The Corroboree Tree

Ainslie built a park around this tree, and named the park after what may once have happened beneath it. Corroboree Park was laid out in about 1925 with the yellow box at its heart, on ground believed to have been a corroboree site, where Aboriginal people gathered for ceremony and dance. The same patch is said to have been the first campsite of James Ainslie, the overseer of the Duntroon estate. Both stories arrive with care attached. The ACT Tree Register, which listed the tree in March 2013 for its Aboriginal heritage and its place in the landscape, says plainly that the Aboriginal history is not well documented. The ABC, writing about Canberra's exceptional trees in 2015, went no further than saying it is claimed the tree was a focal point for the local Aboriginal community. That is the honest edge of the record, and it is still a lot to ask of a eucalypt in a suburban park. The register measured it at 19.2 metres tall with a crown 26 metres across, and gives its girth only as more than three metres. Nobody has published an age. If you know how old it is, tell us, and since the newest written sources date from 2013 and 2015, tell us too that it still stands.