Melbourne, Thursday 2 February 1939

[Mr. Gowans] You are a vice-president of the Victorian branch of the Australian Forests League?
Yes. The League is strongly opposed to the use of fire as a means of clearing the forest of the native shrub vegetation or the natural litter, especially in mountain forests of mountain ash or messmate, and particularly those of mountain ash where a light fire will damage the trees.

[Mr. Hardy is questioned about research into ecological succession and the nature of undergrowth]
While speaking of forest floors, Your Honor will remember one witness from the north east. He said that the original forest floors were mainly of the Savannah type with grasses between the trees and without scrub for the most part.

I would like Your Honor to look at these photographs taken at the time of the exhibition about 1880 or 1888, by the direction of the Government, to get true pictures of types of forests for the exhibition. One of the photographs shows a tree 220 feet high in the Sassafras Gully.

Your Honor will notice the under-storeys of the forest that had to be cut away to get the photograph. Another photograph taken near Neerim township shows that it is not confined to one example. It shows a tree 227 feet high with a girth of 55 feet 7 inches. It shows the lower storey 20, 30 and 40 feet high.

Mr. Dowie led the Government party into the places where some of the photographs were taken. The tree on the left of one of the photographs is the tallest tree ever photographed and measured by a Government party. It was 326 feet high; that was in the Upper Latrobe Valley, north west of Noojee.

There you can see the tall massive mountain ash forest. The year 1880 in forest succession is only a matter of yesterday. I have been associated with Baron Von Mueller, and, in conversation, he has spoken to me of the impenetrable bush that impeded his progress from point to point. That was way back in 1892.

What inference do you draw from these pictures - that the floor of the virgin forest is not clean?
I am not sure what is meant botanically by 'clean'.

If you mean a park-like appearance, I think it never existed in mountain ash forest. My father told me that they had the greatest difficulty in 1868, which was long before those photographs were taken, in getting through the forest because of the enormous amount of cutting that had to be done.

The floor of this forest seems to be covered mainly with fallen debris?
There is the natural debris that falls in any forest. The old trees decay and fall.

[Mr. Barber] In the foreground there is shown a lot of stuff that has been cut down to get at the tree?
I can give a recent instance of the difficulty of getting at a big tree. Some time ago, with a surveyor of the Forests Commission, I was at Marysville and the Cumberland Valley, and we were advised of a very much taller tree on the Cora Lynn track.

We tried to get into a position to measure the tree with a theodolite. It took the best part of half an hour to cut a lane through the tall under-storey of the forest, so as to be able to see the top and bottom of the tree through the theodolite. That is why so many supposedly record trees in the forests have not been measured.

I want to knock out the idea that originally the forests were grass underneath and that there was no under-storey, no shrub, no undergrowth. In the western Dandenong forest, in the heart of Sherbrooke, following a fire there came a growth of bracken about eight feet high.

A man who was with me had to hold up a handkerchief on a stick and I had to stand on a stump in order to see it. We could not see each other because of the height of the bracken. These are the aliens that come in and take possession of a mountain ash floor if they get the chance.

The aliens came into the mountain ash country after burning?
Invariably if the cassinia and dogwood do not get hold of it.

When were the photographs taken?
In 1880.

Would not there have been a likelihood of some burning prior to that?
There is a possibility. In the early days of settlement in Victoria, when it was found that the forest trees yielded a wealth of palings, there was a raid on the Dandenong forest. When the original survey was made, there were tracks and huts all over the place, but my father said he knew of no fires having occurred.

One would have thought that the people in the forests in those days would have lit fires?
The palings were their livelihood, and they would not burn their capital.

[The Commissioner] Is there any geological evidence of this?
Even geologists are very chary about giving opinions on it.

[Mr. Barber] Going back to the big fires on Black Thursday in 1851, do not they indicate that there were severe fires thirty years before your photographs were taken? I am putting to you the possibility of the forests having been burned through before 1880?
That is possibly so. I would rather you questioned an ecologist on that, because they have gone very fully into it.

Finally we come back to this - that the three great causes of fire are; graziers' fires, settlers' fires, and billy tea fires. The late Sir David Hutchins once told me that billy tea was the biggest enemy the Victorian forests had. He said he could not understand why people would not drink water instead of tea and he thought that tea drinking ought to be prohibited.

Read more about the Black Friday bushfires in the Aftermath Section