and Pretoria, South Africa

IUFRO Division 5 Forest Products meeting 24 September to 12 October 1973, Cape Town and Pretoria, South Africa

More than 120 leading wood scientists and technologists from 22 countries met in Cape Town. Among those who attended were Dr Walter Liese, an eminent wood biologist from Hamburg, Germany, who acted as international chairman at the opening ceremony; Dr Herbert Fleischer, Director of the U S Department of Agriculture’s Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin and Coordinator of IUFRO Division 5; and the Deputy Coordinator Dr Bertil Thunell of the Swedish Forest Products Laboratory. Dr D R Redmond of Canada, the Vice-President of IUFRO, attended the second stage of the proceedings in Pretoria. There were 140 technical papers, 79 presented in person and 61 in absentia. I presented two papers, one each to the two Working Parties of IUFRO Division 5 that were meeting in Cape Town and Pretoria with the theme “Wood in the service of man”: Working Party S5.01.9 Nondestructive evaluation of wood and wood-based materials4 and Working Party S5.01.3 Wood quality.5This provided significant exposure of the work being done in PNG to a large international audience.

Me (arrow) in the midst of the large number of delegates from all over the world attending the meetings of IUFRO Division 5 in Cape Town and Pretoria, South Africa, September - October 1973. The delegates and their wives had lunch at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Pretoria, with the President Dr. C v.d.M Brink, and assembled for this photograph before visiting the laboratories of the Timber Research Unit.

4 Davidson J 1973 Decayed wood in living trees of Eucalyptus deglupta Blume. IUFRO Division 5, Working Party S5.01.9, Cape Town and Pretoria, South Africa. 5 Davidson J 1973 The association between wood basic density and some measurable wood parameters and possibilities of growing wood of optimum density in tropical plantations of Eucalyptus deglupta Blume. IUFRO Division 5, Working Party S5.01.3, Cape Town and Pretoria, South Africa.

Left: At the closing ceremony in Pretoria, Dr H O Fleischer, Coordinator of IUFRO Division 5 Forest Products, presents a Certificate of Honorary Life Membership of IUFRO Division 5 to Ivon Davidson, aged 11 months, in the presence of his parents. Right: Gloria and Ivon out and about.

Tours were conducted of particleboard, laminating, veneer and plywood factories, sawmills, a pulp mill, forest products research organisations, afforested and scenic areas.

E. grandis was the major eucalypt in South Africa’s plantations, at the time of our visit occupying more than 300 thousand hectares. The wood was used for mine timbers, poles, pulpwood and sawn timber. The main objective of the selection programme run by the South African Department of Forestry (SADF) was for improved recovery of sawn timber by selection for straighter stems, better branching and especially reduced end splitting after felling. Along with the wood quality breeding programme for E. deglupta (wood density for pulping) in PNG, at the time this SADF work was the only other eucalypt breeding programme in the world with a major emphasis on wood quality (end splitting in relation to sawn wood recovery).

There were opportunities to visit the Head Office of the SADF and the South African Forest Research Institute in Pretoria and to travel to Sabie a “forestry town” surrounded by thousands of hectares of plantations, to discuss eucalypt provenance and tree breeding research at the D R de Wet Forest Research Station.

Near Tzaneen, for E. grandis, the J D M Keet Forest Research Station (formerly the Zommerkompst Forest Research Station) had two grafted seed orchards, a number of diallel progeny trials and selfing studies. The grafted orchards were managed by pollarding on a three-year rotation. A set of control-

pollinated seedling seed orchards was located next to the grafted seed orchard. Numerous publications on the E. grandis breeding work at the Station were available.

IUFRO Conference delegates toured a number of wood products and forestry institutions. Mostly the emphasis on eucalypts was on the wood quality of sawn timber and veneer, examples of which were laid out for inspection.

The South Africans were keen to demonstrate their work at the time on stress grading of sawn eucalypt timber.

In South Africa, E. grandis was being grown typically on a 20 – 25 years rotation with four or five thinnings between 4 and 19 years of age progressing from about 1,100 stems/ha down to about 100/ha. Some older stands (40-years-old) contained trees 70 metres in height. End splitting was an issue for veneer and sawn timber production. In the bottom right hand photograph end splitting was starting less than 24 hours after felling.

One of the post conference tours was from Johannesburg/Pretoria to Kruger National Park with visits to forest areas near Nelspruit and Sabie on the way.

Post conference tour to Kruger National Park and nearby forest areas. Gloria, centre, keeps an eye on Ivon who is practising crawling during a rest stop.

Ivon and me and just three of the many kinds of animals that were viewed close up in Kruger National Park.