FLASHBACK: Eungella’s ‘red gold’ timber industry

The region’s rainforest proved lucrative in the 1900s as Australian settlers cried out for timber

LARGE LOGS: Logging was a substantial industry carried out in the Mackay district. This photograph shows a group of very large logs on a truck in the district in the late 1940s or 1950s. Picture: Daily Mercury Archives

IN the early 1900s Australia was desperate for timber as settlers and industrialists built homes, large buildings, trains and more and the Eungella region heeded the call.

The Queensland Government’s Mackay Highlands report said “Logging began on the Clarke Range around 1904, followed by the first road up the range form the Pioneer Valley in 1908”.

In 1912, the Lahey Bros timber merchants shipped a sample of Mackay cedar to Brisbane.

“Harder than the ordinary cedar, (it) should be good for cabinet-makers’ work,” the Daily Mercury reported.

The next year, the range’s cedar was shipped to railway workshops at Ipswich for building passenger carriages.

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AgriFutures Australia said the nation’s early settlers nicknamed the red cedar, which grows up to 40-60m tall and up to 3m thick, “red gold”.

By June 1945, then Mackay Mayor Ian Wood was perhaps ahead of his time when he pleaded for preservation of Eungella’s forest.

“Unfortunately, trees do not have votes though they are part of our national heritage and thus did not count much with some public men,” the Daily Mercury wrote on the issue on June 16.

But the region’s logging industry persisted.

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The seasonal haul of timber in 1952 was six million super feet – a ‘board foot’ equal to one foot square by one inch thick, or about 93cm square by 2.5cm thick.

It is now considered commercially extinct.

Logging of crown rainforests ended in Queensland in the mid-90s.

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