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HISTORY

The business was founded in 1920 by Harry Oldham near Little Dock Wharf which stood at the end of King Street Melbourne. Ships carrying timber from Tasmania were moored and unloaded at this location and the leased yard was close to the point of discharge of Tasmanian species including Blackwood, Myrtle, Huon Pine, Celery Top Pine and Tasmanian Oak. By 1924 the business had grown and it moved to larger premises on Lorimer Street South Melbourne before purchasing and moving to the current site in Plummer Street Port Melbourne in 1933.

Post war Melbourne was a very busy time for this city and for the State generally. By 1945 BRUCE OLDHAM had left the air force and forsaken a career in teaching to join his father in the family company. By this time the company had share interests in several timber mills on the Atherton Tablelands Cairns and regularly provided a wide number of Queensland species to local joiners, furniture makers, boat builders and pattern makers. These included Maple, Kauri, Red Cedar, Rose Alder and Satin Sycamore. By 1951, a Cairns yard was acquired to store milled timber for transport to Melbourne but coincidently, around this time, Cairns itself began to grow from a northern outpost into the holiday mecca which it has now become.

Bruce Oldham lived in Cairns for about 6 months per year during the period 1950 to 1972 while he ran the busy Cairns branch selling to a market stretching as far north as Port Douglas and Mosman and down to Townsville in the south. At the same time a steady flow of Queensland species was sent from Cairns to Melbourne. During this period he pioneered the introduction of many Pacific Timbers into Melbourne including Amoora, White Beech, Pencil Cedar and Kamarere from New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.

In 1972, Bruce Oldham took over the reins as Managing Director of AFT and he continued his full time interest in the business until the mid 1990s when he gradually retired.

In 1989, the third generation entered the business when Lester Oldham joined, retiring from a Hamilton legal firm in which he had been a partner for 12 years.

The period 1990 until the present time has seen massive change within the industry. Cheap, imported and mass produced furniture made in countries with a vastly inferior living standard has torn the heart out of the local furniture marking trade. At the other extreme, logging restrictions and in some areas, world heritage listing of rainforest have meant that supplies of some timbers are dwindling to a trickle and the scarcity of the resource is pushing the prices ever upwards. Global warming and forest degradation are worldwide issues of dispute sparking community awareness.

Customers wanting to ensure that they purchase responsibly and that they are not adding to the worlds ecological woes naturally now enquire about the origin of what they are buying.

The primary object of this company is to make available to Victorian users the broadest range of high quality furniture timbers and specific purpose woods that we can. In the year 2003 we continue to bring users species from Victoria, other parts of this country and every continent on earth, doing so, where possible with a supplier's Assurance that the product comes from a Government managed forest resource.

In Victoria we are fortunate to have the ECO SELECT brand as confirmation that the Victorian product is from a managed renewable resource. This is important because people tend to forget that so many other things that we use such as gas, petrol and water are not renewable - once used, they are gone forever and cannot be re-grown.