Lion Mill, Timber and The Whim Festival
- Mundaring & Hills Historical Society
- Oct 21
- 2 min read
This coming Sunday 26th October we will be at the Whim Festival where our focus will be on the early timber mill industry and the use of Whims. We also will be available to talk with locals or visitors about their early history and involvement with the area.
So, what is a whim?
It's device for hauling logs out of the forest.
Moving logs over any distance was a major challenge. The trees encountered by early settlers were very heavy, 1.3 tonnes per cubic metre. An article in a newspaper in 1845 describes attempts to transport a 7-tonne log from Canning to Fremantle for export
“after great labour the log was slung in chains and then transported for a quarter of a mile (400m) when the chains broke like a bundle of twine …. It will be a matter of great difficulty to get this huge log to the beach, and we confess that we do not see how it is to be got on board any vessel”
At first transporting logs to the mill was done by bullock teams or draught horses. When a log is dragged along the ground the leading end tends to dig into the ground and a “shoe” was used. A large piece of heavy steel plate attached with chains. Hauling logs on wheeled machines such as jinkers and whims was only possible on hard ground. During boggy conditions the “shoe” was used. This practice was used for well over 70 years and eventually made redundant by the advent of tractor pulled arches.
Arches were used to lift the nose of a log off the ground. These were replaced by the whim from the 1880s to the 1930s
Whims only had two wheels; jinkers could have up to eight wheels. Whims seem to have been a WA invention in the Canning Mills area.
To find out more about these devices visit us on Sunday where we will have more information and many old photographs of this early hard-working Industry.
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