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History of forests
Australian forests have a distinctive ecology determined largely over the course of geological time. What became the Australian continent broke from the land mass of Gondwana about 135 million years ago. Since then, changes in climate have influenced the evolution of Australia’s forests, as have other events such as the rise and fall of seas and the eventual separation of New Guinea and Tasmania from the mainland 10–15 thousand years ago.
The arrival of humans in Australia at least 40 000 and perhaps over 100 000 years ago appears to have coincided with a significant increase in the incidence of fire on the continent. This has also affected Australia’s forest ecology.
The colonisation and settlement of Australia by non-Indigenous cultures, primarily the British, altered the state of the forests significantly. Forests were cleared to make way for settlement, for agriculture and for pastoralism. Timber was harvested to meet the demands of colonial society, and the condition of the forest resource was also affected by activities such as the gold rushes of the mid-to-late 1800s.
From the middle decades of the nineteenth century through to the first quarter of the twentieth century, States enacted major legislation to conserve forests in perpetuity. They protected both conservation and production forests, thus protecting them from clearing for other land uses and ensuring their active management. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, extensive areas of primarily public forest were added to the forest conservation estate.
The economic boom that followed World War II created an intense demand for construction timber that was met largely from native hardwood forests. In addition, a pulp and paper industry grew rapidly, based on native species such as Eucalyptus regnans and E. delegatensis and a growing resource of plantation softwoods, particularly Pinus radiata.
In the 1970s a woodchip export trade from Australia’s forests commenced with the construction of large woodchip mills in southern New South Wales, Tasmania and Western Australia. Other woodchip operations started elsewhere later.
An environmental movement expanded rapidly in Australia from the 1960s. It criticised forest harvesting and clearing for their impacts on biodiversity and other forest values, including wilderness and old-growth. The movement also called for an end to harvesting in rainforests and an expansion of the national park system. Public controversies about the nature, extent and intensity of timber harvesting, particularly in public forests, continue to the present.