Owen Jones (forester)

Educated at Kingswood School near Bath, he was head of the 1st XI, and the 1st XV rugby teams, and sporting achievement was taken as an indicator of teamwork and a capacity to adapt to arduous forestry work.

[2][5] The key principals in the legislation are thought to have been derived from the earlier 1907 Act and include:[2][6] The new Commission was intended to be a “corporate and politically semi-independent body” maintained by a fixed annual grant of £40,000 from the Treasury.

[2] Significantly, the new legislation provided for the establishment of a Forestry Fund so the Commission could raise its own revenue from timber sales and enter into loans to give it some capacity to implement its own policies and programs.

[7] A worldwide search began in January 1919 for a candidate for the important new role of FCV Chairman with a salary of £1000 per year and over 100 applications were received.

[8] With an eye to career advancement, Jones chose not to return to Ceylon after the War, and at the age of 32, applied on 3 February 1919 for the Chairmanship of the Forests Commission Victoria.

[3] Getting a passage to Australia presented significant logistical problems in the immediate post war period but Lieutenant General Sir John Monash was confidentially approached to hold back some Australian officers to make space for the couple.

He said: [3]Forests must be developed by roads, tramways or railways, they must be cultivated and improved so that their volume production reaches a higher standard, and above all, they must be so regulated as to produce constant and equal yield, so that local industries may be brought into being by the assurance of unfailing supplies.

[2][3] The Lands Department was a dominant government organisation with alleged political affiliations to vested landholder interests inside the Parliament.

[2] The Melbourne Press, led by the Argus, Australasian, and The Age thundered that the scheme was deeply flawed and lacked due process.

He presented a paper at the State Premiers' conference in Melbourne in 1920 titled “The possibilities of Aerial Photographic surveys for forest purposes”.