“An insouciant fellow…with Minotaur’s shoulders and hands like coal buckets”

Justin, known to his friends as “Junk”, comes from the foothills of the Watagan Mountains near Cessnock, in the NSW Hunter Valley. A quiet unassuming giant of a man, Justin has taken over the double handed sawing crown from the Foster monopoly, mainly pairing with Tom Kirk’s grandson, Steven Kirk. His father Robert was also a respected single and double handed sawyer.

“This is a sport where so much of it is in your ability to read the wood,” Justin commented, when interviewed while captaining the Australian team in New Zealand. “…Old radiata has very little sap — it’s full of cork. I’ve had some shocking experiences with the stuff… It’s not so bad when you’re cutting for yourself but when you’re cutting for your team, your country — when there’s half a dozen Aussie fellas relying on you — it’s a real kick in the teeth.”

Justin gains greatest enjoyment from team races. He has captained NSW and Australia a number of times and says that the only thing better than beating Queensland is beating New Zealand. He won the golden axe at Tokoroa, NZ, in 1997 against New Zealand greats, David Bolstad and Jason Wynyard, joining David Foster as the only Australians to win this award. A career highlight was the 2002 Adelaide Show where Justin took the 14” World underhand and 14” World standing block, the 15” Australian underhand and came second in the 15” Australian standing block.

Justin is a member of the Chopperoos in Stihl Timbersports™ Pro Tour and has competed regularly in the USA for a number of years.

(Peter Malcouronne, “Cuttin’ for your country” Westside stories 2016)

“Big, strong and good looking”

Ask David what attributes you need to be a champion axeman and he’ll tell you jokingly, “You need to be big, strong and good-looking.”

At nearly 197 cm tall and weighing about 150 kg, David Foster is a giant of a man. With more than 1000 championships (a record in any sport) and 186 world titles to his name, he is a giant in the sport of woodchopping.

David combines massive muscular strength with physical agility, pin-point accuracy and the will to win. An analysis of his technique concluded that he “produces a greater power output (2.5 tonnes of force at impact) than the world’s greatest hammer throwers with the balance and poise of Nureyev, the agility of a gymnast and at three times the delivery speed (131.76 kmh at impact) of Muhammad Ali.”

Under the watchful eye of his father, George, and the dedicated training of his father-in-law, Henry Munday, David refined those natural advantages into a world champion whose titles covered a period of 36 years from 1979 to 2015. He represented Australia from 1980 and captained the Australian team for 21 years consecutively. He won the Australian Axeman of the Year a record-breaking nine times in a row. David has broken records in every woodchopping and sawing event except tree felling…as he says “Why on earth would anyone want to do that!”

David’s success and his promotional activities raised the sport’s profile nationally and internationally.

“Number one in the world with axe and saw”

The first true World Championship Series was staged in Ulverstone, Tasmania, in 1970 with 300 competitors in representative teams from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA. The World Champion of Champions was George Foster.

George, Tasmanian farmer and woodsman, came late to competitive chopping, entering his first event at the age of 27. At that time, with a young family, the prize money was a great incentive: “When I want something like a wireless for the car, I wait till I’ve won enough prize money to buy it.”

An accurate and powerful master technician, according to Henry Munday, “George was pretty to watch back in his prime; he had a shortish backswing that didn’t waste any energy, and he put his axe exactly where he wanted to with every strike and with a lot of power.”

With son David, George made the double handed sawing “The Foster Event” from 1979 until his retirement in 1989. Their 11^th consecutive win that year was even more remarkable because George had undergone major heart surgery less than six months earlier. After doing a victory dance, George said “This was my most thrilling win as I thought my career was over. Our first win back in 1979 was great, but it can’t compare with the elation I feel at the moment.”

As younger son Peter commented, “They were like two parts of the same person when they were sawing. Totally in tune with each other…” David and Peter continued this legacy, creating a 21-year Foster monopoly of the event.

“Brilliant sawyer, naturally talented”

Peter Foster emerged from the shadow of his older brother to take over his father George’s position when George retired. In 1990 he competed with David in the double handed sawing at the Sydney Royal Easter Show. The pressure was enormous…and not just because the announcer listed all his father’s and brother’s previous wins. George was standing beside them as their wedger as David whispered to Peter at a crucial moment “…concentrate on the saw and DON’T LET THIS @#$%^& TEAM DOWN!”

They won… and went on winning for another ten straight years. In doing so Peter rekindled his love of the sport and his ambition to succeed.

Peter was just 16 years old when he took part in his first competitive event in the novice class at the Henley chop at Latrobe. The handicappers had given him the back mark off 32 seconds. They justified this to his furious father: “Well, George, he is a Foster, and he’s your kid.” With a slightly reduced handicap of 26 seconds, and a slightly jumped start, Peter won the event to his father’s great delight.

