Bulurru

A Notable Tropical Rainforest

16th March 2022

Meaning

Protective Benevolent Spirit in the Jirbal language.

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What is it?

Bulurru is a 58 hectare, privately owned, Nature Refuge of unique tropical rainforest.

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Where is it?

Bulurru is located on the southern Atherton Tableland in northeastern 

Australia, possibly the wettest part of the country. It adjoins Wooroonooran National Park in the  Wet Tropics World Heritage area. It lies at the headwaters of the North Johnstone River and in the shadow of Mount Bartle Frere, the highest mountain in northern Australia.

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Description

Over 90% of Bulurru is diverse tropical rainforest with large buttressed trees, giant lianes, tree ferns, orchids and palms. It is traversed by a perennial stream which is fed by springs within the property. The stream, officially named Five Mile Creek but unofficially Bulurru Creek,  descends a rocky gorge over rapids and waterfalls and through deep pools where platypus swim, and plunges over 80 metre high Bulurru Falls into  the National Park.

A system of trails gives access to such places as The Singing Pool, Bowerbird Ridge, Orania Palm Valley, Triple Falls Pool, Cassowary Bend and Flying-fox Corner.

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The Most Diverse Rainforest

Botanists and rainforest ecologists recognize 13 different  types of Australian tropical rainforest. Type 1 is the most complex with the greatest variety of plants and animals growing in the wettest places with the most fertile soils. Type 13 is the least complex growing in drier areas. It includes such non-rainforest trees as eucalypts and wattles. Bulurru is mostly type 1 rainforest. There are more species of frogs and butterflies than in other types of rainforest. On Bulurru alone there are hundreds of kinds of moths, including the world’s largest. As well as that there are Green Possums, Musky Rat-kangaroos the smallest in the kangaroo tribe and many other wonders.  It is home to a rich variety of birds, from cassowaries to fig parrots and from chowchillas to sooty owls.

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Plant Evolution

Among the first plants to colonise the land, 410 million years ago (mya), was the fork fern. It is still extent and grows at Bulurru. Successive evolutionary milestones produced mosses, lycopods, lichens, ferns, cycads, conifers and others, culminating in the flowering plants. All these groups have representatives growing on Bulurru, including  one of the world’s largest ferns. Most remarkable of all is the evolution of flowering plants that can be seen here. A vine called Austrobailya scandens is of particular interest. Its pollen closely resembles the fossil pollen of the earliest known flowering plant dated at 110mya. Perhaps  one of the first flowers on earth. The Lomatia Silky Oak is known as a 60myo fossil from southern Australia. I can walk down a trail at Bulurru and put my hand on such a tree which is alive and indistinguishable from the fossil. These are so-called primitive flowering plants. The most highly evolved, the orchids, are also numerous. All these you can find on Bulurru. Just down the road, on the lower slopes of Mount Bartle Frere, is another remarkable tree. This is an enormous species with large, elegantly curved buttresses and one of the ancestors of the eucalypts, which now dominate most of the continent.

 Early European botanists decreed that Australia’s tropical rainforests were sweepings from Asia, that they were un-Australian. More recent studies by Australian botanists established that they are Australian in origin. Sixty million or more years ago all of Australia was covered in tropical rainforest. These were the Great Gondwana Forests.  All that remains of them are the forests on and surrounding Mount Bartle Frere, including those of Buluru, and very few other places. 

As long as tropical rainforest has existed, it has grown here. Only a few small to tiny parcels of these forests remain in private hands. Bulurru is one of them. But because it adjoins Wooroonooran National Park – which includes Mount Bartle Frere – it ispart of an 8oo square km Gondwana Forest.

Conservation; More Than Lists And Stats

While science is essential in devising plans to protect the natural environment, science alone is not enough. An emotional attachment to nature is also needed. I think science makes us understand while personal involvement makes us act. We need both.

This idea is not new. It goes back to the earliest naturalists such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, eminent scientists who stressed the importance of an emotional attachment to nature. Both Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, and Aldo Leopold, author of The Land Ethic, books which are the foundation of today’s conservation movement, emphasized that it was as important to feel as well as to know.

A place like Bulurru, close beside one of the country’s most remarkable mountains, could be the catalyst for such a marriage between science and personal attachment. The foundation has been laid.

Rare and Endangered Species

Bulurru is home to more than 20 rare plants and at least five threatened or endangered animals, incuding the cassowary and several kinds of frogs.

Noteworthy

Bulurru’s rainforest has been observed, studied, written about, photographed, lived in and loved for the last 33 years. It is the place where I took photography from film to the most sophisticated digital. 

Bulurru is noteworthy because it has its own extensive literature and imagery. It could be said it celebrates the Australia’s tropical rainforests and in the process unlocked some of its secrets.

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Literature With Bulurru at Its Heart – all by Stan Breeden

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Tropical Queensland

William Collins, Sydney 1970, 1973, 1982

Visions of a Rainforest   illustrated by William T. Cooper

                                                 foreword by Sir David Attenborough

                                                 winner C.J. Dennis Prize for nature writing

                                                 Simon & Schuster, Sydney 1992; Ten Speed

                                                 Press, Berkeley, USA 1993

Australian World Heritage Tropical Rainforest – Natural History Guide

Steve Parish Publishing, Brisbane 1999

Rainforest Country

Fremantle Press, Fremantle 2012

Small Wonders – A Close Look at Nature’s Miniatures

Fremantle Press, Fremantle 2014

A Feeling for Nature – Notes from a Golden Age

Steven Nowakowski Publishing, Kuranda 2022

In the Shadow of the Rainmaker

Steven Nowakowski Publishing, Kuranda 2025

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Unfinished Business

Before I hand Bulurru over, I have some unfinished business here; to tell the story of Mount Bartle Frere and its associates. Bartle Frere is the Rainmaker and the Keeper of the Rainforest. As such it played, and continues to play, a crucial role in where rainforest grows in Australia. It is also the source from which other forests emerged. This role is of as great a significance in the age of climate change as it ever was. 

In essence In the Shadow of the Rainmaker will be the biography of a mountain, perhaps not the tallest in the country, but more than likely the most significant. In the telling it will celebrate the Australia’s tropical rainforests.

For the last 33 years I’ve lived in the Rainmaker’s shadow, kept diaries about what I observed and took countless photographs. Piece by piece I unraveled one of wild Australia’s great untold stories. To write it properly, I need to continue to live at Bulurru for the next three years. In the Shadow of the Rainmaker will be the culmination of my life’s work and will also strengthen Bulurru’s base.