As you drive on the Caves Road between Margaret River and Augusta, you will pass a magnificent forest of tall karri trees called the Boranup Forest.
It is an extraordinary place – the furthest west that karri grows. The forest is isolated from the main body of the karri belt, more than 100 kilometres to the east, by the grey infertile sands and lower rainfall of the Donnybrook Sunklands. It grows on limestone-based soils at Boranup, whereas karri grows almost exclusively on deep red clay loams elsewhere.
Waterbush and karri hazel form a dense understorey, and in spring, white clematis, purple hovea and coral creepers add vivid colours to the cool green of the forest.
People marvel at this forest and are mistakenly led to believe that it is old growth forest. However, it is not. It is a regrowth forest with significant areas about 120 years old and largely a result of clearfelling operations in the 1890s.
The Government granted wealthy timber entrepreneur from Adelaide, Maurice Coleman Davies, a 42-year lease at Boranup in 1882. Two-thirds of the land was forested with jarrah and marri, and the rest with karri. Davies was looking for suitable timber to cut into railway sleepers for a contract he won to build part of the Adelaide to Melbourne railway.
With his six sons, Davies established a timber empire centred on the forests around Boranup. He built three sawmills. The largest was the Karridale Mill, the most advanced in the colony at the time, and it began operations in 1884. It was set amongst the most impressive of karri trees, and the tall chimney of the mill with its brick base was a notable landmark. One of the local legends about Boranup was that the butcher’s chopping block, a huge cross section of karri, was the largest in the state. By 1890 Davies was the biggest state’s biggest timber producer. In 1891 a new steam mill was commissioned but was destroyed by fire a few years later and promptly replaced with a bigger one at Jarrahdale in 1895. Over 40 miles of railway were built to transport the logs from the forest to the sawmills. The first steam trains in Western Australia hauled logs in this forest.
The first Conservator of Forests, John Ednie Brown, inspected Karridale in 1896 and wrote that he was pleased with the “re-production in the karri forest which had been denuded and cleared of its original crop…twenty to thirty fine young trees have taken the place of every matured or large tree cut”. The surviving young trees form most of the older trees visible in the forest today.
The Karridale mill transformed the bush into a thriving town which had a post and telegraph office, hospital, hall, library, sports ground and a racetrack. The 600-metre-long Hamelin Jetty was built nearby. It was capable of birthing three ships simultaneously with steam cranes alongside. Davies was keen to find markets in the construction industry for karri, and the mills also cut jarrah for wood paving. However, by 1913 the timber resource in the area was exhausted, and the last mill at Karridale closed in 1913. The timber yard at Hamelin Bay is now an attractive camping area.
The “King Karri” tree grew at Boranup and was reportedly 342 feet high (104 metres) with a girth of 1.3 metres. It crashed to the ground when a gale in July 1900 ripped through the forest. However, it was salvaged for timber and supplied 146 loads of millable timber.
By 1926 one forester described the Boranup Forest as “one of the finest pieces of natural regeneration of the genus eucalyptus on the mainland of Australia”.
Foresters fought with local farmers who lit indiscriminate fires on their forest leases. In March 1961, a farmer at Forest Grove near Boranup lit a fire, and the strong winds took it into the forest. It spread in all directions, and fierce fires seared through the Boranup Forest and destroyed the last traces of Karridale, which once housed more than 100 people. After the fire, karri regrowth sprouted in abundance, only to be choked by dense scrub undergrowth. Foresters retained old seed trees until new seeds developed in the recovering crowns. After a light regeneration burn, there was adequate regeneration, but fires in 1972 and 1974 disrupted regeneration efforts.
In 1972 a new Environmental Protection Agency was established, and it set up a committee to look at establishing further reserves. One of its first proposals was to convert the Boranup Forest into a national park managed by the Forests Department. This was because it represented karri forests on soils derived from limestone. In March 1985, the Department of Conservation and Land Management (CALM) replaced the Forests Department, and the National Parks and Nature Conservation Authority was also placed within this large new department. In 1993, the Boranup Forest, including the caves reserves, became part of the existing Leeuwin-Naturaliste National Park.
Shots from “Kodak Corner” before and after the fire. Photos: Robert Onfray
We visited the Boranup Forest in early December last year. It was awe-inspiring. However, less than four days later, another fire ripped through the forest. It burnt 8,000 hectares of the national park, causing damage to the park and the nearby cave sites’ infrastructure.
The forest is adapted to fire, and it will recover. But if too many large fires are allowed to occur in quick succession, the whole structure of the forest could change, and the majestic karri trees may disappear.
Robert Onfray is an Australian historical author and forester, currently experiencing life as a travelling writer in the Great South Land. Robert’s latest book, Fires, Farms and Forests – A human history of Surrey Hills, north-west Tasmania is available from www.robertonfray.com, along with many other articles about the Australian country and its history.
