Australian Seasoned Timber Company – Mount Disappointment. – Victoria’s Forests & Bushfire Heritage

The Australian Seasoned Timber Company (ASTC) operated in the Mount Disappointment State forest, 37 miles north of Melbourne, between 1880 and 1902.

It was said to be the largest sawmilling and timber processing company in the southern hemisphere at the time. It owned several sawmills, along with an extensive network of tramlines supplying timber directly from the bush to a large seasoning and joinery works at Wandong west of the mountain range.

Robert Affleck Robertson, who immigrated from Canada in 1879, started sawmilling in the Ballarat/Bullarook region before moving to the Plenty Ranges in 1883. He soon acquired small sawmills and constructed others in the Mount Disappointment forest including the Derril, the Comet, Planets 1 and 2, and the Bump.

The company later grew and diversified to operate sawmills at Yarrawonga in Northern Victoria and Warburton east of Melbourne.

The Comet sawmill was the company showpiece at Mt Disappointment and expanded rapidly during the 1890s processing over 800 logs a month. A thriving community developed with 300 workers and their families. There were rows of cottages, a boarding house, butcher, general store, bakery and about twenty children attended the State School.

Sawn timber and logs on trolleys were pulled along 11 miles of steel track from the Comet Mill, past Planet 1, Planet 2 and the Bump mills to Wandong.

Horse teams pulled timber on the first 7 miles of tramline between Comet Mill and the Bump following gentle grades along Wescott and Sunday Creeks.

Then there was a notorious section of line called “The Bump Incline” with a steam winch to haul timber over the steep hill. Trollies were then let to roll the last 4 miles into Wandong under gravity with a skilled brakeman sitting on top of the load.

Horses pulled the empty carriages on the return journey from Wandong back to the Bump. A small Baldwin steam locomotive later replaced horses on this section of line.

Maybe to curry favour with the State Government, the company built the Best Bridge over Sunday Creek and named it after the Minister of Lands, Robert Wallace Best.

The company began building a new section line to avoid the bump incline which included a magnificent wooden trestle bridge, a quarter of a mile long, 52 feet high and with 10-foot decking, complete with hand railing and other trimmings over a deep gully. It was constructed by Lee Brothers, specialist bridge builders in Victoria of the time. The bridge was named after George Samuel Perrin the Commissioner of the Forest Department. It was also known as the white elephant bridge because it was never used by the company before it folded in 1902.

However, the Perrin Bridge was later used by another sawmiller, Jack Harper. It was damaged by fire in 1916 and repaired but then was completely destroyed by the 1929 bushfires.

Robert Robertson had always been a keen innovator and astute businessman. Seasoning (drying) of Australian eucalyptus wasn’t well understood in the 1880s. A relatively new process patented by Leon Rieser came to his attention at an exhibition in Melbourne where he displayed ten-day-old seasoned timber and parquetry boards.

Robertson seized the opportunity and within 48 hours had acquired all the Australasian rights for the process as well as recruiting Reiser in a partnership to set up new kilns and joinery works at Wandong.

Messmate (E. obliqua) was the species of choice for seasoning rather than the more abundant mountain ash (E. regnans). It wasn’t until the Forests Commission opened the Newport experimental seasoning works in 1919 that techniques for kiln drying and steam reconditioning of mountain ash were fully developed.

The company owned most of the Wandong township and the railway station grew with several sidings to load and transport seasoned timber to Melbourne.

However, poor management and shareholder dissatisfaction, rather than a lack of timber resources, led to the company and its assets being liquidated in 1902.

As a result, the Comet Mill closed with the machinery dismantled and sent to Western Australia, although some of the foundations of the mill can still be found among the tree ferns. The site of the Planet Mill was flooded under the Sunday Creek Reservoir.

Huge sawdust heaps in the bush are remaining evidence of a thriving sawmilling past. Remnants of the ASTC tramways can still be found in the forest and near Wandong, although many were destroyed by fire in 1982.

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