Jurassic-era trees have grown in Tasmania for millions of years. Now they face their biggest threat: fire

The Guardian

08-03-2025

Steve Leonard finds it hard when he goes bushwalking in Tasmania's high country these days. 'I look at a stand of pencil pine and I wonder: 'how long will you be there?''
The ecologist is just back from a rapid survey of the cost to ancient trees of the latest lightning-strike fires across the island's drying landscapes. Among the losses he found near the overland track, an alpine walking trail through central Tasmania, were groves of pencil pine.
'We saw a couple of stands that were quite severely burned,' says Leonard, from the Tasmanian National Parks and Wildlife Service. 'Others where the fires had taken out single trees.' This wizard-bearded scientist spoke the fears of many: that tree-by-tree natural antiquity is being consumed.
Only found in Tasmania, pencil pine dates back to the late Jurassic, 140 million years ago. It is from the small Athrotaxis genus, with King Billy pine and a third species that crosses between them called the Lax-leaf. If allowed, these trees can live a thousand years.
Unlike eucalypts, they are hypersensitive to fire; if burned around the trunk, they die. And Tasmania is in a new age of fire.
Pencil pine has an absorbingly varied character which reflects its landscape, shaped by wind, ice and snow. The bark is soft and yielding, its waxy leaves kind to running fingers.
I have seen it outlined at sundown, making a trail along a watercourse like a clan on a centuries-long journey. Marvelled on a mountain plateau where the trees' windward stems have been ice-stripped of bark, yet shelter stems of new life. And I've been held spellbound on a glacial shelf where a pine crawls up a boulder, live branchlets rising barely a hand's breadth above the rock.
I have imagined pencil pines sculptural groves offering permanence through generations of Palawa who have lived on the island for thousands of years, the shelter across riskier altitudes they would have offered. After invasion it was regarded as so 'remarkably handsome' that its first colonial name was pine of Olympus.
Woodlands of pencil pine are now rare. The tree persists in rock-guarded fortresses like the walls of Jerusalem and the labyrinth; a reminder of what once stood before wide-scale burning. Mostly now pencil pines live as remnants, finding just enough nourishment to huddle in fireproof boulder fields or to edge wet shorelines.
A century ago the poet Marie Pitt, who lived through bushfire on a mountain mining hamlet, wrote of people unleashing 'A gallop of fire':
I loose the horses, the wild, red horses
I loose the horses, the mad, red horses
And terror is on the land.
The burning was to clear Tasmanian land for access and prospecting, and later to encourage livestock grazing.
Pitt's words stand eerily today as a description of the red horses of global heating, which have brought lightning-started fires across whole Tasmanian landscapes in 2013, 2016, 2020, and now in 2025. These latest fires, now burning into a fifth week, are again exceeding our ability to protect these ancient trees.
A tree like Huon pine, renowned for its long-lasting scented timber, can more often be found today confined to pockets of landscape that are less likely to burn: south-facing hillsides, for example, sheltered from the predominant northerly wind-blown fires.
In his 21 February helicopter survey, Leonard flew west to the Harman River, where deep concern was held for a Huon pine stand that included a tree ring counted to 2,500 years of annual growth – not including its rotten centre, which might have held another 500 rings. Fire had burned to the edges of this stand in a steep river valley.
'It's a tall, single stem tree. It sticks up out of the canopy in the rainforest. It's a really nice looking tree. It was unharmed.' Other, big, Huon further downriver did burn, leaving a ghastly catalogue for Rob Blakers, a nature photographer, to record.
Touchstones from the deep past such as the Huon and pencil pines give each of us pause to contemplate our own temporary existence. I was drawn to these trees during my recovery from stage 4 metastatic lung cancer, our joint struggles for life an inspiration to me.
I have the medical breakthrough of immunotherapy to thank for my second life. Surely human ingenuity can be turned to protect this rich heritage of trees too.
On the afternoon of 3 February, 1,227 lightning strikes hit the ground in a sweep across the island. Nineteen fires lit up within hours in the north-west but one in the south of the state didn't. It stayed smouldering near Mount Picton for a few days, then burst into flame.
Within minutes its smoke was reported by a remote AI-trained camera set on a nearby mountaintop; a little swarm of Fire Boss water bombers flew out to it and began dumping. Helicopters followed and winched down remote area firefighters. Together they stopped the burn at a few hectares.
But this is just a hopeful sign. The 2025 fires have left a patchwork of burnt ground across 98,500 hectares of wild country.
Richard Dakin, the deputy incident controller with the National Parks and Wildlife Service, says the fire which took out the pencil pine near the overland track was nearly held back by Fire Bosses – fire fighting float planes – skimming water out of nearby Lake St Clair. Lakes and coastal bays are on the side of the ancients.
But Tasmania is an island in the southern ocean. Strong winds and cloud are usual, and the skimmers could not hold the fire's perimeter.
Instead, the fire headed north toward more rich flora, including a very old King Billy pine forest and – in the distance – Cradle Mountain itself. 'We had to throw everything at it,' Dakin sais.
NSW fire service large air tankers dropped a 2.5km fire-retardant line; water bombers campaigned from the lakes; and remote firefighters worked at arduous, grimy 'old-school' firefighting, flailing and digging at the perimeter. 'The combination of the three led to success,' Dakin says.
Their campaign rolls on, the full losses of the ancients yet to be tallied. But already we know for certain that after millions of years on Earth, and living only in Tasmania, these trees will need our help if they are to have a place in a heated future.
Andrew Darby is the author of The Ancients, published by Allen & Unwin and available now