A Man In The Forest

• Finn Ball, Grade 4, Alstonville Public School
• Poetry
• 2010

1st in the 'Something With Bite 2010' competition

I grabbed the first trolley I could find and hurried to catch up with my mum, she already had an armful of groceries ready to throw into it.
“These biscuits are good and they will make it easy for school lunches,” she mumbled.
I took the packet out of the trolley and read the label.
They contained Palm oil.

The mother orang-utan huddled close to her baby, protecting it from the danger just metres in front of them. Giant diggers, bulldozers, and other demolishing devices were coming closer and closer, ripping down the rainforest. A new plantation of palm oil trees was to replace their rainforest home.

Palm oil is used to make products for super markets and shops. They are burning and bulldozing down rainforests in Borneo to plant more and more palm oil plantations.

The mother orang-utan could feel her baby trembling in her mass of orange fur.
Suddenly a big, steel toothed scoop exposed where the mother and her baby were crouching. The orang-utan leapt up and tried to defend her baby, baring her teeth back at the big scoop trying to ward off the big machine.

It was the squeeze of a trigger that sealed the poor mother orang-utans fate on the damp forest floor.

Crying, the baby buried its face in its dead mother’s fur. Confused and frightened the small ape welcomed the wooden box placed over his head.

Orangutan means ‘Man of the Forest’. They are our closest living relative.

The baby orang-utan was driven away from the rainforest to a busy airport. Wide eyed with fear the baby crouched listening to the noises of big jumbo jets and people rushing along the streets of Jakarta.

Many years later it was mating season and our baby orangutan now named Tom was a fully-grown male. He paced up and down in his cage and drew pictures in the sandy floor of his iron prison. He could not be released into the wild. There was now not enough rainforest left. He became bored, naughty, violent, and often tipped food over his head. His minders could no longer comfort him.
He died in that cage of a broken heart.


Today when I am a buying things in the supermarket, I do not let my mum buy biscuits with palm oil in them, even if they are on special!
I do not enjoy fast food outlets with food that has been fried in palm oil. I look and read everything. I try to be aware.

I dream about one day seeing an orangutan in the wild, free with lots of rainforest in which to roam. I dream about Tom finding a mate and loving babies of his own.
Unfortunately by the time you have read my story more orangutans may have died because of people’s greed to get rich regardless of our rainforests.

In the rainforest of Borneo there once lived an orangutan.