An Axe to Grind: forgotten tools of the Australian bush

Saltbush Bill and his off-sider “doing up” his axes on a bush grindstone – a classic drawing by Eric Jolliffe

 A few years ago, my wife Ellen worked as a teacher at a privately-run primary school in Claremont. It was a well-run school, with good kids and professional staff. She was a fine teacher and popular with everybody.

I also made a minor contribution. Every December it was my job to provide the school’s Christmas Tree. I knew a spot up near Jarrahdale where radiata pine seedlings were invading the native jarrah forest, and I would pop up there, knock a suitable one out of the bush and bring it back to be set up at the school with all the trimmings. Two birds were killed with the same stone, as it were.

One day I had a brilliant idea, and I laid it out to the Headmaster. Why not grow your own? There was a patch of land near the school’s playground where four or five pine seedlings could be planted and nurtured. In December every year, a 4-year-old tree could be ceremoniously harvested, taken in, set up and decorated. A replacement seedling would be planted, to be harvested in its turn when it became a 4-year-old. Not only would the school have a never-ending supply of Christmas Trees, but the kids would be taught a basic principle of sustainability: replace what you use. I thought it would also be good for the new trees to be planted by the Grade 1 kids, so they could watch “their” trees grow over the years, look after them, and then take pride in the finished product.

In my enthusiasm I could see this wonderful scheme spreading from school to school, eventually encompassing every educational institution in the entire southwest.

I was completely naïve, of course. When the young teachers on the school staff heard about the scheme they were appalled. “Teaching children to cut down trees!” they cried, “this is like teaching them to cut the throats of their family pets!”

My idea came to naught, and I gave it away. Not long afterwards Ellen retired, and I was no longer asked to provide the school Christmas Tree.

How the world has changed! And in such a short time. Between my generation and the next, the cutting down of any tree, anywhere, has become politically incorrect, indeed dastardly. My father, and his brother and father were all good axemen, and cut down hundreds, maybe thousands of trees when clearing the bush for the pioneering family farm at Waddy Forest. Converting the forest into farmland was considered a noble endeavour. Dad taught me to use an axe at the family woodheap, and I still remember him insisting that I learn to chop both right and left-handed, as his father had taught him. Right up to the 1960s, settlers were still using axes to clear the bush of its trees, as the Western Australian agricultural area expanded; at the same time, the State’s timber industry was one of its proudest. People admired the axemen of the karri and jarrah forests, and they loved the beautiful hardwood timber they produced.

Axemen scarfing a karri tree back in the 1940s.

When it came to timber cutting back then, mostly I think people understood that the basic principle of sustainability was being applied in our forests: we replaced what we used, new forests now grew where old ones had been cut.

But things changed, and they changed almost overnight. Cutting down a tree, even on your own farm, is now not merely regarded as reprehensible, but actually it has become illegal. The timber industry, despite the policy of reforestation (a keystone of conservation), was shut down. Today, even thinning regrowth forests is frowned upon and any urban tree more than about 20 years-old is regarded as sacred. The cutting down of any tree, no matter what the circumstances, has come to be considered positively sacrilegious … unless, unless. You can still buy timber in Western Australia, but it comes from trees cut down in Malaysian rainforests or in New Zealand, out of sight and out of mind, and therefore OK.  

Don’t get me wrong. I love trees and have spent most of my life studying, planting, nurturing and admiring them.

The “tree nerd” as I am known by some, chatting with a fine York gum, one of the thousands of trees I have planted over the years.

I understand the many roles that trees play in the environment, in society, in culture, in literature, and in our lives.  However, I also love timber, I tread fine jarrah floorboards, sit upon wooden furniture, warm myself and cook with firewood, read books made from paper and enjoy a range of other products of the tree. And I know these are only obtainable by tree felling. Underlying this is my experience (and it has been a lifetime inspiration), that trees and forests can be regrown, or regrow of their own accord if they are looked after lovingly. I intuitively understood sustainability, and the meaning of “recycling” well before the terms came into everyday use.

But enough old-forester-type grumbling, I hear you cry! 

Sorry!  What I really want to talk about today is how the sanctification of the tree and the demise of tree felling has been a factor in the demise of the axe.  Ironically (to some eyes) I love trees, yet I also love axes. The axe is more than just an elegant and efficient tool, it is historically significant, one of the basic tools of civilisation. Again, and almost overnight, it has virtually disappeared from the Australian bush. In my day, it wasn’t just timber cutters or pioneering settlers who wielded the axe.... every farmer, stockman or forester carried one, as did the navvy gang working on the railways, the Shire crew keeping the roads open, the bush engineer and the surveyor, the carpenter and the shipwright – they all used axes almost on a daily basis. The axe was a fundamental tool that enabled the development of regional Australia and the quality of life enjoyed by Australians today.

