A Voice From the Bush
Published in The Age, Saturday 7th February 1925, page 23
By G.C.
Before even the tireless J. J. Kearney was afoot to push local industry and his railway business we were mounting the timber trolly for haulage into the big timber on the shoulders of the mountain. At 6 a.m. there is “the vision splendid of the sunlit hills extended,” and a wondrous panorama of conflicting sunbeams and cloud banks on the towering crests. There were nearly a score of us—timber fallers, “pullers-out,” bridge builders, splitters and other bronzed bush workers, with a city furniture warehouseman and a holiday-maker. The rough beams of the trolly looked to be a comfortless sort of conveyance. But we packed ourselves as closely as logs of wood and tried for somewhat treacherous footholds. The furniture warehouseman was enthusiastic. He said that he was “admiring the chaste fittings and mural decorations of the mountains from a Morris chair.”
The trolly started to mount the heights like a mining cage in an incline shaft. The grade at times was one foot in eighteen inches. The trolly was hauled up by a wire rope worked by a winch 1500 feet above. When we had mounted to the winch and surveyed the glorious expanse of Warburton and other Upper Yarra towns far beneath our feet, there was another track of seven miles to travel on a rising grade of one in thirty-two. A more pretentious trolly, driven by a petrol motor, supplied the accommodation. The saw-milling industry is cleverly adaptive. It takes a discarded railway locomotive to provide the power for an extensive saw mill. A secondhand motor car is made to earn much more in its old age than it ever earned in the days of its elegant youth. Down this seven-mile tram track, along which the old motor carries you upwards, the timber-laden trollies run back by gravitation at safe speeds ranging up to fifteen miles an hour.
The track winds upwards round the hills to the north-eastern slope of Donna Buang, a few hundred feet below the crest. The forest grows denser and more beautiful. The atmosphere cooler and more bracing. The Yarra side was last cut over by the fallers fourteen years ago. The present aspect shows the marvellous productivity of our native forests and their permanent value if there be rational protection. Where the pioneers of the forest were slaughtered as recently as 1910, there is now a fine dense young forest growth, with thousands of stems as straight as gun barrels, reaching to heights as great as 100 feet. They are thick enough to make the race upwards for light and air a sharp struggle for existence. Thinning may be a danger. The falling tree smashes the limbs and bark of its young neighbors to make openings for the destroying pests. The forest eliminates its own weaklings.
The length of time at which our native eucalypts attain the age of commercial use is the subject of extraordinarily varying statements. Mr. E. A. Robinson, the experienced and observant managing director of the Enterprise Saw-milling Co., gives good evidence. He says that the fine fourteen-year-old young forest of mountain ash through which we are passing will be ready for the saw within about 40 years. The patches of messmate, heavier and less symmetrical, will take about half as long again. The mountain ash begins to decay, as far as can he estimated, at the age of about 150 years. Near the streams its course of life is always shorter. The damp gets to its heart. The Communistic white ant appears, and the finest looking trunks turn out to be partially hollow. They contract heart disease much earlier than do their hardier relatives higher up the hills.
Another object lesson in the life and death of the mountain ash is close at hand. Leaving the young forest, the tram track penetrates a far-reaching blue-hazed array of forest giants. Towering mountain ashes raise their black butts and steel-grey stems to heights of 300 feet. The inexperienced enthuse over the magnificent timber. Yet it is estimated that these trees, thousands upou thousands of them, are about 300 years old. Were they sound the timber in each of them would be worth from £40 to £100 wholesale. The dry twigs are like bald patches on their summits. Some years ago a saw mill was put in here, but it had to be removed. The timber was over-mature. The trees were suffering from heart disease and galloping consumption. A long-neglected uncut forest loses its value.
Within half an hour we are on the upper reaches of the rocky, crystal Cement Creek, a mile or two above the point at which it is crossed by the tourist road to the summit of Donna Buang. Dense and denser thickets of beech, sassafras, tree ferns and wattles wall in the precipitous watercourse. The beech is a fine hard timber for saddle trees and furniture, worth about 40/ per 100 super. feet. A tree faller explains that the sassafras is valuable as well as beautiful also, because if three or four of its leaves are dropped into the billy of tea there is an ecstatic flavor. The tree ferns may not be removed from the State forests, but from private lands they are supplied to public and private gardens at from 10d. to 2/ per foot.
The Enterprise Co., which has a plant valued at £22,000, is extending its tracks further around the mountain, and may soon connect with Narbethong and Marysville. Leaving the established track it is necessary to shin up a grade of one in two, or steeper, along the new line, for another mile or two. At the top there is the fine mountain ash, spotted gum and mountain blue gum forest that is to supply millions of feet of the State’s timber during the coming year. The blue gum is heavier and harder than the mountain ash, and the spotted gum heavier and harder still. The work in hand consists of constructing a bridge over the creek for the extension of the tram track and the falling of trees for the season’s milling.
The heavier labor is done by a winch having 150 horse power. Its cables stretch out into the forest, finding anchorages in the butts of the trees on the hillside. The immense logs for the bearers of the bridge, or for transport to the mill on the gravitation timber trollies, are often hewn down in the steep, rugged gulches, or far up the rugged mountain side, from where it seems almost impracticable to remove them. A scarf is cut at one end of the log, to cast the weight of haulage to the end, at the very centre. A heave of the winch, a lifting of the log end, and the great mass of timber comes tearing to the loading place as if its many tons were only the weight of a walking stick. Sometimes a cable is stretched across the thickly-timbered ravine. The wire rope holding the log is attached to a block that runs along the main cable, and the ponderous burden is hurried along without contact with the rocks, or the surrounding timber. Occasionally, however, when the tree that forms the cable anchorage is not too firmly rooted, it is torn away with a resounding crash, smashing and crushing the smaller growth beneath it.
