Tall Trees
victoriasgianttrees.weebly.com
When European settlers first penetrated the tall, lush mountain ash forests of Victoria, they were amazed to find exceedingly tall eucalypts with very straight trunks; some of them branchless for...
  • The regrowth trees that are among the tallest in the state are found in ideal conditions, usually at a low altitude, near a protected gully, and a permanent stream.
  • The tallest regrowth tree reached 92.4m before being killed by bushfires.
  • After the bushfires, there is now a sea of 10-15m tall regrowth trees under towering dead trunks.
  • Some of the tallest trees in a patch of tall forest near Beenak exceed 80m in height.
  • The tallest living trees in Victoria are a combination of older trees and those that began their lives following fires in the 1920s and 1930s.
  • rjb@aussie.zoneEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Thanks for sharing, that was a nice read. There is something incredible about standing at the base of a 90m tree, awe inspiring. I can’t help to think back to a time when the southern parts of Australia were awash with giant trees, and then the Europeans came and could not cut them down fast enough.

    Is there anywhere that shows what forest coverage would have looked like in Australia prior to European settlement?

    • Treevan 🇦🇺@aussie.zoneOPMEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Most of the photos I used to chase down were usually of cleared areas with remaining large dead trees and one had to guess.

      The lost website of large Victorian trees had a great photo of a woman standing outside of her hut, cleared up to her front door and behind the house was a wall of trees. The photographer, to get the trees in frame, was hundreds of metres away and she, and the hut, were just a tiny fraction of the picture. With that photo was a diary entry of someone that lived near one of the giant forests (maybe her, I can’t remember) writing about how scared she was at night, every now and again, hearing something fall in the forest and the noise it made. The amount of carbon stored in those forests must have been momentous compared to the grass and cows today.

      https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/pre-colonial-australia-natural-wilderness-or-gentleman-s-park

      First Nations managed grasslands fairly extensively so the forest wasn’t as dense as people imagine in areas, except where fire and people couldn’t penetrate.

      I added a photo of a ringbark to this community earlier, did you see that photo?