Loss of Biodiversity
Posted: Sat Apr 26, 2008 10:21 pm
Harvesting Cedar
Australian Red Cedar, (Toona ciliata formerly Toona australis), was named for the resemblance of its timber to that of the Cedrus genus, Indian Cedar or the Cedars of Lebanon. Written of in biblical times, regarded as ancient, the Cedars of Lebanon are contemporary with Australia’s Red Cedar, thousands of years old when harvested. The distribution of cedar extends from Ulladulla south of Sydney to far north Queensland, with the best cedar growing on the rich volcanic, alluvial soils of the plateaux in the hinterland of the north coast of New South Wales.
When cedar was discovered in the Hawkesbury and Hunter districts in 1790, the government claimed title and sent in gangs of convicts to cut it. The first export of it as sawn timber was to India in 1795. Shiploads went to England, China, New Zealand, South Africa and Mauritius.
It took only twenty-five years for it to be cut out on the Hawkesbury. By 1815 the cedar getters had moved on to the Hunter. Governor Macquarie was delighted to find another supply at the new settlement at Port Macquarie.
On his instructions three of the Hastings timbers were to be sent to Sydney as back-loading on the ships that came in with supplies: red cedar, rosewood, Dysoxylum fraseranum, and pine, Callitris macleayana (Port Macquarie Pine). Convict timber getters using pit saws cut large quantities that were shipped regularly from Port Macquarie.
In 1824 the well known Simeon Lord, former convict and by then wealthy trader and ship owner, was successful in his tender for the purchase of 300 tons of Port Macquarie cedar at a little less than one and one halfpenny per foot.
Much of the cedar was rafted down the river. In November 1826, Captain (later Major) Innes, Commandant of the settlement, reported that 880 eight-foot cedar logs were lying on the beach at the lumber yard to be sawn. A further 276 eight-foot logs and 20 fifteen-foot logs were at the cedar camp up river awaiting suitable conditions. The river mouth was difficult when strong winds and adverse tides prevailed. A year later, Innes sent a party to investigate the extent of cedar on the next big river to the north. This river was soon to be named the Macleay in honour of the Honourable Alexander Macleay whose daughter Innes married in 1829.
John Verge, the notable architect, had been on the Dorrigo plateau since 1828. The four square miles of land he later took up along the Macleay included a large stand of cedar. Verge, who is buried in Port Macquarie’s Historic Cemetery, was responsible for many large elegant houses in Sydney including Elizabeth House, Tusculum, Lyndhurst and Rockwall which are extant,
By 1830 when Port Macquarie was thrown open to free settlement the most easily accessible cedar had been cut out by the convict gangs. Those who arrived by ship seeking cedar soon moved north to the Macleay and farther on to the rich and accessible pickings of the Clarence and the Richmond districts. The cedar in the Camden Haven valley had been temporarily overlooked.
Then surveyors for the Australian Agricultural Company, exploring the waterway there hoping for a connection with the Manning River that would provide safer passage, noted the timber riches of the area and were quickly followed by others from the south. By 1856 ships were calling in to the Camden Haven specifically to pick up cedar. They dumped their ballast of Sydney sandstone before proceeding upriver to present-day Kendall where the first organised timber milling is said to have taken place as early as the 1860s.
As wholesale clearing took place in areas such as the Comboyne, the use of cedar became indiscriminate. Whole houses were built of it, public buildings, fine furniture, packing cases, paling fences, farm buildings. There was so much of it that it could be used as deal. Those who used it in this way did so for its ease of working rather than for the beauty so sought after by others.
The cedar getters developed a special technique. Crosscut saw, axe, standing boards were their only equipment. Cedars are buttressed, the bases are often hollow, so they felled them at heights up to six metres off the ground. They would cut a slot about shoulder height – they called it a scaffold hold – drive in a board, stand on it, cut the next slot and drive in another board, perhaps another and another. Since boards were awkward to carry through the bush, many used one board only. After they had cut the second slot they would cut a toe hold to stand in while they moved the board up. Getting down as the tree was beginning to fall required great dexterity.
Pit Sawing at Comboyne c 1906,
exactly the same method used by the first convict cedar getters
Photograph Port Macquarie Historical Society
Attention turned to the valuable hardwoods of the area in the latter part of the nineteenth century and, with occasional exceptions, the last of the great cedar trees remained in their hidden gullies and gorges.
In the 1930s two things combined to reinstate its harvesting. The first was the increase in mechanisation which allowed men to get into areas within the forests previously denied them – bullocks and horses were replaced by petrol and steam driven log haulers– and the other was the obsession of one man, Bill Haydon who became known as the Cedar King.
