The prosperity of the Hastings Valley was shaped by the hard work of timber workers and the power of sawmills. It is a valley of vast forests, where towering blackbutts (Eucalyptus pilularis), tallowwoods (E.microcorys), Sydney blue gums (E.saligna), brushboxes (Lophostomen confertus) and flooded gums (E. grandis) stand in seemingly endless supply. These trees formed the backbone of an industry that cut, hauled, and milled them into beams and boards that helped build Australia’s homes, railways, and bridges. However, when war came, the forests of the Hastings Valley became more than just an economic pillar, they evolved into a crucial asset for the nation’s survival.
Oxley’s discovery
While Lieutenant James Cook and Matthew Flinders briefly noted the main features of the Hastings Valley, viewed from the sea, John Oxley, the Surveyor-General of New South Wales, was the first European to venture into its depths during his 1818 expedition. Governor Macquarie sent Oxley to explore the mythical inland sea that captured the waters from the west-flowing rivers discovered after the Blue Mountains’ crossing.
After reaching the Macquarie Marshes, Oxley decided there was probably no inland sea and headed east through the Liverpool Plains and up the New England Plateau.
On 18 September, he and his party descended from the New England Tableland, navigating the dense ranges and finally emerging into the lush, fertile valley of the Hastings River.
As Oxley left the rugged escarpment behind, he was struck by the sheer beauty and abundance of the landscape. In his journal, he described the valley’s rich forests, fertile plains, and the winding course of what he named the Hastings River (after the then Governor-General of India, Lord Hastings).
After battling in the dense forested ranges, losing horses to starvation, and surviving wild storms and strong winds, Oxley’s journey along the valley floor became much more pleasant as he traversed an area he described as open forest, abundantly covered with lush grass.
One of his most notable journal entries describes the mountain forests he experienced:
“…we soon entered a forest of stringy bark and blue gum trees of immense size and great beauty… creepers and smaller timber trees, all of species not previously noticed by us, grew so extremely thick that we found it impossible to penetrate through them. We therefore continued along the edge of those valleys, our progress much impeded by the vast trunks of fallen trees in a state of decay, some of which were upwards of one hundred and fifty feet long, without a branch, as straight as an arrow, and from three to eight and ten feet in diameter.”
Oxley’s descriptions hinted at what was soon to be realised—the valley was a treasure trove of timber ready for harvesting. Sawmills emerged throughout the valley within decades, and the timber industry took root.
Red gold
By the 1860s, the valley’s first timber-getters focused on Australian red cedar (Toona ciliata), referred to as “red gold” for its beauty and versatility.
It was utilised for various purposes, including fine furniture, railway carriages, packing crates, and fences. However, the ease of working with cedar resulted in rampant exploitation.
By 1830, when Port Macquarie was open for free settlement, the most easily accessible patches of cedar had been depleted by convict gangs. Cedar cutters continued north, temporarily overlooking the cedar in the Camden Haven area. However, as wholesale clearing took place, more and more cedar was discovered. By 1856, ships began to call into Camden Haven specifically to pick up the timber.
The cedar cutters used to stand on the edge of cliffs overlooking the valley to spot their red spring foliage and then triangulate its approximate location.
The cedar getters developed a unique technique for felling trees to access timber. Their only equipment was a crosscut saw, an axe, and standing boards. Because cedars have hollow buttressed bases, they were often felled at heights of up to six metres above the ground. A slot at about shoulder height was cut for a board to stand on, then another slot was cut, and another board was driven in, perhaps adding more as needed.
Since boards were awkward to carry through the bush, many used only one. After cutting the second slot, they would create a toe hold to stand on while moving the board up. The cutters needed great skill to return to the ground as the tree began to fall.
As the cedar ran out in the late 19th century, attention turned to the area’s valuable hardwoods. In 1883, the government began setting aside forest reserves in the valley to protect them from indiscriminate clearing.
Boom times: the sawmills take over
In the mid-1870s, poet Henry Kendall was close friends with the pioneering sawmillers, the Fagan brothers, and accepted a clerical position at their Camden Haven mill. In 1881, Kendall, who loved the bush, was appointed New South Wales’ first Inspector of Forests by another close friend, Premier Sir Henry Parkes. Unfortunately, he died the following year, and the village’s name was changed to honour him in 1891.
From the 1870s onward, sawmills became the heart of the Hastings Valley. Every town had mills that shaped local life. The first mill was set up near Kendall in the 1860s. Sailing ships dumped their ballast of Sydney sandstone at Peach Grove before proceeding upstream to the mill to load timber. This valuable sandstone was later used in the retaining walls along the river.
