OzKit Homes Newsletter
Australian Hardwood for Australian Kit Homes - A History
Native Australian hardwood has been the most effective material for home building in Australia right from the start and is still an essential material in our home construction industry. Stone, brick and mud constructions were used by our early pioneers where the raw materials were near at hand or where the settler had the ability to transport the materials, some well-to-do’s were able to import from the home land, but generally timber was the way to go.
A number of kit home construction methods suited the earliest pioneers. The simplest method involved the splitting of slabs of timber to fill into a basic frame.
Many of the early settlers were not unfamiliar with methods of building in wood, but most Australian timbers proved too hard and intractable to do much shaping with the tools available. For this reason, one of the most common ways of building in timber was to construct a framework of logs that supported walls of split slabs topped by a roof structure of saplings. The roof would then be covered with large sheets of bark removed from trees using methods learnt from Aborigines.
A settler in a remote spot could build such a dwelling using only axe, mallet, wedges, saw and a few iron spikes, and perhaps with the assistance only of his wife and children. The slabs were usually set vertically, but horizontal slabs were also used and, as time went on, the slabs might be pit sawn, or even power-sawn.
These post-and-infill walls took many forms, clay, brick, stone or combinations were referred to as “half-timbered”. One variant of this very old method using slotted corner posts and horizontal slabs has been excavated at the Iron Age settlement of Biskupin in Poland.
The “wattle and daub” construction dates back to Anglo-Saxon times and was common up to the mid 1860’s, the Wattle bush gets its name from this practice. A basic timber frame was filled in with stakes driven into the ground and flexible branches were woven between them and daubed with mud to fill the many gaps. A finish coat of a lime-based whitewash gave a harder surface and some waterproofing.
The settler’s cottage at old Mogo Town is a fine example of this method.
Early manual production of timber for housing was very localised; each settlement had its own workers gathering specific timber for local needs. The first sawmills (1788-1850) harvested red cedar hardwood, native softwoods and eucalypts. In this period trees were felled by axe or cross cut saw and sawn into lengths using pit saws.
In the forest, timber was also hewn or split with broad axes and wedges. Transport of the timber to mills and markets was by animal power and forests closest to market areas were logged first. By the time European settlement began in Australia there already existed in countries closest to London a building technique employing closely spaced light studs of sawn timber to reduce the timber required, while still resulting in a strong building. The prodigal use of timber for iron smelting and ship building contributed to the trend for low cost building works to use less material than the dwindling heavy timber construction methods in England during the late 1700’s. The traditional carpentry methods of mortise and tenon joints were complimented by hand made nails joining studs to plates. Gradually the expense of this jointing carpentry was replaced with fully skew nailed joints especially when machine made nails at about one tenth the cost of hand forged nails appeared after the 1830’s. These old joints can still be found at second hand timber yards. Split or hewn timber was the predominant form of forest product for the first 70 years of the colony. The development of the native hardwood timber industry closely followed the development of improved energy sources and new logging technology. Steam power and larger sawmills from 1850-1945, used mostly eucalypts and rainforest native hardwoods. Improved road transport enabled access to areas previously uneconomic to harvest. In the last one hundred and fifty years of house building in Australia the Light Stud Frame methods of timber house construction have changed very little. Variations have occurred across the country depending on the climate and of course the house designs and decorations have morphed through the generations as different materials and techniques became available. The classic Queenslander, which developed in the later 1800’s had the wall cladding left bare, usually on the outside to cut costs and to allow the heat of the day to quickly dissipate after sunset. The most typical cladding for private houses was a single layer of planed, lapped boards about 180mm in width nailed flush to the inner face studs. Electrification and diesel power from 1946 has led to the development of wood-chipping plants, pulp and paper using plantation softwoods, eucalypts, cypress pine and rainforest timbers. |
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Today, sawmillers face a market demanding increased environment protection and improved efficiency. Australia’s native forests are sustainably managed to protect and enhance the environment, to ensure the long term supply of timber products, and to provide on-going local employment through value added processing of the timber resource and import substitution.
The total area of Australian native forest is about 163 million hectares (or about 21% of the continent). The most common forest types are those dominated by Eucalyptus and related genera (80%). Today’s distribution of forests in Australia represents about 60 per cent of the cover that existed before the arrival of Europeans in 1788.
Throughout the life of our colony, these hard native woods have served us well and are now represented by the responsible management of an industry that will continue to provide essential building materials and promote the use of Australian Hardwoods in our homes.
References:
Timber and Iron |
Peter Bell 1984 |
Australian Hardwood Network |
www.hardwood.timber.net.au |