Hydrowood is a specialty Tasmanian timber recovered from Lake Pieman on Tasmania’s remote west coast. When the Pieman River was flooded in 1987 to create the Reece hydroelectric dam, a large area of native forest was inundated. The trees died where they stood. Nearly forty years later, they remain upright beneath the water: a submerged forest of dead standing trees, preserved by the cold, low-oxygen conditions at depths of up to 26 metres.

Hydrowood is the first Australian company to develop the technology to recover this timber at commercial scale. A purpose-built self-propelled harvest barge uses a waterproof felling head, dynamic positioning thrusters to identify and cut individual trees underwater. Recovered logs are transported to shore, milled and dried at Hydrowood’s Hagley processing facility in northern Tasmania, and sold as specialty timber to designers, architects, joiners and furniture makers.

Photography: Adam Gibson