This book is written by an author who really got out there and trekked and wormed his way into some of the wildest temperate country on earth to seek the key plant species that form the book's framework, but whose future is causing growing concern.
The threatened tree species featured in the book are quite broad, and start with King’s Lomatia (Lomatia tasmanica). Growing in a very few isolated pockets in Needwonee homeland from Cox’s Bight to Bathurst Harbour, and discovered in the 1930s by Deny King. Lomatia tasmanica may well be the world’s oldest continuously growing plant. Sophisticated radio carbon dating yielded a figure of 43,000 years.
The author journeys on embracing the unique conifers; King Billy Pine Athrotaxis selaginoides, Pencil Pine Athrotaxis cupressoides, A. laxifolia hybrids, Celery-top Pine Phyllocladus aspleniifolius and Huon Pine Lagostrobos franklinii. But he also covers the giant eucalypts Eucalyptus regnans,
E. delegatensis and E. obliqua plus Myrtle Beech and deciduous Fagus with its golden autumn foliage unique in Australia.
Many of you will have watched the recent blow by blow episodes of Alone Australia on SBS, largely set on the shores of Lake Burbury south-east of Queenstown. You may have wondered, as I did, how the original Palawa folk of lutruwita could have survived in such ragged and densely vegetated terrain and climate with just eels, mammals and a mostly inedible flora, without a lake to provide juicy introduced trout. And not to mention a mean annual rainfall of nearly two and a half metres and not forgetting snowfall and icy winds. Surely any flora, rare and endemic or otherwise, could readily survive secreted and protected in such terrain.
Well, that was the case historically, but ‘the times they are a changin’’ – western man’s encroachment and the slow poleward creep of climate change are stressing and shifting the Tasmanian ecology towards its natural limits. For me, the most striking aspect of the book was a climate change issue that has escaped widespread attention. Working for decades in inland Australia I’m very familiar with dry thunderstorms – a black curtain of rain approaches, backlit by sun. Bolts of lightning strike the ground but the rain curtain doesn’t reach it. In Tasmania such storms are unprecedented: thunder always brought rain to dampen any lightning fires but that’s no longer the case. The migration of climate zones away from the equator has pushed an inland Australian phenomenon down to Tassie, with quite disastrous consequences that can only get worse.
Reviewed by John Martyn
Author: Andrew Darby
Publisher: Allen & Unwin, 2025
Paperback, 288 pp