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(4) Mr. Adamson's recommendations were adopted and successively implemented. By 1928 it had been proved, through extensive tests both 011 an experimental scale at the famous Madison Forest Products Laboratory and on a commercial scale at the mills •of the Consolidated Pulp and Paper Co. at Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin, that insignis pine and other exotic softwoods could be used for newsprint, kraft, and other papers. Kaingaroa State Forest was extended to provide an ample supply of pulp-wood as well .as of saw logs, &c., and ever-increasing proportions of species other than insignis pine were used for this purpose. The Forest Service policy was in strong contrast to that of -the forest-bond-promoting companies, which concentrated largely on the planting of insignis pine, many of them avowedly for pulp and paper production alone. For a •quarter of a century the Forest Service has followed the Scandinavian policy that an -economic pulp and paper industry is only practicable as a supplementary activity to the utilization of saw logs, which probably for all time will remain the most important and basic product of the forest. That principle is sounder to-day than it was twenty-five years ago. It will become more so in the future. (5) Mr. Adamson acted as the Forest Service consultant until his death in 1945, when he was succeeded by his colleague Mr. J. Temperley, also as Technical Director of Walmsleys Ltd. For almost fourteen years until 1939, Mr. Adamson had consistently recommended against any attempt to establish the pulp and paper industry in New Zealand, on the grounds that it was premature and uneconomic. Actually as early as 1928 some consideration was given to the possible establishment of the newsprint industry in New Zealand based on the production of a mixed softwood-hardwood sheet similar to that now being manufactured at the Australian Newsprint Mills, Ltd., at Boyer, Tasmania. Insignis pine was to have been used as the long-fibred. chemical pulp to give the necessary tear and tensile strength, but the body of the sheet was to have been manufactured from tawa wood similar to the Australian eucalypt wood now being used at Boyer. Immediately newsprint prices broke in 1928, however, Mr. Adamson strongly recommended that the idea be abandoned. It was not until 1939 that he felt that the conditions which he had laid down in 1925 justified an early commencement with a newsprint project. As a result of his visit to New Zealand in that year, he was satisfied that there was a sustained yield of sufficient wood and a large enough -consumption of newsprint to warrant the establishment of an economically sized mill. (6) Concurrently, the Forest Service, pursuing its conception of saw log importance in the national forest economy, had been studying sawing practices both in New Zealand and abroad. It had been forced to the conclusion that none of the local sawing practices, •established as they had been on the conversion of large-diameter logs, was either •economical or suitable for the conversion of small-diameter exotic softwood logs, and that only by the adaptation of Swedish log gang saws was there any hope of solution to this problem. As no industrial interests in the Dominion either agreed with these -conclusions or were willing to put them to test, the Forest Service was forced into sawmilling on an unprecedented scale, " unprecedented " in terms of size because the full benefit attached to the use of Swedish-type log gang sawing equipment could not be realized except on a mass-production scale. The ten years interim experience with this equipment not only has completely vindicated the Department's conclusions and fulfilled its' fondest hopes, but has contributed a major improvement to the original plans developed by Mr. Adamson for the Dominion's first newsprint project. Meantime, the Waipa Sawmill is the unchallenged leader of the sawmill industry in the Southern Hemisphere, with its products freely acknowledged to be the Rolls Royce of the exotic softwood trade, whether in New Zealand or on the Australian export market. (7) Though the intervention of the Second World War effectively prevented the immediate establishment of the projected newsprint mill, the delay proved to be a blessing in disguise. Nevertheless, the project was kept under constant review even during the war period, and the departmental consultant revisited New Zealand on several

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