Air Adventure Australia

Destination Profile - Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, Tasmania

The Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area (WHA) is one of the largest conservation reserves in Australia, covering 1.38 million hectares, or about 20% of the island of Tasmania. It conserves a diverse array of both natural and cultural features of outstanding global significance. The region provides pristine habitats for a range of plants and animals that are found nowhere else in the world, including many rare and endangered species. For a number of animals which have become extinct on mainland Australia in recent times, the area offers a last refuge.

The WHA is the Australian stronghold of temperate rainforest and alpine vegetation. Its landforms are of immense beauty and reveal a rich and complex geology. Aboriginal occupation extending back beyond 36 000 years, combined with nearly two centuries of European settlement, have created a legacy of humanity's interaction with the wilderness.

The Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area (WHA) conserves within its boundaries a wide range of plant communities. The WHA conserves two-thirds of Tasmania's endemic (found nowhere else in the world) higher plant species. The distribution of many of these is confined to the WHA.

Many species provide living evidence of the Gondwanan origin of the Tasmanian flora. Today, their closest relatives are found on the other continents that once comprised the supercontinent of Gondwana - South America, New Zealand, Antarctica and southern Africa. Some species are representative of plant communities which were once widespread across the Australian mainland.

The WHA is the Australian stronghold of cool temperate rainforest - a type of rainforest very different from the better-known tropical rainforests. Some cool temperate rainforest communities are characterised by an open and verdant, cathedral-like quality; a silent, cool, dark and damp place where both the trunks of trees and the forest floor are covered with a luxuriant carpet of mosses and lichens.

Within these forests are the descendants of some of the most ancient of Australia's plants. Some species date back over 60 million years, and were dominant components of the vegetation across the Australian continent long before the arrival of the eucalypts and acacias which today dominate the Australian flora. The ancestors of many rainforest species, such as myrtle-beech (Nothofagus cunninghamii), native plum (Cenarrhenes nitida) and leatherwood (Eucryphia lucida) evolved on the ancient continent of Gondwana.

Many rainforest species are extremely fire sensitive. It can take 400 years or more, in the absence of any further fires, for a rainforest to recover to its former glory after fire. Other threats to our rainforests include pests and diseases such as myrtle wilt

Most of Tasmania's unique conifers occur within the WHA, including the Huon pine (Lagarostrobus franklinii), which is typically a component of the riverine rainforest habitats in the west of the WHA. It is the second longest lived organism in the world after the Californian bristlecone pine, reaching ages in excess of 3000 years.

The endemic King Billy pine (Athrotaxis selaginoides), pencil pine (A. cuppressoides) and their natural hybrid, A. laxifolia, are the sole representatives of the family Taxodiaceae to be found in the southern hemisphere. This family includes the world's tallest plant, the Californian redwood (Sequoia sempervirens).

The tallest flowering plant in the world, the swamp gum (Eucalyptus regnans) is one of a number of eucalypt species that dominate the sclerophyllous forests of the WHA. This species can grow to heights in excess of 100 metres.

These forests are noted for their aesthetic beauty, their high biomass production on relatively infertile soils and the successional processes that involve the transition of vegetation from buttongrass moorland through scrub, wet eucalypt forest to rainforest in the absence of fire. Old-growth sclerophyllous forests contain the greatest diversity of living plants and animals in Tasmania.

The terrain has been created by ancient glaciers - this is one of the most glaciated areas in Australia. It is full of lakes and mountain tarns and is the highest in Australia with Mount Ossa being the highest spot in the state and, at the other end of the park, Lake St Clair being Australia's deepest clear water lake with a maximum depth of over 200 m. The lake is in a massive basin that glaciers scooped out of the earth.

For the whole of the distance there are no roads. Forests are of beech, Tasmanian myrtle and King Billy pine. Some plains are covered with buttongrass. And every now and again in the summer - the only time to walk - a sweep of wildflowers to lift the spirit.

At the impressive modern Cradle Mountain Visitor Centre there is an abundance of information on the many day walks available in this area of the park. As a starting point next to the centre is the Rainforest-Pencil Pine Falls Walking Track which is less impressive in length than its name covering only 500 m of boardwalk. But it is an easy introduction to the local scenery.

This destination is part of the Cradled into Freycinet Bay Australian Adventure.