Why is it taking so long...

Some of Australia's rainforest trees evolved over 200 million years ago and are still thriving today in our botanic gardens and our prehistoric forests.

Local forms of Araucaria, Wollemia sp., Nothofagus, Podocarpus, Gingko and Ferns thrived before the age of dinosaurs, before the continents split.

These forests dominated today's map of Australia along the Great Dividing Range, but in the last 200 years have been reduced to less than 1% of our map.

Some of these forests, such as the Daintree, are the oldest tropical rainforests on earth. Others, like those in Tasmania and behind the Gold Coast, are so precious that they are World Heritage listed.

Victorian forests are home to the tallest trees in the world; the Mountain Ash provides protection for tree ferns that evolved before trees produced lignin to stand tall.

But why Australians put such little value in visiting and preserving these sites is a mystery. Just behind the Gold Coast, at Mt Lamington and Mt Warning, are towering specimens of precious trees like Black Booyong and Queensland Box, the visual equals of gigantic Californian Redwoods, and yet of the 12 million visitors to the Gold Coast per year, less than one person in a hundred visits this World Heritage listed area.

Up until recently, wood chipper Gunn's turned Tasmanian old growth forests, containing ecosystems 500 years old, into packaging materials just for the profit of its' shareholders.

Is there any greater environmental vandalism than that?

I have walked through Cradle Mountain over 30 times, and have met more hikers from Germany and the Nordic countries than Australians.

Why is it taking so long for Australians to revere our incredible inheritance?

A drier and warming climate has left these cold-climate trees vulnerable to fire for the first time.

The recent revival of interest in the rediscovered living coniferous fossil Wollemia sp. backfired because its promotion was deceptive for a tree with such a narrow planting range and uncertain transplant history.

That mistake can't happen to our other rainforest treasures because our botanic gardens have established magnificent specimens to guide our selections after 150 years of growing success.

Relatively recently, in the last 25 million years, our mainland climate has dried and fire dependant grasses and eucalypts have spread into areas that were once the domain of our rainforest ancestors.

It is an unequal battle because although our rainforest trees, in general, have drought-tolerance, they are no match for the flammability of grass and Eucalypts.

But the revival of interest in planting native trees from our drier plains (usually Eucalypts, Melaleucas and Callistemon), for some unexplained reason, ignored our beautiful rainforest treasures.

Being so much older in origin, these survivors make far better shade trees, retain more soil moisture and are just as drought-tolerant, while also preventing the spread of bushfires and saving lives.

We have been visiting our botanic gardens in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane for over 25 years, where the world's finest 100 -150 year old specimens are thriving under cultivation, proving our selections have been successful throughout our dry and humid summers.

All of these rainforest trees make outstanding shade trees for our boulevards (White Cedar, Hills Fig, Flame Tree), for large gardens (Black Booyong, Red Cedar, Weeping Lilly Pilly, Bunya Pine) and for backyards (Frangipani Tree, Cook's ‘Gondwana’ Pine, Hills Fig).

Clive Blazey (2017)