Quite a few years ago my wife and I noticed a tree at the top of Gillies Range that we liked. Nearly every visit to the Tablelands we would stop by it on the way home and watch the sunset behind it.

Then one year the tree lost all its foliage and we thought it would be a seasonal thing. We were so very wrong.

By April 2021 we had come to accept that the tree had died. Even since taking the above photo the tree has degenerated even more with branches falling off. It reminded me of the ephemeral nature of life. There would be no more wonderful photos of that tree and you can tell even the cows are not impressed :(

Enjoy it while you can

Not far away from that spot on Gillies Road is my friends farm which is also a reminder to me of how things do not last forever. For years now I have been trying to get a nice photo of his original milking shed and the dead tree next to it. I will never get that photo.

The dead branches of that old tree started to fall so what was remaining of it was cut down for fire wood. It prompted me to get a great photo of the milk shed before it was gone also.

In March 2022 I took this photo of the shed I was pleased with and gave it to my friend. He has assured me that the shed will not be around forever. I would not be so lucky with getting that great photo of the next landmark I will share with you.

That photo is gone forever

A month ago I was scaling the base of the Giant Fig Tree in Barron Gorge that for a year or so now I have been trying to get a great photo of. At the time I assumed I had all the time in the world to get the photo, at least in my life time given how old I guess the tree is.

We have had rain for weeks now and that has meant that I have taken the chance to photograph the seasonal waterfalls in Barron Gorge. I took this photo on my way up the hillside towards the Giant Fig on the Anzac Day long weekend. Perhaps today I would get that great photo of the Giant Fig?

I was not the only one enjoying the rain as I bumped into one of my friends who often sits with me under the Giant Fig for a coffee. So glad to see that he had survived the recent event at the Giant Fig that would soon reveal itself to me.

A water drenched branch of the giant fig has broken off in the high winds that have delivered the rain. The branch and foliage are so large that they have taken much of the surrounding foliage down with it as it fell.

The base of the tree that I planned to use in a photo is now covered in fallen debris and in particular that one huge fallen branch that will take many years to decompose.

The other problem is that the top of the tree now has a large area of open sky. We will see if I can use that to my advantage in a photo in the future but somehow I think not.

The photo above is of the Giant Fig as I shared it with a friend back in August 2021. The tree will never look like that again and my friend now lives in Tasmania. You cannot get a much better example of ephemerality than that.