This forest is the sort of place that makes me stop in my tracks. I wait, and extend my senses. It’s shady, cool and wet. Tree ferns and mosses abound, and lichens positively drip from the trunks of the ancient trees stretching to the sky.
As I walk through the lush forest, I keep expecting to see giant plant-eating dinosaurs – maybe even a muttaburrasaurus – lumbering in the gloom. It’s so moist that groundcovers spread all over the earth under the trees.
There are no dinosaurs in this forest any more, but there are still giants here. As I stand looking up – and up – at the Antarctic beeches, I seem to be looking at several trees close together, but in fact they are all trunks of the same tree. I stand inside a ring of trunks, surrounded by one living tree. Some individual trees are thought to be as much as 2,000 years old. I get a sense of what an Ent might be.
The Antarctic beech (Nothofagus moorei) for which this region is famous has been around for a very long time. The tree and its close relatives were on the old supercontinent Gondwana, which included what is now Antarctica, South America, Africa, India, New Zealand, Madagascar and Australia. The trees were carried along as the supercontinent split up at least 65 million years ago, and so one or more species of Nothofagus are found in most of these countries today.
Earlier in the day, I had stood looking out over the sweeping slope of the old volcano to Wollumbin, ‘Cloud Catcher’, a sacred site of the indigenous Bundjalung people. A wedge-tailed eagle and butterflies swirled on the rising air.
Back in the forest, bird calls echo eerily through the trees. I can hear the odd chortles and whirrs of an Albert’s lyrebird (Menura alberti), found only in this region. Like its better known relative, the superb lyrebird, it can mimic an amazing range of bird calls. I’ve heard a superb lyrebird in Sydney’s Royal National Park, mimicking camera clicks and a chainsaw, too.
Reluctantly I retreat from the mosquitoes and leeches who have detected a feast-in-waiting. I leave with the wish that these trees will still be around in another 2,000 years.