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. Disciplines Education | Social and Behavioral Sciences Publication Details

A sound track to ecological crisis: tracing guitars all the way back to the tree

“…Following leads gleaned from guitar manufacturers and luthiers, visits were then made to sawmills and tonewood specialists in Tasmania, Hawai'i and the Pacific Northwest, followed by excursions, chaperoned by guitar timber experts and native forests custodians, to see surviving trees. Unforeseen issues were revealed, including the politics of Indigenous peoples’ rights and access to forests, legal complexities around international timber trading, and the advent of privatised forestry (Gibson and Warren 2018). We witnessed unheralded and underappreciated skills and knowledge among guitar timber specialists and foresters, set against much larger-scale forces at work transforming biodiverse landscapes into monocultural ‘tree farms’ and ‘carbon banks’ (the latter increasingly a feature of carbon trading in the climate-change era).…”

“…Probably the first thing we had to do was to find an alternative for mahogany’. Australian manufacturers turned to native species such as blackwood and bunya pine (Gibson and Warren 2018). American firms turned to their own more plentiful domestic timbers such as maple and cherry, and new alternative species were trialled.…”

A review of kowhai (Sophora spp.) and its potential for commercial forestry

“…have prominent status in the European and North American tool handle market respectively, due to their toughness (Mania et al 2020), and a New Zealand equivalent is conceivable. Alternative regional timbers are demanded to replace unsustainably harvested tropical timber for use in musical instruments (Gibson & Warren 2018;Shirmohammadi et al 2021).…”