Bushmen loved their old “kelly” as the axe was usually known, and they would boast that it was “as good as new after fifty years”, having had only two heads and three handles. As recently as the 1970s, the hardware stores in country towns would have racks of axes of different makes and sizes. In the big timber country down south, I would often see an old bushman inspecting them, lifting one out to test the balance and heft, running his finger along the edge, or flicking the blade with a fingernail to see if it had the ring of good steel.

In my early days in the bush the work of the axe could be seen everywhere, especially in the karri country where post-and-rail fences still stood, and ringbarked stags originating in Group Settlement days still dotted farm paddocks from wall to wall.

Dairy farm land near Northcliffe, photographed in the 1960s, the product of ringbarking karri forest with a sharp axe and strong arms.

Even the humble forestry student had an axe.

In 1961 when I took the train from Perth to Canberra to commence my studies at the Australian Forestry School, I carried a 4 ½ pound Hytest axe in my luggage. It was a requirement of entry. Each student had his own axe, and they varied widely in make and quality. The finest was a Tasmanian Plumb belonging to my mate Jack Bradshaw, which had been “done up” for him by one of the fallers at Jarrahwood where his father was the sawmill manager.  One or two students had a high-quality Kelly, but mostly our axes were old and weather-beaten, picked up second- or third-hand at the cheapest possible cost. My classmate Pat Cooney told me that his axe was:

… a cheap and nasty brand which I disposed of to Doug Wheen when I left Forestry School. He was upset with it as he did not realise that because I was left-handed the handle had bent a bit that way so when he first used it, he almost cut his leg off.

A nicely restored Kelly, with gracefully curved handle and business-like head

Our student axes were used in practical field training: felling pines from whose trunks we cut ‘biscuits’ to count and measure growth rings, treemarking, pruning, thinning research plots in eucalypt forest on Black Mountain and at Pine Creek in northern NSW, blazing trees on a survey line … and chopping firewood when we were in camp. Once Phil Cheney and I felled an enormous stag-headed old brush box at Pine Creek (part of a research trial), using only our axes, me chopping left- and Phil right-handed. We fancied ourselves as old-time fallers. Truth to tell the standard of axework was nothing to write home about, but I will never forget the sound of the rhythmic thud-thud, thud-thud, as we worked.

Anatomy Class: my fellow-forestry students in 1961, each with his personal axe, dismembering a pine log in the Stromlo pine plantation, as part of an exercise in understanding the internal workings of a tree.

I was lucky when it came to axework, as I was already a reasonable axeman before I reached forestry school. I had spent my university vacations working in forestry gangs, and in those pre-chainsaw days, every forest workman was perforce experienced with an axe. When I joined the Wuraming gang at Dwellingup on Day 1 of my forestry career, I was issued with my own axe by the Overseer Bob Mylum. Every member of the gang had a personal axe. They were departmental property, of course, but you were issued with your own and then expected to look after it, rather like an infantryman being issued with his rifle. Mine was a beauty, especially compared to the blunt old splintery-handled woodheap axe at home. It was razor-sharp, and I managed to cut myself on the thigh with it on my first morning in the bush.

Sharpening on the stone

Thinking about axes, and keeping them sharp, reminds me of another bit of essential gear, once commonplace throughout rural Australia, now obsolete: the grindstone.

A bush grindstone with improvised stand, and water dripping from a suspended billy.

At one time there was a grindstone at every forestry HQ and Shire depot, in every blacksmith shop, at most sawmills, and on nearly every farm. If you had to use an axe every day, then it was easier, and the job was done more swiftly if the axe was sharp. Later, bushmen had access to high-quality imported (and expensive) steel files, and later still to the electric emery wheel mounted on the benchtop in the workshop. But in the early days, if you had to sharpen a metal cutting tool, it was the grindstone that did the job.

The importance of all this was covered in an interesting little article I once read in my favourite journal The Indian Forester. Entitled “The Forester’s Grindstone” and published in 1877, the author wrote:

There is no tool so essential to the forester as a good grindstone; it is therefore necessary that every forester should have one and know how to take proper care of it.

