MANAGING AUSTRALIA'S FORESTS

History

Harvesting and Milling

Forests and their resources were not only important to Indigenous Australians; they were also vital to the European settlers who came to Australia in the late eighteenth century.  Timber was the most readily available building material at the time and was used to create the foundations of the new colonies.

In those early days of the timber industry, trees were harvested from native forests using axes and hand-operated saws.  It was a slow process that required hard manual labour.  Sawmills were located within the forests, and the logs often had to be transported over long distances and difficult terrain, by convict or by bullock.  It wasn’t long, though, before rivers and other waterways started being used to carry forest products. 

In 1854, the first steam railway in Australia was opened in Melbourne. This revolutionised timber transportation and enabled the fledgling sawmilling industry to move inland away from the coast. At the same time, the colonies were expanding rapidly, providing new markets for timber products.

In the 1920s, road transport started to become important for the sawmilling industry.  Roads enabled fast and easy access for supervision and fire-fighting, and provided ready extraction routes for forest products. They also had a dramatic impact on the social framework of sawmilling communities.  With ready road access to forests, the families of loggers and millers no longer needed to live in remote locations, but instead could live in townships close to hospitals, schools and other amenities.

The first Australian sawmills consisted of little more than a power source (either a waterwheel or a steam engine) and a single saw.  By the twentieth century, though, these saws were being replaced by twin circular saws imported from North America. A mill with this modern technology could turn out between 14 and 23 cubic metres per day.  Up until the 1940s, most Australian sawmills were small family owned firms, often financed by a large city timber merchant who would guaranteed to take a significant portion of the mill’s output.

Today, the remnants of mill housing, mill foundations, and immense sawdust heaps are all that remain to remind us of the bush sawmilling era in Australia. The heritage value of such sites has now been recognised under Regional Forest Agreements, and a large number of historic sawmill and tramway sites have been added to the Register of the National Estate as a permanent reminder of the history of sawmilling in Australia’s forests.

Bullock train transporting logs
Photo: Forests NSW Image Library