White Beech: The Rainforest Years (56 page)

Epilogue

It is done. The project is now run by Friends of Gondwana Rainforest, UK registered charity No. 1145364, UK charitable company No. 7842375, and we are well on the way to transferring the property to an Australian not-for-profit company. Am I bereft? No. If I have not learnt in my seventy-four years that to love and care for something you don’t need to own it, then I have learnt nothing. The day I gave away all the cash I had to the rainforest was one of the happiest days of my life. Giving the forest back to itself is taking a little longer.

The process has not been easy. I and my faithful co-directors were given the wrong advice and set off on the wrong foot. In less than a year of little sleep I realised I had to find expert advice and regroup. Part of the difficulty was that conservation charities are new and their rationale is poorly understood. It is not enough simply to restore a forest as a storehouse of biodiversity from which future generations will benefit much as one might endow a library or a museum; the charity had also to claim an educational function. I pored over other rainforest charities’ mission statements, and, after a minor tussle with a Commissioner, the concept was eventually accepted. The most intractable difficulties were those that affected the interface between the UK charity and the Australian administration. We were not helped by expensive lawyers’ bigging up their own role by exaggerating the already considerable complexity of the operation.

Why Gondwana Rainforest? Because that’s what the Cave Creek forest is. As such it’s a treasure house of species that have survived almost unchanged from the Cretaceous, when the world was divided into two supercontinents, Laurasia and Gondwana. When Australia was part of Gondwana it was covered with subtropical rainforest, which remains the most ancient vegetation type to be found in the great south land. Many of our plant families, the Lauraceae, the Cunoniaceae, the Winteraceae and the Eupomatiaceae, for example, can trace their descent back to the dawn of the evolution of flowering plants a hundred million years ago.

Over the millennia the drying of the continent and the firefarming of the indigenous peoples favoured the dominance of sclerophyll vegetation that encroached on the fire-sensitive rainforest leaving it to survive in sites that were isolated and disjunct. You will find it also growing in gullies surrounded by fire-scarred eucalypts, or by treeless pasture degraded and eaten out by hard-hoofed animals, or by strip and open-cut mines.

When I bought the land at Cave Creek the World Heritage site that extended from its southern boundary along the Dividing Range almost as far south as Newcastle was known as the Central Eastern Rainforest Reserve Area. In 2007 it was renamed Gondwana Rainforests of Australia. This broken chain of isolated sites, in all fifty separate reserves, covering 3,665 square kilometres, represents the most extensive area of Gondwanan rainforest to survive anywhere in the world. Just how little that is can be seen by taking a look at the map on the website of the Australian Government Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities (
sic
), which makes embarrassingly clear that crown land is set aside for reserves only when it is unsuitable for any kind of exploitation. These bits and pieces are now all that remain of the Gondwanan subtropical rainforest. Many of the individual fragments are too small to provide the larger animals with a range big enough for them to maintain their genetic diversity. A significant number were heavily logged state forests that have simply been dubbed national parks, with no commitment to removing the weeds and pioneers that have colonised the damaged forest, let alone to restoring the original vegetation. Many are now mostly sclerophyll and fire-prone.

The Australian Dividing Range is the eastern extremity of the Samfrau orogenic belt, which originally ran along the southern edge of the southern supercontinent of Gondwana. As Gondwana gradually broke up during the Mesozoic and the five main fragments separated and rotated to form South America, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Antarctica and Australia, the Samfrau has been reduced to the Andean range of South America, the Ross range of Antarctica and the heavily eroded Great Dividing Range of Australia. The Tasmanian rainforest is also Gondwanan and a World Heritage Site, but it is to be known as the Tasmanian Wilderness.

Friends of Gondwana Rainforest are concerned for subtropical and temperate rainforest wherever it survives. CCRRS is our flagship, where we learnt how to rebuild a forest and how exciting and gratifying it is to give it your best shot. What we are doing there can be done elsewhere, and we exist to help it happen, not only among our neighbours in Australia, but in New Caledonia, in New Zealand, in Chile, in Argentina, in southern Africa, in Madagascar, in India and Sri Lanka, wherever fragments of the ancient Gondwanan forest survive.

