The case of the "Spicci Log - solving a south coast mystery

Pt Conspicuous juts out into the Southern Ocean on the coast of Western Australia (photo by Jack Bradshaw)

Holidaying at Nornalup, I decided one day to take a trip in to Point Conspicuous. I had not been there for many years, but my mind conjured up a memory of soaring limestone cliffs, granite outcrops, and Southern Ocean rollers coming in to a wide, spray-drenched beach. It was also part of my plan to check out the red-flowering gums (Eucalyptus ficifolia). This beautiful tree is one of the most widely planted ornamentals of all Australian trees but is native only to a tiny pocket of bushland just inland from the Conspicuous coast. It was summertime, and I knew they would be in full and gorgeous blossom.

Red-flowering gum in flower, in the wild, just inshore from Conspicuous beach.

I was happy to find the red-flowering gums looking tip-top, but something else entirely captured my interest that day.

A mysterious discovery

Since I had last visited Point Conspicuous, the parkies had constructed a first-rate wooden path and stairway down between the dunes from the carpark to the beach. As we approached the bottom of the path, I caught sight of a large and weather-beaten log wedged in a gully at the foot of a dune. It was so totally out of context with its surroundings, that I had to scramble down and across the gully for a closer look. Little did I know that this curiosity over the “Spiccy Log” (as it is now known) would lead me on a voyage of discovery, and to investigations into Indonesian rainforests, endangered species, oceanography and war-time history.

 The “Spiccy Log”, when I first examined it in January 2019

The first thing I noticed about the log was that it had been neatly cross-cut with a saw at both ends.  This indicated that it was a product of timber cutting, not simply an old fallen tree washed down from the bush.  I briefly considered that it might have originated on a farm further inland, but this was clearly not possible. The little creek in which it was lodged was dune seepage and unconnected to any inland waterway …. and in any case, our native eucalypts all have timber that is denser than water and the logs would not have floated downstream even had there been a stream.

The second thing I noticed was that the log was heavily pitted by marine borers and eroded by salt water and ocean waves and winds. It looked to me as if it had been at sea and then sand-blasted on the beach for many years.

At this point I might mention that logs are rarely if ever seen on Western Australian beaches. This explains my surprise when I first visited the beaches of Oregon and Washington in the Pacific Northwest of the USA. They are littered from one end to the other with logs, stumps and bits and pieces of trees. It was a most unusual sight for the eyes of an Australian forester.

Typical beach scene on the Oregon coast (image courtesy of CV Photos)

There are a number of reasons for this, the principal one being that the logs from PNW forests are buoyant, while those from Western Australian forests are not.

Getting back to the mysterious log at Conspicuous, my curiosity was piqued. I began to wonder if there was any folklore about it and contacted the local historical society, and the Parks and Wildlife people. Nobody knew anything. I checked with an old mate Ray Flanagan, who for many years had been a forester at Walpole, had lived nearby and had fished at Conspicuous beach many times. Ray knew the log well. When he had first come across it, he said, it had been right down on the shoreline with the surf smacking over it, only recently arrived. This had been maybe 25 years ago.

So, I calculated that since its arrival, the log had moved about 500 metres inland across the beach and into the dunes. Presumably it had been washed and rolled in by the violent winter storms which notoriously lash this part of the coast.

On the case

The next job was identification. Here I was helped by the Walpole Historical Society who organised approval from the Parks and Wildlife Service, and then the extraction of a small sample of the timber, which was duly delivered to me.

Timber sample from the Spiccy Log, showing weathered exterior and well-preserved heartwood

The outer layers of the log were crumbly and fissured, but the inner heartwood was still sound. The timber was brown and light. I could see at once that Spiccy came from no native Western Australian tree, but for an accurate identification I needed specialist advice. So I took the sample around to my forestry colleague and good mate Dr Graeme Siemon, Australia’s foremost expert on timber identification. Graeme not only knew the name of the tree that most Australian timber came from at a mere glance, he also had ID keys to the timbers of the world inside his computer. Within minutes he had tracked it down: the log had come from a Hopea sangal tree.

Hopea sangal is a rare tree, found only in the tropical rainforests of the Indonesian/Malay Peninsula, in PNG and Thailand. In Indonesia the tree is known sometimes by the common name cengal while the timber is (or rather once was) sold under the trade names of merawan and giam.

I have not been to Indonesia and do not know the tree in question. However, some elementary research soon disclosed two things of interest.  Firstly, the tree (in the wild) is so rare these days, that the numbers can be counted almost on one hand. It has been selectively harvested for its valuable timber over the years, but evidently no attempt had been made to regenerate the tree after logging. [I feel sure things are different today, but up until a few years ago the logging of Indonesian rainforests was not automatically followed by reforestation, as was always the case for logging in WA forests].

Secondly, I discovered, there was once a famous Hopea sangal tree that grew adjacent to the notorious Changi Goal in Singapore, where so many Australians had a hard time during the Second World War. Known as “The Changi Tree” it was extremely tall (quoted by Wikipedia as 76 metres, which I do not think can possibly be correct) and was a major landmark in Singapore from at least the 1880s until the early 1940s. It was felled at the time of the Japanese invasion in World War II, as the locals feared it would be used as an artillery ranging point.

