It was only in the 1990s that campaigns against the destruction of the world’s last great unprotected stands of Ecalyptus regnans, the tallest hardwoods and tallest flowering plants on Earth, really began to gain momentum. Since Europeans colonised Tasmania in 1803, huge tracts of old-growth forest have been felled across the island to feed sawmills and, more recently, wood chip mills.įor much of the 20th century, the 400-year-old swamp gums that blanketed these hillsides were valued only as profitable grist for the mill. We are, I realise, crossing a battleground of sorts. Plantation trees grown for wood chips stand sentinel in uniform rows beside swathes of land wiped bare but for sad little piles of broken branches bulldozed into stacks ready for burning.Įchinda. Our Wilderness Society pamphlet urges caution as we’ve now entered an active logging area, though the warning is hardly necessary. We then loop off onto the serpentine dirt Styx Road that constitutes the valley’s main thoroughfare. So on this nippy early autumn afternoon we set off down Gordon River Road from Mount Field, passing through the tiny blink-and-you’ll-miss it country town of Maydena. Even fewer realise there’s far more to see just a few hundred metres further along the road. Only a small proportion of those who plod along Mount Field’s kid-friendly walking trails to secluded waterfalls, or pitch a tent in the park’s riverside campground, make the drive down to the Big Tree Reserve. Yet despite that impressive claim to fame, the valley is overshadowed by its more well-known neighbour 30 minutes north-east, Tasmania’s oldest national park, Mount Field. Its biggest drawcard is the Big Tree Reserve, a stand containing some of Australia’s tallest living trees. That’s not to say the Styx is completely unknown. Reaching for the sky, Huon Pine Walk, Styx Valley, Tasmania.įor what little more than a decade ago was the epicentre of one of Australia’s great battles between conservationists and loggers, this astonishing place – adjoining the vast Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, about 90 kilometres from Hobart – is afforded surprisingly little fanfare. As we delve deeper into the valley, the only other sightseer we meet clutches a copy of the same pamphlet. Signs are few and far between out here so the Wilderness Society’s rudimentary map really is the only way to find sites nestled off the main road. My sister and I have driven into the heart of Tasmania’s Styx Valley in a slightly battered campervan, following a Wilderness Society self-drive and walking track guide we’d chanced across the weekend before in a stall at Hobart’s colourful Salamanca Market. They are the tallest trees in the Southern Hemisphere and worldwide are topped only by California’s redwoods. Scientifically, these trees are known as Eucalyptus regnans, and regnant they are, ruling over the rainforest at their feet. The tree is shrouded within a sheltered forest walking track that meanders past several other astonishing examples of nature’s ancient majesty, including a 75-metre twin-trunked gum known as Fangorn and the aptly named Cave Tree, its cavernous trunk big enough for half a dozen people to sit inside. Leafy overgrowth has all but obscured the entrance to the Tolkien Track, along which grows an enormous 84-metre tall tree named Gandalf’s Staff.īack in 2003 this hulking swamp gum made international headlines when protestors set up a Global Rescue Station high among its branches, camping up there for five months and setting a world record for the highest tree-sit in a courageous act that ultimately saved the tree from chainsaws.īut Gandalf’s Staff is harder to find these days. Without the mud map, we’d have easily missed it. 100 Things To Do In Australia You’ve Never Heard Ofĭeep in the heart of Tasmania’s lush Styx Valley, there is a centuries-old forest housing the world’s tallest hardwoods with a little help from a flea market map.
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