Other sawmillers followed, including the Laurie family, whose mill was where the fish co-op is now. The village became known as Laurie’s Town and later Laurieton.
As the mills expanded, so did the towns. Hastings Valley’s prosperity depended on timber, with families relying on the industry for employment, trade, and survival. Such was the demand that nearly every landowner had a bullock team.
Nicholas Cain, a timber-getter and merchant on the south coast, moved to Wauchope in the early 1880s and initiated the timber industry in the town, which supported the area’s prosperity for over a century and earned the title of Timbertown. He constructed a timber wharf on the river, which became the focal point for sourcing much of the fine timber in the valley. Cain acquired and built ships, establishing a regular trade route between Wauchope and Sydney. The rail loading yard in Wauchope was the largest in the southern hemisphere in terms of the volume of product moved.
Over the next 60 years, the number of small mills in the district increased as more loading dumps were established along the riverbank. While they operated temporarily and employed only a few men, they were able to supply timber for specific orders, mainly for the local domestic market. Larger mills were permanent, employing more staff, and were supported by 10-20 workers in the bush who felled and transported the timber to the mill for processing. They utilised modern machinery and provided regular orders for overseas and domestic markets, primarily in Sydney. There were around 63 sawmills in the valley at one stage.
During its heyday before WWII, it was estimated that up to two-thirds of the population in Hastings Valley towns depended on the timber industry. At its peak, there were nine sawmills alone between Laurieton and Comboyne.
The demand for mining timber led to many more mills in the area, but the Great Depression ran many out of business. The timber industry picked up after the Depression, and a couple of mills were set up in the scrub about 50 miles west of Wauchope in the upper Hastings Valley to cut enormous stands of coachwood (Ceratopetalum apetalum) in Doyles River State Forest. They also cut sassafras (Athrosperma moschatum), red bean (Didymocheton muelleri), and red corkwood (Duboisia myoporoides).
War and Wood: Supplying the War Effort
With Australia’s forces deployed across Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific, demand for timber skyrocketed. Timber wasn’t just used for building barracks and fortifications but for rifle stocks, aircraft frames, ammunition boxes, and the decking of warships. The valley’s mills, already the backbone of the local industry, worked day and night to meet the need. New mills were established along the Oxley Highway to cut defence orders for the army.
Men who were not called up to fight contributed by felling trees in the forests with crosscut saws and axes before bulldozers and chainsaws became common. Horse teams assisted in timber collection. Rainforests, in particular, played a pivotal role in Australia’s performance on the battlefields, acting as our defence against an invasion by the Japanese and aiding the country’s recovery after the war.
The Federal Government restricted the use of valuable timbers to ensure their use was strictly for the war effort. Under the direction of the federal government’s wartime “Timber Controller,” timber was harvested hastily without any silvicultural considerations, bypassing the state government regulatory agencies.
Coachwood, in particular, was in high demand for rifle stocks and butts, prompting the Federal Government to establish a mill along the highway at Mount Seaview to cut the nearby coachwood stands. Slazenger, known for sporting products, operated the mill and fulfilled the army’s requirements for many years.
The Yarras Plymill was the largest of its kind in the southern hemisphere. It began as a sawmill in 1936 and evolved into a veneer mill during the 1940s. Cottages were constructed for 30 families, quarters for single men and a mess hall.
During the war, the mill briefly supplied coachwood plywood for the Mosquito fighter bombers built in Australia.
The de Havilland Mosquito twin-engine combat aircraft was introduced during WWII and was unusual because its frame was mostly made of wood. Although it was a British plane, it was built in England (and Canada) using Ecuadorian balsa (Ochroma pyramidale), spruce (Picea spp.) Canadian white birch (Betula papyrifera), walnut (Juglans regia), Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), and beech (Fagus sylvatica) plywoods. The plane was used mainly in Europe, and many variants were built. However, about 200 two-seat fighter bombers were built in Australia for the Royal Australian Air Force, which was based in the Halmaheras and Borneo during the Pacific War.
British engineers arrived in Australia with briefcases full of valuable materials related to the top-secret Mosquito design. The primary structure was constructed using imported spruce and balsa, while Australian timber was utilised in various secondary structure components.
Initially, the wings and spar webs were to be made of coachwood ply of the same thickness, but that decision was reversed when strength and shear tests showed that coachwood couldn’t match the Canadian birch ply. The spar web thickness for coachwood was increased, but this caused a few technical issues. So much so that the use of coachwood was later abandoned, and planes were replaced with imported birch ply.
