8 
The Queensland Naturalist Sept., 1936. 
AN ADVANCING ANTARCTIC BEECH FOREST. 
By D. A. HERBERT, D.Sc., BIOLOGY DEPART- 
MENT, QUEENSLAND UNIVERSITY. 
Eorests of Antarctic beech ( Nothofagus Moorei) 
fringe the Queensland border in the highest parts of the 
Macpherson Range, reaching their eastern limit at Mount 
Ilobwee. Favouring the southern sheltered slopes as they 
do, the}" extend over the New South Wales border, which 
runs, roughly, east and west along the watershed of the 
range. In New South Wales they are found in the upland 
brushes bordering the New England Tableland, at the head- 
waters of the Bellinger, McLeay, Barrington, Manning, 
and Gloucester Rivers. In the Dorrigo forests (NS.W.) 
the trees attain a height of 100 to 140 ft., and a girth of 
9 to 10 ft. In the Macpherson Range forests, such as those 
of Mount Ilobwee and Mt. Wanungara, the beeches do not 
attain this stature; they are usually well under 100 ft. in 
height, and often not much more than 30 or 40 ft. They 
have a peculiar habit of growth, a ring of trees surround- 
ing a central decayed trunk, from which they have sprung. 
Such a clump might be described as a caespitose tree, 
though it commenced as a normal single-stemmed tree. 
This type is the rule in the easily accessible beech forests 
of South Queensland. Seedlings and saplings are rare. 
The forest is composed of gnarled old trees, and the im- 
pression they give is of great age and decay. 
The heavy investment of epiphytes-— mosses, lichens, 
filmy ferns, Cyclophorus serpens , Polypodmm pustulatum , 
A.splenium falcatum, Asplenium nidus, Plat y cerium 
grande , and Dendrobium falcorostrum — and the climber 
Fieldja australis, which creeps up the stem, rooting and 
branching amongst the decaying bark and mosses, 
heighten the impression of age. Even the fructifications 
of some of the fungi, which are the agents of decay, are 
moss-covered. The brackets of Pomes lucidus are par- 
ticularly noticeable for their thatch of moss; shorter-lived 
fructifications, such as those of the luminescent Panus 
concliatus, of course, do not present the opportunity for 
epiphyte colonization. 
No other rain forest tree in South Queensland has 
such a load of epiphytes. 
Popular descriptions of the beech forest stress the. 
great age of the trees, and often suggest that they are 
relics of an ice age, surviving in the moutains, but mori- 
bund and out of their element. Such ideas are far from 
the truth. The beech forests of South Queensland occupy 