“The lanky police constable”

 Elwin Griggs served in the Queensland police force as a constable, where his bush skills were useful in several searches in the Cairns hinterland. The lanky Griggs was a keen all-round sportsman playing rugby league, tennis and sprinting.

He grew up inland from Maroochydore where his father was a sawmiller and dairy farmer. His brother Les was also a champion axeman. Elwin won his first title at 15 years of age.

Elwin’s passion for the sport was such that in 1952 he took his first leave for two years and travelled 1168 miles (1800 km) for a woodchop win in the Ekka (Royal Queensland Show). Nor did operations or injuries slow him. In 1954 he drove 1000 miles to Brisbane in four days, after competing in Tully, Townsville and Cairns just a few months after an appendix operation. In 1964 he cut off a piece of his big toe at the Royal Adelaide Show.

As well as competing, Elwin supported, trained and fostered many future champion axemen, including Harold and Bruce Winkel, Col Schafferius and Martin O’Toole.

In 1966, the year he toured England with the Australian team, he held four world titles: the 15” underhand, 12” hard hitting, 25” double handed sawing and the 15” single handed sawing. Elwin always boasted how he was on personal terms with the Royal Family. He met and chopped for Queen Elizabeth, Prince Phillip, Princess Margaret and Princess Alexandra. He could never reply with a one-word answer – there was always a joke or two thrown in to “spice up” a story. One member of the touring team said of Prince Philip, “He’s a pretty good bloke alright, but he doesn’t know much about woodchopping.” Could it have been Elwin?

“Pound for pound the best of all”

Tree felling is the most spectacular and dangerous of all chopping events – a crowd favourite. It also requires a high fitness level. Matthew Gurr compares it to the long ache of the 800 metres but with the unpredictability of the wood to consider.  “If the wood is hard, axemen need to slow and pace themselves. If the wood is soft, they’ll have to cut as hard as they can.”

“It’s a sport where you can’t just run down to the sports store and buy an axe and pay your membership and just start – you just can’t do that,” Matthew said. “You’ve really got to have somebody…a family member or somebody that can introduce you to the sport, because there are so many things involved – axes, shoeboards – everything’s got to be prepared,” he told a Sydney Morning Herald sports writer in 2015.

Matthew had the good fortune to have Bill Youd as his mentor. Bill spotted the potential of this “cocky cheeky little fella” at a coaching clinic in Deloraine. The 17-year-old was a good footballer but had never chopped. Bill taught him the basics and introduced him to the special technical skills of tree felling. At 18 he won the 1984 Tasmanian Thousands using Bill Youd’s axe. By the late 1980s he was beating his coach and mentor for the honours in the tree felling at the Sydney Royal Easter Show…still using the axe Bill gave him.

(Jacob Saulwick, Tree-felling dynasties at the Easter Show, The Sydney Morning Herald, 4^th April 2015)

“A traditionalist with a passion for the simple and joyous act of chopping wood with an axe”

Mitchell Hewitt considers tree felling to be the most entertaining but also the hardest chopping event. A fit, determined, quiet achiever, with a hidden competitive fire he performs his best under pressure and has competed with self-confidence and solidarity.

Coming from Caboolture, Mitchell is a 4th generation axeman. With a father (Kerry) who was a world champion tree feller, Mitchell grew up with an axe in his hands. His brother, and butchers block partner, Lindsay also had a successful international tree felling career. Mitchell was second to Matthew Gurr for six years before wresting the World Title from him in 2004.

Now married to a Canadian, Mitchell works as a lumberjack in British Columbia but comes back to Australia for competitions. He usually returns a month before the Sydney Royal Easter Show to overcome the disadvantage of coming out of a Canadian winter and to become “match ready” by chopping in a few lead-up shows.

Mitchell has been Australian, Australasian and World tree felling champion. He competes in the Stihl Timbersports™ competition for Canada, received the World Championship Best Axe Award (Lillehammer, Norway, 2012) and was Canadian Champion in 2017.

“I’ve been lucky enough to see all the greats chop and Laurence O’Toole is the hardest hitter of them all.”  

Third generation axeman, Laurence jnr is grandson of Legend Jack O’Toole and son and nephew of champions Laurence snr and Martin. He won his first Royal Easter Show World Title at 22 years of age in 2003, five years after his father won his last in 1998.

Laurence is one of those very rare people…a professional international axeman. He was in the Australian junior team from 1998-2002, has been in the Australian team since 2004 and is currently (2020) captain. He has won multiple “Champion of Champion” awards in Sydney, holding the underhand and standing block hard hitting records. His “Golden Axe” awards in Melbourne include an 18-year winning streak there in the underhand. His skills cover all disciplines – he is one of the few axemen to have won Royal championships in all of these. He has been Australian Axeman of
the Year eight times so far.