Other brush or rainforest species were harvested for specialised purposes – sassafras and yellow carabeen (Sloanea woollsii) for packing cases, ammunition cases, and coffin boards.
The Yarras mill produced the country’s most extensive variety of plywood, including aircraft, marine, waterproof, form ply, fancy ply, commercial, and rotproof plywood. They even invented fireproof plywood. Additionally, they manufactured solid-core doors and random-groove panelling.
However, as the post-war boom waned and scrub timber became scarce, the valley would ultimately confront the same destiny as countless timber towns across Australia—consolidation, closures, and the gradual decline of an industry that had once appeared invincible. This backgrounder, which I wrote in 2023, includes additional information on scrub or rainforest logging.
The Post-War Timber Boom
The 1950s saw an explosion in demand for timber, driven by a housing boom, infrastructure expansion, and projects like the Snowy Hydro Scheme. It was a golden period in the valley. The Forestry Commission of New South Wales (FCNSW) responded by opening new logging areas, including Bellangry and Doyles River. The overcutting was a critical issue in the state’s two main rainforest logging areas– the Richmond-Tweed and Hastings Valleys, because their specialised timbers were in great demand. Foresters warned that the resource was being overcut – it was in the order of at least three times the likely sustainable yield. The initial solution between federal and state governments in the early 1960s was to embark on a massive increase in Australia’s pine plantation resource elsewhere in the state.
Nonetheless, considerable progress was made by FCNSW in the 1970s to reduce rainforest commitments and lower the annual cut. The intention was to avoid a sudden cessation of rainforest logging since this could only result in widespread industry disruption, unemployment and severe social stress, something politicians would not countenance.
In the mid-1970s, the Forestry Commission released its landmark Indigenous Forest Policy, which primarily recognised that the best and most accessible areas of state forest on the coast would be managed carefully and sustainably. The Kendall Management Area, with its regrowth blackbutt forests, became the showpiece of this policy. To rest the coastal forests, operations were shifted into the mature foothill hardwood forests, which produced magnificent timber to supply the rapacious domestic market.
The Herons Creek sawmill was one of the beneficiaries. Herons Creek was first settled in 1890 by timbermen. The enormous hardwood resource was very attractive to the timber industry. From the early days, mill logs and girders were hauled by bullock teams and taken by log punt to Laurieton. In 1915, Alf Noone arrived in the area and established a sawmill at Herons Creek, home to some of the state’s best bushmen. The mill became associated with blackbutt, the most common tree in the coastal forests. Over the years, Noone acquired other local sawmills and, at the urging of the FCNSW, amalgamated their log quotas at a centralised mill.
With the help of CSIRO and a fact-finding mission to North America, a new state-of-the-art sawmill was constructed at Herons Creek and opened in 1961. It became the largest mill on the mid-north coast.
One of the primary state forests in the Hastings Valley is Bellangry, which occupies the northern slopes of the valley. A forest headquarters was located within the southern border of the forest, about 27 kilometres north-west of Wauchope via the village of Beechwood. A significant forest road was built up to the crest of the range.
The forest is a joy to drive through. Its large, even-aged stands of blackbutt, dating from the 1940s, surround the beautiful Wilson River Reserve. From many vantage points, there are extensive vistas over the forested hills. An extraordinary Antarctic beech rainforest area occurs along its highest ranges, some 1,200 metres above sea level.
Another state forest is Middle Brother, now a national park established to “protect” two of the largest blackbutt trees in New South Wales – the Bird Tree and Benaroon Tree. It is located near the Pacific Motorway, south of the villages of Kendall and Kew, and occupies a prominent mountain named by Lieutenant Cook in 1770.
Australia’s largest red bloodwood (Corymbia gummifera) is found near Herons Creek in Burrawan State Forest. It is known as “Old Bottlebutt” because of its large, flared butt, which has a girth of over 16 metres.
Sydney’s Opera House
One of Hastings Valley timber’s greatest legacies is its role in the Sydney Opera House. Mills in the valley supplied the miles of wood panelling that made up the ceilings in the concert hall and adjoining halls.
The design of the Opera House was challenging and ambitious from the outset. Inspired by Jorn Utzon’s vision, it aimed to create a series of interconnected, sail-like shells that would accommodate a concert hall, opera house, and drama theatre.
