Immigrants brought sawmill in luggage

Press, 12 February 1986, Page 3

Immigrants brought sawmill in luggage

The $37 million sawmill complex opened yesterday by the Prime Minister, Mr Lange, at Eves Valley, Nelson, had its beginnings in an immigrant couple’s luggage 144 years ago. One of the descendants and a director of Baigent Holdings, Ltd, Mr Harry Baigent, told the 200 guests at the opening: “If we go back to our roots in New Zealand it must be to May 13, 1842, when Edward and Mary-Anne Baigent came ashore at Nelson with a sawmill in their luggage. “I don’t know what machinery made up that sawmill, but it can’t have been much,” he said.

After a tour of the complex, Mr Lange said he was fascinated by seeing “such large logs behave in such a docile way.” The Baigent Forest In-

dustries, Ltd’s, new multifaceted, high-technology timber processing plant is the most sophisticated in the southern hemisphere. It is abreast of the rest of the world in the pushbutton age of sawmilling with its computer-con-trolled sawing, sorting, and stacking. It uses laser beams to line up the logs and flitches to ensure the optimum cut.

All that is a far cry from the backache and blisters that faced the Baigent family’s pioneers in the industry. But there had been nothing docile about the company’s attitude toward growth over the years and it was now in the forefront of forestry development in New Zealand, said Mr Lange. “A new business climate is emerging in this country, one which requires a more outward-

looking perspective and an ability to meet new challenges. “It is a climate in which initiative and effort will be better rewarded and it will bring greater benefits to our country,” he said. The chairman of Baigent Forest Industries said the output from the sawmill on a single shift basis would soon reach 82,500 cubic metres of sawn timber a year, which would mainly be exported to Australia and the Far East. It is expected production will be stepped up to the capacity of 165,000 cubic metres when the large areas of pine forest in the Nelson region start to mature in the mid--19905. The company owns 26,000 hectares of forest land, ofwhich about 19,000 hectares is now stocked.