by Terry Gordon
From his March '06 newsletter.
Recently I was invited by Graham Naughton (who I call the gidgee man) to go bush and collect some gidgee for my own use. We set out at 3am in the morning in Graham’s Land Rover towing a specially built boggy wheel trailer that can hold 3 - 4 ton of wood. It was a long drive and we arrived at the property near Cunnamulla at about 3 in the afternoon. We were staying in the shearer’s quarters on this hugh sheep station so it was a matter of putting the food and beer in the fridge and saying hello to the station managers before setting out to get some gidgee.
By 4 pm, Graham was kicking over his big chainsaw ready to get into it. We went about 1 km from the quarters back to where Graham left off last time and soon found a nice Gidgee tree to cut down. By sundown we had our first Gidgee tree cut into billets about 0.5 to 0.7 m long sliced in half to form a half moon shape which I can handle on my bandsaw on return. We got about 8 billets from this log and they were individually wrapped in pallet wrap plastic, painted on the ends with an oil sealer to prevent any cracking at all. Back to camp for dinner and a few beers that went down pretty well. I was a happy camper at this stage and fired up to get more Gidgee the next day.
We were up early the next day and had our first tree down by about 7am. The second tree was a medium sized Ringed Gidgee just nearby – I was getting excited as anyone who knows Ringed Gidgee will understand it’s beauty and it can be difficult to find. We had smoko and I wandered off, while Graham was sharpening his saw, to see if I could find some more nice trees. I came across this very big, old tree which was 3 feet x 2 feet at the butt and one side was dead standing and the other side growing. With my limited training from Graham on spotting a Ringed Gidgee tree, I started to think I had found gold – a very large completely Ringed Gidgee tree. I got Graham over to take a look and he confirmed it was Ringed Gidgee so out with the saw and down it came. We had hit the jackpot as it was solid Ringed Gidgee in large sizes virtually defect free – now I couldn’t wait to get home to cut it up.
It was too early in the day to stop and celebrate with a beer so we continued on with cutting down another couple of trees with Graham’s tried and tested method of cutting the logs into billets and lugging them to the trailer on his trusty modified wheel barrow. The Gidgee forest is just too thick with old fallen trees and other scrub to drive the vehicle to the tree so you can only work a few hundred meters from the farm tracks, otherwise it would be too far to carry the heavy gidgee billets on the wheel barrow. We nearly had the trailer full and there was only enough room for one more tree which we cut down early the next morning before heading home.
I think we cut down 7 Gidgee trees to put 3 tonne of billets in the trailer and this came out of about 3 acres of the Gidgee forest. To put this into perspective, the station we cut the wood from is 28 miles x 28 miles or 501 760 acres (203 056 hectares) and it is at least ½ covered in trees. This property is also surrounded by other similar properties so it became very apparent to me that harvesting Gidgee in this manner is sustainable forever and a day.
Graham runs a business called ‘Loggerheads’ and has been cutting Gidgee, Mulga and other inland woods for several years. He cuts the wood up and kiln dries it to sell to box makers, musical instrument makers, pool cue makers etc. It can only be classed as sensible and sustainable use of this resource.
This trip certainly opened my eyes to the potential of inland timbers for specialised use which is definitely sustainable and the product is superb.