Gija Jumulu

This boab did not grow where it stands. It is reckoned to be over 750 years old and it spent almost all of that beside Telegraph Creek near Warmun in the Kimberley, until 2008, when it was lifted out of the ground to clear the way for a road bridge on the Great Northern Highway. Eighteen metres tall and 37 tonnes, it then travelled 3,200 kilometres south on a truck, the longest known road journey by a living tree of that size, and was replanted in Kings Park on 20 July 2008. The Gija people, traditional owners of the country it came from, held a farewell ceremony for it six days before it left and gave it the name Gija Jumulu. Jumulu is their word for boab. It arrived with superficial damage to its bark and was assessed as healthy in 2016. Boabs are built to absorb that sort of insult. They drop their leaves through the dry-season winter and keep photosynthesising through the bark itself, which is why the bare months show the tree at its best rather than its worst: a swollen grey bottle of a trunk above the Two Rivers Lookout, with nothing to distract from the shape. New growth usually starts again in December. On the estimates it has another twelve centuries ahead of it, all of which it will now spend 3,200 kilometres from where it started.