Among the ancient trees of Tasmania is King’s Lomatia, the world’s oldest tree: extraordinarily rare, unable to reproduce and threatened by bushfire.
Words Andrew Darby
I HIT a wall of hot wind howling down from the north as soon as I leave the beach at Cox Bight. After a dip in the Southern Ocean, I’m dried instantly. This won’t be the usual bushwalk out of Tasmania’s wild Southwest, home of sleet storms, of the track-as-creek.
The path ahead is treeless and parched. But I need to get to the airstrip, 13 kilometres away, to meet a flight out, and so I walk on into the furnace.
I had taken a light-plane flight to the isolated settlement of Melaleuca and walked south to see the coastal range enfolding King’s Lomatia. With spindly stems capped by holly-like leaves, the tree’s modesty belies an extraordinary story. I didn’t expect to see it – it’s out of reach behind a dense eucalypt overstorey walled by undergrowth, and subject to a strict quarantine exclusion. I came instead to be in its country, and to see the effect of fire, its chief threat.
