Bland Oak

On New Year's Day 1941 a storm split what was reported to be the largest tree in Australia into two pieces. The salvaged timber was carved into Fairfield's mayoral chair, now held at the city's museum, and the oak itself is still alive in Oakdene Park. William Bland planted it in 1842. He arrived in New South Wales as a convict and became one of colonial Sydney's more prominent figures, a surgeon, a politician, a farmer and an inventor. What he put in the ground was a southern live oak, an American species, and 1842 is a documented planting date rather than an estimate, which gives this tree one of the few real birthdays in Sydney: 184 years. It never recovered the size it lost in 1941 and it is still the largest oak of its kind in the city, about thirteen metres tall with a canopy spreading more than thirty metres across. Fairfield put it on the city's coat of arms. The National Trust added it to the National Register of Significant Trees in 2018, and in 2020 the council germinated acorns from it to raise about ten young Bland Oaks around the district, which is the most practical answer anyone has found to a tree that cannot last forever. Oakdene Park is free and open at any hour. Carramar station is a short walk, 45 to 60 minutes by train from central Sydney.