[Tannin]

More than 50 years ago my family moved to a big, run-down old house in the mountains 40 miles from Melbourne. When it was built in the 1890s, it had been rather grand. No such thing as air conditioning back then: only very posh people could afford to build a big house in the mountains just to get away from the oppressive heat of an Australian summer. Little by little over the next ten years or so, my parents did it up. Among the many tasks they took on was renovating what we called "the big room", a huge room with 14-foot ceilings which had once been a ball room. They removed quite a number of the original vertical lining boards. These were 14 feet long, 6 inches or so wide, and the best part of an inch thick - that's a crazily wasteful thickness for boards to line internal walls, but in the 1890s there was a whole untouched continent full of wildlife and trees to pillage: horrendous waste of resources was a perfectly normal thing.

I gave very little thought to all this at the time. I was a child, then a teenager leaving home to live and work in the Big Smoke 40 miles down the road. Meanwhile my father kept the leftover timber to one side, and took it with him when they sold the house around 1980. In 1983, the Ash Wednesday bushfires burned the old house to the ground (along with more than 3000 others). All that remains of the house today is the pile of timber in my father's garage.

Now it obviously won't be quarter sawn, but there is quite a lot of it and something like 20% of the planks will have been cut on the correct angle anyway. It's 130 years old, and it is all old-growth Queensland Kauri.

Let's back up a little: there are 22 kauri (Agathis) species, one from the north of New Zealand, three from Queensland, one from Patagonia, with the others scattered generously across the south-west Pacific and as far north as the Malay Peninsula. By far the best-known one is New Zealand Kauri (Agathis robusta), often just called "Kauri", but most of the others are quite similar. This timber of my father's is probably Queensland Kauri (Agathis robusta) but could be Bull Kauri (A. microstachya) or Blue Kauri (A. atropurpurea). Queensland Kauri is pretty much unobtainable these days: all the big stands were cut down 100 years ago and the country where it grows turned into farmland or housing estates. There is a little in national parks (obviously and rightfully protected against logging), not much else.

Anyway, I have it in mind to fish the old boards out and have a look at them next time I'm over there (later on this year). I'm welcome to take it if I want it and make space in his garage. Some years ago I was planning to make bookshelves out of it one day, but seeing what the Kiwis do with Kauri as a tonewood, well, let's explore those options first, at least for the quarter-sawn boards. I'll have to have it shipped over here, which means paying for a truck to pick it up, load it on a ship, and another truck to bring it here - maybe $1000, maybe double that amount. I can't take 14 foot planks on a roof rack or a trailer, and I'm reluctant to cut them just for transport. So I'll look first and figure out what to do later.