The Moreton Bay Fig of Curtain Square

This park was a hole in the ground, and prisoners dug it. Between 1853 and 1866 the block was a bluestone quarry worked by men from the Collingwood Stockade, and bluestone is the rock Melbourne's kerbs and laneways are still made of. The pit was filled, levelled and planted, and Curtain Square became a square. This fig went in somewhere after that. It is a Moreton Bay fig, Ficus macrophylla, an Australian tree but not a Melbourne one: its home range runs up the east coast around Moreton Bay in Queensland, roughly 1,400 kilometres north, and Victorian gardeners planted it down here anyway for the shade and the ropey buttress roots. It stands 25 metres tall with a trunk of about 4.77 metres round, converted from the 152 centimetres of diameter at breast height the City of Yarra's register publishes, because the register measures across the trunk rather than around it. Local accounts describe a surviving avenue of Moreton Bay figs at the Canning Street entrance, which is where this tree stands. Whether this particular trunk belongs to that avenue is not something anyone has written down. Its age is the register's own band, over a hundred years at the survey in August 2012, and there is no planting date on record. If you know one, tell us.