The film opens at Palm Beach, where life guard Jim Thornton, a former jackeroo, has just graduated from forestry school and is about to look for work in the timber industry.
Blake is secretly plotting with a treacherous businessman, Ludwig Rich, to take over Burbridge's company.
Burbirdge explains that Joan is his adopted daughter; her biological father was Lloyd, who is now dead.
They make an agreement that if Burbridge cannot supply a million feet of timber in a specified time, he will sell his business to Rich.
Thornton arrives at Boundary Ridge, where he befriends the workers, particularly Scotty, who tells him the history of the property, including the disappearance of Burbridge's wife when she was pregnant.
Thorton reveals that he is Burbridge's long lost son, explaining his mother raised him in New Zealand, and has since passed.
Thornton delayed revealing his identity until he could get the measure of what sort of man Burbridge was and says he admires his father.
[8]Hall claims the script had no connection with the 1926 Australasian Films picture Tall Timber, which he had never seen although he said "Bert Cross, who was with me all this time right through the Cinesound period, often spoke of it.
It was a film that had not done well, and which, unfortunately for Longford, had failed about the time he was looking to come back to Greater Union Theatres as the boss man.
[11][12] Kenyon then made a model of the timber slope in the studio and staged it in miniature, using cut up sponges as foliage and knocking them over with wires.
[13][14] Frank Leighton was bitten by a spider during filming, causing him to fall ill for a number of weeks.
[15] The film was one of the last made at Cinesound when it was under the stewardship of Stuart F. Doyle, who resigned from the company in June 1937.
[16] A "Tall Timbers Ball" was held to promote the film in Sydney with 1,200 attending, including Lloyd Hughes, the American star of Cinesound's next feature, Lovers and Luggers (1937).
[20] Hall later admitted he felt the resulting movie was "weak as hell" because of its melodramatic storyline, although he was proud of the special effects.