Above left:
Australian red
cedar planking and
Huon pine ribs at
Australian Wooden
Boat Festival;
Above right:
Zelectra, an
electric-powered
speedboat built at
the Wooden Boat
Centre
Below: Huon pine66 CLASSIC BOAT AUGUST 2019TIMBER FROM DOWN UNDER
are all very durable, Huon pine particularly so due to its
high oil (methyl eugenol) content and resistance to
marine borers. It is very slow-growing – trees harvested
in the past were typically 800 to 1500 years old – and
this gives it a very tight, and normally straight, grain
which results in great strength and makes it highly
suitable for traditional planking. Furthermore, tree
stumps often provide shapes suitable for grown knees
and floors. Many boatbuilders describe it as “beautiful
to work” although its oil content means that extra care
needs to be taken when gluing or coating it.
King Billy pine also has a fairly high oil content but is
much easier to glue. It has the lowest density of the three
but is softer and bruises quite easily. Celery top pine is
the heaviest. It glues and takes fastenings well and is
often used for keels and other structural parts, but is
generally thought to be suitable for any component. All
three species steam well and so are often used for ribs.
Huon pine and celery top pine have a golden colour when
varnished and King Billy pine has a pinker appearance.
Of the three, celery top pine is the only one that can
still be commercially harvested, and there is one
particularly unusual location from which this is currently
being extracted. In the mid-1980s Lake Pieman was created
when a dam was built for hydroelectric power. Since
2015, significant quantities of celery top pine have been
harvested from the bottom of the lake by the company
Hydrowood using a purpose-built vessel which can reach
down 85 feet, cut the trees and bring them to the surface.
“So far, about a fifth of the lake has been harvested with
over 14,000ft^3 of celery top pine salvaged last year,”
Hydrowood’s Andrew Morgan told me.
There are still small quantities of dead trees of all
three species lying on forest floors and floating down
rivers which, with certain restrictions, can be salvaged
and sold. However, far more significant quantities of
dead Huon pine trees – resulting from lightening strike
fires - were mapped in the mid-1990s in a remote part of
the island. A plan has now been proposed to conduct a
harvest trial of these dead trees in the near future to
assess the usability of the timber for boatbuilding and
other crafts. If the trials are successful there could be
enough supply for the local industry to last as long as
120 years.Among the many stories of recycled timber concerns an
old hydroelectric pipeline of about 5ft diameter which
had been built of King Billy pine. When it was replaced a
few years ago, a boatbuilding school used the old timber
to produce a small dinghy.
Three boats built on the banks of the Huon River and
one of its tributaries in recent years have benefited from
these magnificent Tasmanian timbers. The 8-Metre Varg
(see p4), a recreation of a 1924 Johan Anker design of
the same name, was completed by Wilson Brothers of
Cygnet in 2013. Huon pine was used for the hull planking
but it took the owners two years to convince the timber
merchant that they weren’t going to sell it on for a profit
before he would part with it; blue gum was used for the
ribs; and the beamshelf, clamp, deck beams and keel are
all in celery top pine: after three years looking for a tree
for the keel, one was found growing alongside the
Arthur River on private land whose owner was willing
to sell it to pay for a new access road into his property.
The L Francis Herreshoff-designed 45ft ketch Gloria
was also built by Wilson Brothers, immediately before
Varg. King Billy pine was used, for its light weight, in the
four-layered, cold-moulded hull planking; celery top
pine, for its strength, in the frames, beamshelf and deck
beams; and Huon pine in the grown knees, for its crooked
shapes, and for much internal joinery, for its appearance.
Zelectra is an electric speedboat built at the Wooden
Boat Centre at Franklin in 2017. She has a celery top
keelson; a laminated stem, frames and stringers all in
King Billy; external hull planking laid over a plywood
cold-moulded hull in King Billy; deck beams and laid
deck in King Billy; and a Huon pine instrument console.
It is extraordinary, and yet not it the least surprising,
to think how much timber there was in these islands just
two centuries ago, and how quickly so much of it was
felled. “But you can imagine that in the early days when
the population was low, they thought the forests were
endless,” said Mike Johnson who teaches boatbuilding
at the Wooden Boat Centre. “Then one day they thought
‘hang on, it’s not so endless’.” It is perhaps even more
extraordinary to think of what these now-precious timbers
were once used for. “There are Huon pine fences at Battery
Point,” said Andrew Denman, “and as recently as the 80s,
celery top pine was being used for railway sleepers.”