Proof of concept will be the icing on the cake when Kim Booth fulfils a lifelong dream of building a house made of trees grown himself, and he hopes others will follow his example.
LANA BEST reports:
KIM Booth may be 72 but is not even thinking about retirement as he borders on realising a life goal of building a house from trees he personally planted 40 years ago.
Everything that can possibly be made from timber will be – and if it wasn’t a fire hazard, he’d have wooden shingles instead of tin for the roof.
“Not many people believe that you can plant a tree and harvest it in your own lifetime and produce a quality building product, but I’m going to demonstrate that you can,” he said.
“This is the future – sustainable plantation timber, not the rip and tear mining of old growth forest that it still is today.”
The former Greens leader and owner of Timberworld, which operates two sawmills in the Meander Valley and a timber wholesale outlet in Glenorchy, is pretty used to raised eyebrows around how he straddles two worlds.
But during the forestry wars of the 1980s and 90s, and to this day, his allegiance could not be any clearer. Conservation, sustainability and preserving Tasmania’s native forests for future generations is at the core of everything he does.
“I’ve sold a lot of timber to a lot of people, but Timberworld is not your average timber mill,” he said.
“The majority of our timber is salvaged macrocarpa, redwood, poplar, radiata pine and other varieties that are generally bulldozed and burned on farms – the old landscape elements planted by the pioneers or windbreak trees that were planted 150 years ago and now have to make way for pivot irrigators and the like or are simply too old and dangerous to leave standing.
“We do our best to make sure the majority of our timber is plantation based, and sometimes that means buying it from overseas from places where it’s grown sustainably.
“It might be hard to swallow, but Tasmania can’t compete with the cost of growing trees, produced from eucalyptus seeds sold by Forestry Tasmania, from countries like South Africa, South America and Asia – it’s actually cheaper to import the timber.”
Kim has been proactive in finding a market for the many plantations of fast-growing nitens that never reached their investment goals for Landowners.
He debunks the belief that nitens are only good for woodchips and he does it while resting his arms on a large and beautiful dining table in the Timberworld staff room made from nitens.
Since 2010, Kim has been working with Western Australian joiner Stan Samulkiewicz who has been making beautiful chairs from the unpopular eucalypts.
“The timber is so light that the chairs weigh less than 3kg each, but they have a higher strength to weight ratio that traditional timber use in furniture making, and the result is stunning – there’s one on display in the Launceston Design Centre.
“Timber barons in the industry still use the argument for slaughtering our native forest that you can’t use the nitens for anything other than chips or pulp and that’s simply not true.”
The Booth’s timber business, now managed by eldest son Bronte, evolved from a time when Kim and his wife Kerin needed an extra room for their growing family, so they decided to build a house from the trees on their own land just like their Forebears. To do this, Kim had to build his own saw bench, with the saw hooked up to an old tractor to drive it.
Before he knew it he was inundated with requests from other people in the district wanting their timber sawn into boards so he bought the old church grounds in Meander and set up a mill in the 1980s.
Overflow from the Meander River devastated Kim’s Deloaraine mill but the former Greens leader has worked hard to get operations back on track.
As Kim delved deeper into the forestry industry he realised more and more how little protection there was for the big trees and the native Forest.
He said he saw it as a microcosm of how humans in general fail to manage their natural environment from rural farmland to urban sprawl. So he decided to try to make a real difference by running for parliament on the Greens Tasmania ticket.
In 2002, he was elected to the House of Assembly representing the seat of Bass and for the final two years of his political career in 2014 and 2015 he replaced Nick McKim as Greens leader.
He resigned unexpectedly when his father died, citing his opposition to the proposed Tamar Valley pulp mill, his campaigning against native forest wood chipping and Tasmania’s fracking moratorium as key Achievements.
He’s also proud of fighting for a GEfree Tasmania, helping commercialise the industrial hemp industry and introducing what he calls “double snout trough” legislation to parliament – effectively stopping local government councillors from becoming members of parliament and retaining both salaries.
“It was during that 13-years hiatus, when I was in parliament, that Bronte really stepped up to run the place and the mill was upgraded with new sawing gear, Young more technology, we employed joiners and we started building transportable homes,” Kim said.
“Two years ago we bought the Deloraine sawmill and it’s our goal to move the whole operation into there eventually – it’s a bigger, safer site and easier to keep customers separate from the milling operations, it‘s also closer to market and the freight routes between the North West and Hobart.
Kim had only been operating the Deloraine mill for a short time when the Meander River broke it’s banks and the whole place went under several metres of water. Massive piles of timber simply floated away, 13 machines and vehicles were under water, the electronics and gear boxes in the machinery were damaged and the mess left behind is still being cleaned up, more than 18 months later.
Around 25 people work between the two sites, including several apprentice wood machinists and carpenters, handling everything from the primary milling of logs for lining and flooring to building finished Houses.
The conglomerate of workshops has everything from a behemoth old bandsaw, made in 1913, to modern milling machines that can handle timber of a size that most mills couldn’t touch.
Kim is basically the repair man, constantly fixing and maintaining machinery, a skill that was crucial after the flood damage.
Massive slabs, some trimmed, some rough sawn with bark still attached, are stacked as far as the eye can see for carpenter, joiners and any lovers of timber to run their hand over and admire the colours, the grain, the knots, the smell.
In places, visitors will round a corner to find an old vintage car on a hoist, where Kim’s hobby for restoring cars has impinged on his workspace.
He admits that ever since he bought his first car – a 1928 Austin 7, at age 16 – and drove it to Narrabeen Boys School in New South Wales, he’s loved working on vehicles from the 20 and 30s era.
1913 bandsaw that is still operational at the mill alongside modern machinery.
When Kim started out there were hundreds of timber mills around the state, and now just a handful remain.
“It’s regrettable that most sawmills have now gone, crushed by the bigger players subsidised by the Crown,” he said.
“Small mills can’t even compete thanks to the monopoly control of the resource timber barons who have bought and consolidated the timber quotas from different locations.
In reflection, Tasmanian politicians have stumbled from one dumb idea to another really.”
When Kim heard that a re-elected Liberal party would ‘unlock’ 40,000ha of native Tasmanian forests for logging – he was speechless.
“When you look at the history of the timber industry it’s always been rape and pillage and too many beautiful rainforests have been bulldozed and burned,” he said.
“It really doesn’t have to be that way in the future.”