High up in an ancient conifer rainforest, at what was once the largest Indigenous gathering place in eastern Australia, there is sunlight where there shouldn’t be.
Among the eponymous pine trees of the Bunya Mountains, in south-east Queensland, a deadly disease has taken root. Walking through the forest, Adrian Bauwens, a Wakka Wakka man, says pockets of sunlight have replaced what is “usually quite a dense canopy where’s it’s quite heavily shaded”.
The towering bunya pines are afflicted by a plant pathogen known as dieback and becoming skeletal, dropping their leaves and limbs. The culprit is Phytophthora, a type of water mould that spreads through soil and attaches itself to the roots of trees, cutting off nutrient and water supply.
View image in fullscreen Feral pigs are causing bunya pines to die off. Photograph: Auscape/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
Bunya dieback has been an issue over the past decade, but its spread is being worsened by a porcine threat. Feral pigs are “running quite wild”, Bauwens says; “trotting around in dieback areas … spreading it through the mountain by digging it up”.
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