Welcome Swamp Reclamation:
Report of the Royal Commission 1924
Go to Royal Commission report
Go to Introduction and Strickland's role
Go to The Innes tender
Blackwood sawmilling
Blackwood (Acacia melanoxylon) is a large wattle which grows naturally in eastern Australia from southern Tasmania to southeastern Queensland. It reaches millable size and quality in the wet forests of Victoria and Tasmania, notably on rich river flats. The timber has long been prized for furniture and other high-end uses. Tasmanian blackwood has dominated the Australian market since the 1880s, thanks to a combination of its quality (often a dark red-brown, sometimes with a striking wavy figure) and ready availability. Large stands of blackwood are found in the swamp forests of Circular Head, where blackwood trunks are commonly 'nursed' into long, straight sawlogs by the surrounding, densely grown tea-tree (Melaleuca ericifolia and Leptospermum lanigerum).
Circular Head blackwood was first systematically exploited by J.S. Lee and Sons, who built tramways into the swamps to access the timber. Lee's also erected bush sawmills to process the logs before sawn or partly sawn timber was carted on tram trucks to the company's main plant at Leesville. Through the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, Lee and Sons created a substantial Australian and British demand for high-quality Tasmanian blackwood. They also pioneered the steam-bending of short blackwood pieces for barrel staves. Most of Lee's cut came from Crown land leases, for which they paid a lease fee in addition to the royalty owed to the Lands Department for log volume harvested. By the time the First World War broke out, accessible stands of blackwood had been largely depleted and the company was looking towards the 'back country' far from Smithton.
Unfortunately for Lee and Sons, much of the 'back country' Crown blackwood had already been targeted. Arthur River Sawmilling Co., Britton Bros., Cumming Bros., Dunkley Bros., E.H. Fenton, Grey Bros., Mackay Bros., Marrawah Timber Co. and others were harvesting blackwood in exclusive lease areas or on licence in larger, 'unassigned' blocks of forest. At the end of the War blackwood milling began an extraordinary boom which lasted for almost 10 years and has never since been equalled. The peak year of cutting was 1925-26, when the Forestry Department reported that Tasmania produced ca 156,000 blackwood staves and ca 6.4 million super feet of blackwood logs (ca 19,500 cubic metres) from Crown land. More than 20 sawmills were operating in Circular Head, some backed by mainland timber merchants. Every sawmiller wanted as much high-quality blackwood as possible. Competition was strong and sometimes nasty; for a fictional account, see Bernard Cronin's 1920 novel Timber Wolves, now freely available online.
The Welcome Swamp scheme
Thomas Strickland dropped into this war of sawmilling interests in 1921. The Lands Department no longer regulated timber harvesting in Tasmania; a Forestry Department had been established for this purpose in 1920. However, Lands Minister Alexander Hean still had enough political power to ensure that the cutting of blackwood and other timber in Welcome Swamp was controlled by Strickland's employer, the Closer Settlement Board, and not by the Forestry Department. Strickland and the Board saw blackwood sales as an offset to development costs. The more blackwood Strickland could salvage and sell from the Swamp, the greater the overall return to the Government when the developed land was sold to settlers.
This strategy was complicated by two factors. The first was that the Marrawah Timber Company, sawmillers of Smithton, had a prior right to Welcome Swamp blackwood. They had been cutting blackwood and 'hardwood' (mainly stringybark, Eucalyptus obliqua) for years along the Marrawah Tram, and claimed to have 1¼ million super feet of blackwood on their Welcome Swamp block.
The second complication was that other large, local sawmillers felt they also had a right of sorts to Welcome Swamp blackwood. If the reclamation project didn't exist, they could each have applied for an exclusive lease over part of the Swamp and built a tramline to the lease from the Marrawah Tram. The leaseholder could then have harvested only as much blackwood as customers required over a period of years, and only paid the modest Forestry Department royalty on what had been harvested. The new reclamation works threatened to throw up large volumes of salvaged blackwood over a short period. Local sawmillers would have to compete for what Strickland was offering, resulting in a higher log price. That was good for the Government, but could be uncomfortable for the sawmillers.
Selling Welcome Swamp blackwood
The sawmillers' discomfort began on 7 April 1923, when Strickland advertised that 500 blackwood logs totalling ca 350,000 super feet were available for tender at the reclamation works yard in East Marrawah (at that time, the end of the steel-rail section of the Marrawah Tram). The advertisement appeared not only in the Advocate and the Mercury, but also in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Argus (Melbourne) and the Register (Adelaide). Competing with each other was bad enough – would the local millers have to compete with mainlanders as well?
The new Minister of Lands, E.F. Blyth, visited the reclamation works on Wednesday and Thursday, 16 and 17 May 1923. When he returned to Smithton on Thursday evening, he faced a deputation of unhappy sawmillers: J. E. Lee (J. S. Lee and Sons), P. H. McVilly (Marrawah Timber Co.) and E. H. Fenton. A long and remarkably candid report of the meeting was published two days later in the Advocate. The sawmillers were suspicious that the tender had already been awarded to a mainland sawmill, because Strickland had been making arrangements for log shipments from the port of Stanley. The Minister was also pressed on whether preference would be given to local tenderers. Blyth ducked and weaved, but defended Strickland's right to get the highest possible price for the logs.
The plot thickened slightly when the Stanley port's Master Warden, K.C. Laughton, met with his Marine Board the following Monday. He told them that 'a Sydney merchant' had heard that if his tender was accepted, he wouldn't be able to get the logs from Marrawah to Stanley. Laughton wired the Public Works Secretary about the threat. Personally, Laughton saw log shipments to the mainland as good business for the port.
