Unintentional path dependence: Australian guitar manufacturing, bunya pine and legacies of forestry decisions and resource stewardship

ABSTRACT

Australian guitar manufacturers are increasingly competitive globally, known for quality, design, and sustainability. Also distinguishing Australian guitar making is the use of native timbers—a result of unforeseen historical endowments of available trees from earlier eras of colonial appropriation and State-sponsored planting. We develop a critical-materialist, and historical, evolutionary economic geography to trace an example of unintentional path dependence. Present craft-based manufacturing is linked to past regimes of resource stewardship. We illustrate this through the example of the bunya pine (Araucaria bidwillii), an endemic tree with Indigenous significance now used industrially as a ‘tonewood’ in guitar making. With limited geographic range, bunya was planted by State forestry during the inter-war period, considered ‘useful’ in difficult locations where other industrial species failed. Reflecting prevailing stewardship norms, bunya trees were pruned and cared for, even though always considered marginal. Abandoned as an industrial forestry species, a half century later surviving cultivated bunya trees were rediscovered for guitar making. From this case, we argue that economic geographers remain attentive to material resource histories, as antecedent to contemporary configurations. Earlier decisions, ideologies and labour processes bestow present generations with available material resources, enabling new geographic concentrations of expertise. Acknowledging how historical materialities of resource stewardship reverberate unpredictably in the present, guitar makers and tonewood specialists are contemplating prospects for longer-term scarcities, and experimenting in anticipation of them now.

KEYWORDS:

• Evolutionary economic geography
• materiality
• temporality
• history
• lock-in
• care
• guitar making

Acknowledgements

Nicole Michielin provided invaluable research assistance; we also thank John Steele, Shaun McKiernan and Jenny Atchison for conversations and collaborations on the broader project. For insights we thank David Kirby, Patrick Evans, Miles Jackson and John Huth and, in David’s and John’s cases, we acknowledge technical feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. All remaining errors are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Chris Gibson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7242-8255

Notes

1 In the 1850s the intrepid Baron Ferdinand von Mueller distributed seeds from Melbourne Botanical Gardens to Kew, in London, and other Australian and New Zealand botanical gardens. At the same time, Von Mueller also distributed and planted California redwoods, as another experiment in colonial horticulture and forestry. It would become another species used by Australian guitar manufacturer Cole Clark in the twenty-first century. Cole Clark now uses boards from California redwoods, salvaged from public parks and gardens, from specimens originally planted from von Mueller’s eager distribution efforts, but now damaged or in need of felling.

2 A log can be cut in several ways, depending on anticipated use. Quarter-sawing involves cutting at an angle perpendicular to the growth rings, to maximise soundwave resonance, and to minimise risk of unwanted warping and shrinkage. For guitar making, this means relying on large logs of sufficient width, typically beyond the scope of most industrial plantation species, which are instead harvested much younger, for quicker return, with less width.

3 The sole private interest in Queensland plantation forestry is HQPlantations, who manage 340 000 ha of the state's forests, on behalf of Hancock Timber, the world's largest manager of timberland investments for private equity investors, based in Boston, United States.