The Men Who Built Queensland

Part 1: The Timber Cutters and Sawmillers

by Doug Patterson (September, 2026)

Background

The Moreton Bay Penal Colony was first established in 1824 at Humpybong, Redcliffe, but was relocated in 1825 to an area upstream of Breakfast Creek on the Brisbane River, stretching from Newstead to New Farm and up to Park Point, the site of the old Botanical Gardens. The colony was at the centre of a 50-mile exclusion zone that prohibited free settlement and delayed the commercial development of the new colony.

These restrictions resulted in the construction of low-cost timber buildings, in contrast to the permanent stone and brick structures more common in Sydney and Melbourne at that time.

Additionally, timber became the building material of choice for practical, environmental reasons: the new colony was built on the floodplains of the Brisbane River, which flooded regularly. To survive, buildings needed to be raised above flood levels on wooden stumps. Timber was readily available and comparatively inexpensive.

By the time the colony was opened to free settlement in 1842, a new form of Queensland architecture had developed, better suited to its northern climate. The Queenslander became the house design of choice for the next 100 years.

The Queenslander House

A Queenslander is set on stumps. Depending on flood heights, these could be anywhere from three feet (one metre) to nine feet (three metres) high but were most often high enough to create usable space underneath for storage, a garage, and a semi-enclosed laundry. Another advantage of its off-the-ground design was the belief that many biting insects—such as midges, sand flies, fleas, and even mosquitoes—were less prevalent in higher buildings.

The typical Queenslander was built around a central hallway with rooms on either side, leading to a kitchen at the back, originally semi-detached as a fire-safety measure when stoves were combustion varieties. Usually, the front and both sides featured open verandahs with wrought iron rails or timber slats for safety. These verandahs were often used as sleepouts during summer and provided a cool place to sit on a squatter’s chair in the evening.

The Vining Queenslander showing the verandah and space for storage underneath, Montville 1905

The Vining Family Queenslander with semi-detached kitchen, Montville 1905

The roof was tin—later galvanised—and high-pitched to handle heavy rain. It extended well past the sides of the building for greater protection from the sun and inclement weather.

The Queenslander proved ideal for a tropical climate. Raised off the ground, it benefited from airflow beneath the building, while the covered verandahs protected upstairs from direct sun exposure during the heat of the day. Wide eaves, a generous roof cavity, high ceilings, fanlights over doors, and a hallway all helped the building breathe and provided cooling cross-ventilation.

Later variations included partly enclosing the space underneath to create more secure, dry storage; enclosing sleepouts to create weatherproof, year-round, multi-person dormitory areas; and cyclone-proofing by tying the roof and frame down with long strips of tin.

Commercial Adaptations

As Brisbane suburbs grew and country towns developed, timber was also the building material of choice for strip commercial businesses. These were basic two-storey buildings, with the ground floor serving as the business front or shop and the second floor providing accommodation for the business owner’s family. However, they still incorporated many of the design features of the Queenslander house, including a front verandah behind a footpath awning.

The Queensland hotel, made famous in the ‘gold’ cities of Gympie and Charters Towers, was almost universally a two-storey wooden structure. Downstairs offered public spaces for bars, dining rooms, and toilet facilities, while upstairs was given over to centrally placed accommodation rooms and guest toilet facilities, all inside wide, airy verandahs.

The Palmwoods Hotel, 1905. Two storeys with wide, airy verandahs

A range of industrial structures—including wharves, jetties, bridges, warehouses, and railway infrastructure—also used readily available and cost-effective timber, while an emerging agricultural industry packaged its produce for market in timber cases.

The Timber Industry

This reliance on timber across a range of buildings and uses led to a booming timber industry that was both diverse and innovative. Timber mills sprang up across South East Queensland. Some specialised in a particular product, such as case mills preparing timber slats for farmers to build produce cases. Others focused on timber used in the housing market, while still others supplied timber suitable for industrial uses in bridges and wharves.

However, the sleepers used to carry the thousands of miles of rail lines across Queensland were produced not by mills but by a hardy group of self-employed, independent timber men who often worked alone.

