“I remember Dave going: ‘Have you ever seen a tree like this before?’.
“We looked around and we’re in the middle of this area that’s totally different to any other place in the Blue Mountains, and these trees were everywhere.”
They didn’t know it then, but Michael Casteleyn and mates Tony Zimmerman and David Noble had walked into a den of dinosaurs – and they were alive.
Standing up to 40m high with main trunks approximately 1m in diameter, the men were dwarfed by a stand of bizarre looking trees.
They had an unusual fern-like, dark green foliage and unique pattern of branching.
“The trees looked like they were about to explode because they had that Coco Pop bark,” Casteleyn says.
“I remember saying they looked like Bunya pine, but they weren’t that.”
Until then, this strange tree was only known from fossil records dating back to the age of dinosaurs.
Even Noble, who had taken botany courses as part of an environmental science degree, had never seen the like of it.
It was a cool, clear day in early spring 1994 when the trio paused for lunch deep in a canyon in Wollemi National Park, 130km north-west of Sydney.
Casteleyn, 28, an engineer for Dubbo City Council in country NSW, desperate for any excuse to escape for a weekend in the Blue Mountains.
Zimmerman, 40, was a road manager for the Parkes Elvis Festival in the NSW Central West.
And Noble, 29, was a temporary NSW National Parks & Wildlife Service ranger who built walking tracks near Blackheath. Fit and wiry, he was renowned for exploring uncharted, inaccessible territory.
He grew up bushwalking in the Blue Mountains with his parents, John and Olive, who were members of Blue Mountains Conservation Society.
“Of course, once you've done all the tracks and all the common things, canyoning and walking off track is the next step,” he says.
Intrepid trio
The trio had met through caving circles, along with a small group of others, and knitted closer together over time, taking to the bush most weekends.
Back in 1994, if they weren’t cycling they were kayaking, if they weren’t kayaking they were bushwalking deep in the Blue Mountains wilderness.
Every day in the outdoors involved 12 hours of continuous climbing, fast-paced walking, abseiling, jumping and schlepping through creeks and sticky mud puddles.
They travelled light and moved fast, maximising rest breaks by working on their gear.
While other hardcore bushwalkers wore protective gear, boots and shouldered heavy packs stuffed with gear and provisions, Casteleyn, Noble and Zimmerman wore footy shorts, t-shirts and runners. They wore light ropes and harnesses and ate simple food.
“Dave used to have some really good long socks, but I just used to rough it and I’d come back with scratches all over me,” Casteleyn says.
“We were fit as. We were like professional athletes. We could do in one day what other people with heavy packs did in three.
“We’d joke that we had to stick to union rules.
“Dave always said he’d get us out by dark if we had a 15-minute morning tea and afternoon tea break and half an hour for lunch. If he had his way, we’d have five minutes for morning tea and fifteen minutes for lunch.’’
They were on a mission. Noble’s mission to conquer the bush (“we’d run out of caves”), as in: walk every bit of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area.
No one had ever done it.
Noble had mapped out areas on a topographical map, with a methodical plan to conquer each one.
“This was before they invented mobile phones or GPSs,” he says. “So we didn’t have a map on the phone with the dot moving on it like we do today. We had to have a compass and a map.
“Then you had to remember where you’ve been and where the Wollemi Pines were.”
Out in the bush, they relied on Noble’s gut instinct and navigational skills. Zimmerman and Casteleyn say they trusted their mate completely.
“We had no idea where we were half the time,” Casteleyn says. “Dave had maps, but we never walked the tracks.”
Most of the time, they never saw any evidence of any other soul.
They rarely returned to the same place.
“I’ve only done two or three hundred of these places,” Casteleyn says.
“Dave’s done about a thousand, I’d say.”
In fact, Noble has named more than 200 places previously unnamed and unexplored.
The trio had a system of traversing the ridges and dipping into the valleys to explore canyons.
Over a three or four-day weekend, the man would explore three or four canyons a day, 100 a year or more.
“Bang, bang, bang, bang. It's up, down, up, down, up, down,” Casteleyn says. “It was like a bit of a sporting exercise - we were competing when there was no one there.
