RIMU TIMBER

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 156, 3 June 1937, Page 7

RIMU TIMBER

TOO GOOD FOR BUTTER BOXES. POLICY CRITICISED. * “It has become apparent even to the farmers who seldom have given a thought to lorest-conservation that New Zealand cannot afford to send rimu and kahilcatea out of the country any longer,” states the May number of Forest and Bird, issued by the i Forest and Bird Protection Society of New Zealand (Inc.). “A Hawke’s Bay farming association recently passed a resolution requesting the Government to prohibit the further exportation of those timbers. Wo need every bit of those timbers ourselves, so far as the North Island is concerned. The farmers and the dairy industry are becoming'concerned about material for making butter boxes. Large quantities of these two valuable timbers have

been sent to Australia for that very purpose. Now, however, the Government has wisely stopped the excessive export of white pine. “Rimu, it must be stated emphatically, is too good a timber to devote to butter-boxes in lieu of the vanishing kahikatea. _ It should bo reserved for house-building and furniture. At this moment those trees are disappearing like smoke, before the. desperate onslaught of timber-millers who have

! practically a free hand in our forests, j The country is being scoured for every | available standing stick. AVe have recently seen rimu hauled out of gorges and gullies and felled on hillsides in steep country that will fall to ruin if the destruction continues, yet the cutaway; and haul-away gaily continues without a thought for tbe future, j “A" timber-man on the. AkatarawaI AYaikanae mountain road, a bushman of great experience and skill, was asked by .a AA’cllington man making an unofficial inspection of the ravaged bush: ‘ What is going to be done with this high country when you strip the big trees off it ?’

“ ‘Oil,’ he replied, ‘the usual thing. I suppose. Burn off the small stuff and grass the land for sheep. Anyhow, all we want is the big fellows’.” The article concludes: “And this was rugged country from a. thousand to fifteen hundred feet above sea-leVel, where the ‘small stuff’ —the forest of the future, if cared for~ scientifically—is the soil-covering tlwt bolds the precipitous ranges and gully walls together. Young rimu and kahikatea trees are there in their thousands, with many other species of coming-on timber. But what is this to tbe timber miller, of the sheepfariner ?”