ONE of the city’s longest-serving and certainly the elder statesman of the local timber industry, Les McDonnell turns 90 next week.
His legacy has been felt by the industry for many decades through his family’s NF McDonnell & Sons logging and timber mill operation.
My association with him started in 2011 when I worked with him and son Ian to produce the book, The NF McDonnell & Sons Story.
Les was born into a timber family in 1928.
His father Newman hauled hardwood logs out of the Grampians in Victoria during the Great Depression and Les and brother Don grew up in various small Victoria townships such as Hall’s Gap, Camperdown and finally settled in Cobden in 1941.
It was a massive bushfire at Mount Burr in 1939 which changed Les’ life.
He was part of a family team that set up a felling, hauling and saw milling contracting business in the Mount Burr forest to extract and mill burnt timber following the bushfire.
Conditions were difficult and the timber crew slept in small tents for six months as they battled wind and rain in one of the wettest winters on record.
From there, the business grew and in 1946 the partnership NF McDonnell & Sons was established between Newman, Don and Les.
Les was very much a hands-on operator and boss.
He and Don drove log trucks, cut trees with bow saws and axes and knew the business from the ground up.
He could drive anything from a motor cycle to a semi trailer, grader or bulldozer and these skills proved very useful as the business expanded into log haulage, saw milling, farming and freight transport.
After establishing mills at Mount Burr, Millicent and Kalangadoo the operation moved in 1956 to its present premises at Suttontown.
Before the introduction of forwarders Les became somewhat of an innovator.
Tired of the virtually impossible task of keeping the old crane-type log trucks up to legal road worthiness he came up with an idea of loading an old Mack truck with a front end loader.
The logs were held in place on the trailer by large pins, similar to what are used today.
Les was president of the South East Log Hauliers Association for many years and, along with others, was instrumental in getting most logging contractors to agree to join an independent insurance pool which had great financial benefits and returned good profits for contractors.
He was very innovative in terms of introducing equipment and machinery to the business and the industry.
During the 1950s and 60s NF McDonnell & Sons became the first to introduce mechanisation to the local timber felling industry and after inspecting a timber jack skidder in Gippsland purchased one and it became the first to be used in the South East.
In the 1960s he again showed great vision after inspecting a Volvo forwarder at a trial site near Mount Gambier, bought the machine and McDonnells became the first to introduce a forwarder to government forests in the district.
Following the disastrous 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfires a business opportunity presented itself and Les and the company took a gamble to become the first Australian company to export wood chips to Japan which continues today.
NF McDonnell & Sons were also the first to introduce B-doubles to the logging industry.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the log hauling operation complemented the saw milling operations the company owned in both Mount Gambier and in Gippsland.
However a change in contract arrangements by ForestrySA forced Les and his company to finally end the log hauling side of the operation in 2006.
Les has often been called “the last of the original timbermen”.
When he retired in 2007 he had seen many changes and developments in a lifetime that spanned the complete timber industry – and to his credit he played a significant role in the introduction of mechanisation and other innovations which today are a major part of the industry.
The timber industry legend title is one which Les McDonnell can wear with great pride.
