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Board and shingle makers Graham Green and John Graham, whose skills have restored some of Tasmania’s most important heritage buildings, including at Port Arthur and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, have folded their business. Green now works in land restoration. He and Graham keep their tradition alive on a voluntary basis, restoring traditional timber bush huts in remote places. Green, founder of the lobby group Timber Workers for Forests, estimates that 62,500ha of specialty timber-rich forest has been clear-felled since 1996.
Most special timber craftsmen lay much of blame for the emerging crisis on the politicians and timber barons who presided over a forestry industry that “wasted” vast volumes of special timbers in a head-long rush to clear old-growth forests. Driven largely by export markets for woodchips, the industry from the 1980s to the 2000s was marked by the conversion of vast swaths of old growth to plantations and short rotation eucalypt crops. “There were decades of mismanagement,” says Kevin Perkins, one of the state’s most established special species timber craftsmen. “We had such a huge pantry of really good woods in this state. We were the lucky country – until the politicians squandered it.”
Special species miller and furniture maker Richard Davis agrees. Davis salvaged special timbers from flooded hydro-electric schemes in the 1970s and later from logging areas known as coupes. “I brought home what I could from the coupes, but it was just a fraction of what had been there – you’d see beautiful 300-year-old timber just trashed in a couple of seconds; left and burnt,” Davis says. “Ninety per cent [of the special species timber] was wasted.”
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