The Gloucester Tree

A prince helped drill the holes. Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, came through in the late 1940s and worked an auger into this karri's trunk himself, which is how the tree got both its name and part of its ladder. The ladder was the point. In 1947 the forestry service picked this karri as a fire lookout, one of eight raised across the south west between 1937 and 1952, and George Reynolds drove a spiral of steel pegs up the trunk. Jack Watson, a forester and Gallipoli veteran who later ran Kings Park, made the test climb and took six hours over it. The job at the top was to see smoke over the karri forest before it turned into something visible from the ground. It became the second tallest fire lookout tree in the world, behind the Dave Evans Bicentennial Tree a few kilometres away. It stood 61 metres until a trim took seven metres of rotting crown off. The climb closed in November 2023 on safety grounds and reopened on 1 July 2026, now stopping at a platform 37 metres up rather than the old 53. There is still no harness and the risk is still the climber's own. At the climbing zone the trunk measured 7.3 metres round on that first ascent in 1947. Its age is a floor without a ceiling: sources say at least 250 years, and nobody has counted the rings.