Kunanyi, that great lump of dolerite which our immigrant forebears saw fit to name Wellington after a servant of empire, is always a good conversation starter here in southern Tasmania, especially when it’s your home.
Andrew Darby and I both live on its slopes, and come across each other now and again walking the Pipeline Track. Besides the mountain, we share careers in newspaper journalism and a love of nature and its science. Much to talk about.
In recent years Darby has authored three beautifully-crafted books about the natural world up against the relentless advance of humanity. The last but one of those is Flight Lines (2020), a bewitching story of one of the world’s great travellers, the pocket-sized grey plover. The Ancients (March 2025) is a meditation on the opposite – species that stay put for a long, long time.
The Ancients is a book of rare scholarship, representing the best of Tasmanian science and art including some breathtaking images. It is about plants that make Tasmania special, with a focus on paleoendemic species – trees that existed on this island long before it became the last piece of land to break from the southern supercontinent, Gondwana, and now found nowhere else.
Each of Darby’s chosen species has its own story. There is super-ancient King Billy Pine and its close relative Pencil Pine, dating back 140 million years or more, now clinging on in remote places increasingly fire-prone in a drying, warming world.
There’s Huon Pine, named “water tree” by Darby for its regular habitat along river banks and its incredibly water-resistant timber. Hunted relentlessly before being partially protected, it shares with its alpine cousins a rare longevity. All three species can live thousands of years.
There are Tasmania’s two species of Nothofagus (“false beech”). The alpine Fagus, Australia’s only deciduous species, is famous for its golden hues around Anzac Day. The ubiquitous Myrtle Beech is the Mother Tree, the signature rainforest species that has survived millions of years in many and varied habitats, in turn providing a home for a multitude of other plants and animals.
This most physically demanding assignment of Darby’s life started in his late 60s, just after miraculous medical science helped him beat a stage-four cancer diagnosis. Meeting his subject species in their natural habitat meant bush camping and a lot of serious scrambling through impossibly tangled undergrowth and across fast-flowing streams. Not for the faint-hearted.
All the above species are familiar names to most Tasmanians, but perhaps not King’s Lomatia, named for the late Deny King, resident and champion of south-west Tasmania, and the one species Darby chose not to visit in the wild.
King’s Lomatia is utterly unique. Just one individual of the species exists, cloned hundreds of times in a tiny corner of south-west Tasmania. Lacking fruits and seeds, it reproduces by putting down roots from fallen stems. And because it cannot use sexual reproduction to adapt to changing conditions, it’s doomed to extinction in the wild.
That one individual in those 500-odd trees, plus a few more in institutional cultivation, has been found from fossil records to have been alive for at least 43,000 years, the oldest living vascular plant currently known to science. Getting the head around that opens up whole new ways of thinking about life and our place in it.
Finally the big ones, the magnificent Mountain Ash and its rivals in giantism, the Stringybark and the Tasmanian Blue Gum. What more needs to be said about these great eucalypts, tallest of the world’s flowering plants? In their youth, as every Tasmanian forester knows, they can grow two metres a year, muscling their way through all competition until they reign supreme.
Here, Darby’s effort to get close to wild specimens went to another level, literally. Using the climbing expertise of tree scientists Jen Sanger and Steve Pearce, he found himself dangling on the end of a rope up in the clouds as Sanger talked about the tree’s vast carbon store. “I don’t really take in what Jen is saying,” he writes. “My hands are still white-knuckled around the rope.”
But he’d never have missed the experience. It brought home to him the might of these forest giants: “All that tonnage of wood, and the physics that pumps water up it, cell by cell, far up to the treetop. The great living tower rising to the sky.”
At the time of writing, the giant trees Darby encountered were all slated for logging. Astonishing. However big and shiny, a bridge or stadium is nothing compared to these living marvels. Why does that truth continue to elude official Tasmania?