Red cedar

Red cedar (Toona ciliata) is one of the very few local rainforest trees that drops its leaves — briefly bare in winter, then flushing new growth in an improbable coppery pink-red — and for a century it was the most valuable timber tree in eastern Australia. Two facts about it decided its fate, and they are the same two facts that make it worth knowing.

Why it went first. The wood was the prize: tall, straight, soft, richly coloured and easily worked, the "red gold" of the colonial cabinet trade (a qualitative superlative, widely repeated rather than measured, and kept as such). A tree that valuable was always going to be hunted. What turned the hunt into a clearance was the second fact — cedar does not grow in stands but scattered singly through the scrub, a large emergent here and another half a kilometre off through the closed forest (see rainforest-structure). So the cedar-getters could not simply work one rich patch; they had to range across the whole forest to find their trees, pushing in ahead of almost any other settlement, felling the giants with axe and cross-cut saw and floating the logs down the rivers on the floods. Within a few decades of that ranging they had cut out nearly every mature tree in the district. The very qualities that made the cedar precious — prized wood, thinly scattered — are exactly what emptied the forest of it.

What it does, and its absence now. Alone among the mostly animal-planted trees around it, the cedar scatters small winged seed that spins away on the wind and germinates fast in any sunny gap — a gap-coloniser inside a forest whose other giants 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 forest that eventually reassembles over it. A large red cedar is a rare sight on this coast today, a century and more after the trade that hunted it moved on. It survives as scattered younger trees and in the plant lists of the remnants — at Mary Cairncross, for one, it is still on the record — a reminder of what the whole Blackall Range once carried.

The cedar is the opening act of the region's clearing history. The timber went first; then, because the rainforest grew on the richest basalt soil, the cleared ground was handed to dairy farms, and the big scrub of the range went from closed forest to a scatter of steep-gully remnants inside a single working life. A forest that could shrug off any fire had no answer at all to the axe.