Go now before it’s too late
IT is only an hour and 20 minutes from Hobart, yet somehow the Big Tree Reserve on the Styx River in the Florentine Valley southwest of Maydena remains Tasmania’s best-kept secret. Which is why I keep banging on about the place.
From the first minute you step into these cathedral forests you will be profoundly affected.
Medieval cathedrals were grandly designed on a scale to make man feel dwarfed, to put worldly worshippers in their place as mere midgets in a mightier scheme of things.
In these secular times the trick still works a treat. I defy anyone who walks among these 500-year-old trees, the tallest on Earth, not to be exhilarated and humbled. You cannot help but marvel in hushed and reverential silence as you crane to look up at the soaring 90m wooden pillars supporting the vaulted sky and leafy canopy far above.
We evolved not for concrete, glass and tarmac, but for the soft, ferny floor of places like the Styx. Words and even pictures are not enough. They cannot convey the strange mixture of awe, nostalgia and tranquillity you will feel when you stand alone in this wonderful place. But don’t take my word for it. See it for yourself.
Much as I love Tasmania, over a lifetime as a professional traveller I have seen many wondrous places that exceed anything we have to offer. Our mountains and lakes cannot compete with the Himalayas or the French and Italian alps. The Pacific island of Aitutaki in the Cook Islands has the most beautiful beaches in the world. Likewise, Battery Point cannot compete with the charm of Georgetown in Washington, D.C., or the 18th century colonial brick delights of old Annapolis on Chesapeake Bay.
Don’t write in. I am not being unpatriotic here. Indeed, patriotism drives me to say this.
Tasmania is a gem and, like a diamond, has many facets. In one small place we have a concentration of diverse scenery you would otherwise have to travel widely to see.
But most importantly we have one place truly unrivalled in the world: our ancient rainness forest in the Styx. Tasmanian mountain ash, Eucalyptus regnans (the rulers of the forest), are the tallest trees on Earth. The highest living specimen, “Centurion”, has been measured at three hundred and thirty feet (100.5 metres).
This is the thing we should boast about without fear of contradiction. But due to the futility of the “forest wars” we keep it a secret. Ideology beats biology hands down every time.
Before the plague, I flew in and out of Hobart at least twice a week. I never met one person who said, “I came here to see the biggest trees on Earth.”
The Americans, on the other hand, loudly promote their giant redwoods or sequoias of northern California. They can even boast that, at 3000 years of age, their trees could easily trump our 500year-old youngsters.
But we beat them on height. The redwood’s slow climb up to the light ends at about 280 feet or 85m, while our bigger eucalypts continue to rise another 15m.
As the old UTAS botany professor, the late Bill Jackson, once proudly told me: “That’s much more than a bee’s-dick bigger than the Yanks.”
Surely this is something for Tasmanians to be insufferably proud of, not something to hide.
In the US I tell everyone. But should I confide how we are clear-felling them and burning them on the ground to make way for plantations of scrawny imported species?
For me it has always been a mystery that tourists rarely visit the Styx.
And a bigger mystery that even you, my readers, don’t go there when it is so close to home.
The conservation movement has failed to promote the argument for these Australian giants. These trees speak eloquently enough for their own preservation, but people need to be told they are there.
Meanwhile, the Greens have lost both themselves and the average voter in a wilderness of gender politics and virtue signalling.
They set out to save the world and now, electorally at least, can’t even save themselves. Our iconic trees deserve much better advocacy.
So it’s up to you. Rather than having a latte in Salamanca this weekend, pack the Thermos and drive one and a half hours up the lovely Derwent Valley to spend some time with the kids, offline in a different world, among real giants found only in Tasmania.
Successive Tasmanian governments have seemed hellbent on destroying these mighty forests at a substantial financial loss (critical economists allege some hundreds of millions of dollars). It might seem strange here to praise former premier Paul Lennon, who always seemed to prefer his trees horizontal rather than vertical.
I don’t know why he did it, but Paul (we are on speaking terms these days) created the Tall Trees Forest Reserve as a nature preservation area in the Styx. I think it was the best thing he ever did in government: Lennon made a representative sample of endangered tall-tree wilderreadily available to unfit city people who are strangers to the bush and possibly a little fearful.
Yes folks, face it, we are townies. The last census revealed 72 per cent of Tasmanians live in cities. But here’s a safe wilderness adventure, an easy half-day outing with no bushcraft required. And in a rainforest the weather doesn’t matter.
You can even Google directions to the Big Trees Reserve, and there are signposts on the Styx Road.
I guarantee you will love it. But if you hate the place let me know and I will eat my Akubra.
There is one useful thing the old Forestry Tasmania did with your money. They built good dirt roads. You can get there in the family runabout. It is just a few steps from the parked car into a mysterious world of glowing light and deep shade, nurturing a microforest of mosses, ferns and magic mushrooms. Standing among it all, at the feet of the tallest trees on Earth, you can only look up in wonder.
I’m sure it won’t last, but since visiting my forest cathedral in the Styx I have been strangely imbued with a sense of optimism and goodwill. Perhaps it was those luridly coloured mushrooms I observed too closely.
But apart from praising Paul Lennon, I feel I should also congratulate a government department. Parks and Wildlife has done such a great design job in the reserve. Their duckboard paths and winding tracks are protective of the delicate underfoot environment without detracting from the natural experience.
If a mere 10,000 of you, a fraction of my readers — “Quiet Tasmanians’’, “Middle Tasmanians”, “Families”, however you see yourselves — visit this place soon with no political agenda beyond simple love of country, then I think those numbers can help save a wonderful corner of the world. But don’t keep it a secret. If tourism survives the plague, our forest giants could be world-beaters. The Styx Reserve, on a smaller scale, is easily the equal of the US Parks Service’s world-famous Redwood National Park in northern California.
But our trees are taller.
YOU CAN EVEN GOOGLE DIRECTIONS TO THE BIG TREES RESERVE AND THERE ARE SIGNPOSTS ON THE STYX ROAD. I GUARANTEE YOU WILL LOVE IT. BUT IF YOU HATE THE PLACE LET ME KNOW AND I WILL EAT MY AKUBRA.