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Photo: Eucalyptus Tree, Woodford Academy. John Leary OAM

One of my favourite eucalypts in the Blue Mountains is the one which is about 70 years old, growing beside the oldest building on the Blue Mountains - Woodford Academy.

Woodford Academy originally was a wayside inn built by a ticket of leave convict, Thomas Pembroke in the 1830s. It must have been surrounded by eucalypts such as this specimen. Travellers who stopped off at the sandstone building to quench their thirst with a glass of ale, take a meal or stay overnight must have seen these majestic trees being cut down to make sleepers for the Great Western Railway's dual ribbon of steel as it's construction in the 1860s pressed relentlessly on to open up much of the country to the west for rural settlement.

No doubt the Dharug and Gundungurra people who passed through this country sheltered under these eucalyptus trees, for not less than 50 metres from this tree are sandstone engravings believed to be timelines. Just as the built heritage of European settlement is important, so too is the natural heritage bound up in the eucalypts perhaps for tens of thousands of years.

This image of the eucalypt brings together the natural and built heritage while invoking the country's cultural heritage going back perhaps 40,000 years.

By John Leary, OAM

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