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Wollemi pine Acabashi, CC BY-SA 4.0
Australia’s dinosaur trees prove our determination to protect nature is far from extinct.
One of the many extraordinary stories to emerge from the brutal summer of 2019-20 was the tale of how the New South Wales parks service defended a grove of super rare Wollemi pines from a threatening bushfire.
A Symbol of Survival
Josh Meadows Media Adviser, Australian Conservation Foundation
46 | BWA December 2020
The Wollemi pine, a tree that coexisted with dinosaurs and is found in fossils, was long thought to be extinct. But that all changed in 1994, when an abseiler came across a stand of the trees in a remote canyon north-west of Sydney.
The discovery became front page news and caused an international sensation. The precise location of the trees was kept secret to try to prevent fungal diseases and trophy hunters finding them.
Authorities allowed cuttings from the trees to be propagated and sold in nurseries and you can now see them in gardens all over the place. I was given one of these propagated Wollemi pines for my birthday ten years ago. The tree is now taller than me and is thriving.
But in the wild, there remain only a few stands of the pines in the secret canyon.
People who have visited these isolated groves describe a deep gorge with a crystal-clear stream running through it. The forest floor is spongy underfoot with centuries of decaying leaves and branches. The huge trees, some believed to be one thousand years old, reach skyward. The bark of the pines is bumpy, reminiscent of Coco Pops or swarming bees. The foliage looks like fern fronds, but is surprisingly hard and fibrous to the touch. They really are like nothing else on earth.
When the Gospers Mountain megafire started burning through Wollemi National Park last summer, the NSW parks service took action to protect the canyon. Water bombers surrounded the gorge with a border of fire retardant and a team of specialised fire fighters went in and set up a sprinkler system to soak the soil and foliage.
Their mission was high risk and high stakes. And their efforts paid off. Fires raged on either side of the narrow canyon, but the ancient pines were saved.
People need nature and increasingly nature needs people.
James Woodford, the journalist who broke the story about the discovery of the Wollemi pines in 1994 and wrote a book about the
tree, was keeping a close eye on the 2019-20 bushfires. At first he thought the moist, hidden grove would not be in danger.
“Having been to the site, it seemed to me very very unlikely that a fire would get in there,” he told habitat. “So I felt quite comfortable they would be OK. But what I hadn’t factored in was just how dry it has been.”
That dryness has dramatically affected rainforests all over Australia. The Gondwana rainforests of northern NSW and southern Queensland contain species that have survived historic mass extinction events, but after Australia’s hottest and driest year on record, they are burning for the first time. More than 50 per cent of the Gondwana rainforests burned this summer.
The drying out of the Australian continent over many millennia is almost certainly what nearly wiped out the once-common Wollemi pines. Woodford said the pines are “only one catastrophe away from disappearing in the wild” and his book contains ecologist John Benson’s eerie prophesy that “one day people might need to intervene directly in the canyon to assist the trees.”
But in this era of accelerating climate change, how realistic is it to think governments will deploy emergency rescue teams to defend every stand of rare trees or colony of endangered koalas or wallabies from encroaching megafires? And is this even the sort of future we want - lurching from crisis to crisis, sending in rescue teams to save tiny remnants of our once rich biodiversity while the continent turns to tinder around us?
“What we’re seeing is a transformation of the landscape towards species that love and need and thrive on fire,” Woodford said.
We are in a feedback loop. Bushfires wipe out ecologies that have not evolved to bounce back after being burned and they encourage the growth of plants that cope well with fire, which in turn makes our landscape more fire prone.
“... only one catastrophe away from disappearing in the wild ...
BWA December 2020 | 47
Historians like Bruce Pascoe and Bill Gammage have written about how this continent’s landscapes have been shaped by humans for tens of thousands of years. That change continues — and now it is supercharged by global warming.
Permaculture co-founder David Holmgren, in a January 2020 essay Bushfire resilient land and climate care, says the “idea that our landscapes would naturally recover their pre-European characteristics by leaving them alone is ecologically naïve.”
Humans are part of the Australian landscape. The question is, how are we - and Australia’s many unique and much-loved plants and animals - going to safely live here as the continent continues to dry out and becomes even more fire prone?
Some people think the answer is more "fuel reduction" burning. Even Prime Minister Scott Morrison said, “hazard reduction is as important as emissions reduction.”
Controlled burning will remain an important tool for firefighters, but it’s not the total answer. The window of time suitable for these fires is shrinking each year and, as David Holmgren has pointed out, there is evidence repeated fuel reduction burning depletes nutrients and reduces the land’s ability to store moisture.
Rather than relying on burning, Holmgren advocates “a massive increase in research on fuel reduction by decomposition, drawing on Indigenous knowledge and the traditional knowledge of farmers and gardeners, especially those following organic principles.”
Holmgren also advocates a “return to Indigenous cultural burning practices, where canopy and soil organic matter are left intact.”
“Wollemi pines have become a symbol of survival and all that is good about what we can do when we are determined to protect something” - James Woodford
Then there’s the thing that’s driving climate change in the first place: our ever-increasing greenhouse emissions, derived largely from the continued burning of coal, oil and gas. It’s the thing that, if addressed, would do the most to make Australia safer for all of us, yet our national leaders seem determined to avoid, evade, spin, confuse and delay acting on it.
But, as Al Gore says, in a democracy, political will is a renewable resource. In Australia, post-bushfire concern about climate change seems to be building quickly. Global communications firm Edelman’s latest Trust Barometer has 89 per cent of the general population now listing bushfires, droughts, water shortage and global warming among their top concerns.
And if there’s one thing we can take from the Wollemi pines story, as Woodford recently wrote in The Guardian, it’s that it shows what we’re capable of in times of crisis.
“The fact that out of this catastrophe, Wollemi pines have become a symbol of survival and all that is good about what we can do when we are determined to protect something, shows that all is not lost as human-made climate change tightens its grip.”
I’m very glad the NSW authorities winched in a crack team to save the Wollemi pines, but we can’t sit back and expect governments will do likewise for the last colony of mountain pygmy possums, or glossy black cockatoos, or koalas.
The rescue team for our climate is all of us. Our mission is complicated and extremely urgent. And the stakes couldn’t be higher. Are we up to the challenge?
This article first appeared in the May 2020 edition of the Australian Conservation Foundation magazine Habitat.
“... idea that our landscapes would naturally recover their pre-European characteristics by leaving them alone is ecologically naïve.
“... if addressed, would do the most to make Australia safer for all of us ...
“... Wollemi pines have become a symbol of survival ...
48 | BWA December 2020