The white tiled scales of the shells (more correctly, they are concrete vaults, not shells) are the building’s greatest triumph. While revolutionary, creating the curved roof structure was also extremely challenging. Traditional steel and concrete methods were insufficient to erect these forms efficiently. Instead, plywood was chosen to form the moulds and templates for the concreting. The process started with building a full-scale model of the shells using plywood by skilled carpenters, which were later used to guide the placement of the concrete.
Utzon’s original plans envisioned the concert hall being enclosed within a prefabricated plywood structure, built within the concrete roof and entirely independent of its support. However, the seating capacity became a point of contention, leading to numerous design revisions.
Ultimately, although regarded as less functional and more costly than Utzon’s original design, the final design used approximately 93,000 square metres of high-quality white birch or crab apple (Schizomeria ovata) plywood and 2,000 cubic metres of brush box panelling.
The Concert Hall is the largest section of the building. Peter Hall’s iconic work complements the “shell” design and addresses various challenges.
He ultimately designed the ceiling to be a hollow raft suspended from the roof ribs. The raft has a top deck of two inches of concrete and a lower surface, visible by the audience, of half-inch plywood backed by one-inch plaster board.
The focal point of the ceiling is a crown piece of plywood 40 feet in diameter and 80 feet above the floor. From this, panels of plywood swirl out radially to form the bottom side of the hollow ceiling and then plunge downwards to form the upper part of the walls of the hall.
The ceiling in the Opera Theatre is made of plywood with stained yellow carabeen.
Winning the contract to supply the specialist timber needed for the iconic ceilings and wall panelling of the Concert Hall was a crowning glory for the Yarras mill. The contract specified white birch plywood because the white colouring and distinctive cathedral-patterned grain in its veneers were considered essential.
Grains were matched in each length of wood from the central crown to the end. The hall’s central crown consists of 80 pieces of specially matched veneers. The moulded plywood panels are acoustically damped, individually profiled to a computer spatial grid, and faced with white birch veneer.
The Yarras mill could handle the job because of its ingenuity and strong demand for its veneers. Producing the veneers with the right grain patterns was very expensive and time-consuming. Only 10 per cent made the grade. However, they were able to sell the other 90 per cent by exposing it to chemical dyes to produce “cinnamon” birch, which supplied a lucrative wood panelling market.
Additionally, other timbers from the Hastings Valley were utilised for the building’s interior to provide a natural, warm aesthetic and sound absorption and distribution. The mill also supplied the timber for 6,000 chairs and 1,000 doors at the Opera House.
Allen Taylor’s sawmill at Maxwell’s Creek supplied the laminated brush-box timber for the floors and wall panelling of the Opera House concert hall and main foyer.
Dominated by white birch on the ceiling with an incredible span design leading over the stage, combined with brush box flooring and panelling around the stage and box fronts, it is a true testament to the hard workers in the timber industry from the Hastings Valley.
The result was breathtaking, using Australian timbers. The Hastings Valley timber remains one of the Opera House’s defining interior features.
Today, the ceilings of a world-renowned architectural triumph glow with the veneers proudly produced by Yarras by men who loved their timber.
The Endeavour replica – a special connection
The Hastings Valley’s contribution to Australia’s history didn’t end with the Opera House. In the 1990s, when shipbuilders in Fremantle needed sturdy timber for the replica of James Cook’s Endeavour, they struggled to find suitable material for the ship’s knees—natural curved supports critical to the hull.
Les Oxenbridge, a local timber cutter, heard of the problem as his son-in-law was a shipwright on the project. At the time, a significant deviation of the Pacific Highway was being built near Herons Creek. It required clearing an area of mature blackbutt, tallowwood and red bloodwood forest. Les looked for stumps with the required natural angles for the knees and sent a sample over. The Endeavour Foundation of Western Australia were impressed, put in an order, and got their knees made.
His work ensured that the Endeavour replica set sail in 1995 with timber from the same forests Cook had seen smoking from the Three Brothers peaks over two centuries earlier.
The timber industry and forest management had to adapt and change to meet the new laws introduced over time. In 1979, the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act required an assessment of the impact of logging operations and prescriptions to reduce any adverse effects. FCNSW conducted its first Environmental Impact Assessment (EIS) in the early 1980s to evaluate rainforest logging in the Hastings Valley. While the EIS determined that logging could continue, it was quickly overshadowed by Neville Wran’s decision to phase out rainforest logging entirely.
