What is the oldest tree in Derby?
Derby's only mapped tree, and its oldest, is the Boab Prison Tree, a Boab (Adansonia gregorii) beside the Derby-Gibb River Road a few kilometres south of town. Its trunk measured about four metres through in 1905, close to twelve and a half metres around, and it is documented since 1916 as a shelter and burial place used by Aboriginal people, though the popular story of prisoners locked inside it has no supporting evidence.
Historians Kristyn Harman and Elizabeth Grant, and separately the anthropologist Kim Akerman, traced the prison story to a 1948 newspaper description of an artwork and to a different, similarly named tree at Wyndham. No record has turned up of anyone held inside this particular trunk. What is documented is older: in 1916 the anthropologist Herbert Basedow photographed it as a living boab used for shelter and burial, and recorded human bones inside it, a use with real significance for the Nyikina and Warrwa people. The one trunk measurement on record, taken in 1905, gives a girth of 12.57 metres and an age estimate of roughly 500 years, which reads as a round guess rather than a dating; radiocarbon work since has reportedly suggested it is considerably older, so it is stated here as disputed. It stands free to visit on the road toward the Gibb River Road, ringed by a post-and-wire fence put up after visitors compacted its roots and carved into its bark.
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