Restoring a rainforest

摘要

My first encounter with Australian rainforest was when I was six years old. My mother had taken me and my baby sister on a holiday to Belgrave, 40km east of Melbourne. Seventy years ago Belgrave was bush; now if s deep suburbia. From my bedroom windowthat bit of the Dividing Range looked all blue and velvety, but when I got there it was all brown and green and drippy and damp, and that was before my mother dug me out of bed at 5am to go to Sherbrooke Forest to see the superb lyrebirds.Sherbrooke Forest is a cool temperate rainforest, dominated by mountain ash (a species of eucalyptus) and tree ferns. These days it is part of the Dandenong Ranges National Park, with manicured walkways, but then it was slippy and slidy and sludgy, withmossy fallen trees to clamber over, and my school shoes could gain no purchase. Within minutes I was a bruised, tearful mess, begging to be allowed to go back to the warm, dry guesthouse and my cooked breakfast. And we didn't see a lyrebird.