ALEXANDRA was once a timber town. Not any more.
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Timber company Gunns has announced it is closing the last of the central Victorian community's three mills, putting 44 people out of work.
For Tim Doherty, a mill employee for 10 years, it could mean the end of his working life. ''I'm 62 years old, what else can I do?'' he said. ''I'm pretty secure, but the young kids are the ones who are going to suffer.''
The reverberations from the decision will be felt beyond the dozens of households losing a pay packet just before Christmas.
Locals say it will devastate the town, which is already losing three businesses - a clothing shop, toy store and hairdresser - over the next month. ''Apparently the bottom has dropped out of the property market already because a lot of people thought this was going to happen,'' Mr Doherty said.
''When you lose 44 families and their regular income from a town of 2000 or so people, how many other people lose their job because of it?''
Further afield, environmentalists claimed the mill's closure - which follows Gunns' announcement that it would move out of native forests and into plantations - raised fresh questions about the future of Victoria's timber industry and the towns that depend on it.
Wilderness Society campaigner Luke Chamberlain said it showed native forest logging was not commercially viable, and a plan was needed to move to plantations aimed at the high-quality timber market.
''The longer we leave this industry to itself, the more jobs are going to go,'' he said.
But Gunns said the Alexandra mill closure was not linked to its position on native forest logging.
Gunns' head of timber products, Chris Peterson, said it was forced by dual pressures - the ballooning cost of native sawlogs under the Victorian government's blind auction system, and the soaring Australian dollar making it harder to compete with cheap timber imported illegally from the developing world.
He said both needed to be fixed quickly. ''If we don't there will be further cutbacks in the mills left out there,'' he said.
Mr Peterson said Gunns would continue indefinitely native timber processing at its larger, more modern mill at Heyfield, in Gippsland. ''We are not rushing to exit the [native timber] business,'' he said.
The new Coalition state government won office on a platform of guaranteeing the native timber industry's future through long-term agreements that maintained current timber allocations..
Agriculture Minister Peter Walsh indicated there were no plans to change the auction process, and said a decision by Gunns to move out of native forests would not lead to a reappraisal of Coalition policy.
''Whatever decision Gunns makes is obviously their own commercial decision, but if a particular person in any industry chooses to exit that usually opens up opportunities for other people,'' he said.
