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PropertyGuide GippslandTimes
TIME CALLED ON TIMBER
SUMMER HOT SPOT PAGE 4
The cessation of Victoria’s timber harv rvesting v industry ryy has arrived, aft fter t the state government moved the closure date to January ryy 1, 2024.
Photo: File
POLICE BEAT PAGE 16
FOOTBALL FIXTURES SPORT
END OF AN ERA Philip Hopkins
AS of January 1, Gippsland’s hardwood industry is now largely gone, with harvesting of timber from native forests on Crown land no longer permitted. Gippsland’s native forest is part of the vast swathe of forest that stretches along the Great Dividing Range from the Dandenongs to behind Brisbane. It’s integral to Australia having the seventh biggest forest estate in the world after Russia, Brazil, Canada, the US, China and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Victoria is still one-third forest, even after land clearing for agriculture and towns and cities. These hardwood forests have provided Victorians with high quality timber for housing, such as framing, flooring and windows, and furniture - beds, dining tables, chairs, sideboards and kitchen fit-outs. Victorian Ash has been used in engineered wood as huge columns and beams that are as strong as steel.
Lower quality hardwood timber has become fences, garden stakes and pallets while traditionally; pulp was turned into white copy paper at Australian Paper’s Maryvale Mill. Most of these products were from timber processed in Gippsland. The timber was largely harvested under the forestry science and sustainable practices that were developed in Germany in the 18th Century and then spread throughout much of the Western world. These practises were adapted to Australian conditions. The state government’s decision under then Premier Daniel Andrews to close Victoria’s native forest industry, taken behind closed doors, is the culmination of successive cutbacks in the timber available to industry over the past 50 years. It was a process of attrition. Gippsland bore the brunt of this development. Initially, the reductions in native timber were based on sound public policy but they became increasingly driven by
ideology and a desire for ‘green’ votes at state elections. Key drivers were the huge expansion of national parks and other reserves that exclude timber harvesting; increasing environmental protection in state forest available for timber production in federal-state agreements; relentless pressure from green groups; dubious political decisions; the massive fires of the past two decades; and new harvesting techniques. The 1939 Black Friday bushfires had a massive impact; the Central and East Gippsland forests were opened to harvesting to provide timber for the postwar building boom due to the damaged hardwood forest close to Melbourne. The then Forests Commission realised that the relentless use of the hardwood forests in the housing boom, particularly as post-war immigration grew rapidly, was unsustainable. Forest researchers pushed to develop a softwood resource for use in general house framing; the upshot was the dramatic expansion in
the 1960s of pine plantations over the next 20 years based on interest-free Commonwealth loans. From the 1950s to the early 1970s, quality native hardwood saw log production at 1.2 to 1.5 million cubic metres per year (m3/yr), according to a paper by the former chief executive of the then Victorian Association of Forest Industries, the late Graeme Gooding, who grew up in Seaspray. In 1970, only 205,267 hectares of national parks had been created in Victoria’s native forests. In that year, the state Coalition government formed the Land Conservation Council, which over the next three decades established an extensive reserve system founded on sound science. The studies included special investigations into wilderness, rivers and streams. Out of that process, an extensive reserve system was created, including the Alpine National Park and other national parks in East Gippsland. Continued - Page 3
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