There were many other timbers that Haydon harvested and milled. There were others cedar getters, Vernon McLeod of the Camden Haven among them. But it was Haydon’s passion for cedar, his determination and his audacity that marked him for greater recognition.
Haydon first of all drew cedar along the Oxley Highway to the west of Wauchope and from Bellangry where he and his team also drew White Beech and Mountain Ash. They moved for a while to the Macleay district to the north. But the 1930s depression affected the market for these fine timbers and for more than a decade Haydon turned his skills to harvesting and milling the major hardwoods and softwoods of the area.
In 1940, the Forestry Commission were charging royalty of £7 per 100 superfeet for cedar. When drawing cedar, one might snig a log seven miles with a tractor, then cart it sixty miles to a mill. As the royalty was still £7 irrespective of the distance the log had to be taken, it didn’t pay the logger to go back for the smaller log and so it was left to waste.
Following World War II the demand for cedar accelerated. NSW Railways were rebuilding their rolling stock and cedar was required for the inside of the carriages. Unlike other timbers, when cedar is butted against cedar it does not squeak, a valuable attribute in a constantly moving railway carriage. Bill Haydon had a twenty year contract to supply cedar to New South Wales Railways.
He also supplied cedar to Thurlings Joinery Works in Port Macquarie where windows, architraves and fine furniture was made. His own home was a showpiece of the rich mellow timber.
Bill Haydon felling a giant red cedar tree
Photograph Wauchope Historical Society
For most of the very wet year of 1954 Haydon hauled cedar out of deep gorges at Kangaroo Flat at Yarrowitch, on the headwaters of the Hastings and Forbes Rivers. He used two crawler tractors, often lowering one over a cliff to attach the logs and using the second to winch up both logs and tractor.
During the 1950s Bill Haydon had the foresight to employ Earl McNeil, still and movie photographer, to record his team of cedar getters in action.
Hauling a giant cedar log up a cliff face
Photograph Wauchope Historical Society
Bill Haydon snigging cedar with one of his crawler tractors
Photograph Wauchope Historical Society
Fourteen trucks carry the cedar from Kangaroo Flat to Wauchope
Photograph Wauchope Historical Society
Click on http://www.timbertown.com.au/pages.asp?code=108 to see images
I have posted this blog to show how we humans have methodically taken everything from this landscape with no forethought to future generations. Australias once magnificent biodiversity is GONE...forever. Nature will replace it a NEW ecosytem as it has done since time began.
Australian Red Cedar, (Toona ciliata formerly Toona australis), was named for the resemblance of its timber to that of the Cedrus genus, Indian Cedar or the Cedars of Lebanon. Written of in biblical times, regarded as ancient, the Cedars of Lebanon are contemporary with Australia’s Red Cedar, thousands of years old when harvested. The distribution of cedar extends from Ulladulla south of Sydney to far north Queensland, with the best cedar growing on the rich volcanic, alluvial soils of the plateaux in the hinterland of the north coast of New South Wales.
When cedar was discovered in the Hawkesbury and Hunter districts in 1790, the government claimed title and sent in gangs of convicts to cut it. The first export of it as sawn timber was to India in 1795. Shiploads went to England, China, New Zealand, South Africa and Mauritius.
It took only twenty-five years for it to be cut out on the Hawkesbury. By 1815 the cedar getters had moved on to the Hunter. Governor Macquarie was delighted to find another supply at the new settlement at Port Macquarie.
On his instructions three of the Hastings timbers were to be sent to Sydney as back-loading on the ships that came in with supplies: red cedar, rosewood, Dysoxylum fraseranum, and pine, Callitris macleayana (Port Macquarie Pine). Convict timber getters using pit saws cut large quantities that were shipped regularly from Port Macquarie.
In 1824 the well known Simeon Lord, former convict and by then wealthy trader and ship owner, was successful in his tender for the purchase of 300 tons of Port Macquarie cedar at a little less than one and one halfpenny per foot.
Much of the cedar was rafted down the river. In November 1826, Captain (later Major) Innes, Commandant of the settlement, reported that 880 eight-foot cedar logs were lying on the beach at the lumber yard to be sawn. A further 276 eight-foot logs and 20 fifteen-foot logs were at the cedar camp up river awaiting suitable conditions. The river mouth was difficult when strong winds and adverse tides prevailed. A year later, Innes sent a party to investigate the extent of cedar on the next big river to the north. This river was soon to be named the Macleay in honour of the Honourable Alexander Macleay whose daughter Innes married in 1829.
