Along the NSW–Queensland border, and tracing the Great Divide to the Hunter Valley, lies one of the most biologically extraordinary landscapes on the planet — The Gondwana Rainforests of Australia — a World Heritage-listed network preserving the most extensive areas of subtropical rainforest in the world along with ancient plant and animal lineages. This spring, the Great Eastern Ranges (GER) Initiative is excited to announce the start of a new effort to protect and reconnect it: the Greater Gondwana Rainforest Corridor.

A living link to an ancient world

The Gondwana Rainforests of Australia World Heritage Area is not one forest but an archipelago — 41 separate reserves scattered across south-east Queensland and north-east New South Wales, together covering more than 366,000 hectares. These forests are what remains of the vast rainforests that once blanketed the Australian continent when it was still part of the southern supercontinent of Gondwana.

Rainforest now covers barely 0.4% of mainland Australia and the scientific value of the Gondwana Rainforests is difficult to overstate. They hold an outstanding fossil-like record of plant evolution, including a secondary centre of endemism for some of the world’s earliest flowering plants, and they contain nearly all of the world’s Antarctic beech cool temperate rainforest. They are also a stronghold for some of the planet’s oldest surviving songbird lineages — lyrebirds, scrub-birds, treecreepers, bowerbirds and catbirds — groups that trace their ancestry back to the Late Cretaceous era. More than 270 threatened plant and animal species depend on this landscape, including recent discoveries such as the black-tailed dusky antechinus, found only on the misty summit of the ancient Tweed Shield Volcano caldera that straddles the Queensland–NSW border.

An archipelago under pressure

Being an ”archipelago” of forests means these forests are now vulnerable to a range of threatening processes. Restricted to landscapes that retain the necessary climatic conditions and fragmented by cleared land, many rainforest species have nowhere to retreat to when conditions in their patch turn unfavourable. The 2019–2020 Black Summer fires exposed just how serious this vulnerability has become with findings from peer reviewed research[1] estimating that 16% of the 151,662 ha of rainforest in the Gondwanan Rainforest of Australia World Heritage Area burnt; that that the fires struck hardest through the Nightcap Range and Gibraltar–Washpool sections of the World Heritage Area; and that  rainforest bird communities in burnt areas were still measurably less diverse than in unburnt forest years after the fires — a sobering reminder that recovery from these events is neither fast nor guaranteed.

The elusive Albert’s Lyrebird, native to the Gondwanan Rainforests   Photo: Shutterstock

As the climate continues to shift, rainforest needs to be better buffered and isolated rainforest patches will increasingly need to function as a connected network rather than scattered islands — allowing species to move between refugia, track suitable conditions, and recolonise burnt areas from nearby unburnt forest. That is precisely the gap the Greater Gondwana Rainforest Corridor is designed to close.

Building on a proven model

GER has received start-up funding from the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) to extend into this landscape the climate adaptation corridor model piloted over the past three years in the Bunyas to Border (B2B) corridor, on the Queensland–NSW border to the north. That pilot has already shown what community-led, science-informed restoration can achieve: in its first year alone, landholders across 53 properties planted more than 3,500 trees and installed dozens of nest boxes and wildlife water stations, establishing a connected 200km climate refuge along the Great Dividing Range.

The Greater Gondwana Rainforest Corridor will apply the same model to a new stretch of country running from the NSW–Queensland border south to Guy Fawkes River National Park — itself a biodiversity hotspot of more than 1,000 plant species, 40 vegetation communities and 24 threatened animal species, from brush-tailed rock-wallabies to glossy black-cockatoos. Together, the Bunyas to Border and Greater Gondwana Rainforest corridors will form a single connected corridor of roughly 400km, linking some of Australia’s most biologically unique and diverse habitats at the very heart of the Great Eastern Ranges.

Powerful Owl fledgelings are generally considered an indicator of abundant prey  Photo: Shutterstock

Built on four regional foundations

This is very much a partnership-led initiative. The corridor draws together four established GER regional alliances as its foundational ‘building blocks’:

• Bunyas to Border, consolidating the gains of the original pilot corridor;
• Border Ranges Alliance, working across the rugged shield-volcano country of the caldera;
• Upper Clarence (Clarence Landcare), connecting the escarpment country toward the Clarence Valley; and
• Jaliigirr Biodiversity Alliance, extending the corridor into the Coffs Coast hinterland.

Each brings trusted landholder relationships, on-ground delivery capacity and deep local knowledge — the ingredients that made the B2B pilot work. Over the coming year, GER will work with these partners, Traditional Custodians and technical experts (including spatial connectivity science from Griffith University’s NESP Climate Resilient Landscapes project) to map priority restoration sites, identify critical pinch-points on private and Aboriginal-owned land, and develop a scalable implementation plan ready for on-ground delivery.

Why it matters

The Greater Gondwana Rainforest Corridor is an obvious landscape for GER to re-focus its attention in coming years, with benefits that will flow to iconic landscapes and species that depend on old hollow-bearing trees and ancient rainforest specialists that exist nowhere else on Earth.

Reconnecting this landscape won’t undo the impact of Black Summer, but it will give this remarkable, ancient ecosystem a far better chance of adapting to what comes next.

Help us build the corridor

Projects like this depend on the support of people who care about protecting Australia’s most extraordinary landscapes. You can help extend the Greater Gondwana Rainforest Corridor by making a donation to GER — every contribution helps fund the on-ground restoration, landholder partnerships and science that will keep this ancient corridor connected for generations to come.

[1] Mackey B, Lindenmayer D, Norman P, Taylor C and Gould S (2021) Are fire refugia less predictable due to climate change? Environmental Research Letters 16: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2e88