Thank you for the opportunity to help launch this wonderful book.
Anyone who visits the Upper Florentine is immediately struck by the majesty of its stunning environment, for here is a place where the natural world is at its most magnificent. But of course you are not the first to be smitten. The intrepid Surveyor-General George Frankland, a well educated civil servant, named the Florentine in the evening of the last day of summer in 1835. Perhaps he was still on a high from discovering the picturesque scenery around Lake St Clair a few days before, but his nomenclature was strikingly apposite. Having taken a “Grand Tour” of the cultural highlights of southern Europe in his privileged youth, Frankland was well aware of the prestige attached to Florentine culture, that jewel of the Renaissance; so we may presume he did not confer the name lightly.
Indeed, the coincidences and symmetry are compelling. Equidistant from the equator, the two Florentine landscapes preserve outstanding examples of cultural and natural endeavour. Similarly, the fate of both has been shaped by Machiavellian politics and Medici-scale patronage, although only one landscape has clearly survived these so far. But for us an important point of symmetry remains distressingly incomplete: Tuscany’s Florentine landscape has long been a treasured World Heritage Site – it is well past time that its southern hemisphere namesake is accorded the same respect.
The Upper Florentine is a special and beautiful place where that intricate web connecting sunlight, water, soil and creatures has woven a tapestry of living communities with few counterparts. Here, among the world’s tallest flowering trees, is preserved deep history in the landscape and ecosystems which bear witness to the 80 million year old story of Gondwana adrift, climate changes, the Pleistocene ice ages and the first Tasmanian people. Although our understanding remains scant and the full narrative will take centuries more to reveal and relate, the heritage values of the valley can only be enhanced. In recent decades we have rediscovered that aboriginal people thrived in this place thousands of years ago along with giant marsupials. Beneath the ground, one of the most extensive cave systems in Australia has formed and within it live an array of rare and bizarre creatures such as blind beetles, colourless pseudo-scorpions, matricidal glow worms and the magnificent Tasmanian cave spider. These forests remain a stronghold for the world’s most ancient cicada – a strange, woolly and silent creature active on cold winter nights. Giant ghost moths may emerge en masse from among the roots of trees on damp autumn evenings while handsome velvetworms, largely unchanged in appearance for 500 million years, forage for prey in the damp leaf litter. Reluctantly the Florentine gave up the last Tasmanian tiger in 1933, but clearly it preserves many other treasures.
It is timely indeed that Miranda and Lily have produced this most attractive field guide. In it we see art and science blended in a beautiful and compelling way – in the Florentine tradition no less. I especially like that it showcases many species which are overlooked in most nature guides – small life forms such as mosses and fungi and invertebrates which only reveal their intricate shapes and stunning colours to the patient observer. Edward Wilson, the Harvard entomologist who coined the term “biodiversity” three decades ago, wasn’t joking when he pointed out that “it is the little things that run the world”. We know from Tasmanian research that a hectare of tall wet forest can be home to more than three hundreds of species of fungi, more than two hundred species of beetles and a hundred different spiders. We cannot possibly hope to conserve these species and their important interactions on a species by species basis as demanded by the bureaucratic Threatened Species Act. The whole ensemble of species, common and rare alike, only exist, indeed only make sense, when embedded in their ecosystems going about their essential business as they have done for millions of years.
For all of us, this book is the key to enhanced appreciation of the wonders of the Upper Florentine Valley and I believe it will become an influential tool in its defence. We therefore owe a special debt of gratitude to both authors and their supporters for their vision and hard work.
And finally, our perpetual vision for this wonderful Tasmanian landscape must reflect that of the great Julius Caesar who in 59BC, in another fertile and temperate valley, founded Florentia – a place that flourishes (from the Latin).
Speech at the Hobart Bookshop by Peter McQuillan (School of Geography & Environmental Studies, University of Tasmania) on 11 February 2010 at the Still Wild Still Threatened launch of “Flora and Fauna Guide to the Upper Florentine Valley” by Miranda Gibson and Lily Leahy.
Picture: Geoff Law photo