On the Blackall Range, the earliest European settlers initially cut trees into timber for slab huts roofed with bark shingles for their first-generation homes. Slabs were created by sawing logs to the required length with a cross-cut saw, then splitting them with wedges and finally smoothing them with an adze. The adze was also used, along with an axe, to shape shingles.

When they began to clear their selections, trees felled on their properties by hand were either shipped to Brisbane as logs behind bullock teams or by boat via the Maroochydore or Mooloolaba Rivers for income, or milled on the property for local consumption. This milling process was crude and labour-intensive.

Felling a tree by hand involved using axes and cross-cut saws. After branches and bark were removed, the log was dragged to a prepared pit by draft horse. The pit was deeper than a man’s height and long and wide enough to hold a log. The log to be milled was then placed in a cradle at each end, over the pit. With one sawman below the log in the pit and a second above the log, they drew a long ‘pitsaw’ through the log lengthwise to saw beams and planks. The sawman below provided the major cut and was showered with sawdust, while the one above controlled its straightness.

Cross-cut sawyers working from Spring (NLA)

Between 1895 and 1915, most farms had become profitable enough for farmers to build second-generation family homes with timber milled in this way, as were the first public buildings: the Montville School of Arts Hall, the Razorback Provisional School, Elston Guesthouse, and the Montville Store and Post Office. By then, these buildings were roofed with corrugated iron and boasted glass windows, stylish fittings, and generous verandahs. As farm incomes grew, many became comfortable homesteads. Two of the grandest of these homes, Eastnor and Chermside, still exist today.

Pressed metal ceilings of Eastnor

Farming success on the central range was centred around fruit—initially berries and bananas, and later citrus, pineapples, macadamia nuts, and avocados. Farmers needed to pack their fruit into cases to send it to southern markets, which led to the creation of case mills. These mills specialised in cutting the small softwood planks used to build fruit cases. Case mills operated in Flaxton and Mapleton for many decades.

The number of sawmills on the range boomed to meet demand, with Maleny boasting five mills along with the Simpson Mill nearby in Beerwah. There were also mills in Bellthorpe, Conondale, and Montville, while the early case mills in Flaxton and Mapleton were quickly upgraded to handle hardwood milling. Most of these mills focused on timber for the building industry, but a number acquired by the Hornibrook company, Hamilton Sawmillers, specialised in milling timber for large commercial and industrial building projects.

A new industry emerged as mills started producing ‘ready-to-erect’ or ‘mill-cut’ houses—the precursors to today’s kit homes, which provide first home buyers with a more affordable and efficient path to home ownership.

Hamilton Sawmillers ventured into a specialised business of milling hardwoods with properties resistant to water rot and saltwater borers, while boasting high load-bearing capacity. These timbers included Brown Pine, Turpentine, Ironbark, and Tallowwood. Some of the more famous projects Hamilton Sawmillers supplied timber for include landing craft for the Dutch navy, the Hornibrook Highway between Sandgate and Redcliffe, the Brisbane Wharves, and the dance floor of the Cloudland Ballroom.

Another major driving force behind the timber boom was the construction of thousands of miles of railways across Queensland to access the far north and western communities. Railways were constructed on wooden, hardwood sleepers. Most of these were supplied by ‘sleeper cutters’ working alone or in small partnerships.  Logs were cut to size and split into sleepers by hand using wedges, then finished with an adze to meet railway standards. The sleeper cutters often camped for long periods in tents or crude bark or slab huts in the forests they were licensed to take timber from, to be close to their worksite.

The work was hard, but a good sleeper cutter could prepare ten sleepers a day and, at three shillings per sleeper, earn 30 shillings a day.   That would be equivalent to approximately $150 a day today, compared to an average daily wage of about $50 at the time. However, overhead costs, including shipping sleepers to railway depots, would have brought profits back down closer to the average.

Together, the saw millers and timber cutters of the Blackall Range played a significant role in building the new colony of Queensland, which was declared in 1859.