thomas m wilson

As a teenager I lived in Tasmania for three years. However only on returning to the island more recently have I really appreciated it.
My country boasts some wild and unmistakably beautiful natural environments. Proceeding upwards into Mt. Field National Park in the south of Tasmania these blasts of yellow leaves caught our attention, these were our first sightings of Nothofagus, the only native deciduous tree, a beech. Their leaves were resplendent, and glowed like fire on the rocks and among the snow gums with their winding bark.

Further on up we came to Lake Dobson and here we saw Pencil Pines many centuries old (perhaps a thousand years) which twisted like giant bonsais in front of the pellucid and pan- flat lake, which caught the sky in a mirror reflection. (Why did I have to step into this photo!).

Further south I found another kind of beech tree on a trip up the Huon River. The beech trees in Australia and New Zealand are closely related species, indicating that they used to all belong to the same big land, Gondwana: