The Separation Tree, Melbourne’s huge and ancient river red gum, took its name from the impromptu celebration held when Governor Latrobe declared Victoria separate from the colony of New South Wales. Now we’ve killed it. Well done, humans.

As Tim Entwisle from the Royal Botanic Gardens explains, the tree predates white settlement of Melbourne. It would, he says, “have been a sapling in the 17th century, when the Boonwurrung and Woiwurrung met and camped beside the Yarra River.”



Now it’s dying, after two separate ringbarking attempts by vandals, who also targeted collections of other plants.

In the scale of the catastrophes to which we of the 21st century need to accustom ourselves, the loss of one tree seems trivial.

Correction: it is trivial. We’re talking about one gumtree while the Amazon sheds 400 square kilometres of forest each and every month.

Across the world, the populations of wild creatures, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish, have dropped by more than half in the past four decades. As many as 33% of all vertebrate species are estimated to be globally threatened or endangered: scientists warn that we’re entering the early stages of the Earth’s sixth mass extinction event.

Meanwhile, the human disasters pile up. Last year, the death toll in Iraq doubled, while nearly 75,000 people died in Syria. The civil war in Libya intensified; the oppression of Palestine continued unabated.

In the light of all that, who cares about a bloody tree?

Yet it’s still deeply depressing to learn that, for the sake of safety, the gardens’ staff will begin removing the Separation Tree’s canopy over the next months.

James Boyce points out that, more than any other major city, Melbourne’s natural environment is now difficult for us imagine, since “the region was dominated by swamps and grasslands – the two ecosystems that were most comprehensively transformed by conquest”.

In 1836, John Norcock, one of the marine officers transporting government officials to Port Phillip, described the grasslands as

enchantingly beautiful – an extensive rich plain all round with gently sloping hills in the distance, all thinly wooded and having the appearance of an immense park. The grasses, flowers and herbs that cover the plains are of every variety that can be imagined …

Very quickly, all of that was destroyed by graziers. As for the wetlands, the 19th century penchant for turning swamp into agricultural land meant that, as Boyce puts it, “the marches were drained with ruthless efficiency and all very pale reflections of their lost splendour now remain”.

The French historian Ernest Renan described forgetfulness as “essential in the creation of a nation”. Perhaps that’s why no one remembers the Blue Lake that once occupied the low ground near today’s Flagstaff Gardens, a place the settler George Gordon McCrae described as

intensely blue, nearly oval and full of the clearest salt water; but by no means deep. Fringed gaily all round by mesembryanthemum (“pigs-face”) in full bloom, it seemed in the broad sunshine as though girdled about with a belt of magenta fire … Curlews, ibises and “blue cranes” were there in numbers … black swans occasionally visited it, as also flocks of wild ducks.

Tim Flannery goes so far as to describe the region that became Melbourne as “a sort of temperate Kakadu” adding that, “as in Arnhem Land, it was the wetlands that were the focus of life”.



Today’s Royal Botanic Gardens were once a swamp where animals and birdlife proliferated, and thus a popular Aboriginal meeting place. Settlers established the first mission – three houses and a number of Aboriginal huts – on the site in 1837, though it lasted only two years before the growth of the town displaced Indigenous people still further.

The Separation Tree was a relic of that time, a reminder that things were once otherwise. And now it is no more.