Surely one day Hollywood will make a blockbustingly awful film (loosely) based on intrepid, canyon-exploring David Noble's 1994 discovery of the tree we now call the Wollemi pine.
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After meeting the real, shy, unaffected David Noble at the National Arboretum on Tuesday, I felt sure the Hollywood version (with him played by Johnny Depp or by Channing Tatum, or by Hugh Jackman if it's a musical) would embarrass him. Quite why Hollywood is taking its time is a mystery. After all it is a story, even before Hollywood embellishes it (surely adding a pneumatic love interest, played by Jennifer Lopez) that has almost everything.
The Jurassic tree (Wollemia nobilis, with its discoverer's name now wittily hinted at in its botanical names) has been called a "living dinosaur" and Hollywood loves dinosaurs. Then there is the way in which it could only have been discovered, deep in its all but inaccessible sandstone canyon, by a one-in-a-million intrepid and manly canyoner (one with a smattering of botanical learning) like the real-life David Noble.
On Tuesday, Noble described (modestly, unaffectedly) the techniques involved in clambering in and out of sheer-walled canyons and of swimming in their marrow-freezing waters. As he spoke, one could just imagine how Hollywood would make hay with all this. It will have Johnny Depp performing (contrived, digitally enhanced) feats of climbing, swinging, tightrope-walking and rapids-shooting.
Meanwhile, up on top of the ridge, Jennifer Lopez, (not a canyoner herself) will be half swooning with fears for her gymnastic hero's life. Her tears run down her face and, rather like a creek running into a canyon, trickle into the cleavage revealed by her low-cut Gore-Tex bushwalking jacket, where ...
Oops! Sorry, readers! Boyishly, I we got a little carried away there, and had half begun to write Hollywood's screenplay for it. But back now to our largely truthful report of David Noble's first visit to the Arboretum and (see our picture) to the young forest of the tree genus and species he discovered.
One half expects someone who has done what David Noble did in 1994 to be somehow transformed by it. After all, the tree is world famous now and Noble himself has been on some international jaunts, sometimes rubbing shoulders with potentates, to take part in official plantings of it. And yet there he was on Tuesday, still in the green uniform of a ranger with NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. He was a ranger with them in 1994, albeit on THAT day, out on one of his weekend canyoning explorations (with some equally intrepid canyoning chums) in the vast Wollemi National Park.
He is tall and substantial, as one expects an elite canyoner to be. Imagine, readers, the physique of a not long retired AFL great. Johnny Depp will need some digital enhancing if he is to have David Noble's body.
Importantly, Noble is still canyoning. This raises the exciting possibility that somewhere in the 500,000-hectare immensity of Wollemi National Park there may still be exciting discoveries to be made by him and by the similarly intrepid.
"I've been to over 400 different canyons there and there are still some not yet visited," he reflected.
But he did make the point, wholly without narcissism, that on THAT day it was only because of his fascination with flora and that fact that he had picked up some botany with his undergraduate degree that could discover the tree's existence.
"It had to be the right person at the right time," he said, because it is one thing to be out there canyoning but another to be botany-conscious while there. He remembers how, on THAT day, his companions ("they didn't have a clue") didn't have the faintest interest in the flora of the highly unusual place they'd abseiled down into.
Not that even he knew, taking a little plant material to bring home to study, that he had found something unique. He only knew that he wasn't sure what it was. It was the bark of the trunks of the mature trees that first grabbed his attention. That bark was "bubbly" (the surface of a trunk of a mature Wollemi pine has been famously likened to Coco Pops) and not like barks of the usual botanical suspects.
Initially, back in civilisation, he tried himself to make a scholarly deduction. Still baffled, he showed it to a scientist (he too was baffled), and then the wheels of botanical investigation eventually got into motion. Now we know it is a tree we didn't previously know of and that might have emerged 200 million years ago. There is only a slight chance dinosaurs might have known them and rubbed their itchy bottoms against those nice rough Coco Pops. But we can be sure that in the movie down in the canyon, there will be dinosaurs, man-eating ones, that Johnny Depp will fight to the death (theirs, not his).
How are we to explain the semi-miraculous survival of this woody dinosaur, this arborsaur, at the bottom of a deep, narrow canyon? David Noble surmises it was once widespread but this little colony of it may have survived only because, way down there, it was out of reach of the ravaging bushfires you get in more open places.
And survive they did – so today the National Arboretum's highly visitable Forest 32 is a wealth of young, pre-Coco Pops Wollemia nobilis.
