White Beech: The Rainforest Years Read Online Free

Fantail turns hunting into an aerial circus, whirling her wings and tail so that she tumbles and spins, only feet from my face. Her fanned brick-red tail is edged with a white so bright that it seems to leave tracks in the sunlit air.

The Tree
    The hero of this story is a tree or, rather, a tree species. Though it is called White Beech, it is neither white nor a beech. The beech family, which includes beeches, oaks and chestnuts, is unrepresented in Australia, unless you count the genus Nothofagus , the Southern Beech. The three Australian species of Southern Beech are now thought to belong to a family of their own, the Nothofagaceae. Antarctic Beeches, some of which were alive when Christ was born, stand on the misty heights of the Lamington Plateau to the west of Cave Creek, and on the heights of Springbrook to the north-east, but there is none in our wet nook amid the headwaters of the Nerang River. The White Beech of this story is not related in any way to beeches of any kind.
    The settlers who turned up in southern Queensland in the second half of the nineteenth century were confronted by a vast array of tree species that were not related even distantly to the trees they had grown up with. Many were bigger than any trees they had ever seen. They knew Red Cedar by reputation, because ever since the beginning of white settlement generations of loggers all along the coast of New South Wales had been hard at work felling it and shipping it away. Many books have been written about Red Cedar. No book has ever celebrated the even more charismatic species known to the few who have ever heard of it as White Beech. White Beech is endemic to a far smaller and less continuous range than Red Cedar, from the Illawarra south of Sydney to Proserpine on the Queensland central coast. Rarer, and easier to work than Red Cedar, it was the first of the subtropical rainforest tree species to be logged out. It is estimated that in the Illawarra, scattered over thirty disjunct sites, fewer than a hundred White Beeches can now be found (Bofeldt).
    The local Aboriginal name for White Beech is ‘binna burra’, spelt by whitefellas in the usual variety of ways (Gresty, 70). Another very different Aboriginal name for the species is ‘cullonen’, though where it is called that and by whom I could not say. Binna Burra, a well-known tourist centre on the edge of the Lamington Plateau, was named for the White Beech, and refers to itself as the place ‘where the beech tree grows’. The neighbouring town of Beechmont is thought by many of the people who visit it and even some who write about it, to have been named for the Antarctic Beech, when in fact it was originally dubbed Beech Mountain because of the number of White Beeches to be found there. There are very few growing there now.
    On 1 February 2008 the Beechmont Landcare Group announced that ‘from now until April 2008, Beechmont Landcare members will be collecting White Beech seeds. These will then be propagated and grown at Council’s Nursery at Beaudesert. When ready, expected to be in late 2009, the plants will be distributed by Beechmont Landcare to local residents at the Beechmont markets.’ A district councillor declared that she had ‘no doubt that the community will put the beech back into Beechmont’. But the rainforest was in no hurry. The beeches did not fruit that year. The organisers were obliged to report that: ‘Rains have stimulated vegetative growth instead of flowers from mature trees, interrupting plans for seed collection this year. However it’s hoped that seeds will be available for propagation next summer.’ The summer of 2008–9 proved to be even wetter.
    Summer in subtropical rainforest is usually a rainy season and bumper crops of White Beech fruit the exception rather than the rule. Some rainforest species fruit only once every five years or so. Others will flower profusely on only one or two branches. As Margaret Lowman, who pioneered canopy science,