To the mainland they went. The successful tenderer was Geo. Hudson Ltd. of Redfern, in Sydney, who paid 13s. 8d. per 100 super feet for 334,000 super feet in the log, delivered to the Stanley wharf. The Closer Settlement Board paid only 6s. per 100 feet to have the logs cut, hauled to the East Marrawah yard and railed to Stanley, and the Board made a profit of £4,000. The first log shipment left Tasmania in August.
Through the winter of 1923, the arguments for and against local milling were put and contested in Parliament and in the press. At the 8 June meeting of the Circular Head Council, Councillor G. Acheson moved and Cr. L. W. Brooks seconded that this council respectfully request the Closer Settlement Board, if consistent with economy, to have the blackwood on the reclamation area milled in the State. The motion was opposed by Councillor K.C. Laughton, and was lost five votes to six. The debate included a suggestion by Brooks that the Closer Settlement Board build its own small mill to process the Welcome Swamp logs. The idea was echoed in a State-wide debate two years later (see below).
Strickland's next call for blackwood tenders appeared on 1 September. The story surrounding this call is scandalous: it cost Strickland his job and ended the Welcome Swamp reclamation scheme, and for that reason I devote a separate webpage to the tale. The key points are that this time all the tenderers were local, and that at the last minute the Minister added a condition that the logs had to be milled in Tasmania.
Upstream from the reclamation works.
Aerial photo courtesy Forestry Tasmania, from a set taken by an RAAF crew in May 1930.
Strickland's workmen had cleared the Welcome River banks to the point shown,
but had not dug the main channel this far before the scheme collapsed.
Note that the Christmas Hills-Marrawah road (now part of the Bass Highway) had not yet been built.
The same scene in recent times. Satellite image from Google Earth.
The main channel of the Welcome River was extended to the highway in the 1960s.
The Welcome Swamp resource
In the Strickland years, no one had a clear idea of how much millable blackwood was standing in Welcome Swamp. Bushmen with experience in forest assessment offered estimates ranging from 2,000,000 to 6,000,000 super feet. North of the Marrawah Tram, Strickland's contractor had harvested 374,000 super feet (the parcel sold to Hudson, plus 40,000 super feet brought later to the works yard) from ca 600 acres, or 620 super feet per acre.
An official Government estimate appeared after the reclamation scheme had been abandoned. In February 1925, two Forestry Department officers assessed ca 5400 acres in Welcome and Dismal Swamps. Parallel lines were cut through the forest at ca 400 m spacing, and all trees within ca 10 m of the lines were measured for girth and bole height. The average assessed blackwood volume was 3,752 super feet per acre, with one ca 570-acre patch averaging almost twice that standing volume.
There was a huge difference between the bushmen's estimates and the foresters' estimates, and it was due to the highly selective nature of harvesting at the time. Sawmillers wanted big old blackwood with straight trunks, flaky bark and only a narrow ring of light-coloured sapwood around the dark heartwood. Short logs and trimmed-off sections of longer logs could be split into staves, but stave buyers were as fussy about quality as sawmillers. Blackwood milling operations were also very selective. Sawmiller E.H. Fenton said in 1923 that local mills recovered 40% of blackwood log volume as sawn timber, compared to 60% for mainland millers who could profitably cut to smaller sizes.
The greater the demand for blackwood, however, the less selective the harvesting. During the blackwood-hungry 1920s, swamp forests that had been abandoned as 'cut out' years before by the larger sawmillers were profitably worked by stave-cutters and small-scale loggers.
End of the boom
In June 1925, furniture-makers based in Hobart began looking for a way to reserve for themselves the huge reported volume of Welcome Swamp blackwood. Their claim (disputed) was that Circular Head sawmillers were mainly controlled by mainland interests, and that sawn blackwood from the Welcome Swamp area was almost all exported, forcing the furniture-makers to buy Tasmanian blackwood in Melbourne. The Hobart manufacturers kept the issue alive over the next few months with delegations to Ministers, and proposed that the Government build and operate a sawmill to cut Welcome Swamp blackwood to local requirements. The Government was opposed on principle to State-owned enterprise, and Conservator of Forests L.G. Irby said it would probably cost as much to rail the sawn timber from Circular Head to Hobart as it would to have it shipped from Melbourne. A public meeting of manufacturing woodworkers was held on 17 September 1925 in Hobart's Town Hall. It resolved that yet another deputation would be sent to Government, to urge again the 'conservation' of blackwood, especially in Welcome Swamp, for future local needs.
The Government allowed the issue to die in the latter part of 1925, having heard that not all Hobart furniture-makers were having problems getting blackwood, and that competition from a State sawmill could force some local sawmills out of business. The uncut portions of Welcome and Dismal Swamps (i.e., the portions assessed by the Forestry Department in February) were subdivided into seven large blocks. Three were offered to sawmillers, while the remaining four were temporarily withheld for purposes of blackwood 'conservation'. The three available assessed blocks were taken up by F.D. Hay and Sons, who erected a sawmill near the Welcome Valley Line ca 1928 (see image above) and laid a wooden tramline east across the upper Welcome River. S.P. Adams of East Marrawah acquired timber rights to the area between the assessed blocks and the upstream end of Strickland's main channel.
Why were small operators like Adams and Hay cutting the Welcome Swamp blackwood at the close of the 1920s, rather than the big sawmillers who had been so concerned about salvage from the reclamation scheme a few years earlier? One reason was that demand for blackwood had dropped off. According to the Forestry Department annual report for 1930, Blackwood appears to have enjoyed an abnormal boom from 1924 to 1927. This species is now said to be out of favour in the cabinetmaking trade both in Australia and in England. For good figured blackwood there is always a profitable market, but the proportion of figured timber is very small. And in 1931: There is no demand for blackwood timber ... very few blackwood staves are being asked for.
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