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ASH at Heyfield is still open for business. With the closure of the native forest industry, the manufacturer has lost its cherished Victorian Ash timber, but the company is not panicking – it is in expansion mode. Source: Philip Hopkins for Timberbiz Each month, 30 40-foot containers carrying American hardwood from the country’s north-east arrive in Heyfield. “We aim to be growing that,” ASH’s managing director, Vince Hurley, told the Gippsland Times/Express. “It’s the prince of hardwoods – regarded as that everywhere, not just in the States. It’s the timber that everything is compared to, it’s why England conquered the world with their oak boats. Oak is the king that everything is compared to. “It is a really good outcome; we import a raw material, a very basic raw material, and we manufacture in Australia – a bit un-Australian really, isn’t it? Importing a raw material and manufacturing it in Australia?” Mr Hurley said ASH had branded the timber ‘Glacial Oak’. “The reason is, the wood is extremely consistent and blond in colour, it doesn’t contain any pink. Often pink oak has variations and pink doesn’t sell,” he said. “Glacial Oak has been one of our star performers and we originally started with Glacial Oak nearly four years ago, off the back of trying to grow a market, we actually started before we knew what was happening with the Victorian supply,” he said. In 2017, ASH lost half its Vic Ash volume, which gradually diminished further to only three% of its supply in 2023. The dwindling supply prompted a strategic rethink in 2017, with a few aims: look after the company’s people, diversify the fibre input, have a greater emphasis on advanced manufacturing and tighten the supply chain to the end user. “We had no relationships in the US – they couldn’t be developed overnight,” Mr Hurley said, so ties with US suppliers began in 2019. The company also targeted greater use of plantation hardwood from the Strzelecki Ranges that was available through HVP (previously Hancock Victorian Plantations). “As it happens, we developed markets and products and a good supply of the US hardwood,” he said. With the government’s announcement in May to close the industry, ASH turbo-charged its US ties. “’Let’s go!’, we said. Everything was in place – Glacial Oak, the produce out of the plantations; we just had to bump them up a bit to cover what we were missing. Out of necessity, we put ourselves in a good position. With the closure announcement and the actual closure of Victorian hardwood supply, we have been able to ramp it up.” Trucks from the Port of Melbourne laden with the US timber arrive in Heyfield. “We unload; we have an 85-tonne container forklift we got it when we were exporting a lot, now we are importing a lot,” Mr Hurley said. “We are using it (Glacial Oak) to supply the market we have developed and as a replacement for some of our Vic Ash as well. It has been really good in that space – staircases, windows, doors and furniture. We also have a new engineered flooring line; we’re also going to have an engineered floor made of it as well.” It was important that the engineered floor match the ASH staircase. “Home builds, interior designers involved – they want to match the stair with the floor, and now we have an exact match,” he said. Mr Hurley emphasised this point. “We are not importing something and re-selling it; we are importing raw product, manufacturing it in Australia as a finished product – not a sawn board, but as finished products,” he said. These included stair treads, stringers, stair rises, window styles, window sashes, door moulds, furniture components, kitchen bench tops and furniture tabletops. “It’s a balancing act. Part of our solution is to ensure we have a good long-term growing company with access to a long-term certified supply of sustainable timber,” he said. “These are private forests, but they are grown as forests. That’s their business; they want it to be there forever. There are weekly auctions for wood – it’s a massive industry.” Mr Hurley said the US hardwood all came from mixed hardwood forests selectively harvested. “There is no clear-fall at all. It’s a great way of doing it. We went to a couple of its operations that were harvested six months before – you would not know they had been there! Basically, they go through once every 25 years, they take effectively a bit less than a quarter and gradually go through. They leave old trees; they stay there, they do not burn,” he said. Such selective harvesting meant ASH paid more for the timber than if the wood was from a clear-felled coupe. “You’re effectively paying for social licence, to make sure you are looking after everything in the forest,” he said. ASH is part of a group of more than 40 Gippsland and Victorian businesses connected to the forestry sector, led by Bowens and including Dahlsens, who have written a letter to the Premier, Jacinta Allan, urging a rethink of forest management. “There are management solutions that deliver important benefits and wider community needs including – forest health and resilience, reduced wildfire risk, greater biodiversity and wildlife protection outcomes, and also sustainable, renewable, local and independently certified Victorian hardwood products,” Mr Hurley said. “The current situation enables the opportunity to consider forest management from scratch-a fresh start. The fresh start would not consider the industrial type clear fall harvesting or coupe burning. Active Forest Management as widely practised in the hardwood forests of Europe and USA for centuries has maintained the same forest and biodiversity in perpetuity. “Active Forest Management incorporates all forest values and is now being successfully practiced in Tasmanian private forests, with the same species as in Victoria under a strictly approved Forest Practices Plan. This model enables funding for biodiversity, research, forest improvement and fire prevention work. It is also self-funding. “Monitoring of is an important component both […]

Australia has seen a steady build-up of timber in timber yards across the country because the country is not making progress towards those housing targets, according to Australian Forest Products ­Association NSW chief executive James Jooste. Source: Timberbiz Slow release of land, slow approval rates for loans and houses and economic factors including high interest rates have all had a major impact on timber supplies for some months. “What’s emerged is we’ve got these ambitious targets, that we need housing, yet we’ve got timber sitting in mills, which is an indicator that that things are moving,” Mr Jooste said. “It came on very quickly. It was probably predictable once we started to see those rate rises kick in. “But was it sharp? Absolutely. “We need a roadmap and a steady plan for how we’re going to get to these housing targets, we need to make sure that we get out of these boom and bust cycles for the industry, because we’re seeing significant capital investment being made by mills. “The timber industries continues to be a strong employer of local workers in our regional areas, in our manufacturing areas, in the downstream employment that created our construction sector, but in order to retain those workers, to enable a steady platform for business investment, and for that capital investment, we need to make sure we have a steady increase in the housing construction market, and not go back to these boom and bust cycles,” he said. AKD Softwoods chief executive Shane Vicary said the company’s Tumut mill at Tumut was processing 500,000 cubic metres of logs but that had fallen to 250,000 cubic metres. AKD is the largest sawmill company in the country, producing about a quarter of the nation’s timber consumption. “This mill is doing half the volume that it used to do, and it’ll do half for the next 20-plus years, based on the fact that those logs got burnt,” Mr Vicary tole The Australian recently. Despite this dramatic reduction in production, timber continued to sit on the shelf without being sold, he said. “We can’t get enough people to buy the timber,” he said. “At the moment, most of our employees are earning less because there’s less activity: we’ve got overtime bans, we’ve got employment freezes.” The federal government has previously laid out ambitions to build 1.2 million new homes in the next five years but NSW Premier Chris Minns has already admitted the state would not meet its target this year. Mr Jooste said that New South Wales carried the lion’s share of the of the housing construction industry. “So, we feel the boom and bust cycle because as a state, we’re most exposed to it. “But these handbrakes that have been put on the economy are nationwide, and those timber mills, across the country will all be seeing a similar picture, as we are in New South Wales. “So what’s the circuit breaker going to be? “We’ll have to wait and see what the Reserve Bank and others do. But we need to make sure we continue to keep a focus on fixing, working hand-in-hand between local government and state government around how we’re getting the planning process right. “And we’ve got to give credit to the state government in New South Wales for doing that and identifying those issues, and then making sure we have a stable business and operating platform for our meals to continue to produce the timber that we rely on.”