By Alexa Vorster, Wood-Mizer Oceania
September 3, 2026
“I couldn’t see any reason why we should chip, burn or bury a good resource — and then go and cut down more trees because we didn’t use the salvage log.”
That’s Colin Goldsmith’s philosophy in a single sentence. He says it plainly, the way he says most things, and it’s the idea that built everything around him: Premier Timber Milling, the hardwood sawmill he has run for more than 25 years from a heritage timber shed in Mill Grove, a small town in Victoria’s Yarra Valley, and the Australian Wood-Mizer Agency, the dealership he operates alongside it. Both are built on turning what the world throws away into something beautiful.
The Wood You’d Never Think to Save
The Yarra Valley doesn’t treat its trees gently. Storms roll through and lay timber across roads and power lines. Farm windbreaks planted generations ago in cypress macrocarpa are reaching the end of their useful lives. Contractors come in, clear the windrows, and move on. Most of that timber gets chipped, burned, or buried, and most people never give it a second thought.
Colin is the exception. Where others see waste, he sees timber worth salvaging.
“Whenever it’s available, I get it — even if I’ve already got more than we can use. Because I don’t know whether I might not get any more for six months, nine months. So it’s get what you can, when you can.”
His sources read like a salvage inventory: farm windrow removals, freeway extensions, storm-fallen hardwoods, and old pier pilings pulled from the seabed, their ends encrusted with shell. Timber driven into a harbour bed decades ago, forgotten, and dragged back into the light. In the Yarra Valley, salvage timber milling never runs short of raw material. The land keeps providing, and Colin keeps answering.
What Gets Made
The range of what comes out of Colin’s shed tells its own story. Landscape gardeners order large-section hardwoods for outdoor entertaining areas. Farmers need bridge decks for creek crossings. Furniture makers come for bespoke feature timber that can’t be sourced anywhere else. And then there are the radially sawn weatherboards, cut from pie-shaped slices of tree, producing a face grain that stops architects and designers in their tracks.
Every piece started as something somebody else was ready to discard, and Colin knows exactly who it’s for.
“You’ve got customers who like clean and pristine, and you’ve got customers who like feature and a degree of rustic. That’s more our market, because of the trees we source.”
The knots, the weathering, the story in the grain: in this shed, those aren’t flaws. They’re the point.
The Machine That Made It Possible
Colin didn’t stumble into Wood-Mizer. He was pointed there by someone who’d learned the hard way.
“I had a friend with a mobile sawmilling business — he had a collection of different mills and attachments. And he said to me: don’t make all the mistakes I’ve made, just buy a Wood-Mizer. If I had’ve bought a Wood-Mizer instead of all this other stuff I’ve got, I’d be a lot better off.”
Colin took the advice. In 1997 he bought a Wood-Mizer LT40 Super, a portable sawmill he loaded up and took across Victoria, setting up on the side of highways, milling timber for farmers and builders wherever the logs were. Nearly three decades and well over 20,000 hours later, that same machine is still running, with its own station in the operation re-cutting dried timber down to final size. Primary production now runs on a Wood-Mizer LT70 stationary electric, a fixed-site machine built for the volume of a full-scale operation.
One thing Colin is quick to defend is the Wood-Mizer monorail design and not because it needs defending, but because he has spent nearly three decades proving what it can do. Competitors have liked to point to four-post heads and twin rails as if more steel automatically means more accuracy. Colin sees it differently. His LT40 has logged well over 20,000 hours cutting the kind of timber most mills would rather avoid, and the result is still the same: straight, accurate boards from difficult logs.
The design is more sophisticated than it first appears. Wood-Mizer’s patented trapezoid-shaped bed with monorail track is what makes the cantilever head possible, giving the saw head a solid, precise foundation while leaving one side open for access. The idea is familiar in bridges, balconies, and forklifts: anchored solidly on one side, open on the other. In a sawmill, that open side is not a weakness; it is the advantage. It gives operators clear access to odd-shaped storm-fallen hardwoods, crooked windrow cypress, and shell-crusted pilings, while the single-rail bed allows mud, bark, and grit to fall away instead of interfering with the head’s travel. More than 100,000 Wood-Mizer mills sold worldwide suggest Colin is not alone in trusting the design.
For a man whose raw material never arrives clean, square, or straight, a mill designed around irregular logs isn’t a compromise. It’s the obvious choice. Wood-Mizer patented the design decades ago, and Colin’s timber proves it, cut after cut.
Part of what makes Premier Timber Milling a trusted source is Colin’s hands-on approach to blade quality. Wood-Mizer’s blades team has worked closely with Colin given the unique demands of dense Victorian hardwoods, and he bench-tests every box before dispatch. For the breadth of timber he processes, from knotty farm windrows to reclaimed pier pilings, each blade has its job. The DoubleHARD handles the everyday variety of hard, dry, or knotty timber, while the biMETAL’s HSS tooth tips are purpose-built for reclaimed beams and high-volume milling. For the hardest, most abrasive Victorian hardwoods, the RazorTIP, with carbide-tipped teeth delivering up to three times the sharp life of carbon blades, is the blade that doesn’t flinch.
“I believe we have the best blades going around.”
From a man who tests every box himself, that’s not a slogan. It’s a verdict.
A Dealer Who Thinks Like a Customer
Becoming Victoria’s Wood-Mizer dealer was a natural evolution: Colin had spent decades on the operator’s side of the machine, and he brought that perspective with him.
“My approach is to not even talk about Wood-Mizer until I know what the customer wants to accomplish. They’ll say, I want to buy this machine — and upon talking to them, it’ll become evident that’s not the most appropriate machine for them. My first obligation is to make sure you don’t over-capitalise, and that you get the product you want.”
It’s the same advice his friend gave him back in 1997. Buy what actually works. Colin just passes it forward, one customer at a time.
Handing It On
The operation carries more than one name now. Colin’s son manages the sawmilling side of the business, while Sam, who has worked alongside Colin for over 20 years, handles much of the Wood-Mizer dealership day to day. Colin’s role is shifting.
“My job at this stage is morphing into making everybody else’s life easier.”
There’s something fitting about that, given what the business is built on. Nothing gets wasted in Mill Grove, not even a lifetime of experience. It gets passed along to the people who can put it to good use.
“I love the beauty of timber and the naturalness of it. It’s always been a bit of a passion.”
In the Yarra Valley, where the storms still come and the old windrows still fall, that passion has an answer for everything the land brings down.
Colin Goldsmith runs Premier Timber Milling in Mill Grove in Victoria’s Yarra Valley, specialising in salvage timber milling and reclaimed timber, supplying hardwood and cypress for furniture, outdoor timber, farm use, and architectural applications. He is also the Wood-Mizer dealer for Victoria through the Australian Wood-Mizer Agency.
