Thread: What is this timber

I am now convinced from the recent posts what is show on first post is Qld walnut veneer which I'm not familar with.
From pics shown and what is on the net it looks more like that than any ebony.

Good to see the responses come in and people having a go at identifyng wood ... its a good subject, interesting and we often learn heaps.

Cheers Euge

PS: I am not afraid to be wrong or corrected. Its the best way to learn. Thanks for the suggestions

edit: Just saw your post Mobyturns.
Thanks for that background which is most interesting when such woods were cut and milled and used for veneers.

Euge, I was fascinated by the many saw and veneer mills in Cairns & Hinterland as a child. My Dad was a builder so I used every excuse to go along for the ride when he went to the saw mill. I would even visit the mills on my way home from school, and often the long way home - lol. The FNQ timber industry largely collapsed in the mid 1980's with World Heritage listing of the rainforests. With that went the saw & veneer mills. In the post WWII period the veneer & ply industry boomed in FNQ with over 60 veneer (rotary & sliced) mills in the Cairns & hinterland. I watched probably 10 or more of them in action in the 1960 & 70's.

Yep, what a shame that no-one could get the industry right. I worked for Foxwood in the mid 70's in Mareeba.(the old Lawson's mill) then briefly for Hynes in Hervey Bay. Everything died completely in the 80's. Some degree of sustainable logging and milling was always possible, but politically - not a chance.

Originally Posted by Mobyturns

Euge, I was fascinated by the many saw and veneer mills in Cairns & Hinterland as a child. My Dad was a builder so I used every excuse to go along for the ride when he went to the saw mill. I would even visit the mills on my way home from school, and often the long way home - lol. The FNQ timber industry largely collapsed in the mid 1980's with World Heritage listing of the rainforests. With that went the saw & veneer mills. In the post WWII period the veneer & ply industry boomed in FNQ with over 60 veneer (rotary & sliced) mills in the Cairns & hinterland. I watched probably 10 or more of them in action in the 1960 & 70's.

Originally Posted by Bendigo Bob

Yep, what a shame that no-one could get the industry right. I worked for Foxwood in the mid 70's in Mareeba.(the old Lawson's mill) then briefly for Hynes in Hervey Bay. Everything died completely in the 80's. Some degree of sustainable logging and milling was always possible, but politically - not a chance.

I agree, there are a few small "fixed" hardwood mills, Ron & Steve O'Brien in Proserpine, some "sustainable" miro-saw mills about, and the softwood mills at Ravenshoe & Emerald Ck near Mareeba but its nothing like it was in its hey day. As kids we often got to see the logs being unloaded in the Barron River at JM Johnstons wharf from the boats shipping logs from the Daintree & Bloomfield.

There is hardly anything left of the Foxwood mills. The huge circular sorting table is long gone.

Simm's mill in Gordonvale still stands but hsn't been operational in decades. Rankines mills are all but gone, some buildings survive at the many sites. Tarzali mill closed a few years back. Flying Fish Point mill near Innisfail is still there & operational, last I heard.

I had fond memories of Winkworths joinery in Aumuller St Bungalow, with its storage racks and the herringbone system of timber tracks and "cars" to move the timber about. Those smells, like fresh sawn QMP & NSO, the buzz of working saw mills, joinery works, rotary & slicing veneer mills, still linger in the memory banks. Then there was the treasures to be found in the waste heaps. We built many canoes from discarded ply, some lasted (marine ply) others weren't much more than single use. IF only we had the foresight to recover the ply cores and the remains of veneer bolts, it was simply burnt or fired the massive boilers at the mills.

Do me for QLD walnut. IF it is it will smell like vomit when you sand it.

Fellas, I have to put in my 2c about the timber industry in FNQ. Its demise is not as simple as having the resources 'locked up' by the "greenies"! I also grew up on the Tableland, and my dad was involved in the timber slaughtering business from time to time too - we cut mill logs in the 'scrub' and fenceposts, poles, & sleepers on our own place, which was in the heavy Eucalypt strip just outside the rainforest. In the 50s & 60s, they were still clear-felling & burning acres & acres of rainforest for pasture land. In most cases, any mill logs deemed suitable were cut & sold (not always, some of the land being cleared was too inaccessible to get the logs out safely), but stuff that we'd value highly today was just downed & burnt because it simply wasn't saleable at that time. I could operate for a lifetime on what we downed in an afternoon in 1961 on our neighbor's 'scrub block'. Maple & cedar logs that were considered too small to be millable (but pretty damn substantial by today's measure!) were just torched as soon as they were dry enough to burn. I drove past the paddocks we cleared, a couple of yeas ago, & it's an eroded, lantana-covered wasteland. Imagine what those trees would be worth if they were still there today!

If you've been up in a light plane over the Tablelands lately, you'll have noticed there ain't much of it covered by forest any more, and what there is has almost certainly been logged at least once, I doubt there is a single acre outside the national parks that hasn't felt the axe & saw already. The mill down the road from us (Walkers) ceased operating long ago as the available trees got further & further away, that was simple economics. High quality veneer logs are worth much more so it remained economic to haul them long distances to Mareeba or Cairns for a while longer. Trees do grow, so there is still some nice wood up there, but it's well-scattered and mostly only economic for the portable mill blokes to chase down.

So while some potential sources of timber have indeed been 'locked up', they represent only a small portion of what was there 200 years ago - the main reason for the demise of the FNQ timber industry is competition for land-use, exacerbated by lack of foresight & over-exploitation. Much as I love my wood, I'm grateful a few areas have been set aside so future generations can see a little bit of what once was......

Cheers,

So true Ian, our emotions get the better of us when we can't get that beautiful timber any more.

It is such a common tale for mankind, we swing from one extreme to the other, I guess like the fishing industry too.

I dream of the day when sustainable logging of tropical rain forests is possible once more, but even that will be a tiny industry at best I guess.

(I do remember the story that the Masterson Hotel in Mareeba was almost entirely built of ARC. I wonder if it's true and worth buying now??? )

Yes,Definitely Queensland walnut. I have a big stack of it, probably over 1000 square feet.
Very attractive timber with striping similar to Macassar ebony.
It was heavily used over here for furniture as a veneer.You see lots of cabinets etc from the 20s/30s onwards.

Ian, very good & pretty darn accurate wrap up of your experience with the Tablelands & FNQ timber industry. Few people understand that agriculture is largely responsible for the vast clearing of (rain)forests, & that the timber industry had pretty good forest stewardship from the early 1900's and perhaps earlier & was already into plantation species research, trials, establishment etc.

The agricultural impact is very easy to prove as it is very well documented within the Lands Dept & Titles Office archives - the leasee had development conditions imposed upon them under te lease which included land clearing, fencing, etc. I surveyed the northern side of Tolga - Kairi Rd in the 1990's and the first 2km or so had never been resurveyed since the original lease surveys. The original survey plan included a notation "numerous red cedar stumps to 12' high." Few people today would realise that the Tolga Scrub is a very small (and poor) remnant of the vast rainforests in that area.