Veterans of the Territory of Papua and New Guinea’s forest service have reunited at Maleny in South East Queensland, with some of the twelve people at the table meeting again for the first time in more than fifty years. That is according to Dick McCarthy, editor of the magazine History of Australian Foresters in Papua and New Guinea 1922 to 1975, who travelled north to thank the group for a decade of help recording the sector they built.
Bringing the group back together took the hospitality of Des and June Harries, who organised the reunion with forest entomologist Barry Grey and booked the Mountain View Restaurant inside the Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve, 55 hectares of remnant rainforest overlooking the Glass House Mountains, for Monday, 13 July. The lunch came midway through a week of visits between 9 and 16 July, and within minutes, McCarthy wrote, the group was back among the people, the challenges, and the friendships of the PNG Forest Service.
“The early Australian foresters in PNG loved forestry and PNG,” McCarthy wrote in his account of the gathering, crediting men and women who built a working forest sector in one of the world’s least explored forest regions.
By the September 1975 handover, those foresters had mapped flora inventories across the territory’s forest systems and established a concession system that covered landowners, government, and developers. Local species were introduced into plantations, sawing and treatment methods for PNG timbers were developed, and forestry colleges began training Papua New Guineans to manage their own forests.
Around McCarthy sat Phil Ainsworth, the Department of Forests’ former mapping chief, Bulolo forest research chief Barry Gray, silviculturist and wood scientist Des Harries, botanical illustrator Di Howcroft, mapping officer Mike Jones, Madang district forester Paul Ryan, and forest entomologist Ross Wylie. Fellow forest cadet Jim Belford sent his apologies.
Recognition flowed the other way over lunch, with the group presenting McCarthy with an inscribed copy of The Magic of Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve for his work recording the history of forestry in Papua New Guinea, a gesture the editor called unexpected and one he will forever honour.
Support for the project runs deep within Queensland’s forest establishment, with Gary Bacon, the former head of Queensland Forestry, standing alongside senior forestry officer Keith Gould, tropical harvesting specialist Andy Page, PNG historian Michael Pearson, and Andrea Williams of the Papua New Guinea Association of Australia. PNG’s forest sector has fought hard battles since the handover, from legality disputes that reached the Australian Institute of Criminology to a log export trade dominated by China.
Those friendships carry commercial weight, with a long-standing wood trade linking Australia and PNG, especially Queensland, through similar forest types, shared plantation species, and decades of forestry training ties, and with Canberra backing a regional standard for the billion-dollar Asia-Pacific timber trade.
