The Original Big Scrub Forest The Big Scrub was a complex forest ecosystem of sub-tropical lowland rainforest associations covering an area minimally estimated to have been between 75,000 and 80,000 hectares. It extended from Lismore, east to the edge of the coastal plain inland from Ballina and from Meerschaum Vale in the south to the Nightcap, Goonengerry and Byron bay in the north, including the villages of Alstonville, Clunes and Bangalow. Try this site for model maps ..... www.greenwork.org.au/bsmodels.html "Discovered" in the 1840's by the Cedar getters (the first white men in the area), the Big Scrub, or Red Scrub as it was sometimes known because of the magnificent red cedar trees which grew there in abundance, was almost entirely cleared by the turn of the century. Anxious for land and fearful of the unknown, the early settlers who followed the cedar-getters saw the Big Scrub as an obstacle to settlement and development. They cut and burnt some 60% of the timber, completely unaware that this was a highly evolving forest community dating back to the supercontinent Gondwanaland, or that most of the accumulated fertility of the region was in the trees and easily lost to fires and erosion. Today the Big Scrub is represented by only a few small isolated reserves, a mere 0.4% of it's former grandeur! Today, landcarers aim to protect the remnants of the Big Scrub and develop buffers around them and connectivity between them, using riparian regeneration. back to BSEC Home Page