'We're blowing this thing into the harbour': 50 years since woodchip bombing

Inside Bunbury's anti-woodchip bombing that nearly blew a port to pieces in 1976 Sun 2 Aug 2026 at 5:07am Two men are in the front seats of a stolen car packed with explosives. They have wires, a gun and a mission to blow a port in the southern WA city of Bunbury to smithereens. It is July 1976, and Michael "Fud" Haabjoern and John Chester are about to commit what the then-premier called a "gross act of terrorism" in protest against the woodchipping industry. Fifty years on, the little-known event leaves a complicated legacy in Australia's conservation history. Loading...The timber town The story of the Bunbury woodchip bombing did not start with a bang. For Haabjoern, it started with the roar of a chainsaw. "You go out the bush, and you see 20 [men] with chainsaws, knocking down huge … karris in 10 minutes," he says. "You think, 'That tree has been there for 500 years, some bastard knocks [it] down in 5 minutes, and then within 5 hours it goes through a mill.'" In the late 1960s, the state government ramped up the existing timber sector in WA's South West by introducing woodchipping as an industry. It agreed to export 750,000 tonnes of chips a year from Bunbury to Japan. Haabjoern and Chester were part of an informal conservation group that was against the idea of old-growth forests being pulped for paper products. Schoolteacher Graeme Robinson was in the same collective. "We would write letters to the editor of the local newspaper, and we made a big effort to have a letter each," Robinson says. But those letters angered some parts of the community, because woodchipping was big business for these small towns. One night that tension came to a head in a hall in Manjimup, in the heart of WA's southern forests. The 'beating' The conservation group held a meeting with speakers, including academics and environmentalists. Thirty or 40 people were expected, but hundreds rocked up. "Most of them were anti our group," Robinson says. He remembers scores of workers from a nearby mill arriving drunk to disrupt the meeting. "The manager offered his men a keg of beer if they could break our meeting up," he says. "The catcalls got worse, the noise, the shouting." Robinson says the third speaker was terrified when a drunk worker strode out to the front, snatched the microphone off him, and started shouting abuse. So Haabjoern walked up and retrieved the microphone, pushing the disrupter back into the crowd. The crowd turned physical, and the police arrived. Haabjoern says workers chased him and beat him up, leaving him cowering under a car. Robinson believes that night only strengthened Haabjoern's resolve. "It was the beating that led to the bomb," he says. The bomb The other bomber, Chester, was described in newspaper reports at the time as a "loose cannon" while Haabjoern was said to be calmer. Fifty years on, Haabjoern is still relaxed when he recalls the night of the bombing, a scene straight out of a movie. The two men stole a car from Perth and loaded it with a batch of the explosive gelignite that they had taken from a limestone quarry. Then in the dead of night, they hightailed it from Manjimup to Bunbury. "We were driving around the car full of gelignite and and detonators and all wiring and the whole shooting match," Haabjoern says. "One mistake and we would have been minced meat, on our way to heaven or hell." Haabjoern said he and Chester acted alone, and their crimes were not associated with their conservation group nor with the broader forest movement. They would cut a hole in the fence to get into the port, set up three bombs by the port's loading machinery, write warning signs to keep people safe, and get out: that was the plan. "The aim was to drop the whole installation into the harbour and stall the woodchipping process for several years," Haabjoern says. "The whole intention was never to do anyone any harm." But things did not go to plan. The night watchman "We're setting up the charges and wiring everything up, and along comes the night watchman," Haabjoern says. It was security guard Trevor Morritt. "He just comes up and says, 'What are you doing?' and we said, 'We're in the process of blowing this thing into the harbour.'" In newspaper reports at the time, Morritt said the bombers seemed "concerned about not wanting to hurt" him. In a later interview, he said he was not sure if the pair might shoot him that night. With their plans going awry, the armed bombers tied Morritt up and took him from the site. At Morritt's request, they drove his car out and left him with it so it would not be damaged. In the early hours of the morning, with the bombers long gone, he eventually freed himself and called the police, just before the bomb went off. Morritt has since died. His family did not want to be interviewed for this story, but said he did not speak much about the bombing. They remembered him as a hero. The bang It was 5:20am when Bunbury woke to the explosion. Police arrived on the scene quickly, and a bomb expert from Perth was brought down to diffuse the other two bombs, which had failed to detonate. There were reports the damage cost about $300,000, equivalent to about $2.3 million today. The story made front pages around the country, with then-WA premier Charles Court calling it a "gross act of terrorism". Newspapers did not run with the terror label, instead reporting the incident as regular crime, albeit a serious one. The West Australian reported that the blast "caused serious damage but [was] likely to have little effect on woodchipping operations". Loading...After a week-long manhunt, Morritt helped police identify Chester and Haabjoern. They were initially sentenced to seven years in jail, with a minimum 10-month sentence before parole. But amid criticism the sentence was too lenient, the minimum parole period was extended to three years. Haabjoern says his time in prison was rough, but that it changed his perspective on the world. "You'll learn more about Australian society doing your jail time than you will in 20 years running around the suburbs talking to people." He was freed as soon as he was eligible for parole. Chester escaped prison in 1978, was captured and stayed inside a few more years. The legacy The bombers' goal was to deal the woodchipping industry a blow and draw attention to the felling of old-growth forests for pulp mills. Five decades on, Haabjoern is not sure he achieved that. "Was it a victory? Not really," he reflects. "The attention that it brought was probably more used by the system. "They used it to make out that the conservation movement were all radicals, which they weren't." Despite this distinction, Robinson says the bombing was the end of his small conservation group. The broader forest movement was quick to distance themselves from the bombers too. In the years since, some historians have labelled the bombing Australia's "first act of ecoterrorism". While that small conservation group disbanded, other forest protests continued for decades. In 2022, the WA government banned native logging, drawing a backlash from the now much smaller timber industry and celebration from conservationists. The 1976 bomb occupies a complex spot in the story of WA's forests. Robinson says while he was grateful at the time to have not been involved in the bombing, he now considers Haabjoern a "great hero of his life". "I've always believed they did it out of an understanding that something needed to be done that wasn't being done," he says. Regardless of how the 1976 bomb shaped the conservation movement, there is no doubt it changed the course of Haabjoern's life. "You pay a price for that when you do a whole pile of jail time," he says. "And then you pay a price for the rest of your life because every second [person] you run into thinks you're a loose cannon." Five decades on, at 80 years old, Haabjoern says he is happy with how his life turned out. "Even though I've made some mistakes in my life, I'm quite content."