Milling a Round
Keeping Wee Waa at Work
Established by one of Wee Waa’s earliest settler families in 1881, Schwager’s Sawmill grew to become one of the biggest businesses in town. Before the proliferation of the automobile, horse-drawn wagons with wheels cut from Ironbark trees wound their way through the lands of the Kamillaroi peoples, hauling logs from Pilliga Forest to Schwager’s Sawmill.
Initially founded by Francis Louis Schwager (1838?–1923) between Narrabri and Wee Waa, Francis relocated the mill to Wee Waa in 1898. In 1903, Alfred (d. 1960) and L. Schwager took over the family business, supplying timber across New South Wales. By the 1920s, sawmilling was Wee Waa’s biggest employer.
Most of Schwager’s timber came from the Pilliga Forest, known for its range of timber classes, from hardwoods to soft cypress pine. The native cypress pine, resistant to termites, was used in the burgeoning nation’s housing industry, while the destiny of the Ironbark was to become railway sleepers or fence posts. Ironbark has non-conductive properties and is still used to build electric fences today.
Before motor vehicles and rubber tyres were commonplace, carts had wooden wheels fitted with metal tyres like this one. A wheelwright would shape the metal tyre on a circular template called a ‘tyrebender,’ then heat it until it had expanded enough to slip over the wooden wheel, quenching it quickly in water so the metal shrunk to fit the wheel snugly.
During the busy seasons in the early 1900s, as many as forty horse-drawn wagons with ironbark wheels like this one would be on the roads hauling logs to Schwager’s Sawmill, which could produce between 50,000–60,000 feet of timber a week.