“It was a weird time where we're just ticking off these canyons, and often we'd be in areas we could tell no one had been before. It was quite exciting, not knowing if you're going to get out.”
With few other canyoning groups around at the time, Noble, Zimmerman and Casteleyn were the only ones finding new routes and ways through, up and over obstacles and challenges.
“It was that excitement of chucking a rope down something and not knowing where that canyon goes,” Noble says. “Or we could have had not a long enough rope or nothing to tie off on. Or we could have abseiled down and walked along the creek to find it was all blocked up and we couldn't get through it.”
One time out at Kanangra Boyd National Park near Jenolan Caves, 180km from Sydney, they got to the end of a canyon only to be faced with a steep 900m climb.
There were no trails.
The only way out was up.
As usual, they turned the seemingly undefeatable into a challenge. Noble and Casteleyn challenged each other to a race. Both made it to the top in less than an hour.
“I couldn't do those trips we did now,” Casteleyn says.
He is now aged 58, Noble 59 and Zimmerman 70, but their connection remains strong.
They joke like teenage boys, ribbing each other’s foibles, remembering silly competitions deep in the bush where they’d see who could keep their feet dry the longest while crossing a creek.
There’s also the knowing looks of a shared secret, the respect and the quiet admiration of men who know each other deeply and trust their bush brothers with their lives.
“Dave was always the leader,” Casteleyn says. “He was always fastest and had the best foot moves, especially along slippery rocks.
“He liked to be first and would often push his foot to the front, and we’d joke around and try to push it out with our foot.
“Well done, Dave: he did something different and it paid off.”
Den of dinosaurs
On that spring morning in 1994, Noble, Casteleyn and Zimmerman abseiled down another rock face into another beautiful canyon in another section of bush that no one had seen for who knew how long.
Maybe no one ever had.
The trio had spent the whole day focused on the ground, carefully watching their feet for safe footholds and trying to stay out of the frigid creek water.
They stopped to eat lunch in a dark, narrow gorge at the bottom of a wet canyon.
“We were on our way out, and I remember that particular area was quite easy walking, which is kind of rare.
“I was just enjoying the nice, easy trotting. It was twilighty, just really chilled.”
Noble interjects.
“Michael described it as quite easy when we got there, but we did abseil down into a canyon and scrambled and climbed, and it was a fairly long day.
“It was quite late in the day when we got to the tree, but we spent the whole day getting there.”
They came to a flat area between two creeks.
“And then I remember Dave going: ‘Have you ever seen a tree like this before?’,” Casteleyn says.
Noble took a clipping and a piece of bark.
“And then, of course, we have to climb out afterwards, so the rest of the day wasn't easy,” Noble says.
The next bit of the story is famous.
Identification
“Whaddya think this is, Wyn?” Noble says.
National Parks & Wildlife Service naturalist Dr Wyn Jones, David Noble’s boss at the time, was dismissive of the samples Noble had chucked on his desk: “Nah. Looks like a fern. It’s useless.”
Noble pressed the point, describing the tree as an odd conifer-like tree.
There was only way to find out, so a few weeks later, Noble led Jones to the secret canyon to see them for himself.
Casteleyn continues.
“A few months later, I said: ‘What about that tree?’, and Dave goes: ‘Ah, I dunno. It could be Bunya Bunya Pine. I don't know.’
“Of course, they all then went into secrecy mode . . . and it was all very quiet for about a year.
“Then it was all out there. It was crazy.”
As his mate tells the tale, Noble gently chuckles and listens. He chips in every now and again to correct the story with a quiet “I don’t really remember it that way, but anyway” or fill in a gap, but otherwise, he simply listens, one arm held across his body, supporting the other with his hand cupped over his mouth.
Noble mainly looks at the ground. Every now and again he’ll look at his friends fondly or looks up at all the listeners and grins, his face lit up by his cheeky smile and twinkly eyes.
In that year of “secrecy mode”, Jones teamed up with Jan Allan from Mount Tomah Botanical Gardens (now Blue Mountains Botanic Garden, Mount Tomah) and set about identifying and classifying the plant.
