GIANT trees once dominated the rich alluvial Hunter River plains around Maitland in the early colonial days.
That's hard to believe today though, looking around central Maitland with the land long cleared for crops, then houses and general business.
That's the inevitable result after more than 200 years of rapid expansion of European settlement inland from first Newcastle and then Morpeth, once the bustling river port of Maitland in colonial times.
In both Maitland and Newcastle-Lake Macquarie, however, some reminders of the long gone past remain.
Take the Riverwalk promenade near Maitland bridge in the CBD. Here, high above the flow of the sluggish Hunter River and at the edge of a major carpark stand several large signs illustrating what once stood in the immediate area.
On one of them, the comments of a correspondent to the Maitland Mercury in 1877 wax lyrical recalling what had existed almost 50 years before, back in the 1830s.
The vivid description is a bit flowery, but it's an interesting read about Maitland's lost rainforests. Stay with me.
The newspaper extract goes like this: "Gigantic gum trees towered far and away above all others and spread their radiating and mighty limbs far and wide, like umbrellas over the green ocean of lovely foliage which crowned the tops of the closely wedged mass of their smaller brethren.
"Less lofty, but still imposing and beautiful, were the fig trees which in many instances were of enormous size and covered an immense space". So ends the 1877 report.
Well, how big were these fig trees once on the fertile floodplains of old central Maitland, then known as Wallis Plans, or The Camp?
They were pretty large by all accounts. One landmark tree went by the title of "the giant fig". The perimeter of this huge triangular tree trunk was 18.3 metres in today's metric world (or 60ft) and the height of the trunk to thefirst branches was 30ft (9.1m).
This was in the early 1830s, and the tree was measured then by a traveller, a Royal Navy lieutenant W.Breton. He later wrote that where the giant fig stood was in "one of the thickest vine brushes in NSW" where it was "difficult to penetrate even a few yards".
But it wasn't long before new settlers cleared the riverbank land for cultivation. Before them though were the convict timber cutters of the early 1800s from the tough penal settlement of Coal River (later Newcastle) who rashly exploited all the best timber around them.
The most highly prized trees weren't figs, but the aromatic cedar trees. Quickly felled, they were lashed together and floated as rafts down the Hunter River back to sawpits at the bottom of Watt Street, Newcastle, bound for Sydney Town to be used for doors, architraves and wainscoting (skirting boards) in early government buildings.
Very soon, this valuable rainforest timber resource was depleted and the convicts were forced to cut trees in (then) far-away Paterson forests.
Following them came the settlers trying to clear the low canopy consisting of enormous fig trees and vines before being able to plant crops.
The dense and luxuriant rainforest was known in Aboriginal culture as Bu-Un, or place of the bittern, a heron waterfowl.
The deep rich topsoil of the Hunter River floodplain had been created by floods regularly depositing silt. Like in 1820 when the river rose a reported 11 metres, then in 1892 and major floods since, including the disastrous February 1955 flood when the raging, muddy river reached a record height of 12.1 metres.
Today only rare pockets of rainforest survive hidden in the Lower Hunter, including in the Watagans, or up along the NSW north coast (pictured) .
Meanwhile, some other interesting "relics" survive in the Hunter. One I'm told is an old "Pioneer's Tree" near Rocky Crossing, in the Barrington Tops. It's a marked tree, apparently with names carved into it by members of early local European families and timber getters in the 1930s. The site is a two-hour walk from the old, now gone guesthouse.
Then there's a "scar tree" discovered by a Vacy farmer on his property in August 2016. It has two huge scars cut into it by indigenous people to make either a canoe or shield, or maybe both. There's also supposed to be another such marked tree at Green Point, on Lake Macquarie.
I once spied at Mount Boyce just off the Great Western Highway, in the Blue Mountains, a similar scarred tree, representing previous occupants of the area. It's secure under a canopy to protect it from vandals and future road-widening.
Closer to home in the Hunter, two Aboriginal scar trees at Glendale are reminders of the area's first hunter/gatherers.
Hunter Valley bushwalker and author Greg Powell alerted me to them about six weeks ago when I was researching the then recently removed "Explorers Tree" from 1813 west of Katoomba.
At the time, I was writing of the ancient, but fire-damaged, "Fishing Tree" moved for safety in 2001 from Bagnall's Beach at Nelson Bay to Newcastle Museum, at Honeysuckle.
Powell had urged me to inspect Lake Macquarie City Council's efforts to preserve some of the district's Aboriginal heritage.
"There's now a Scar Tree Way near the Main Road sign to Cardiff off Glendale Drive," Powell said.
"The other Aboriginal scar tree is preserved under perspex and displayed near the Hunter Sports Centre at Glendale with a plaque attached. The tree was relocated there in February 2018."
The plaque states such scarred trees were highly significant to the original Awabakal people, the traditional land custodians.
Centuries ago, bark on the long trunks of such trees was identified by the Awabakal as a resource as vital as water, animals, clothing and bush medicine.
Long strips of bark were removed using stone axes to make river canoes, plus coolamons (carrying containers) or shields.
No examples of the traditional, if frail, bark canoes (or Kuueeyung) survive from pre-British colonisation days. After the bark is removed, it was passed over fire to heat the ends. Once done, the ends were folded in and secured with rope made from the same bark.
And they floated! Ingenious.
