y interest is industrial archaeology, in particular the sawmilling industry, its communities and the light rail transport systems it once employed. I have no idea why I have developed this interest but I think it has something to do with my love of the bush and a curiosity about the relics that you often find there.

I recall interviewing Wilbur Saxton some years ago and being moved by how his family was affected by the fires there. He lost a brother and sister-in-law to the fires and to hear the story from a family member was saddening to say the least. But there was also an acceptance that fire was part of life in the bush and often it could be cruel. You had to deal with it and its terrible aftermath but in its wake you picked yourself up and got on with rebuilding.

The particular areas that I’ve had a special interest in include Gembrook, Warburton, the Little Yarra Valley, Noojee, to an extent Tanjil Bren, Erica and West Gippsland generally. They each were unique in their own way but had much in common as well. Sawmilling was the dominant industry in each at some stage and many families moved with the mills from one region to another. But almost by definition fire was also a common factor. I have been amazed at times at how individuals and families dealt with the certainty, which existed in the 1920s and 30s, that at some point in the near future they personally; their livelihoods and industry would be seriously threatened by bushfire.

At Warburton the sawmilling industry was largely defunct by 1939. There were only a few mills still going, but mills were burned there, a lot of regrowth forest was destroyed and the Warburton township itself at one point was virtually ringed by fire.

Noojee was almost burnt through. I think there was only the pub and one other building that actually survived the fires. It certainly caused a lot of damage, and it seriously affected the sawmilling industry in that region for many years to come. Tanjil Bren was just starting up as a sawmilling region at that time. The process would have followed traditional lines with mills moving in and sawmillers being allocated blocks from which they would log and then send away the timber.

But after the 1939 fires it rapidly changed into a salvage operation where the aim was to fell the trees as fast as they could, preserve the wood on the ground and then saw them up as soon as possible. For perhaps the first time on a large scale in Victoria the government took the lead in actively determining the shape the industry would take across a region.

Erica was affected in a similar way to Tanjil Bren to a point. Fortunately no one died there but with the death and destruction that occurred in the ‘26 and ’32 fires still vivid in many memories, the fear that permeated the sawmill communities was palpable in the reports dispatched to newspapers and the Forests Commission at the time.

The fire swept down the Thompson valley which was then being logged by Jack Ezard. He was a very dominant sawmiller in those days and his plan was to log out the Thompson valley over many years. He built his tram line north from Erica to facilitate this. The timber up that way was immense and offered a rare opportunity for a sawmiller to take up permanent residence. He had the valley to himself and by the time he would have logged it through, the regrowth would have allowed the process to be repeated; or at least that was what Jack told me was his big plan.

Well the fires came through, killed just about every standing tree and dramatically upset Jack’s future! It also changed the whole profile of the industry in the area. There was a huge investment by Ezard into the Thompson valley to try and salvage the burnt timber and then the Forests Commission, fearing that Ezard’s efforts would not be enough, established its own sawmill at Erica to cut the salvaged timber from further up the valley beyond the reach of Ezard’s operation.

Camps were established in the ash country at Little Boys and elsewhere, to accommodate the loggers who were too far from Erica to commute each day. But even this was not enough; in a departure from the past, the Commission encouraged major city timber merchants to place mills in the valley as part of the frenzy to get the fire-killed timber out.

All of this was so different to the traditional model where it was normal practice to locate a mill close to the source of the logs. A community would develop around the mill. It was usually mostly comprised of single men, but there were almost always married couples living there as well, and kids who would sometimes attend a mill school. This, however, was different; camps such as Little Boys were made up of entirely single men, living in tents. It was rough and ready with little sense of community.

In terms of the sawmilling industry generally, the 1939 fires certainly affected the way the industry presented itself, especially in the short term but also with impacts into the future.

The speed at which it was thought the timber had to be moved certainly meant that older traditional means of logging had largely to be abandoned. To understand this need for haste you have to look at the then held belief of what was happening with a fire-killed tree. The actual trunk of the tree - although dead - was still useable for sometime after. How long, at that time, was thought to be five to six years.

Beyond then it was thought that the tree would start to crack and that would mean a far less valuable product from the point of view of turning out construction timber, weatherboards and the like. History tells us that in practice trees were found usable for a much longer period but it was what was thought then that shaped the salvage methods adopted.

They believed that they had to get in and log the forest very quickly. The traditional model that applied was that you, the sawmiller, would apply for a block of timber; it could be 300 or 400 acres. And then the sawmiller would log that block, generally over a period of five or six years, after which he would apply for another block, hopefully somewhere close by, so the crew could be kept together.

Well, with the fires, there wasn’t time for that. The whole lot, thousands of acres, was destroyed, so it meant that the entire forest had to be cut and logged almost immediately. What might have taken about 20 or 30 years in the past needed to be done in the space of about five or six years.

To bring this about the Government, through the Forests Commission, invested heavily in constructing roads and tramlines. It established a mill itself at Erica, and encouraged other timber merchants/sawmillers with substantial available capital to come into regions, with the aim of logging the whole lot in one go. The capital was needed because only modern large-scale logging technology could hope to cope with it all. Gone were the days of horse teams and small winches.

A lot of North American practice was introduced; high leads, large powerful self propelled winches, and caterpillar tractors. Some tramways were used but only because of the time needed to build roads. Their days were numbered as roads were built and trucks, with greater capacity and flexibility coupled with lower costs, took over.

New techniques were introduced in the bush as well; the timber had to be preserved once it was logged, you couldn’t saw it all up in one go. The Forests Commission constructed large log dams, particularly up around the Toorongo region where they would dam the streams and put logs in the water, as a way of preventing them drying and splitting. Whether it worked or not, I’m not sure, but some suggest that trees left standing fared much better than those subjected to such preservation methods.

The longer term effect was to see much of the technology remain in the industry after the salvage work was complete, however it would not be correct to credit the 1939 fires solely with this change. It would have occurred anyway but I would think that the focus on investment in equipment, transport and logging methods in the aftermath of the fires accelerated the pace of change. The industry, since probably the late ’20s, was becoming increasingly mechanised, as a departure from the model of sawmilling that existed prior to that which really hadn’t changed much over a hundred years.

With some different equipment here and there, a sawmiller of the 1850s could walk into a sawmill of 1925 and probably run it quite well, and vice versa, and be very familiar with the whole thing. But after the fires you had much larger operations, huge winches, and spar trees with ropes going up, hauling logs from great distances radiating from that spot. In the bush it was vastly different from earlier times.

Likewise with the despatch of timber; where road transport now dominated the prior use of tramways for transporting timber. Mills were increasingly located in the towns rather than the bush, perhaps partly because of the desire to remove communities from the risk of fire but principally because of structural change in the industry. In a departure from the past, post-fire economics now demanded larger mills located close to a railhead rather than a log supply. Road-based log trucks could efficiently carry logs long distances.

The role of the Forests Commission also changed in that time. It went from a regulator and royalty collector to being an active participant. This took the form of direct management of logging activity. To match the needs of larger more efficient centrally located sawmills, the Commission took on the tasks of tree-felling and selling logs to sawmillers, activities it has been engaged in until recent times. The genesis of this changed approach can be found in the salvage operations that followed the fires at Erica.
h
The activity that followed the 1939 fires demonstrated the efficiency of new methods to a wider audience, brought an influx of imported technology and equipment, and encouraged the production of local equivalents. What were isolated examples of change before the fires became the norm afterwards. So it would seem the fires affected the way things were done, but probably more in accelerating change rather than in bringing about the substance of change itself.