A quick calculation shows that just over four percent of the fleet are of some sort of wooden construction.

Applications go beyond construction. Superwood is like carbon fiber, but less brittle, and carbon fiber is already used in everything from sports equipment and tennis shoes to race cars and airplanes. The last notable wooden airplane was the De Havilland Mosquito, in World War II, but in a future of eVTOLs, otherwise known as “flying cars,” a material like Superwood could be in demand.

Seventy beautiful and unique Wooden Boats assembled at the RMYC Broken Bay for a great weekend of festivities and displays. The RMYC Festival now in its 23rd year is Sydney’s only annual celebration of classic wooden boats.

At present what there is of the wood bank is kept in a dirty, dusty corner of a shed with no firefighting facilities (apart from a single small diameter hose). The timber is jammed in behind a vast wall of other timber. There has been no actual audit of the timber since its establishment, some boat builders who have tried to buy timber are appalled that sometimes good wood is mixed with low quality craft wood

HOANA, like most old wooden boats, has a tenuous monetary value. Humanity's notions of progress place little value on the thousand-year-old particles in her veins, even less on her vanished forest ancestry.

“It’s quite simple for me,” says French designer Thomas Tison, “Modernity does not neglect where we all come from – on the contrary it makes the best of it. In a way a boat is a heritage, so to ignore wood would be to ignore the essence of yacht design and building.”

A speech by Ian Johnston from the City of Hobart’s Speakers’ Corner Series acknowledges why Tasmania is so special and suggests what needs to be done to keep it so.