And now they see the loggers and the oil companies coming in a little further every year.
The Tasmanian listing was announced under the previous Labor government as part of a peace deal to solve the state's long-running battle between loggers and environmentalists.
However the decision has been labelled a "smokescreen" to reopen old-growth forests to logging, despite loggers not wanting it.
The interior, though, feels like no other place on earth; it's worth visiting, before the loggers get there.
Illegal loggers are even worse - they carry machine guns.
The value of meat from elephants, apes and other animals has also risen as loggers and miners move deeper into the country's forests.
But even where governments claim a forest, the result can be the same; 63% of the lowland parts of West Kalimantan's national parks were illegally cleared by loggers between 1985 and 2001.At least it was obvious who was to blame for the clearance.
The land is quickly exhausted as pasture, but it then passes to another type of farming, while the loggers and cattle move farther into the forest and begin all over again.This pattern helps to explain why the rate of deforestation tends to move with prices for beef and soya, with a lag of about a year.
The loggers work in tandem with cattle farmers: once the loggers take the best trees from an area, the rest is cleared and burnt.
And although it is true, as loggers argue, that extracting old, slow-growing trees and preserving their carbon in expensive furniture may represent a net sequestration opportunity, high levels of wastage make the argument less convincing.
Most loggers harvest when the land is frozen, but a run of mild winters has melted the logging roads and made it impossible to harvest the wood without scarring the land which, in turn, gives environmentalists more cause for complaint.
