The Boom and Bust of the Australian Lumber Trade
A look at the rise of Puget Sound timber exports to Australia and why the financial collapse in the colonies is hitting Washington mills hard.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Consul General Wallace, this country's representative at Melbourne, Australia, has just sent a report to the state department giving some valuable information in reference to the American timber trade with Australia. Following the discovery of rich deposits of gold, an extraordinary demand for building material developed. At first, the trade was in the hands of English houses, but American firms soon competed with lumber from the eastern coast. This was followed by pitch pine, which has had to give place to lumber from Puget Sound. Known to the trade as 'Oregon,' it became a standard building timber. Importations of this wood into Victoria rose to 55,487,694 superficial feet in 1888, but declined to 12,000,000 feet in 1892. It is the opinion of the trade that the demand in the near future must be small, as it cannot recover from the severe blows dealt by the collapse of building societies and the bursting of the land boom. The future importations may be affected by customs duties, but the decline is due wholly to the financial depression existing in the colony at this time.
“The demand for timber in the near future must be comparatively small, as it cannot well recover quickly from the severe blows dealt it by the collapse of building societies and the bursting of the land boom.”
The 1893 economic depression was a global shock that hit Seattle’s timber-dependent economy hard, a precursor to the volatile real-estate and resource-driven market cycles that have characterized Seattle’s history ever since. The report's mention of a 'land boom' collapse in Australia mirrors the recurring boom-and-bust cycle of Seattle's own development history.
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