Bunya Trees for Timber

What a fuss this tree created when it was first shown by aborigines to a white man in 1838! Andrew Petrie heard of it from an aboriginal friend. He asked to be shown it, and was taken to Mt Beerwah. Recognising instantly that the tree he saw was new species of great potential value, he took a hatchet and chopped out a sample of the timber, to the great distress of his friend. Bunya trees were regarded by the aborigines as highly valuable for the food they produced, and were personally owned by individual men.
Botanists were delighted with the new discovery. In1843 Ludwig Leichhardt wrote of it: ‘The Bunya-Bunya tree is noble and gigantic, and its umbrella-like head overtowers all the trees of the Brush.’ Again, the next year he noted: ”Bunyas lift their majestic heads, like pillars of the blue vault of heaven.”
The excitement among the timbergetters was even greater. Petrie noted that the average diameter of the trees at that time was four feet, and this rich supply of creamy-yellow, easily worked timber appeared to be theirs for the taking. They didn’t have things all their own way, however. In 1842 Governor Gipps, recognising the tree’s importance to the aborigines, proclaimed that no licences would be granted for logging of the lands bearing bunya pines. Settlement in these areas was also prohibited. In theory, this should have resulted in a de facto aboriginal reserve on the Sunshine Coast and the wide bay areas, and their hinterland. In practice, the New South Wales Government was a long way away, and its less popular laws were winked at in the faraway colony of Moreton Bay.
In our own district, hand-cutting and milling of bunya trees on a small scale probably began soon after the area was opened up by squatters in 1840. The original range of these magnificent trees is no longer known. Remnants and regrowth show that it came close to Toowoomba in the north. It could well have once included the city area, the nearby escarpment, and perhaps further south. However in 1851 Christopher Rolleston, the Darling Downs commissioner for crown lands, reported that settlers were deliberately destroying the trees with the aim of “keeping the blacks from the neighbourhood”. It would be impossible nowadays to say from how great an area the plants were completely exterminated.
When the new colony of Queensland was created in 1859, one of it’s government’s first acts was to rescind Gipps’s proclamation. By 1861 Governor Bowen could report with satisfaction that aborigines had been driven out of the Blackall Range. Timbergetters were encouraged to make full use of any timber they could find. Inland, records show that timbergetters were working in the Bunya Mountains in the 1860s.
By 1865 it again became impossible to get a licence to cut bunya pines - this time in recognition that they had been over-cut. It doesn’t seem to have stopped the “harvest”, however, and in 1878 girth limits of eighteen inches were imposed in an attempt to give the smaller trees time to grow and ensure a future for the industry. There were still large trees in the Bunya Mountains, which were more remote from easy transport, but in that year the land was thrown open for settlement, and the settlers attacked “their” trees with enthusiasm. Then in 1883, the Great Bunya Sawmill was opened. It dealt with those trees to such effect that the sawmill could no longer operate at a profit a mere nine years later.
By 1900, the bunya forests of the Blackall Range - originally much greater in extent than those of the Bunya Mountains - were a thing of the past. The Bunya Mountains themselves had fared better, and still contained enough forest country for some citizens to consider it worth persuading the government to reserve 9000 hectares as Queensland’s second national park. It was gazetted in 1908, but timber continued to be cut from it until 1917. The big old trees we see there now are ones which were rejected then as being too small to be worth cutting, or trees which have grown up since that date. Outside the fringes of the national park, a timber industry continued until 1945, when at last there was insufficient timber for it to continue.
The nineteeth century belief that our timber resources were so large as to be virtually unlimited was sadly proven wrong in a very short space of time. The twenty-first century does not mourn the passing of our great forests just for their own beautiful sakes, however. Nor does it merely deplore the careless waste of a resource which could still, had it been better managed, be a large and profitable industry. There is a growing awareness that the reckless destruction of trees all over the world is having a disastrous effect on its climate. Revegetation, once seen as the romantic endeavour appealing only to “greenies’ now seems a worthwhile mainstream activity.
What a great thing it would be, if this motivation led to the re-establishment of the great bunya forests.