2014 and 2015 he replaced Nick McKim as Greens leader.

He resigned unexpectedly when his father died, citing his opposition to the proposed Tamar Valley pulp mill, his campaigning against native forest wood chipping and Tasmania’s fracking moratorium as key Achievements.

He’s also proud of fighting for a GEfree Tasmania, helping commercialise the industrial hemp industry and introducing what he calls “double snout trough” legislation to parliament – effectively stopping local government councillors from becoming members of parliament and retaining both salaries.

“It was during that 13-years hiatus, when I was in parliament, that Bronte really stepped up to run the place and the mill was upgraded with new sawing gear, Young more technology, we employed joiners and we started building transportable homes,” Kim said.

 “Two years ago we bought the Deloraine sawmill and it’s our goal to move the whole operation into there eventually – it’s a bigger, safer site and easier to keep customers separate from the milling operations, it‘s also closer to market and the freight routes between the North West and Hobart.

Kim had only been operating the Deloraine mill for a short time when the Meander River broke it’s banks and the whole place went under several metres of water. Massive piles of timber simply floated away, 13 machines and vehicles were under water, the electronics and gear boxes in the machinery were damaged and the mess left behind is still being cleaned up, more than 18 months later.

Around 25 people work between the two sites, including several apprentice wood machinists and carpenters, handling everything from the primary milling of logs for lining and flooring to building finished Houses.

The conglomerate of workshops has everything from a behemoth old bandsaw, made in 1913, to modern milling machines that can handle timber of a size that most mills couldn’t touch.

Kim is basically the repair man, constantly fixing and maintaining machinery, a skill that was crucial after the flood damage.

Massive slabs, some trimmed, some rough sawn with bark still attached, are stacked as far as the eye can see for carpenter, joiners and any lovers of timber to run their hand over and admire the colours, the grain, the knots, the smell.

In places, visitors will round a corner to find an old vintage car on a hoist, where Kim’s hobby for restoring cars has impinged on his workspace.

He admits that ever since he bought his first car – a 1928 Austin 7, at age 16 – and drove it to Narrabeen Boys School in New South Wales, he’s loved working on vehicles from the 20 and 30s era.

When Kim started out there were hundreds of timber mills around the state, and now just a handful remain.

“It’s regrettable that most sawmills have now gone, crushed by the bigger players subsidised by the Crown,” he said.

“Small mills can’t even compete thanks to the monopoly control of the resource timber barons who have bought and consolidated the timber quotas from different locations.

In reflection, Tasmanian politicians have stumbled from one dumb idea to another really.”

When Kim heard that a re-elected Liberal party would ‘unlock’ 40,000ha of native Tasmanian forests for logging – he was speechless. 

“When you look at the history of the timber industry it’s always been rape and pillage and too many beautiful rainforests have been bulldozed and burned,” he said. 

“It really doesn’t have to be that way in the future.”

ALTHOUGH the journey is far from over, the time has come for renowned Tasmanian surfboard maker Nick Stranger to shut up shop. 

GLADYS BARRETA reports: 

THE resin that has dripped from surfboard to surfboard and onto the workshop table over the last 20 years will no longer sit pretty as a work of art and reminder of hard work. 

The rustic shed at Rokeby, in all its chaos and character, would not have changed much since opening in the 80s. Though the next phase for Nick Stranger brings a bittersweet feeling, he hopes that by closing one chapter another will open. 

With a hand on his heart, Nick says his surfboard making will not slow down just because he has decided to shut the shop but will instead use the extra to time gained from working at home to get back in the water.

“I am excited but also a little bit worried,” Nick said.

“I am sure things will slow down and things will back off but I hope…by not much.”

With much of his energy spent running the business, making surfboards and being a family man above all, Nick simply did not have enough hours in the day.

“For a lot of years now, I just haven’t had time to surf – which is ok because I get pleasure from other people surfing with my boards,” he said.

“But hopefully the next part will give me a bit of time to get in the water.”

A board starts from a blank polyurethane foam that come in different shapes and lengths. From there they go into a shaping room, which has special lighting that casts shadows on the board so the humps and bumps can be identified on the foam.

Once that’s evened out and the foil of the board is correct, then it’s on to shaping the rails of the board.

Once the shape is done, then it’s all about wrapping it into fiberglass resin then a lot of sanding.

While it sounds simple, making surfboards is a difficult process to learn and to master.

“Pretty much anybody can make a board and a lot of people have a go at it these days but to make a decent board that’s going to perform and do what the customer wants it to do, that’s where the years of knowledge come into it,” Nick said.

Nick has always been a salt-water baby, with his dad instructing him from a very young age.

“Dad used to surf and back when we were very little – he’d push us on to waves and got the salt water in our blood. And that was it.”

When he was just 12 years old, Nick had a crack at fixing one of his boards. It was made from an old, stripped-down board and it needed resurrection, so he thought if he was going to surf with it, he might as well make it.

His 13th birthday was when it truly kickstarted: his parents got him the materials to finish the board, not knowing they had bought into what would be a lifetime career.

What makes Nick’s boards so popular is not only can they perform, but they’re built with care and passion.

“I fell in love with surfing, but I became obsessed with surfboards.”

“I love the form of them. I love all the old ones and I love all the new ones.

“They’re just something special and I guess the way I make them – hand-shaped boards are more of an art piece than the average surfboard that you run through a cutting machine.”

Being the only man on the job, Nick would be lucky to do 70 boards a year – and that’s a really good year. While most of his customers are from Tassie, Stranger boards have made it to the mainland and overseas as well.

“At the end of the day, it’s the satisfaction that you’re doing something that’s going to please people,” Nick said.

“You’re making people happy and that’s what makes me happy.” Inspired by his very own clientele, each surfboard is usually custom-made to suit each surfer.

“If they can’t find a board that suits them or they’re unsure about what’s going to suit them, I’ll work with them around their ideas.”

And for the last 15 years, it’s been more about Nick just wanting to make boards and less about the financial side of it all.

“Making boards is more for my own satisfaction than anyone else’s really.”