Living Slowly, Dying Fast

Coloured pencil on watercolour paper, 2023

39 cm x 54 cm

This piece was made for the Tree Veneration Society exhibition, Arboreal Narratives 2023: In Conversation, held at the Woollahra Gallery. It focusses on a small patch of heath near Pine Lake in the Tasmanian highlands, reflecting the rich diversity and interdependence of plants and animals this environment supports.

Tasmania’s endemic Pencil Pine, Athrotaxis cupressoides, is one of the longest-lived trees in the world, some over 1300 years old. It grows slowly, taking 50 years to reach 1 metre in height.

150 million years ago Athrotaxis, an ancient Gondwanan genus, was widespread. The Pencil Pine is one of two surviving species, both found only in Tasmania’s highlands. It is the sole food source of the Pencil Pine moth, Dirce aesiodora. Highly susceptible to bush fires, tree numbers have declined markedly since European colonisation. Around 40% of pencil pine rainforest has been destroyed by fire and will never regenerate. Changing climate affects growing conditions and its reproductive pattern, and the introduced fungus Phytophthora poses another threat to its survival.