The Wire

Tasmanian timber company, Gunns, has been placed into voluntary administration after reporting a loss of 904-million-dollars last Friday. It started out as a family business in the 1870s, but was embroiled in scandals and strong community opposition by the early 2000s for its logging activities. In 2005, former Greens leader Bob Brown famously attended a protest with twenty other prominent conservationists in an attempt to stop the company’s plan to build a pulp mill. Gunns sued the protestors and the case became famously known as the “gag 20”. Some of the charges were later dropped and they ultimately lost the case.