Visionary changes forestry foreverThe turning point for forestry in Australia has often been seen as one man, a rumbustious larger-than-life forest visionary, Edward Harold Fulcher Swain. A New South Welshman by birth, Swain was made Director of Forests in Queensland in 1918 and served in that position until his dismissal in 1932. At the time of Leonard Board's appointment as Queensland's first Inspector of Forests in 1900, Swain already had a year under his belt with the Forestry Branch of the NSW Lands Department.
He spent 16 years in NSW before heading to the United States on a two-year self-funded trip to study American forestry. Swain returned to take up the position of Forest Inspector at Gympie in 1916 and became the first senior forester to seriously question the use of European forest principles in Australia. Appointed Queensland Director of Forests in 1918, Swain began his 14-year crusade to revolutionise as much of forestry as he could. He dictated the curriculum for the study of forestry in Queensland, writing silvicultural manuals based on Australia's climate rather than that of Europe's. He set up Queensland's first forest nurseries. He established some of Queensland's first plantations, including those now surrounding the Glasshouse Mountains. He saw forestry as a business to be managed on business principles. He garnered enough support to set up the Queensland Forest Service as a department in its own right and then moved towards possibly his most memorable achievement - preventing the destruction of the magnificent hoop pine forests in the Mary and Brisbane valleys. The pro-development Lands Department of the day was determined to clear these forests for the growing dairy industry, but Swain locked horns with the department's officialdom and won. Swain was a brilliant thinker who did remarkable things for the conservation and management of forests in Queensland, but he worked with little fear or favour towards his political masters. This attitude saw him at loggerheads with any number of elected and non-elected officials, and eventually proved his undoing. When the State Government of the early 1930s wanted to open the hardwood forests of north Queensland for settlement, Swain played the role of conservationist and vehemently opposed the plan. He claimed a Royal Commission for the Development of North Queensland was "rigged", and wrote a dissenting 200-page Royal Commission report himself. Although his views were later endorsed by the Auditor-General and finally adopted by the government, Swain's political masters thought he had gone too far, and dismissed him, without compensation, four years before his contract was to expire.
Swain left Queensland to become NSW Commission of Forests for 13 years, and completed his career as a United Nations forestry consultant in Ethiopia until 1955. In the 1920s, Swain built his family home on a 2-acre block in Brisbane's fashionable riverside suburb of Chelmer, using timbers that he wanted to prove could be grown commercially for housing construction. It was to this home that he retired following his Ethopian sojourn. Swain passed away in 1970 and was, appropriately, tending his garden at the time. The home and an arboretum Swain planted beside it were still standing when the property was sold in 2003.
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