Carlie Porteous is not packing her ports just yet.
The popular and effervescent outgoing General Manager of the Australian Forest Contractors Association is not leaving her Brisbane bayside home until June ahead of taking up a new position as manager of the Murray Region Forestry Hub and the Softwoods Working Group.
Carlie will continue at AFCA full-time until June 30, and will continue one-day a week thereafter to help the association in its new restructuring phase. She came to AFCA in December 2021, bringing over 10 years of experience in the forestry industry working in all aspects of the value chain – contractors, growers, processors, and government agencies.
Her appointment at AFCA followed her role as Manager, Forestry and Fibre Compliance, at Visy Industries, enhancing communication and collaboration with industry groups, supply chain members, and customers to achieve a responsible supply chain across Visy’s manufacturing sectors.
Now her career has taken a new and equally dynamic direction with her appointment as manager of the Murray Region Forestry Hub. The hub takes in about 3.5 million ha in the area east of the Hume Freeway, west of the Great Dividing Range, south of Gundagai, and takes in the softwood plantations of NE Victoria down to Lake Eildon.
Key forestry towns in the NSW part of the hub are Tumut, Batlow, Tumbarumba, Gundagai, and Adelong. In the Victorian hub area, the main centres for the industry are Corryong, Tallangatta, Myrtleford, and Wangaratta.
This area contains around 170,000 ha of plantations, both public and private, and the Murray region is home to one of Australia’s largest softwood industries.
Carlie will bring to the hub expertise in FSC, ForestFit and PEFC certification systems; she managed the largest FSC chain of custody certificate within Australia while participating in a number of industry groups, including trustee on the board of the Gottstein Trust and a director of FSC Australia and New Zealand.
With the new changes in her career, Carlie also has a busy family life with husband Sam and children Jamie and Alex. They will leave the Queensland family home at Wellington Point in January to settle in Albury.
“I’d like to talk to you some more, but there’s dinner on the stove, three hungry mouths to feed and a barking dog under my feet,” she apologised when we called last night.
No apologies necessary, Carlie. We’ll have a lot to talk about before and after June.
