Forests (2024)

In the last couple of days, something of a ‘blue’ has developed among some Western Australian fire experts over ‘Prescribed Burning’ – the deliberate lighting of fires as part of fire management policy. On Jan 22, Byron Lamont and Tianhua He published a short opinion… Read more

“This is the Giant Stinger tree – avoid it”. Work place health and safety now out of the way, I could then get on with introducing my students to Australia’s forests. *** In Queensland’s O’Reilly’s/Lamington Park I began my student classes with a walk down… Read more

Broken River is a Hell of a place to get to. From Christchurch you need to head inland, driving along the road to Arthur’s Pass, the gateway to the West Coast. But then turn off and dog-leg back south along a narrow road beside, and… Read more

Do we have a submerged ‘Doggerland‘ in New Zealand? In 1950 a boat, the HMNZS ‘Lachlan’ dredged a sample of “lignite” from the bottom of Toitoi (or Toetoe) Bay, at the far south end of New Zealand’s South Island, from a depth of nine fathoms… Read more

“We’ll follow these guys – they’re three local hoodlums”, This from my local guide on Omatepe Island, Nicaragua. I was sitting behind him on his trail bike, and we were burning down the road after walking up Volcan Maderas, the smaller of the two volcanoes… Read more

Our Indonesian guide, with a parang (machete) in hand, dropped vertically in front of me, just brushing my face, while out of my peripheral vision I saw someone cartwheeling down through the trees. Then, within about two seconds, six people had vanished. I was alone… Read more

Forests that have disappeared so completely that you would hardly believe they really existed, have long fascinated me. When I left my home in Alexandra for university in Dunedin, I took with me a facsimile map my mother had given me. It was a mid… Read more

Early on a cool Sunday morning I sipped my latte outside Relishes Cafe, Wanaka, and thought the immediate view could be better. In a somewhat typical urban New Zealand fashion, the lake is cut off from the cafe not just by a road, but a… Read more

If you make your way down to almost the bottom of New Zealand’s South Island, you can walk among the stumps of a petrified Jurassic forest (that’s about 170 million years old). It’sagem of New Zealand’s fossil plant history, and because of its complete preservation… Read more

I was sitting in a ger in Mongolia when I put up my hand to go to Indonesia. My ulterior motive was to get a chance to get into the Indonesian rainforests. Back in 1988 I had read Eric Hansen’s book “Stranger in the forest:… Read more