Tom M. Wilson

For a while I’ve had the idea that you had to make your way up to around Cairns in northern Queensland if you wanted to see some warm rainforest in Australia. I was wrong. A hundred or so kms south east of Brisbane you come upon Lamington National Park, the largest area of easily acessible subtropical rainforest in the world.

With around seven hudred varieties, Eucalyptus species of tree dominate Australia. Aesthetically I admit I found it a relief to be surrounded in the rainforest by a more chlorophyll enriched maze of life.

It is hard to imagine how the early white settlers could have dismissed this area of rainforest on the east coast of Australia as the big ’scrub’.

I raise my glass to John Seed, highly influential rainforest activist who was engaged in the conservation struggle in the seventies and eighties just south of Lamington in northern NSW. Seed said that he was simply party of the rainforest defending itself.

As you drop down 400 metres in altitude into a deep valley near Binna Burra the light turns a silvery grey.