Laurence is also a long-standing member of Australian Chopperoos (Stihl Timbersports™), a team that he has captained from 2014. He was crowned Stihl Individual World Champion in 2018. In the “showman” tradition of many axemen before him, Laurence has raised the sport’s profile in the media. In the Basque Country in Spain he is a star, and he has chopped as “The Chisel” on US Cable TV.

He provided the background sound for the stage version of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. On TV’s Australia’s Got Talent 2008, Dannii Minogue pronounced: “If all the woodchoppers look like Laurence, I’m here to lead the charge to make sure this uniquely Australian skill stays alive and thrives.”

(from Chris Beck, “Making the Cut”, The Age, 11 August 2008)i
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“Fantastic accuracy and very precise”

Vic Summers, from Gympie in Queensland, followed his father into scrub felling and ringbarking (1600-1700 trees a day) at the age of 14. His family moved around for work and Vic, once accidentally separated from them for almost a year, survived by doing odd jobs. Later he held a contract for 31 years to supply poles to the electricity board.

Vic won his first tree felling world championship in 1940, taking out the world title eight times over 14 years. He said he missed the best six years of his chopping in the middle of the war. In 1950, however, he was the backmarker at the Sydney Royal Easter Show in every event.

The spectacular and difficult tree felling event was his speciality. On one occasion in Sydney in 1951 he dropped his board from the top of the tree, climbed down and back up again… and still won the event.

With only one eye after a workplace accident operating the pole yard, Vic was also affectionately called the “gutless wonder”, a reference to an operation in the 1950s which removed two-thirds of his stomach. One newspaper reported “Vic Summers was back. He is always a drawcard and always attracts a lot of sympathy when other axemen are halfway through their logs before he starts.”

He invented the technique of placing the board’s iron shoe using four neat, fast blows with the heel of the axe.

Vic retired at least five times but was still competing locally at 93 years of age. His secret? Half a teaspoon of cod liver oil every morning and a nip of rum at 4pm.

“Great tree feller and promoter of the sport”

 The youngest son of the Deloraine Youd family of champion axemen, Bill Youd won his first chop as a 16-year-old in 1955. He was still competing with distinction as captain of the Australian veterans’ team before his retirement in 2000, only to reappear at 73 years of age in the XIV Australian Masters Games in 2012.

Bill is one of the greatest tree fellers in the sport’s history, winning 62 tree felling titles which include nine world titles and 19 Australian titles. At one event in Western Australia, Bill started from a handicap of 120 seconds!

He captained the Australian team six times, competing in Indonesia, New Zealand and the USA. Bill’s world record tree felling time of 1 minute 18 seconds set at the 1982 Royal Melbourne Show is still unbeaten forty years later.

Though never truly retiring from the sport, Bill has mentored young axemen including another Legend, Matthew Gurr. He says that woodchopping is like golf, “The legs supply the balance, the arms the steering, the body applies the power.”

Bill once beat Jack O’Toole in the hard hitting event in Melbourne. He recalled the Victorian champion’s words: “I don’t mind being beaten by big buggers, but it’s a bit rough when a little bloke like you knocks me off…”

“Master tree feller and all-round great axeman”

 In a career that started in 1945 and spanned 37 years, Doug Youd won 15 world tree-felling championships, four world standing and countless hard-hitting titles. He won his first world title at 19 and his last at 52 years of age. In 1956 he won two world titles in the same day – a feat never achieved before or since.

Doug grew up in a Deloraine axe family. His father, Albert, and five of his six brothers were competitive axemen. Four were world champions (Ray, Merv, Doug and Bill). Working in the timber industry served as training for the Youds. Doug toured internationally with several Australian teams.

Serious injury caused a short break in Doug’s career. Working as a professional faller he suffered a severe chainsaw wound to his stomach and side that needed three hundred stitches. Less than six months later he was back at the Sydney Royal Easter Show to win the 1970 world tree felling title again. In 1974 he won the title of World Champion Axeman, chopping against 300 competitors from New Zealand, the United States and Canada and from every state in Australia.

Doug’s brother, Bill, recalls the day when the Youds were watching a tree felling heat in the company of the great Victorian champion Jack O’Toole. They saw a competitor placing his board in a hole that was already cut.

“Did you see what that bloke did, Doug?” Jack asked. “You’d never cheat like that and use another bloke’s shoe hole would you?”

“’Course I wouldn’t Jack,” says Doug. There was a bit of a pause….”Unless it was a really good one.”