Travel Routes, Forest Towns and Settlements

Summary (p xvi) (Abridged)

This report has been prepared for the joint Commonwealth/State Steering Committee which oversees the Comprehensive Regional Assessment (CRA) of forests in the South East Queensland CRA region.

The Comprehensive Regional Assessment provides the scientific basis on which the State and Commonwealth governments will sign a Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) for the forests of the South East Queensland CRA region. This agreement will determine the future of the region’s forests and will define those areas needed to form a comprehensive, adequate and representative (CAR) reserve system
and those available for ecologically sustainable commercial use.

The South East Queensland biogeographic region covers approximately 6.2 million hectares and includes a current population of approximately 2,450,000.1 The area is large and diverse and includes the capital city, Brisbane, the population growth areas of the Gold and Sunshine Coasts and important regional cities such as Gympie, Maryborough and Bundaberg. Any attempt to sketch the history of the whole region must employ, of necessity, a broad brush.
Australia was a well-travelled continent when European settlers arrived but no attempt is made to trace indigenous travel routes as this is beyond the scope of the project brief and would constitute a complete study in itself. Historic travel routes provide a background for the study of the expansion of settlement throughout the region; in particular, changes in transportation affected the use of forests and the exploitation of timber resources. Maritime transport was the earliest efficient way of moving people and goods in the colony and logs and timber were no exception. Rivers and coastal settlements were the earliest timber towns in South East Queensland. Explorers and pastoralists opened up areas of land
inland and agriculturalists who followed cleared the land of timber in order to establish a range of primary industries.

Much timber was simply destroyed in this process, for want of easy transportation of the timber to markets. While coach transport
improved the movement of people, it was railway expansion in the early part of the twentieth century that altered not only settlement patterns but more particular the movement of goods. Towns along railway lines were now able to exploit timber resources and send logs and sawn timber to markets. Roads and road transport opened access to more country and from the 1940s, Forestry roads were created to improve maintenance and access to State Forests and in particular to plantations established in State Forests.

This work is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the
purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as
permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part of this
document may be reproduced by any means without the
joint permission from the Joint Commonwealth and
Queensland RFA Steering Committee.