Online Catalogue last updated 9th of October 2023
Jinkers and Whims traces the development of the methods and machines used to harvest the forests of Western Australia over the last 150 years, from first settlement to the present day, from horse and steam power to modern mechanical harvesters. It describes the bush workings and logging operations that underpinned WA's sawmilling industry - once the third largest industry in the state behind wheat and wool. It is also a tribute to the skill and innovation of the bushmen and engineers who brought about the changes and who designed and built those weird and wonderful machines that were unique to the industry and to this part of the world.
Jinkers and Whims contains more than one hundred photographs dating from the 1890s to the present, and provides a timely record of the developments that took place before the details of their existence and their operation fade from memory.
Jack Bradshaw's family has been associated with the sawmill industry of Western Australia since its inception. Jack grew up in the sawmill towns of Mornington and Jarrahwood spending his high school years at boarding school at New Norcia. After graduating in forestry from the University of WA and the Australian Forestry School in Canberra he began work in the Forests Department at Pemberton in 1963 and continued his association with sawmill communities in a variety of centres in the south west. At retirement in 1999 he was Manager of Forest Management Branch in the Department of Conservation and Land Management. He continues to work as a consultant in silviculture and forest management.
Growing up in the 1940s and 1950s he witnessed the change from steam to diesel, from axe to chainsaw and the final days of the horse era. His childhood memories of this time together with a lifetime of work in the forest have fostered his keen interest in both the industrial and social aspects of forest history.
Format: softcover 270mm x 200mm
Code No. 016408, ISBN 9781922022806