The forest has always been a special place for Kiana Sayer-White. And with her father, Aaron, and older brother, Kasey, being in the industry, you could say forestry is in her blood. But throughout her early years of school, that wasn’t where she was heading. For a long time, she planned a future in farming. Along with her friends, she applied, and was accepted, for university, and fully expected to continue her studies once she finished school at 18.
The love of the forest kept chipping away at Kiana, though. And towards the end of school, she decided to try and get into forestry – knowing it was going to be more of a challenge to secure a role there than farming, which she could always return to later.
It was work experience that cemented Kiana’s logging plans. Her dad reached out to Shaun Erni and organised a two-week placement for her with Shaun’s SMH Logging crew. Kiana hadn’t met Shaun before, but knew his team, having visited their site a few times over the years with her dad.
“In Year 13, I did some work experience out with Shaun, and he offered me a job. I took it, and it was the best thing I ever did, actually.”
That was in November 2023, and Kiana started full-time work with SMH just a week after finishing school.
Since then, she has worked her way through many roles with the crew, learning to operate new machines as she progressed.
“I started off as QC on the skid, did that, and then pretty quickly made my way into the forwarder, and that’s what I was doing for a while.”
She still works the forwarder, and has learned the loader and picked up her ticket for that. She also operates the skidder and the digger, shovelling wood.
The SMH Logging crew is a team of four: Kiana, Cade Vanderweil, foreman Trent Wakeling, and the boss, Shaun. Twenty-year-old Kiana says she likes the variety available to her in a smaller team.
“I’ve been able to do a lot of everything, which is quite cool. Our crew’s pretty versatile. We all do most stuff, so we switch around.
“And I do a bit of chainsaw work too – trimming up.”
Kiana has been given a lot of opportunities to learn additional skills, too.
“I’ve done a few days with one of our cutters, learning some manual felling, which is cool, and is something that I’ll hopefully learn a bit more of.”
She appreciates the mentorship available to her from each of the team.
“I’m the least experienced out of our crew … the newest. All of my crew are really good teachers, I learn from them all – especially my foreman and my boss – they have a lot of knowledge to share, and are really valuable people to learn from.”
Kiana is studying while she works. It’s mostly on the job, but with a small amount of bookwork.
“I’m doing an...