They eventually found it in the fossil record – 90 to 200 million years ago during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods in a time when Australia was part of the ancient super-continent Gondwana with Africa, South America, Antarctica and India.
It was a time when the Earth was hotter, wetter, steamier.
The time of the dinosaurs.
The tree is thought to have been extinct for two million years.
Jones and Allan named it Wollemi nobilis, after the place where it was found (Wollemi National Park) and the man who discovered it, David Noble.
It’s sometimes called Wollemia nobilis, a name Jones abhors.
“Wollemi, which means ‘Look out, watch your step’ in Darug language, is a beautiful sounding word. Wollemia – that sounds weak,” he says.
Future
Once king of the forest, towering over the landscape, the Wollemi Pine gradually retreated into just a few dark dank canyons as the climate cooled and dried and flowering plants took over the landscape.
Today, the Wollemi Pine is listed as “critically endangered”.
The next step is “extinct in the wild” before it is gone completely.
That almost happened in 2019-20 when the ravenous Gospers Mountain megafire licked at the secret gorge.
It was saved by a National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) and NSW RFS effort to install an irrigation system, while large air tankers dropped fire retardant ahead of the blaze, and waterbombed the surrounding area to slow the fire down.
Nevertheless, there are only a few known stands of Wollemi Pine with less than 100 mature trees.
Threats to the wild trees, which all share identical DNA, remain. Fire. Vandalism. Climate change. Disease.
But the NPWS, Botanic Gardens of Sydney, and NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water have a plan to future-proof “the dinosaur tree”.
An Asset of Intergenerational Significance, the Wollemi Pine has been propagated and distributed around the world.
Botanic Gardens of Sydney chief executive Simon Duffy says it’s like an insurance policy against loss of diversity.
Two other populations of Wollemi Pine established in Wollemi National Park in 2019 using translocation were further augmented in 2024 with 379 saplings each, bringing the total translocated population to over 835 saplings.
In September 2024, an online auction of six Wollemi Pines directly propagated from the first generation raised funds toward the rainforest seed conservation program.
There was also a special back-up collection planted on the 30th anniversary of the Wollemi Pine’s serendipitous discovery in August.
Cared for and cossetted by scientists, the saplings in the Blue Mountains Botanic Garden are not far from the secluded canyon where 46 adult trees and 43 juveniles remain in the wild in Wollemi National Park in the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area.
Botanic Gardens of Sydney scientists also established a genetically diverse living collection at the Australian Botanic Garden Mount Annan.
Genetically diverse young trees were shipped to botanic gardens in the UK, Ireland, Europe and one in the USA last year to back up the collection and provide greater resilience to potential impacts of climate change.
A complete rescue strategy will be outlined in the draft National Recovery Plan for the Wollemi Pine to be finalised later this year [2024].
“David's chance encounter three decades ago was described as the equivalent of finding a dinosaur alive on Earth and is still hailed as one of the greatest botanical reincarnations of this century,” Duffy says.
“The Wollemi pine has achieved iconic status, championing the cause of plant conservation here in Australia and globally.
“We often describe the Wollemi Pine as the poster child for conservation. These ancient trees have become a symbol of survival and hope.”
As for the three men who first saw “the dinosaur tree” in the wild, the days of remote bushwalking are over for David Noble, Michael Castelyn and Tony Zimmerman.
They’re happy for others to take over the exploration.
While Noble was written into history with the Wollemi Pine named after him, he is adamant one of the most important (and famous) botanical discoveries of the modern age has not changed his life.
A temporary parks ranger at the time, he was offered a permanent job after that, although he’s sure that was just coincidence (“I think it was just that time in life”).
“I certainly get asked questions about it all the time, but I don't think it would have changed anything I did.
“Michael and I got into kayaking shortly afterwards, just as intensely as we did canyoning, looking for remote creeks.”
So, are there other undiscovered secrets left to find?
Zimmerman doesn’t think so.
Castelyn is less sure: “I mean, no one has been diving in all those pools. Who knows? There could be some kind of crayfish.”
As for Noble: “I don't think there is, but you never know, there might be something smaller. No one expected the Wollemi Pine in ’94.”
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