A grindstone should always be kept under cover, as exposure to the sun’s rays hardens the grit and injures the frame. The stone should not be allowed to stand in water, as this causes soft places. The water should be allowed to drip from some vessel placed above the stone and the drip should be stopped when the grindstone is not in use.

All greasy and rusty tools should be cleaned before being sharpened, as grease or rust chokes up the grit. The stone should be kept perfectly round and level on the face.

I must point out that in this story I am talking about the grindstones used for sharpening metal tools, not the millstones used for grinding wheat and corn into flour. They were masoned from a different sort of stone altogether, usually granite or basalt.

The grindstones used for tool-sharpening were made of a special (and highly sought-after) gritty sandstone, capable of putting an edge on steel. The wheel would be turned by a treadle, or an assistant, and kept damp with water, and the cutting edge of the tool was always held facing away from the turn of the stone. As the wheel turned so the tool was ground (shoulder first, then edge) – and when done skilfully, the result was an efficient and keenly sharp tool.

Grindstones have a long history, their use going back to well before Roman times, and a longer history even than that in Australia. Aboriginal people understood the principle and they improvised grindstones to sharpen spear heads and stone axes. The grinding was done using hand-held fist-sized grinding stones, or in specially-cut grooves in slabs of sandstone; some of these grooves are considered to have seen many thousands of years of use.

In European society, knife-grinding (metal tool-sharpening) was a recognised trade and the services of a good toolsmith were in great demand. The toolsmith, or armourer, specialising in battleaxe, sword, cutlass and bayonet sharpening, was an essential member of every army up almost to modern times.

Toolsmiths were even celebrated in classical art:

 The Knife Grinder – a painting by Spanish artist Francisco Goya. The grindstone is mounted in a wheelbarrow, enabling the knife sharpener to take his business to the client.

Speaking of mobile knife grinders reminds me that when I was a little boy, there used to be a toolsmith who rode around the suburbs on a motorbike with a sidecar, doing excellent business sharpening kitchen and dinner knives. He had a ‘round’, and on the day he came by our place my mother would go out with a handful of kitchen and dinner knives plus the carving knife and the breadknife, and he would get to work doing them up on the small grindstone in his sidecar. This was run by electricity, somehow connected to the battery of his motorbike. A few shillings would change hands, and he would chug off. I used to love watching him work and seeing the sparks fly. [We could do with the services of this bloke around our house today!]

It has been many years since I have seen a traditional grindstone being used, or indeed seen a grindstone at all, except perhaps standing derelict by a shed on an abandoned farm, or in a pioneer museum. They were once commonplace in the forestry HQs I knew when I first worked in the bush. I can still visualise the grindstone at the back of the old stables at Mundaring Weir, and the men taking it in turns to sharpen their axes when it was “maintenance afternoon”, or the field officers touching up their treemarking axes. I am sorry to say it stood in the sun, and I doubt anyone took care of it in the way prescribed above, but it did its job over a period of at least 50 years.

I also remember the one in the yard at Bob Hall’s farm near Quairading when I called on him about 20 yrs ago. It was in the yard by the shed, surrounded by old farm junk, a la Saltbush Bill:

A vignette from an Eric Jolliffe classic: wretched horse, grindstone and slab shed.

I don’t think old Bob had used it for 20 years or more before then, but it looked to be in good nick and I was hopeful that I might buy it, to re-erect at my place at Gwambygine, adjacent to my old chaff cutter. Alas Bob died, and the farm was sold before I got around to it.

I also spotted one in the historic precinct at Woolmer’s in Tasmania, with an original stone and turning handle, but a replacement frame:

Just as axes varied in quality, so did grindstones. A good grindstone was highly prized. I have read that when an early settler got a good one, he kept it under chain and padlock. A writer in the 1890 Guide to Settlers in New South Wales wrote:

The best way to get a stone (in theory) is to find someone who has a first-class stone and buy it from him. This is simply a splendid plan except for two reasons. The first is that the owner of a first-class stone always knows it and knows too much to part with it; the second is that if he does part, his price will be about six times what the stone is worth. Grindstones imported from England are the best but are dear because of the risk of breaking in transit. The best stone I ever ground on was an imported headstone (pepper and salt) I picked up in the church graveyard at Cobbitty, and then had it shaped into a grindstone by a stonemason.

The thieving of grindstones was still going on into the 1960s.  Harking back to Pat Cooney again:

 … there was a grindstone at Urbenville when I went there in 1972. It was stationed in the blacksmith's shop at the back of the forestry depot. It disappeared one night, how and by whom nobody knew …

The same writer to the 1890 Guide to Settlers had a further piece of advice:

In the good old days, one could acquire a good stone by the simple process of finding someone who had a good one, and either bagging it when he was away, or by giving him the choice of giving it to you or fighting you for it.

But if you had to buy one, he recommended always to try for a second-hand stone with a proven record of performance:

As a general rule, the best stones are rusty on the sides (from the oxide of iron in them) and white on the face, of a large sharp grit and peppered through with little black specks (iron again, pyrites). These are called pepper-and-salt stones, and, on average, are far the best. Some of the brown stones are also very fair, but not on average, the clay which gives them their brown colour being too soft a cementing material, and lets them grind away too fast. Wearing-out too quickly is a very great fault in a stone, however fast cutting, as [transport costs] on a stone are high, ditto the chance of being broken in transit.

Perhaps the most disturbing picture I have seen involving a grindstone is of Australian soldiers in PNG during World War II, sharpening their bayonets. The picture was captioned something like “Members of the 2/14th Battalion in Papua in 1942, getting ready for the Japs". As is the case with tree felling these days, bayonetting Japanese soldiers is not something people want to know too much or be reminded about, however imperative at the time.

I suppose the passing of the axe led inevitably to the passing of the grindstone. The same is true of the special tools that once were used to file and set the teeth of a crosscut saw, another classical bush tool that you never see anymore, long ago supplanted by the chainsaw. I have a six-foot crosscut, but it hangs on the wall, never used, and I doubt it is sharp enough to cut a soft banana. Ellen and I found it while bushwalking in the jarrah forest about 40 years ago. It was lying on a stump, probably abandoned by its owner the day he acquired his first chainsaw.

And it is not just the tools that have disappeared, but also the expertise involved in filing and setting a saw or sharpening an axe. I once watched an old timber worker sharpening his equipment in the bush. He used his crosscut saw to cut a slot in a jarrah stump, then turned the saw over and wedged it firmly into the slot. Then he took up a flat file to work up and back on the teeth from each side of the stump and to set the depth of the rakers and touch up the angles on the tips of the teeth.

Early settler setting and sharpening the teeth of his crosscut saw

Having done up his crosscut, the old timber cutter then picked up his axe, and with three neat strokes cut an axe-head sized hole in the trunk of a tree, similar to the slots you still occasionally see on an old stump where the fallers had worked on spring-boards. Reversing the axe, he banged it home into the slot (swinging right-handed), leaving it fixed as firmly as in a vice. He then used a flat file to touch up the shoulder on the ‘top’ face of the blade. After levering out the axe and driving it in left-handed, he did the same with the other face. The axe was then taken out of its slot, and the old faller sat down on the stump, tucked the axe handle under one arm and placed the blade on his knee, allowing him to hone the cutting edge with a whetstone, applying liberal doses of saliva in the process. All of this took about 20 minutes. The result was razor-sharp tools of trade which he knew would make his day’s work easier and swifter.

Axe handles

The same Indian forester who wrote about the use and care of grindstones all those years ago added a note on how to “haft” (put a handle in) an axe. I love his introductory statement:

First get your blacksmith to make an iron wedge to fasten the handle in with. It will cost but a few pence …

Like the grindstone, having your own blacksmith to assist with the hafting of your axe is now lost in the mist of time, at least in my experience. However, like most old woodsmen I still occasionally have to re-haft my old woodheap axe (which lives at the woodheap in sunshine and rain), and I always wish I had a blacksmith to do it for me. I also have a fine falling axe in my toolshed at Gwambygine. It's a Hytest head with an imported American hickory handle. Regrettably it gets little use these days, and the handle always shrinks over summer, so that before it can be used, I have to soak it in a bucket of water for a couple of hours and then run a whetstone over the edge and lightly oil the handle. But it’s a lovely implement, and a pleasure to use when thinning small clumps of trees or pruning a champion tree of the future. Swinging a well-balanced and nicely sharpened axe is highly enjoyable ... or was. The last time I swung it seriously, cutting a scarf in one of my brown mallet trees that had died of drought, I decided that axework is a young man’s game.