The received wisdom is that only plant and animal species surviving on public land can be protected. In fact, public nature reserves generally suffer from systemic lack of funding. They are usually poorly staffed, poorly equipped and poorly managed. What little funding they receive has to be justified by providing a public amenity. National parks are obliged to spend their slender means on parking, toilets, picnic tables, barbecues, signage, and may even choose to provide facilities for off-road bicycles and four-wheel-drive vehicles, before investing any energy or resources in protecting and maintaining their plant and animal assemblages. At Natural Bridge fortunes are spent on blowing leaves off the paths, in case tourists should slip and fall. In twelve years, not one penny has been spent on removing weeds.

Once I might have thought of handing CCRRS over to the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, in the hope that one day they would begin to take their responsibilities seriously and set about conserving and protecting habitat, but that was before state governments all over Australia decided that, if they were to grow revenue to run the parks, they would have to allow luxury resort developments in them. Now more than ever it is clear to me that if conservation is to be done at all, it will have to be done by dedicated individuals and organisations on privately owned land.

Eco-tourism is not the answer. Animals are not performers and their behaviour is not a spectacle. Whales are already sick of being watched. People who come with cameras are as much hunters as people who come with guns. I was once lucky enough to find myself off the south-east coast of Sri Lanka on a small fishing boat that suddenly and unexpectedly ran into a pack of hundreds of sperm whales, all ploughing northwards through the ocean swells. At first the whales were curious and playful, but after an hour they became agitated and began breaching and slapping the water with their flukes (something these whales don’t often do). Try as I might I couldn’t persuade the captain to turn the boat around and let the whales be. He was excited, the tourists were excited and screaming, and the boat’s diesel engine was driving the whales mad. We didn’t give up chasing the whales until there was barely enough fuel left to get us back to shore. Eco-tourism means interference and interference means disturbance. Australian animals are very sensitive to stress; all they ask is to left alone. The greatest irony is that by the time the luxury developments are built in wild Australia the animals the tourists will come to see will have retreated up into the deepest gullies of the most rugged ridges, beyond the reach of their spotlights and their four-wheel drives. Our threatened plant and animal life needs space and quiet if it is to survive.

Inaccessible scrubland comes cheap. You don’t have to be rich to make your own nature reserve, especially if you can join forces with like-minded people. The more marginal the land, the more ‘useless’, the lower its market value, the better adapted it is for restoration and conservation. If you’re the kind of person who feels heartache when you see on a country road the bright plumage of a native bird mashed into the bitumen or a skittled koala dead on its back with its claws in the air, you will find great consolation in your mini-reserve. Once the plants are there, the animals will come. To see and hear them going about their business brings a special kind of blessedness. Making a niche for them means finding a niche for you too.

The private landholder, whether individual or corporate, has a better chance of maintaining conservation values than a public entity that has also to provide a public amenity. Private landholders can defend hotspots of endemism as public bodies cannot. Where such hotspots exist alongside public reserves, maintaining them can improve the viability of the reserve community. The fruit of the CCRRS Pigeon-berry Ash trees, for example, will be carried by the rainforest pigeons across the caldera rim to give the Camphor Laurels a run for their money and provide the fruit-eating birds with a food supply that will not kill them. Holders of quite small parcels of land can join forces in providing corridors between isolated patches of habitat. They cannot be expected to do any of these things if no one takes the trouble to inform them about the treasures that have come into their keeping. Most people if told that their muddy stream harbours platypuses would be only too happy to put energy and resources into protecting the habitat of such special and remarkable animals. Expect nothing from people and you will get nothing.

The process by which the forest is being given back to itself is complicated and drawn-out, but now that it has begun a great wrong is on its way to being righted. The stupendous phenomenon that is the forest will have time and space to come into its own again. The charity has been set up to keep the work of rehabilitation going after I have gone to be recycled. One of the workforce said to me the other day, ‘Does that mean that I could still be working here when I’m a grandfather?’

I truly hope so.

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