Yarras was a proud company town, its identity built around a mill that punched well above its weight. It gained national recognition for producing world-class plywood—not just for the Sydney Opera House, but also for landmark buildings like the High Court of Australia and the Victorian Centre for the Arts. Surplus panels from the Opera House project even found a second life lining the walls of the Port Macquarie Civic Centre, completed in 1973. But the glory was short-lived. Within a decade, Neville “Nifty” Wran’s politically charged decision to fast-track the end of rainforest logging shattered Yarras’ future. The mill was forced to close, and the community that had grown around it all but vanished overnight.
By the late 1980s, relentless political pressure from activist groups pushed the New South Wales government to initiate an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) program to assess the effects of logging in the state’s remaining unlogged mature forests. But this costly and drawn-out process was soon overtaken by a landmark court ruling won by environmentalists, which ushered in a new era of regulatory oversight. At the same time, a joint Commonwealth–State agreement on Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs) emerged—an initiative that ultimately saw the unlogged forests offered up as sacrificial lambs in the political negotiations. The EIS program was abruptly shelved, and in 1995, a decision was made to halt all logging in these forests. As the RFA process rolled out, Comprehensive Regional Assessments were used to identify and preserve representative forest types. This resulted in the transfer of millions of hectares of productive state forest into the national park estate by 1999, including large areas in the Hastings Valley.
Today, the coastal forests from the Manning River north to Woolgoolga are the remnants of the finest hardwood forests in New South Wales, including the Hastings Valley. For many years, mills exploited the timber resource, and ample timber supplies have gone in some areas but not all. The forests responded splendidly to regeneration operations implemented by foresters.
While the timber industry has declined, its impact on the Hastings Valley is undeniable. After years of harvesting and exploitation sustainably, many productive forests are now considered beautiful forests worthy of preservation.
The timber that built a war effort, the nation’s homes, and even its most iconic building remains a lasting source of pride for the Hastings Valley. The forests have endured, as has the legacy of the men and women who worked them with skill, courage, and tenacity. No political decision—however well-meaning or misguided—can erase that legacy. Ironically, many of the very forests once managed with care and purpose, 30 years on, are now in poorer condition under passive preservation policies. Yet the story of the Hastings Valley proves that good forestry and national progress once walked hand in hand.
People who don’t know what they are talking about should not comment. My wife’s family owned sawmills. They looked after trees no differently than any other people who work and live with the land. You need to know that if you don’t manage the bush, you will lose the very income you depend upon.
I have been a rural firefighter for 52 years, and now people tell us we shouldn’t burn National Parks. I will give you three things to consider.
(A) Lightning has hit the earth since the beginning of time, and will do so until the end of time.
(B) Lightning doesn’t know the difference between a National Park and a football field.
(C) Isn’t it better that man manages the National Park, rather than leaving it to Mother Nature?
I was the Incident Controller at a fire in 2019 when two National Parks burned.
We had temperatures of over one thousand degrees Celsius. Nothing lives, plants, animals, nothing. So, is it better to do cool burning at the right time of year, at the right time of day, so that the creatures can run up a tree, hide under a log, or go into a hole?
They say that cattle shouldn’t be in a national park. What they forget is that they reduce the fuel load, which reduces the heat and protects the native animals.
People also need to remember that there were no Parks when the Aboriginals burnt the land, they burnt it for several reasons, namely to protect themselves from being burnt, and secondly so that when they passed through again there was fresh feed for the native animals to feed on, so they didn’t have to walk so far hunt.
If people living in a concrete jungle spoke to the people in the bush, they might learn, and many things are done for very logical reasons.
Thank you for this Information. My family roots are from there.
During the fires I was watching on our fire site in WA. I have a husband and son that are fire fighters with a lot of experience with plantation fires. My husband is in a brigade of about 20 firefighters that sent half our team to fight those fires. He couldn’t go as he had had shoulder surgery.
The boys came back saying how steep the hills were. My husband told them they were saving lots of my family members.
My father passed away during these fires, I only just got through for his funeral at Wauchope, when they opened one lane at Mount Seaview.
I agree fire fighters should have the most say on our forests, they have the most information on fire behaviour, they are the ones on the ground fighting a wall of radiation heat before getting anywhere near a flame.
Not sitting safely in air-conditioned offices not volunteering to go help fight it so the trees, wildlife & families survive.
Thank you so much. This represents a depth of interest and passion that very much needed to be documented. Do you have this available in print format?
Thank you, Sharon. No, I don’t, but if you know anyone willing to convert it to print, I am happy to assist them. You can try saving the webpage as a PDF, but make sure you scroll right through the document to capture everything, including the images.