The skill and efficiency of the bush workers fill the mind of the city man with admiration. Another tree is needed for the bridge building. There are many fine stems along the track. They range from 14 feet to 18 feet in circumference six feet from the ground, and the tallest, computed under difficulties by the use of angles, is 300 feet high. The bridge builder says that he will do with “a small one.” How can it be felled without blocking the track of the whole of the operations? The faller is instructed to fall it, so that it will lie parallel with the track, eight feet away, touching an old stump. He hews holes in the butt, and inserts boards in each of them, in order that he may climb up, and work on a perilous perch above the spurs and pillars of the butt. His flying axe is soon hewing a gash, perfectly rectangular on the lower cut, on the side where the tree is to fall. When the gash is big enough he thrusts into it the head of the axe and looks along the handle, to determine the exact spot at which the tree will lie. As the axe handle points slightly too much to the left, he hews out a few more chips to the right. Then the bark is stripped from the opposite side of the tree, and the crosscut is set to work there, about a foot, or less, above the axe cut. Within a few minutes there are ominous creaks, like sharp ejaculations of pain, then an echoing crack, followed by a tremendous reverberating crash, as the tree hurls to its death. It lies in the designed place precisely. Water pours from the gash in the fallen trunk as if from a tap. There is more than enough to fill a bucket, and it is perfectly tasteless. This “small one” measures 245 feet in length. The saw miller usually measures to the first limb—100, 150 feet, or more. Above that the branches and knots rob the timber of most of its value.
A mile away in the forest the champion paling splitter of this or any other bush is working like a steam engine on a contract for clearing a further extension of the tram track. Temporarily splitting is not in demand. He is a Finn named John Sund, 67 years old—a man of magnificent physique, with the innocent eyes and simple manners of a boy. He has been splitting palings for 43 years. The department grants splitting licences with reluctance, for many a splitter wastes the timber. Sund can get a licence anywhere, for he is efficient. He says with pride that a saw mill will waste more in a week than he will in a year. He sighs for a return to his real occupation, and prides in it with enthusiasm that suggests the love of an artist. Buckle says that those who live in scenic grandeur, amongst mountains and mighty forests, are more imaginative than people of the plains. Sund talks of timber and prosaic palings with a suggestion of poetry. He can tell the tree of free wood that will split profitably almost with certainty. When he is in doubt he strips off a ribbon of bark to as great a height as it will run. if it tears in a straight line he knows that the grain will be straight, and that the tree is good. He has never been able to understand exactly the conditions that make a straight-grained tree. He thinks that probably in early years it was compelled to grow rapidly upwards for the light. But the best tree he ever split destroys, or at least modifies, the theory.
“It was beautiful,” he says. “It stood away by itself on the shoulder of the mountain like a great lead pencil, with its point ready to write in the passing clouds. I had to cut about two miles of track to get at it, but the beauty paid me. It was not a big one. It could not have been more than 6 feet in diameter at the butt, but it was all clean quality. It made 22 6-feet blocks without a knot, and split me 10,600 6-feet palings. In those days I got 6/ 100 for them. Now I get 12/. With a man to cut the billets I could split 900 a day. Cutting my own billets I could split from 300 to 400. I have known trees to yield 22,000 palings, but of never a perfect beauty like that one.”
Indicating a distant patch on the mountain side, the old splitter says that there he once found fine splitting trees by the hundred, although neighboring patches would not split at all. “They grew there,” he continues, “tier upon tier, like rows of candles upon Nature’s altar.” Suddenly the light of enthusiasm leaves his eyes, and he is matter of fact. “Years ago,” he observes, “the royalty was only 4d. per 100 palings; now it is 3/6 for 5-feet and 5/ for 6-feet. The beautiful trees are still here. It is grand to be amongst them.”
The champion splitter says that nearly 40 years ago he measured a tree on the Dividing Range in the Yea district, and found that it was 360 feet high. He smiles at doubts. He knows. He ran the tape over it when it was felled. It was slightly more than 5 feet in diameter at the butt. The tallest trees are seldom those of the largest girth. The growth is upward, and not laterally.
On wet days, when the rain falls from the trees in streams, Mr. Sund makes cabinet work from the native woods. In his hut there is a safe of fine figured mountain ash with lattices made of ash strips to admit the air. These strips, which are finely symmetrical and sometimes 3 feet or more in length by an inch in breadth, are split with the knife to a thinness of 32 to the inch. They season to a wonderful toughness. He has carved a rakish-looking cockatoo, which spreads its wings over the mantelpiece.
There are still extensive and valuable uses for the figured hardwoods which, from year to year, are picked out more generally from the ordinary timber. A selected consignment of 16,000 feet was once sold by Mr. Robinson for £3 per 100 super feet, and afterwards realised £4 10/. The beech has been sold up to 50/. Profitable uses are also being found for the timber that is cut to waste. The Enterprise Co., whose chief mill has a capacity of 20,000 feet per day, is installing machines to turn the waste into clothes pegs and butchers’ skewers. Each machine can turn out 63 pegs or 75 skewers every working minute.
