Wild Australia: The Edge

Okay.

That's a better one.

That's really a new species?

Yeah, there was an article about it...

Towards the end of 1994

explorers found a small grove of ancient trees,

a remnant of a species that was thought to have been extinct

for 65 million years.

It was about as IikeIy as finding a small dinosaur

wandering through the forest.

The trees are among the rarest living things on Earth--

a window into an unimaginably ancient past...

if they survive their discovery.

Their exact location is a closely held secret.

Access is strictly controlled,

clothing and equipment sterilized.

Up until now this wild and dangerous labyrinth

has been protection enough

for many rare and endangered species.

But it is not enough anymore.

This is the Old World.

When Europe was young this was ancient.

When the Grand Canyon was a shallow creek

these valleys looked much as they do today.

Over eons of time Australia evolved

an extraordinary diversity of plants and animals,

a flood of creativity that continued

until the arrival of mankind.

All of the very large animals soon became extinct.

And since the arrival of Europeans

another hundred species of plant and animal have vanished.

Five thousand more are now close to the edge of extinction.

The tallest tree ever measured was a eucalyptus like these,

a mountain ash 435 feet high, 133 meters--

as talI as a 40-story office building.

It was measured by the men who cut it down.

There are no trees of that size in Australia anymore.

Most of the old forests are gone forever.

In 1931 a farmer set about felling these trees.

By chance a group of bushwalkers arrived on the scene

and begged him to stop.

He said he had to make a living.

It was too much to lose.

The bushwalkers offered to buy the land.

They had no money, and it took two years

of desperate struggle to raise the cash.

They gave this forest to the people of New South Wales.

It became the core of the Great National Park.

The leader of that campaign was Miles Dunphy.

He recorded the old names and made these maps.

He shared with his friends an almost ferocious commitment

to saving this place.

They were young, they were from the city,

but they were among the first to realize

that the wilderness did not go on forever.

Their struggle gave us this--

a million hectares where even today

it is possible to walk where no one has ever walked before,

to take your life into your own hands.

Woo, down there, go, go, go, go, go!

Whoa, woo!

Woo!

Jump, come on, jump!

Woo!

Deep in this wilderness

it is still possible to be confronted

by the paradox of the platypus--

the furry monotreme with a duck's bill

and webbed feet that lays eggs,

but feeds milk to its babies after they have hatched.

Platypus are rare now,

gone from the pools and creeks where they were once common.

Wilderness is a spell that is easily broken.

A few farms, a mine,

a single road can rob vast tracts of land

of that elusive magic,

that memory of the world when it was young.

Most of AustraIia's wilderness

is where you would expect it to be--

far from the farms

and even further from the sprawling cities.

But in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales

there is an extraordinary exception

right next to the biggest city of all.

Sydney is a city of four million people

spreading inexorably westward

since the earliest days of European settlement.

It has already consumed a million hectares

of coastal plain.

But at the mountain wall

the city stops.

For ancient Australia, the great sandstone walls

were the walls of the century.

But to the new settlers of the coastal plain,

the thousand-meter escarpment was simply a barrier

standing between the colony and its future.

In 1813 after many failed expeditions into the valleys

three settlers followed the ridge tops

and were able to ride their horses across.

They were hailed as heroes.

The journey was uneventful

and seems to have followed an Aboriginal trade route.

But for the new colony, it was a defining moment.

Convict laborers cut through the rock,

built the bridges, and opened the road

to the deceptively limitless pastures of the Golden West.

The fragile ancient grasslands were devastated

by European livestock and European methods.

Wilderness was there to be tamed.

...sinking low

And a world where golden glow

I'm a-thinking dear of you

And those happy days we knew

In 1901 Australia became a nation,

and Australians began to embrace the challenge

of being a new people in a new and different land,

began to lose their uneasiness with this strange place,

to appreciate the wilderness--

the "bush" as they called it--

for its own innate qualities,

not for any fancied resemblance

to the Europe they'd left behind.

Some had learned to see it and to love it for itself,

but most still saw the land through European eyes.

The clearing of native vegetation