MIZEN SAWMILL STUDY  NEW
Copyright       David Mizen  2021
Images Added & Published by Gordon Freegard 2021

 Chronology

Canning Mills Timber Stations

            Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to set out the sequence of ‘ownership’ of the mills that operated in the ‘Gooseberry Hill’ area, the first, started by Benjamin Mason and later became  known as the Canning Timber Station, it will build on the work of Freegard (2019) and set out in full the successors to that business. None of the available sources track the complete sequence of mill owners and mill operators. This paper will fill in the gaps in the sequence of operation and ownership. It will not revisit in any great detail, the political, economic or social issues that the government and the timber millers faced, these details are set out by various others.

Of the various sources, Calamunda a home in the forest (Slee & Shaw, 1979) is perhaps the most comprehensive. However, it suffers from the difficulty of being, in part, an oral history and as a consequence the fallibility of memory. The other issue that arises and is common to Slee and Shaw, McNamara (1961), McIntosh (N.D)and others, is that they do not examine any of the publicly available ‘legal’ documents, particularly the certificates of title and “Lands Department” surveys and plans or the ‘Forests Department’ records.

A further issue with the available sources is that there is no comprehensive list of the mills that arise from Mason’s operations. Nor is there any substantive documentation of the location of those mills. This paper will document the known but not previously recorded mills and as far as possible, there location. For the reasons set below this paper does not purport to be a complete list.

The initial decisions with respect to Mason, Mason and Bird and Joseph Shaw were made before Western Australia was granted representative government, despite an extensive search of the State Records Office no documents relating to those phases of operation were found. To a lesser extent this also applies to the Canning Jarrah Timber Co Ltd, however by virtue of inheriting Joseph Shaw’s license and as a result of EVH Keane’s intervention the CJT Co had exclusive rights to do as they pleased, and they did. The State records Office do hold some correspondence files related to EVH Keane and Shaw’s concession. These have not been examined at this time.

There is a similar issue with respect to the ‘Forests Department’ documents, for a significant portion of the early period of ‘the mills’ there was no ‘Conservator of Forests’ nor was there a ‘Forests Department’. As a consequence, there was no oversight of milling operations or related activities, as a result, there is no official documentation of what took place in the early stages of operation. Once a ‘Conservator of Forests’ was appointed he started to document logging and milling activities.

Following the ‘Conservator of Forests’ a “Forests Department’ was created. The “Forests Department’ then needed to know what had previously occurred, there appears to have been a retrospective attempt in the 1920’s and 1930’s to record what had previously transpired. It appears that this was done in stages, possibly as budgets allowed, there is on the ground evidence that suggests that these records are not complete. The No 1 Sleeper Mill being a case on point (see the comments in that section). These Forest Department maps need to be treated with caution. In addition, not all ‘Forests Department’ maps, plans and other records have survived. This paper is based in part on records that have survived (the A and B series maps) and others that are contained in files held by the State Records Office that are not directly related, as an example the map fragments related to ‘McKenzie’s mill’ were found in an Education Department file related to Barton’s Mill School and a correspondence file between Millar’s and the Forests Department.

Index

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1.             Mason

2.             Mason and Bird

3.             James Morrison

4.             Joseph Shaw

5.             James Morrison (No 2)

6.             Stevens

7.              Waldeck Smith 1885

8.              Stevens and Atkin 1885 – 1888

9.              E.V.H. Keane

10.         Canning Jarrah Timber Company Ltd

11.        Millar’s

12.     Smailes Weston and Liebow

13.     Smailes Mill Carinyah
14.     References

References:     Article:      David Mizen

Copyright : Gordon Freegard      2008 - 2021