The Changi Tree, considered to be Hopea sangal, photographed in the 1930s (source: Wikipedia). A sole and lonely remnant of the rainforest that once covered this area.

One superb Hopea sangal tree did survive the war in Singapore. Indeed, for some time it was thought to be the last remaining individual of this species anywhere in the world. This tree was shamefully (and illegally) felled by property developers in 2002.  Luckily, however, local foresters gathered seed from the felled tree and raised hundreds of seedlings, which were planted out in a suitable locale, in an attempt to recover the species. (I am not sure how this panned out – any Indonesian forester reading this might let me know).

To the best of my knowledge, no Hopea seedlings have ever been planted in Australia, certainly not in the south-west of WA where the climate is temperate, not tropical, and the species would not prosper.

So how did a substantial log of Hopea sangal find its way from the rainforests of Indonesia to a beach on the south coast of Western Australia?

Resolving the mystery

There are two possibilities: (i) it fell off or was jettisoned from the deck of a freighter carrying logs to Australia; or (ii) it floated down of its own accord.

The first explanation is unlikely. Australia has never been an importer of rainforest logs (sawn timber, yes, but not raw logs), and even if it was, surely these logs were so valuable as to have been well secured and carried within the ship’s hold. I think it more likely that the log entered the sea by floating down-river from a timber camp in Borneo or Java, or perhaps escaping from a log raft in an Indonesian harbour.

At this point I sought the advice of the Professor of Oceanography at the University of WA, Dr Charitha Pattiaratchi. He unhesitatingly supported the ocean voyage theory, drawing my attention to the Leeuwin Current that flows south all the way down from Indonesia and Malaya along our west coast, before rounding Cape Leeuwin and flowing strongly to the east. According to Professor Pattiaratchi (who also drew my attention to the picture below), a buoyant log could very easily “go with the flow” of the Leeuwin Current and end up on Conspicuous Beach … although the voyage might take many years.

If this is indeed the solution to the mystery, it is surprising that more Indonesian logs have not turned up, either on west or south coast beaches. The answer is probably that they have, but they have not been recorded or investigated. I have heard an unconfirmed report of a log on the beach at Coodamurrup (west of Walpole) and I am well aware that baulks of Burmese teak washed up on the west coast in the early days, and the pioneer settlers made good use of them. Perhaps other logs arriving on south coast beaches ended up being slabbed out for cattlemen’s huts or used for firewood by fishermen.

Whatever the case, I like to think that the mystery of the “Spiccy Log” is now resolved … or at least a credible explanation has been presented.  

A whimsical research suggestion

My lingering worry is that the theory is still only a theory and lacks proof. What we now need is for a benevolent millionaire to arrange for the tagging and release of 50 buoyant logs (sustainably harvested, of course) into the ocean currents flowing south from Indonesia, and their discovery on a south coast beach fifty years or more hence. There would, of course, be people and organisations who would object to such a scheme (nocturnal yachtsmen among them), but to me it doesn’t seem too different an idea from the tagging of whales or sharks and would be a worthwhile contribution both to folk history and science.

I also like to think that the future of the Spiccy Log might be studied and documented. Perhaps an annual inspection and photograph, with records maintained in a file somewhere. It is the sort of project local schoolchildren might undertake under the supervision of their geography teacher.

The most likely outcome, in my opinion, is that the log will gradually be engulfed by the adjacent sand dune, eventually to disappear and then maybe reappear 30 years down the track. This process seems to have started already, as this photograph, taken in late 2022 demonstrates:

The Spiccy Log, roughly three years after I photographed it in 2019 (photo by Andrew Burbidge)

Postscript:

It turns out the Spiccy Log is not unique. After being interviewed about this story by a journalist on the ABC, I received a dozen or so phone calls from south coast residents who have found similar logs over the years. The logs have come ashore from near Augusta east across to Bremer Bay, and the consistent feature is that they are long and straight and are neatly sawn at both ends, clearly the product of timber harvesting. Darcy Roberts, a Bremer Bay farmer, phoned to tell me how he snigged the log home to his farm and then carted a 5 m section to a sawmill in Albany. There it was sawn into boards, with which he made a beautiful dining room table, of which he sent me this fine photograph:

The toughness of the timber, and the impregnation of the log with salt and beach sand did not endear it to the sawmiller, Darcy added, leading to a cooling in their friendship (since restored).

Another interesting story came from an Albany yachtsman who told me about bumping (gently, thank goodness) into a large floating log several km off the coast in the Southern Ocean. A fisherman from further west said he had found a log which had emerged after a severe winter storm eroded a coastal sand dune about 100 metres inland from the beach. This was in a spot where he had been fishing for over 30 years, and never before seen any log, let alone the one that emerged from the dune.

All of these correspondents were happy with my explanation of sea-going Indonesian rainforest logs, and considered the mystery resolved.

Dedication

I dedicate this story to the memory of Dr Graeme Siemon, who died in March 2024, a fine forester and research scientist, the Australian expert in timber identification, and a cheerful and loyal friend over the 40 years that I knew him.