The Memorial Crows Ash of Toowong

The council that planted this tree was abolished thirteen months later. In September 1924 the Mayor of Toowong set a crows ash into a sandstone box on the corner of Milton and Sylvan Roads, under a marble plaque marking a hundred years since John Oxley landed on the Brisbane River. On 1 October 1925 the Toowong Town Council ceased to exist, absorbed into the new Greater Brisbane City Council, and a second inscription on the same planter records the forty years it lasted. The tree is a memorial to two things at once, and one of them is the body that did the memorialising. A century on, the box has had the last word. Brisbane City Council's own heritage citation notes that the tree appears stunted, most likely because of the constraints of the planter it was ceremonially placed in. Crows ash lives around 200 years in a natural setting, and this is not one: it is a rainforest hardwood spending its life in a stone container beside the traffic on Milton Road. A Vegetation Protection Order covers it and it has been a Local Heritage Place since 2002. That citation, written in 2006, is the only source we have found for the tree, and no photograph or sighting since has turned up to confirm it is still standing. The corner is public footpath, visible at any hour. If you pass it, tell us how it is doing.