The Spero River Tasmania - A Huon Pine Venture
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ต.ค. 2024
- The Spero River enters the sea 55 k's south of Strahan on Tasmania's Wild West Coast, where no roads go. Access was by boat and by foot. The Nielsen family, father and three sons, began establishing a logging job there in 1930. Sadly they did not reap the benefit of their labours.
Love an old timer any day. I am all for respecting the wisdom of elders. Real history.
Love to hear the rest!.
Photo shows my grandfather Victor Nielsen, LHS, and his sons Horace and Roy, my father, on the RHS. Eldest son Oscar is taking the photo.
There ~1930 to "open it up" by felling and shipping out its Huon Pine.
Roy and his brothers were angry at not getting paid for much of their work following failure of the Spero River pining venture to get enough Huon Pine through saw-mills to cover all costs.
Hence Roy's too easily dismissing Victor's vision for it, the problems Victor had trying to get it across to others, essentially the idea that coastal pine in the Spero and Wanderer Rivers was more accessible than far reaches of the Gordon catchment where everyone else was looking.
Roy did hit the nail on the head though, in his remarks about the boats, Roy's Wy Wurry and that steamship they brought up from Huon River trade. Their being UNDER-POWERED.
My guess is that this was the final challenge to Victor's vision, that him and those other two investors would have been having, and finally failed at:
GETTING A POWERFUL ENOUGH TUG-BOAT!?!
Victor was well informed about everything else. He was telling me as a child that he had physically explored all stands of Huon Pine in all of SW Tasmania.
He'd picked the brains of all piners working there, to find out where and how to put in new equipment to take out more Huon Pine, and had ended up deciding that those two coastal rivers, the Spero and the Wanderer were the way to go.
When I got to look at a map as a teenager I found that Victor had named all the rivers I was seeing on it. He'd mentioned the Hardwood and Serpentine and other Rivers for their having no Huon Pine, and a giant sink-hole full of inaccessible Huon Pine.
Victor was AHEAD OF HIS TIME. Even tug-boats were tiny in those days. All engines were under-powered at that time, early 1930s, BEFORE WW2.
IC engine technology matured strongly during WW2, was close to maturity at the end of WW2. NOT BEFORE!
Nor did they have the global wave height maps we have today, so did NOT KNOW where or when big waves, big swell would be hitting them while towing long strings of Huon Pine logs with under-powered boats.
Hence Victor's first shipment of logs into Strahan Harbour being received by hand-clapping from the Strahan community, its being perceived as SO RISKY!?!
The Macquarie Harbour tidal jet is another thing making such shipments risky, its being quite strong, Victor's needing to enter Hell's Gate pulling a huge load in an under-powered boat immediately an outflowing tide ended, whatever else was going on.
No wonder Victor had a hard time communicating his vision . . .
We all note* this was a fabulous world WITHOUT the ignorant propagandized greenies.