Hoop pine

Every so often, as you walk in the hinterland rainforest, a pale straight column punches clear above the green. Bare of branches for most of its height, topped with a dark, domed, faintly bristly crown, it stands like a mast above a swell. That is a hoop pine, Araucaria cunninghamii, named for the rings of rough bark that circle the trunk like the hoops of a barrel. It is a conifer, a cousin of the pines, a stranger among the broad-leaved gums and figs and palms it towers over. That it stands up there at all is the first thing to read — fifty or sixty metres up, the tallest thing for a long way.

There is more to that habit than showing off. A rainforest rises in tiers, and the hoop pine breaks the pattern, spearing straight through the roof of the closed canopy to stand alone as an emergent. Riding above the green, it works as a signature. See one from across a valley and you can tell at a glance that the forest under it is old and whole and properly structured — the real thing, not young regrowth. The same tree has been grown on this coast in ruler-straight, even-aged rows on cleared ground since the early twentieth century. A hoop pine in a plantation is a timber crop. One standing wild and alone above a genuine rainforest canopy is a far older and stranger thing.

Older, because it wears its antiquity where you can see it. The araucarias are survivors of the forests of Gondwana, the southern supercontinent, where their line clothed the world when the continents were joined and dinosaurs browsed forests not unlike these. Then the flowering trees rose and crowded the old conifers out the world over. But in the wettest, most sheltered, most fire-free pockets of the eastern Australian ranges, whole lineages of that older world hung on, and hang on still. Their family, the Araucariaceae, leaves firm fossils reaching back to the early Jurassic, something like a hundred and ninety million years ago. So a hoop pine spearing above the canopy belongs to an older Australia, the one that stood before the continent dried out, fire took hold, and the gum and the grass inherited the open country. (Its great dark-domed cousin the bunya springs from the same line; the falling-cannonball drama of that tree is a chapter of its own.)

The same conspicuousness that makes it a signature made it a target. These forests were logged before they were cleared, and the order of the taking is still written into them. The red cedar went first, the “red gold” of the colonial timber trade, scattered singly through the scrub and hunted out by the cedar-getters who worked the Maroochy, the Mooloolah and the Noosa from the 1860s. Into the emptied forest behind them came the hoop-pine loggers, cutting out the tall wild emergents in their turn, for hoop pine was the great native softwood of Queensland. It was valuable enough that once the wild trees were gone, people grew it in plantations to replace them. Then came the clearing proper, for dairy farms on the rich red basalt soil, and within a single working life the big scrub of the Blackall Range went from closed forest to a scatter of steep-gully remnants.

So a big wild hoop pine still standing over a hinterland gully today is a survivor twice over: of an ancient line of conifers, and of a forest that mostly went under the axe. Where one still spears above the canopy, the country beneath it held on.