Red cedar

Look for a tall tree with a straight, pale trunk that flushes, come spring, an improbable coppery pink-red, and you may have found a survivor of the tree that emptied these forests. Red cedar, Toona ciliata, is one of the very few local rainforest trees that goes bare in winter and then breaks out in that startling colour. For a hundred years it was the most valuable timber in eastern Australia: tall, soft, richly coloured, a joy to work — the “red gold” of the colonial cabinet trade.

Two facts decided the tree’s fate, and they are the same two that make it worth knowing. The first is the wood. A tree that valuable was always going to be hunted. But a prize alone does not empty a forest. What turned the hunt into a clearance was the second fact: cedar does not grow in stands. It scatters singly through the scrub, one emergent here, another half a kilometre off through the closed forest, the way rainforest holds most of its giants (see rainforest structure). So the cedar-getters could not simply work one rich patch and move on. They had to range across the whole forest to find their trees, pushing into the scrubs ahead of almost every other settler. They were a rough, itinerant advance guard who lived hard in the rainforest, felled the giants with axe and cross-cut saw, and took the rivers for their only road, floating the logs down on the floods to the mills waiting at the coast. In a few decades of that ranging, nearly every mature tree in the district was gone.

And yet cedar is still a working part of the forest, and an unusual one. Where most rainforest trees wrap their seed in fleshy fruit and pay pigeons and flying-foxes to carry it, the cedar does something almost eucalypt-like: it scatters small winged seeds that spin away on the wind and germinate fast in any sunny gap. It is the forest’s opportunist, first into the light wherever a giant crashes down and opens the canopy, a gap-coloniser among giants that wait in the shade for their turn. That habit is why a felled forest wasted no time growing back, though rarely back to cedar: the tree recruits in disturbed, sunlit ground, not in the closed, dim forest that eventually reassembles over the top of it.

The cedar is the opening act of the region’s clearing history, the thing the cutters came for first, before the hoop-pine loggers and the dairy farms that followed onto the rich red basalt the rainforest had stood on (that fuller story belongs to the century of extraction). A forest that stayed too wet and too whole to burn had no answer to the axe. The tree defended against the wrong enemy.

So it survives now as scattered younger trees, and in the plant lists of the remnants. At Mary Cairncross, one of the last fragments of the big scrub kept whole on the Blackall Range, it is still on the record: not quite gone, but a big one so scarce that finding it stops you where you stand. The cedar has become the ghost of the forest it once crowned, a coppery flush in spring high in a canopy that used to be full of it.