NOTES AND QUERIES. 163 



Australia, notably, karri timber has sprung into prominence 

 for structural purposes. This new demand has made it 

 necessary to give consideration to methods of avoiding waste 

 of timber resources. Among wasteful practices the methods 

 used by the hewers and firewood licensees may be mentioned. 

 Hewing is a very wasteful form of conversion, the hewer 

 recovering at best only 30 per cent, of the round log, and on 

 an average only 25 per cent. In the years before the war, 

 however, the hewers had been permitted to roam over the 

 country, operating in any area they chose. They were able 

 in this way to earn as much as £1 a day, but the practice of 

 hewing in regions where milling is possible means a loss to the 

 State of £1 for every load of timber hewn. By the permit 

 system an attempt is being made to confine hewing to areas 

 where milling is not practicable, that is where it pays better 

 to take the axe to the tree than the tree to the mill, and 

 legislation is to be brought in to exclude the hewers from the 

 prime jarrah belt. Similarly firewood permits are intended to 

 restrict the cutters to particular areas where their operations 

 can be controlled, in place of allowing them to roam through 

 the forest at will. 



A new development, the result of prolonged negotiations 

 with the Federal Government, has been the establishment of a 

 shipbuilding yard in Western Australia for the building of 

 six ships for the Commonwealth Government. The ships are 

 to be constructed mainly of jarrah, karri being used for deck 

 beams and other work above the water-line. There is no 

 doubt that had more inter-state shipping been available during 

 the war, a very large trade in timber might have been 

 established between Western Australia and the Eastern States. 



For the half-year the revenue of the Department amounted 

 to over ^22,000, and the expenditure to about ^6000. Since 

 the inception of the Department in 1895, the revenue has 

 exceeded the expenditure by the large sum of ^483,000. 



Prolonging the Life of Wooden Poles. 



Mr C. R. Harte, writing in the Electric Railway Journal, 

 describes various means of prolonging the life of wooden poles 

 and discusses their relative advantages, whilst pointing out 



