One of Australia’s largest timber mills is marking 25 years under Hyne Timber ownership — at the time, its single-largest investment, propelling the 144-year-old Queensland sawmiller into the New South Wales and Victorian markets.
Hyne acquired the Tumbarumba site, roughly halfway between Sydney and Melbourne, before spending $180million in the years that followed, as part of a massive expansion. Site Manager Kristina Kaminski said the anniversary would be celebrated year-round.
“2026 marks 25 years of Hyne Timber in Tumbarumba. This year is all about celebrating our people, our achievements, our community and the journey that has brought us here. We have a few little surprises throughout the year to mark the occasion. Watch this space.”
Kristina Kaminski, Hyne Timber’s Site Manager at Tumbarumba, who spoke to Wood Central today about the milestone.
Before Tumbarumba, Hyne had no meaningful presence south of the border. The acquisition cracked open southern markets at a scale the business had never operated at before.
Enough pine to frame 16,600 homes a year.
The mill produces structural framing for homes across the eastern seaboard — the walls, floors and roofs going into Australian houses at a rate of 500,000 cubic metres of plantation pine per year, itself enough to frame 16,600 homes. The daily output, laid end to end, stretches from the mill gate to Melbourne.
Every log in that supply chain is grown locally, independently certified under the Responsible Wood and PEFC certification schemes, and replanted after harvest, with bark, sawdust and shavings burned as biofuel or sold to nearby customers — including Visy’s paper and packaging operation in Tumut.
Nothing is wasted.
In recent years, the mill introduced a robotics and optical recognition system to handle the sorting and stacking of graded timber, replacing manual work. The company says it is an industry-first, though the motivation had nothing to do with efficiency — workers were being injured during manual handling, and the system was built specifically to prevent that.
Then came the summer of 2019-20.
Bushfires tore through 40 per cent of the mill’s local pine supply, coming close enough that volunteers and emergency services — some of them Hyne’s own workers — held the site whilst authorities declared it critical infrastructure. Had the mill gone down, the town would have gone with it. Timber accounts for around 70 per cent of the Snowy Valleys Council area’s gross regional product.
The mill survived. What followed was grimmer — 15 months of salvage, cutting through 1.6 million burnt logs one by one, recovering structural timber that, beneath the charred bark, remained intact and still the same grade customers had always relied on. The last burnt log was processed in May 2021, with the 75.5 million linear metres of timber recovered from those logs enough to nearly wrap twice around the earth.
Four years on from the fires, Hyne opened a 4,700 square metre storage facility at the site — its largest new asset there since the 2001 redevelopment — capable of holding 4,000 cubic metres of Rough Sawn, Kiln Dried material, co-funded by the Australian and NSW Governments under the Bushfire Local Economic Recovery Fund and the Forestry Recovery Development Fund. It was built for one reason — next time, the timber stays dry.
