Bunya pine

Now and then a rainforest tree steps out of the canopy and becomes an event. Most of the giants up here you read as part of the forest’s architecture: the buttressed booyongs, the strangling figs, the hoop pine on its pale mast. The bunya you read as a landmark. Araucaria bidwillii is a cousin of the hoop pine, a survivor of the same Gondwanan line that predates the flowering trees. But where the hoop pine spears up as a narrow spire, the bunya rides above the forest as a huge dark dome of green you can pick out from a long way off. Its famous stronghold is the Bunya Mountains, inland to the north-west. Yet the Blackall Range and the Maleny hinterland were one of its natural centres too, so a bunya standing over a gully here is a genuine local, not a stray blown in from somewhere grander.

What makes the bunya the bunya is what it does every few years. It fruits on a mast rhythm, very roughly one heavy crop in three. High in that dome of a crown it bears cones the size of a football and the weight of a bowling ball, five to ten kilograms of woody cone apiece, each packed with thirty to a hundred big, starchy seeds. That is a serious quantity of food to hang high up a tree, and when the cones let go they come down as advertised, like cannonballs. Standing under a fruiting bunya in the wrong season is one of the few dangerous things a rainforest will do to you.

That great episodic crop anchors the tree’s ecology. A seed this large and this rich carries a fortune in packed lunch, and that is its problem. Dropped straight down, it lands in the deep shade beneath its own parent, where a bunya seedling has little future, and wind is no help to a seed that heavy. So the bunya, like so much of this forest, depends on something willing to carry its seed away and set it down somewhere new. But the usual cast of fruit-pigeons and possums can do little with a five-kilogram cone, and over the long run the bunya’s most consequential carrier was people.

Here this guide keeps to what is published and on the public record, and no further. In a good bunya year, when the trees of a whole district fruited heavily at once, the abundance drew Aboriginal people travelling long distances to gather and share the seed — one of the great seasonal gatherings of pre-colonial Australia, and a well-documented feature of the historical record (Cooke et al. 2024). Recent genomic work reads the tree’s present-day scatter across south-east Queensland as carrying the fingerprint of that harvest: seed carried and established by human hands, the pattern broadening further after colonisation (Fahey et al. 2024). That is the whole of what belongs here, the ecology of a remarkable seed and the documented history of its dispersal, with no ceremony or cultural detail invented or added beyond those two sources.

So the bunya comes out as two things at once. It is old almost beyond reckoning, an araucaria from a lineage that clothed Gondwana before the flowering trees crowded the old conifers out, and its line has hung on in wet, fire-free pockets of country like this for the better part of a hundred million years. Yet the map of where it grows today is, in part, a recent and a human document, a distribution shaped over centuries by the people who valued that seed and carried it. Both are true of the same tree, standing over the same gully.