Dansie, Samuel Justyn (Sam)   (1927 - 2012)

Born on 7 March 1927 in Atherton, QLD; died on 10 September 2012 at Carinya Home, formerly of Atherton, QLD.

Sam's parents were English and lived in London. His father and uncle migrated to Australia and eventually came north and selected a rainforest block for farming at Milla Milla on the Atherton Tableland. Later, Sam's father brought his wife to the new farm in the North.

Sam was born in Atherton and went to a little bush school and finished Primary school in 1941 at the age of 14.

He then got a job on a large dairy farm nearby, boarded there and earned 35 bob a week. And did he earn them! Up at 3am and down to the dairy to help with the milking until 10am. Then breakfast and planting kikuyu runners on the new burn, for cattle fodder, until three in the afternoon. Lunchtime and then back to the milking until 10pm.

Near his 18th birthday Sam joined the Australian Air Force in 1945, near the end of WWII. He served in New Guinea in a 'cleaning up process'. During his Service, he spent nearly three years in Signals.

Following his RAAF Service, he took on contract rainforest felling in the Milla Milla region. Then he bought an unkempt old dairy and tried to upgrade it. The project didn't work, so he sold it and joined Forestry, along with his brother, Lionel.

His early career in forestry was based around Danbulla on the Atherton Tableland where he worked both harvesting and marketing forest species. With no formal education in species identification and wood properties sam built his botanical knowledge through dialogue with local timber contractors, forestry overseers and botanists from the Queensland Herbarium to whom he would send specimens for the purpose of identification and gaining further botanical information.

Sam married Noelene from Herberton in 1958 and they had four children; three boys and a girl.

By the mid 1970s, public pressure had increased for the complete preservation of the remaining areas of tropical rainforest in north Queensland. The public debate escalated during the next fifteen years with much acrimonious discussion among Queensland Forestry Department officials, timber industry spokesmen and members of the green movement, together with massive media coverage.

From the time of his promotion to Forestry Inspector for North Queensland in 1976, sam Dansie found himself increasingly caught up in the acrimonious debate arising from rapidly escalating public pressure to secure the complete preservation of the remaining areas of tropical rainforest in North Queensland. This led to new logging rules and environmental guidelines being drawn up and enforced by Forestry on the industry's loggers.

In 1980, Sam completed a scientific paper for a Forestry Department Marketing Conference in Gympie which controversially cast doubts upon the estimated remaining resource potential of the State Forests in North Queensland. Members of the conservation movement are alleged to have read the paper in the Gympie Forestry library leading to the findings of Sam's report becoming a pivotal link in the chain of scientific evidence supporting the conservation campaign.

Labor Environment Minister Graham Richardson asserted through national media channels that "one of the most respected foresters in North Queensland, Mr. Sam Dansie had warned his department earlier this decade rainforests the world over were in general a one-cut operation and Australia was no exception to the rule".

In the wake of regular 'sit ins' and intensive national media coverage, then Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke announced that his government would move to nominate the Wet Tropics of North Queensland for World Heritage listing in June 1987 with the region subsequently gaining World Heritage status in December 1988.

Sam Dansie retired from the Queensland forestry department the same year.

After he retired, Sam's driving work ethic had him painting churches and restoring cemeteries. He took on the restoration of the old abandoned and very decrepit Atherton cemetery, the original one [now called Sam Dansie Park]; recovered it from the encroaching bush, restored headstones, made it safe and then maintained it in wonderful condition for many years.

Source: Extracted from:
The Ryerson Index: DANSIE Samuel Justyn
Peter Holzworth (2012), https://oa.anu.edu.au/obituary/dansie-samuel-justin-sam-18280
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Dansie
Portrait Photo: 2010s, ex Huth, J. (2022) 'As We Were - prose, poetry and people, Qld's Forest History'.

Collecting localities for 'Dansie, S.J.' from AVH (2024)

Data from 1,539 specimens