Sawlogs & Sleepers

Forest Production - an Overview

Building Victoria

This article will continue to have items added to the Timeline.

 
Imagine

You drive for 90km and alongside you all of the way is a cuboid (a box-shaped object) of solid wood one metre high and one kilometre wide. This cuboid approximates the volume of sawlogs (90 million cubic metres) extracted from Victoria's native forests between 1900 and 2022. The cuboid covers an area of 9000 ha. Most of this wood will have gone into buildings as framing. Victoria depended on this supply for residential development well in to the 1990s.

 

Start Here

But in the earliest days sawn timber would not have been as critical to development as other forest products. On this site  there are reports (The Early Years) that illustrate the mismanagement of Victoria's forests from the time of settlement in the 1830s to the early 1900s. Perhaps mismanagement is the wrong term - lack of management is probably more appropriate. And yet our forests, those that weren't inappropriately "sold off" for agriculture or settlement development, were being heavily exploited (indeed, extensively clear felled )for mining timbers , fuel, fencing material,building materials, wharf development and, from 1854, building railways. The exploitation was such that by the early 1900s the Wombat Forest, as we now know it, was known to be the "ruined forest", and by the time of the FCVs first Annual Report in 1919/1920 future sleeper supply was a concern.

"Upkeep of existing railways and further extensions of the railway system cause a heavy drain upon the sleeper-yielding forests, which it is becoming increasingly difficult to meet from the ironbark, grey box, and red gum areas. In this connexion there are already clear indications that it wi11 soon become necessary to be content with less rigid specifications as regards both species and dimensions."

Keeping important forest areas out of the hands of the greedy was also a continuing focus of the newly-created FCV.

Our earliest plantations, and not just softwood plantations, were generated from about the 1860s with the first forest Nursery at Macedon established in 1872, and softwood plantations being established at Macedon and Creswick, and Sugar Gum plantations in the You Yangs. (At least some of this original plantation was still there in 2024.) Softwood plantation development continued at a relatively low level and at those levels were never going to meet the demand for wood volume, let alone the continuing need for durable timbers. (Preservative treatment of softwood to improve durability did not start until the 1960s.) It was the 1960s Plantation Extension (PX) Program which really allowed plantation timbers to begin to play a key role in housing and other traditionally hardwood uses from the 1980s.

Prior to the first FCV Annual Report (1919/20) statistics related to forest production are sparse to non-existent. But for the next seven decades or so we have relatively good production figures from both Victoria's native forests and softwood plantations. With the move of forest management into the direct control of Ministers, and into larger State govenment departments, fewer production figures tend to be available in the Annual Reports we have been able to locate so far.

Australia was "riding on the on the sheep's back" was a term once used to describe the reliance of our economy on wool production. In Victoria it could easily be said that "Victoria rode, to a significant degree, on the products supplied by our native forests".

So What do the Figures Tell Us?

Information gathered from Annual Reports (AR) has been used to provide a snapshot of production at about 10 year intervals up until the 1990s.You can of course go to the Annual Reports we hold for more detailed analysis if required. This Spreadsheet also contains a good annual series of production figures for hardwood sawlogs, softwood sawlogs and sleepers.

If sawlog volume is concerned then any figure given in super feet is presumed to be sft HLV (Hoppus Log Volume). You will soon see that the description of products and the units used in measurement change throughout time. And, for example, what is a "load" of firewood, and what is the weight of a "bag" of charcoal, or indeed the standard length of a telephone pole. Time series of production for more products, if we ever get that far, will be a long process.

If you look closely you will see changes in the products coming from our forest, their rise and fall (or in the case of softwood timber - just their rise), and changes in the species groups (hardwood or softwood) used to meet demand for certain products.

Also available is a still developing timeline of the production history of our native forests and softwood plantations.

 

Native Forest Production

Forestry Businesses

The link below will provide access to maps of sawmill and tramline locations in a number of forests.

The link below provides access to a spreadsheet recording sawlog and sleeper production statistics.