Mount Irvine

The Rainforest Conservancy is beginning at Mount Irvine, in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales.

Mount Irvine is located in the heart of the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area, at the southernmost extremity of the Wollemi National Park.

A number of the highest peaks in this area are topped with basalt and it’s associated deep, nutrient rich soils. These soils support a unique rainforest assemblage and habitat surrounded by largely eucalypt forests.

Along with other basalt–topped peaks in the area, from the early 1900s Mount Irvine was largely cleared, its timber extracted and the area farmed. The isolated pockets of rainforest on these peaks are vulnerable to bushfires moving in from the surrounding eucalypt forests. In recent years, this vulnerability has been less due to the bushfires themselves, than to the “backburning“ used to protect property from these fires.

As the unique nature of these rainforests has come to be appreciated, the landowners have now banded together to develop the Rainforest Conservancy in an effort to reverse the degradation of these precious natural resources.

This drone view of Mt Irvine, shows the rainforest vegetation at the edges of the cleared area, which has actively re-generated since the 1960s, moving over the cleared areas, currently producing walnuts and chestnuts.

Some of these cleared areas are no longer productive and could be have rainforest re-established on them, increasing the area of the forest and connecting existing forest patches to form a continuous rainforest stretching the length of the Mount Irvine ridge.

(drone footage provided by Kalani Gason).