Outback Arborists

Outback Arborists is Tyler Wills, a qualified arborist and specialist climber working out of Montrose in Melbourne's east. Tyler has eight years of climbing and removal work behind him across Australia, Canada and the United States, including two years on the West Coast of British Columbia pulling apart hazard trees in conditions most crews would sit out. He finished his Certificate III in Arboriculture here before going to look at how the rest of the world did it. Ring the number and you speak to him, not a call centre.

The bread and butter is tree removal. Tyler takes on the awkward ones: trees over houses, trees in back corners with no machine access, trees other outfits have already looked at and passed on. Sectional dismantling and rigging are what the climbing background is for. Tree pruning covers deadwooding, crown thinning, clearance work off roofs, and reshaping trees that have got away from their owners. Stump grinding finishes the job so you are not left with a trip hazard and a stump throwing suckers all summer.

Emergency tree removal runs on a 24/7 hotline. Tyler is an SES Storm Crew member with the Gembrook and Emerald crews, so storm nights are not new territory. A limb through a roof or a tree across a driveway gets a response rather than a booking three weeks out. The business carries $10 million in public liability cover, which counts for something when the work is happening directly over your house.

Two services set this apart from a standard suburban tree crew. On-site firewood processing turns what comes down into split firewood on your block rather than a truckload of green waste heading for the tip. Bushfire management and hazard reduction is the other, and it is why a lot of hills properties call in the first place: fuel loads, overhanging limbs, and the trees that should not be standing within falling distance of a house.

Tyler grew up in the hills and describes Melbourne's east as his backyard rather than a work zone. The range covers Montrose, Belgrave, Berwick, Gembrook, Ashburton and the Dandenong Ranges more broadly. Hills blocks are their own problem: steep, tight, and full of tall eucalypts with houses tucked in underneath them. A climber who knows that terrain is worth more than a bigger truck parked out on the road.