John Verge, the notable architect, had been on the Dorrigo plateau since 1828. The four square miles of land he later took up along the Macleay included a large stand of cedar. Verge, who is buried in Port Macquarie’s Historic Cemetery, was responsible for many large elegant houses in Sydney including Elizabeth House, Tusculum, Lyndhurst and Rockwall which are extant,
By 1830 when Port Macquarie was thrown open to free settlement the most easily accessible cedar had been cut out by the convict gangs. Those who arrived by ship seeking cedar soon moved north to the Macleay and farther on to the rich and accessible pickings of the Clarence and the Richmond districts. The cedar in the Camden Haven valley had been temporarily overlooked.
Then surveyors for the Australian Agricultural Company, exploring the waterway there hoping for a connection with the Manning River that would provide safer passage, noted the timber riches of the area and were quickly followed by others from the south. By 1856 ships were calling in to the Camden Haven specifically to pick up cedar. They dumped their ballast of Sydney sandstone before proceeding upriver to present-day Kendall where the first organised timber milling is said to have taken place as early as the 1860s.
As wholesale clearing took place in areas such as the Comboyne, the use of cedar became indiscriminate. Whole houses were built of it, public buildings, fine furniture, packing cases, paling fences, farm buildings. There was so much of it that it could be used as deal. Those who used it in this way did so for its ease of working rather than for the beauty so sought after by others.
The cedar getters developed a special technique. Crosscut saw, axe, standing boards were their only equipment. Cedars are buttressed, the bases are often hollow, so they felled them at heights up to six metres off the ground. They would cut a slot about shoulder height – they called it a scaffold hold – drive in a board, stand on it, cut the next slot and drive in another board, perhaps another and another. Since boards were awkward to carry through the bush, many used one board only. After they had cut the second slot they would cut a toe hold to stand in while they moved the board up. Getting down as the tree was beginning to fall required great dexterity.
Pit Sawing at Comboyne c 1906,
exactly the same method used by the first convict cedar getters
Photograph Port Macquarie Historical Society
Attention turned to the valuable hardwoods of the area in the latter part of the nineteenth century and, with occasional exceptions, the last of the great cedar trees remained in their hidden gullies and gorges.
In the 1930s two things combined to reinstate its harvesting. The first was the increase in mechanisation which allowed men to get into areas within the forests previously denied them – bullocks and horses were replaced by petrol and steam driven log haulers– and the other was the obsession of one man, Bill Haydon who became known as the Cedar King.
There were many other timbers that Haydon harvested and milled. There were others cedar getters, Vernon McLeod of the Camden Haven among them. But it was Haydon’s passion for cedar, his determination and his audacity that marked him for greater recognition.
Haydon first of all drew cedar along the Oxley Highway to the west of Wauchope and from Bellangry where he and his team also drew White Beech and Mountain Ash. They moved for a while to the Macleay district to the north. But the 1930s depression affected the market for these fine timbers and for more than a decade Haydon turned his skills to harvesting and milling the major hardwoods and softwoods of the area.
In 1940, the Forestry Commission were charging royalty of £7 per 100 superfeet for cedar. When drawing cedar, one might snig a log seven miles with a tractor, then cart it sixty miles to a mill. As the royalty was still £7 irrespective of the distance the log had to be taken, it didn’t pay the logger to go back for the smaller log and so it was left to waste.
Following World War II the demand for cedar accelerated. NSW Railways were rebuilding their rolling stock and cedar was required for the inside of the carriages. Unlike other timbers, when cedar is butted against cedar it does not squeak, a valuable attribute in a constantly moving railway carriage. Bill Haydon had a twenty year contract to supply cedar to New South Wales Railways.
He also supplied cedar to Thurlings Joinery Works in Port Macquarie where windows, architraves and fine furniture was made. His own home was a showpiece of the rich mellow timber.
Bill Haydon felling a giant red cedar tree
Photograph Wauchope Historical Society
For most of the very wet year of 1954 Haydon hauled cedar out of deep gorges at Kangaroo Flat at Yarrowitch, on the headwaters of the Hastings and Forbes Rivers. He used two crawler tractors, often lowering one over a cliff to attach the logs and using the second to winch up both logs and tractor.
During the 1950s Bill Haydon had the foresight to employ Earl McNeil, still and movie photographer, to record his team of cedar getters in action.
Hauling a giant cedar log up a cliff face
Photograph Wauchope Historical Society
Bill Haydon snigging cedar with one of his crawler tractors
Photograph Wauchope Historical Society
Fourteen trucks carry the cedar from Kangaroo Flat to Wauchope
Photograph Wauchope Historical Society
Click on http://www.timbertown.com.au/pages.asp?code=108 to see images
I have posted this blog to show how we humans have methodically taken everything from this landscape with no forethought to future generations. Australias once magnificent biodiversity is GONE...forever. Nature will replace it a NEW ecosytem as it has done since time began.