Andrew Darby’s new book, The Ancients: Discovering the world’s oldest surviving trees in wild Tasmania (Allen and Unwin, 2025), is a deep dive into the wilds of Tasmania. Seven chapters cover eight awe-inspiring trees, with chapter titles that hint at each tree’s character, origin or secret:
- Camouflage for king’s holly (Lomatia tasmanica)
- Dinosaur for King Billy pine
- Pine of Olympus for the pencil pine
- Water tree for Huon pine
- Overshadow for two giant eucalypt species − Eucalyptus regnans and Eucalyptus obliqua
- The Green for myrtle beech
- The Gold for fagus.
Darby spent three years finding and researching these trees in the unforgiving Tasmanian bush. He shares the stories he came across of the plant hunters, the European botanists and the explorers who discovered and identified the trees. He also introduces us to the scientists and campaigners who today are trying to save them.
The Ancients is a book for all tree lovers and for explorers, bushwalkers, geographers, historians and dreamers. They will savour its interesting and quirky facts, including the listing in the Guinness World Records of the 43,000 year-old king’s holly (Lomatia tasmanica) as the world’s oldest colony of genetically identical plants.
However, this is also the story of the creeping destruction of the Tasmanian wilderness. With climate change upon us and fires now the primary cause of deforestation in the world, we need change in the mind set of governments. The good news is that the new Tasmanian Parks management plan highlights the need for rapid attack on wildfires and gives priority to protecting outstanding universal values of the World Heritage Area, such as paleoendemics, over ‘non-critical built assets’.
Dr Jamie Kirkpatrick*, a titanic figure in Tasmanian ecology, whom Darby quotes, once admitted that, while he actually preferred really untidy Australian bush, paleoendemic flora was ‘totally gobsmacking’ and just ‘so beautiful in a European concept of beauty’.
Andrew Robert-Tissot
*Dr Kirkpatrick died in 2024. In keeping with his final wishes, Tasmanian Geographic has made seven of his works new and old available as searchable PDF files: https://tasmaniangeographic.com/presents/kirkpatrick/