Creator Photoglob Co. Zurich

Date 1890

A horse and buggy waits for a shooter pointing his gun at the rainforest on Bulli Pass.⁣⁣⁣⁣..⁣⁣When Governor Lachlan Macquarie visited Bulli Pass in 1822 he entered a rainforest Eden, rhapsodising in his ‘Journal of Tours in New South Wales’ how ‘After feasting our eyes on the view from the summit’ he descended into rainforest ‘with the largest and finest trees ever seen in the colony’. He was impressed with the ‘vast quantities of cabbage palm and fern trees … the former being very beautiful and of great height’. He noted that the red cedar was ’now very scarce, most of it having been already cut down and carried away to Sydney.’ ⁣.⁣⁣.⁣The rush for ‘red gold’, as they called the lucrative native cedars - with forest giants as big as 10 feet in diameter - may have been almost over by the 1820s, but timber getters continued to clear the vast ’Illawarra Brush’. The cleared land between the escarpment and the sea left a picturesque maritime rural landscape. It is estimated that over 80% of the rainforest community, which once stretched from Nowra to Stanwell Park, has been cleared for agriculture and urbanisation.⁣⁣.⁣⁣⁣⁣.⁣⁣Today the Illawarra Subtropical Rainforest is listed as a ‘Critically Endangered Ecological Community’.⁣⁣

Source: Library of Congress