By the middle of the 19th century almost all Australia's forests and woodlands had been discovered and many of their main species described. They were found to stretch -with an average width of some 300 km -from Tasmania and the south-east around the eastern coast more or less continuously to the northern-most point of the continent and then along the northern coast, petering out in the north-west but reappearing in a relatively small area of the south-west. It is probable that at the time of settlement forests covered some 9 per cent of the continent, about the twice the area remaining today.[2]

In NSW mixed eucalypt forests extended along the coastal areas both to the south and the north of Port Jackson. In the south the forests were mostly of the dry sclerophyll type, with the main species being spotted gum (E. maculata), silvertop ash (E. sieberi) and stringybarks (such as E. muellerana, E. obliqua and E. agglomerata). Blackbutt (E. pilularis), Sydney blue gum and turpentine (Syncarpia glomulifera) occurred in warm and humid environments both to the south and to the north and were joined in the latter region by flooded gum (E. grandis), tallowwood ( E. microcorys) and brush box (Tristania conferta). This same association, together with spotted gum, continued into south-eastern Queensland. Interspersed throughout the coastal eucalypt forests were pockets of sub-tropical and warm temperate rain forest, in the more fertile areas of which were valuable timbers such as red cedar, black bean (Castanospermum australe) and white beech (Gmelina leichhardtii). Further north in Queensland were the tropical rain forests containing other species such as Queensland maple (Flindersia brayleyana), maple silkwood (F. pimenteliana), Queensland silver ash (F. bourjotiana) and northern silky oak (Cardwellia sublimis). In some of the rain forests of northern NSW and Queensland also occurred Australia's most important native soft-wood, hoop pine (Araucaria cunninghamii) along with bunya pine (A. bidwillii) and kauri (Agathis robusta). Further inland in drier areas of south-eastern Queensland and northern NSW were large cypress pine (Callitris spp.) forests.

2 Improvement thinning in the Philliga cypress pine forest, New South Wales, in the 1930s

Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering