Australian Trees.
In vegetation as in other matters Australia delights in the vast, sometimes in the outré, often in the contrast of extremes. Dwarf scrub will cover whole regions. One tract of the mallee scrub, shared between Victoria and South Australia, covers an area of nearly 9000 square miles. The mallee is just high enough to render it impossible for a man on horseback to look over it. And on the mountain ranges in the same colony are to be found long stretches and avenues of the 'giant gums,' whose pure white silvery columns seem as though intended to support the sky. Between these two extremes is to be found a pleasantly-wooded country presenting a park-like appearance. Farther afield are the interior plains, covered often with the terrible spinifex, or porcupine grass, a hard, coarse and spiny grass, uneatable by horse or ass, or, I believe, by camel, and apt to wound the feet of the unfortunate animal that journeys over it.
Different indeed from these treeless, waterless steppes are the valleys and mountains of the seaboard. In these regions, protected from hot winds and favoured by a heavy rainfall, we have a luxuriant and elegant vegetation. Beginning with the gullies of the Dandenong ranges, near Melbourne, the traveller can proceed from fairy scene to fairy scene along the coast to far-away Carpentaria and Papua, the vegetation preserving its identity, and yet slowly changing from a sub-tropical to a tropical character. In the Victorian region there are rivulets of clear water hidden from sight by the tree-ferns which flourish on their banks. Journeying northwards, the vegetation thickens. Parasitical ferns—the staghorns of the conservatory—depend from every branch. Palm-trees make their appearance, the noble Livistonia attaining in suitable places a height of eighty feet. The musk-tree and the Pittosporum scent the air, and lovely twining plants help to form an impenetrable foliage. On reaching the ranges of New South Wales, the luxuriance is found to have further developed. From some hill-top you gaze upon a verdant lawn gay with flowers and studded with shrubs. Descending, you find that the surface is a vegetable canopy formed by stout and hardy creepers and climbers that spread from tree to tree, only the tops of the lofty eucalypts appearing above this mid-air canopy. Lower down, fern-trees and cabbage-palms form a second roof, while the soil supports an undergrowth of mosses, lichens and ferns.
But the gum-tree is as distinctive of Australia as are the emu and the kangaroo. It pleases Australians greatly that their country contains the 'tallest tree in the world.' For years it was believed that Nature had done her utmost in the big trees of California, but experts and visitors admit that this belief must be abandoned. The two countries have the issue to themselves; but the Sequoia gigantea has had to retire in favour of the Eucalyptus amygdalina, or giant gum. The following list of generally accepted heights will show how completely the indigenous vegetation of other lands is put out of court:—
| The elm | 60 feet to 80 feet. |
| The oak | 60 feet to 100 feet. |
| Pinus insignis | 60 feet to 100 feet. |
| Himalayan cedar | 200 feet. |
| Sequoia gigantea, or 'big tree' of California | 200 feet to 325 feet. |
| Eucalyptus amygdalina, or giant gum | 250 feet to 480 feet. |
The giant gum is rich in a peculiar volatile oil, and it supplies a splendid timber for shingles, palings, &c. Hence, in all accessible parts, the fine specimens are doomed to early destruction by the splitter. The woodman does not spare the tree. The more huge the round, straight, polished, and beautiful stem, the more likely he is to mark it as his own. Confident statements have been made that in favoured spots the giant gum attains the height of 500 feet; just as equally confident assertions have been published that the Sequoia of California runs up to 450 feet. The highest gum of which there is authentic record is growing on Mount Baw-Baw, Gippsland. Mr. Clement Hodgkinson, C.E., gives the official measurement as 471 feet. The highest tree now standing in California is 325 feet, so that the eucalypt is the taller by 146 feet. If two tall elms, 70 feet high, were placed on the top of the tallest Sequoia in existence, the Mount Baw-Baw eucalypt would still overlook the three.
The Fernshaw or Black Spur timber is famous because it is easily reached from Melbourne, but the trees themselves are not the head of their clan. A gum felled in the Otway ranges, at the instance of the late Professor Wilson, measured 378 feet to the spot where its top had been broken off, and, allowing for the average taper, 40 feet had been carried away. A gum felled at Dandenong, and measured by Mr. D. Boyle, measured 420 feet. And the quantity of the timber supported by the soil where these large trees are found is very remarkable. The secretary of the State Forest Board noted the growth on one acre of ground in the Upper Yarra district, and he found that the plot contained twenty eucalypts of a height of 350 feet, and thirty-eight saplings of a height of 50 feet, these trees emerging from a dense undergrowth of fern and musk trees.
In his Goldfields of Victoria Mr. Brough Smith photographs a tree 69 feet in circumference, and 330 feet in height, and of greater proportions therefore than the greatest of the Sequoias. This tree, with hundreds of others, was felled for splitting purposes. The Australian giants abound, and new discoveries are constantly made; and it is quite possible that in some one of the valleys yet to be broken into by man the real giant of the globe will be discovered. The picture on [page 16] of the Gippsland railway running through a cleared track gives some idea of a primæval forest in Victoria.