NATURALISING AUSTRALIAN TREES IN SOUTH AFRICA - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 208

A large private plantation industry grew up as a result of increased knowledge
about the ranges where Australian trees grew within South Africa. The earnings
from products derived from plantations of Australian trees represented one of the
fastest-growing parts of the South African economy from the 1960s until the early
1990s (Louw, 2004). The size of South Africa's Eucalyptus plantation estate
continued to grow as a result of continued research and breeding programmes
encouraged by an expanding market for eucalypt pulp that was dominated by the
corporate conglomerates Mondi and Sappi. Plantations of eucalypts increased in
size from 161,049 hectares in 1960 to 538,000 hectares in 1993. 21 Private Acacia
plantations, primarily in Natal, reached their peak size in the 1950s at 350,000
hectares before slowly declining (Kull and Rangan, 2008: 1264). South African
government foresters continued to plant wattle and eucalypts for rural development
in the Bantustans, forcibly moving Africans to accommodate these plantations,
fuelling their already strong resentment towards state forestry and exotic plantations
(Tropp, 2003: 228).
The results from experimental arboreta and plantations across the country
produced a large amount of data that had never been examined systematically.
R. J. Poynton analysed much of this data when, drawing upon Department of
Forestry records and published material, he issued his magnum opus of South African
experimental silviculture in 1979, the massive two-volume Tree Planting in South
Africa (Poynton,1968, 1979a; 1979b). Poynton intended his work as a guide to
foresters on selecting exotic tree species, but it also very consciously reviewed the
results of plantation experiments in South Africa and southern Africa (Angola,
Malawi, Lesotho, Mozambique and Zimbabwe) that had been running since the
late nineteenth century and were, he believed, coming to an end:
Regarded from the historical viewpoint, this Report would seem to be
opportune in as much that its publication comes more-or-less at the end of
the era which witnessed the introduction of exotic forest trees in large
numbers and their trial under varied conditions to determine their suitability
or otherwise for timber production in Southern Africa. Although a few species
of potential economic value doubtless still await testing, and while scope exists
also for extending trials of established species to less favourable sites . . .
henceforth the major advances in forestry research will be made in other
directions.
(Poynton, 1979a: 815)
Research, he predicted, would now focus on genetic provenance, breeding 'elite
trees' and a more 'scientific approach towards matching the species to the site'
(ibid.: 815). Hutchins's mantra, 'fit the tree to the climate', no longer served as the
guiding light in forestry research in southern Africa.
A little over a decade later, the research programme that Poynton both
epitomised and summarised derailed. The ending of apartheid opened up the
floodgates of scientific and popular criticism of Australian trees. Not long after the