What is the oldest tree in Flinders Ranges?
Flinders Ranges' only mapped tree is the Cazneaux Tree, a River Red Gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) standing alone on a plateau inside Ikara-Flinders Ranges National Park, near Wilpena Pound Resort in South Australia. Photographer Harold Cazneaux made it famous in May 1937 with an image he called The Spirit of Endurance, and the National Trust of South Australia lists it as significant tree number 239 for its aesthetic quality alone.
The trunk runs 11.4 metres around at the base, and the state gazetteer puts the tree at 29 metres tall, though a recent parks description calls it nearer 25. Cazneaux wrote that the passing years had left it scarred and marked by the elements, and that the tree, unconquered, spoke of a spirit of endurance. That scarring is the tree's own record of storm, fire and water on an exposed plateau with no shelter around it. The naming is credited to George Hunt, the last pastoral leaseholder of Wilpena Station, and Cazneaux's grandson, the entrepreneur Dick Smith, paid for a plaque placed at the site in 1991. Since 2025 the tree has been reachable by the Spirit of Endurance Trail, an easy 90-minute, no-experience-needed walk from Flinders Ranges Way, about 3 kilometres from Wilpena Pound Resort. A South Australian national parks entry pass may be needed for vehicle access to the park, though the trail and the tree carry no separate fee. Nobody has ever put a documented age to it.
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