I was discussing axe handles with my friend and colleague Ian “The Oracle” Bevege the other day and he told me about the tree that grows in Queensland rainforests which is actually called ‘Axe-handlewood Tree”, of which I had never heard. In fact, there are two tree species with the name, the second also being called “Waddywood Tree”, possibly for obvious reasons.  Axe-handlewood Tree (Apananthe philippinensis) has light, closely-grained, flexible wood with a sheen rather like American hickory. Axe handles made from Axe-handlewood were hand-made by pioneer bushmen using a rasp and spokeshave, but no commercial operation developed in Australia, probably because of limited supply. It was used successfully for mallet handles.

The two Australian timbers most commonly used as axe handles were Spotted Gum (Euc maculata) and Brown Mallet (E. astringens). The former makes a nice handle when cut from a good, straight-grained tree, but the latter was not popular and is no longer manufactured. Neither, in my opinion, were a patch on hickory for weight, strength, flexibility and “feel”.

Treemarking axes

Perhaps the best relationship I saw between axe and man was that between a forestry officer and his official treemarking axe. The ‘treemarking axe’ was a standard axe, but with a small metal brand welded onto the back edge of the head. Each officer had his own brand, issued by Head Office, comprising the letters FD (standing for Forests Department) plus a unique number which applied to only one officer. When “marking” a tree for removal, the treemarker would cut a small notch in the tree’s trunk just above ground level, reverse his axe and stamp it with his brand. No faller was permitted to fell an unbranded tree. Treemarkers took great care of their treemarking axes, protecting the blade with a leather pouch when not in use, and keeping the edge sharp and the head tight. A treemarking axe was issued “for life” and I knew a couple of old Assistant Foresters who had owned and used the same axe for over thirty years.

Forester Greg Durrell’s treemarking axe, with the brand on the back of the head …

… and a close-up of his brand (FD9), always in mirror-image on the axe, so that when stamped on the tree, it could be clearly read:

I once asked retired forester Des Donnelly about his tree marking axe. He recalled:

My treemarking axe was a four-pound Plum, brand FD22. It was a beautiful axe and there is a good story about how I acquired it. I was at Nannup at the time, and one of our Assistant Foresters, Bill Tame, was poking around in the storeroom at the back of Jack Lindsay’s hardware shop when he came across a crate of 12 brand new Plum axes, the crate never having been opened. When our DFO Alan Hill heard about them, he went straight down and purchased the lot. He then issued one to each of the district’s treemarkers, and we treasured them.

Speaking of young men and axemanship, I cannot resist telling one final story. When I was the district forester down in the karri country in the late 1960s, one of my Forest Rangers was a young man called Terry Court. Terry was a ‘Son of the Bush’ – his father Les had been an axeman faller, a sleeper cutter and a champion racing log-chopper. They lived on a bush block at Pimelea. Terry was brought up with an axe in one hand and a crosscut saw in the other (if you see what I mean). He was also a tough and determined young man, a wonderful footballer and basketball player, and he brimmed with self-confidence. During his days as a trainee, so the story goes, Terry had once fallen into a dispute with one of his fellow cadets as to who was the best axeman.  “Ok” said the other bloke, laying his hand flat on a nearby log “see how close you can get to that”. With a full-blooded swing, Terry thunked his axe into the log, taking a sliver off the tip of his antagonist’s middle finger … without touching the bone. “Close enough?” he said.

Terry Court on the right, with his father Les, with the tools of trade of the old timber cutters. This was in a re-enactment for an ABC TV documentary, in the days before tree felling (of any sort) became politically incorrect.

A postscript on lost bush skills (although nothing to do with axes or grindstones)

One Easter several years ago I called in to a farm at Mourambine to say g’day to Stephen Leake, an old friend. Stephen is the scion of 19th century pioneers in the district, the fourth generation in his family to farm the property, and a man with a keen interest in bush history. When I arrived that day I found him in the yard outside his shed, crouched over a small campfire, holding a pot of some strange, bubbling brew.

It turned out that I had interrupted an annual ritual: the waterproofing of his leather boots, in the lead-up to winter. He was using a recipe passed down through the generations from his Great-Great-Grandfather: equal parts of mutton fat, beeswax and linseed oil, mixed in the pot, brought to a simmer, and then applied while hot to the boots with a paintbrush. Once it dried, Stephen assured me, the boots were supple, but 100% waterproof.

I wished I had known about this wonderful old bit of bushmanship before buying my Wellington rubber boots, which I have worn in the wet for countless years, but increasingly find heavy, uncomfortable and the very devil to get off when I am tired at the end of the day. Sadly, de-booting my feet has become a two-person job … but how lucky I am to have that other person on the job just when needed, and uniquely able to see the funny side of it all.