Qualla: Mac Clark (Acacia peuce) Conservation Reserve

Mac Clark (Acacia peuce) Conservation Reserve: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mark Marathon, CC BY-SA 4.0. Count the trees and you reach a thousand. Then the plain runs flat to the horizon and the count stops. This is one of just three places in the world where Acacia peuce still grows wild, and the other two lie hundreds of kilometres east, near Boulia and Birdsville in Queensland, marooned across the dunes of the Simpson Desert. Here on a stony, wind-raked flat near Old Andado Station, on country the Arrernte people have walked for tens of thousands of years, the rare tree the locals call waddywood holds its ground where almost nothing else can.

Image: Mark Marathon | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mac Clark (Acacia peuce) Conservation Reserve: A Relic That Refuses to Die

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. Acacia peuce is a survivor from a wetter Australia. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, when central Australia was greener, the tree may have spread across vast stretches of the interior. As the climate dried and the sand seas advanced, it retreated to a handful of refuges, and t...

Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mac Clark (Acacia peuce) Conservation Reserve: Stone Tools and Old Knowledge

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mark Marathon, CC BY-SA 4.0. The land here carries deep human time. The traditional owners are the Arrernte, whose presence on this country stretches back thousands of years, and the plains are rich in stone artefacts left by generations who lived and travelled through. The pastoral lease that surrounds the ...

Image: Mark Marathon | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mac Clark (Acacia peuce) Conservation Reserve: Cattle, Sheep, and a Couple Named Clark

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mark Marathon, CC BY-SA 4.0. Europeans reached this corner of the desert in the 1880s and took up the land for grazing, first sheep and later cattle, in country that offers little forgiveness to either. In 1955 Malcolm Clark, known to everyone as Mac, came to Andado Station with his wife Molly. Mac died in 1...

Image: Mark Marathon | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mac Clark (Acacia peuce) Conservation Reserve: Why a Thousand Trees Matter

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mark Marathon, CC BY-SA 4.0. It is easy to drive past a flat of scattered trees and see nothing remarkable. That is the trap of this place. The roughly thousand mature waddywoods standing here are not just trees but the genetic core of a species clinging to existence, one of three populations holding a 500,0...

Image: Mark Marathon | CC BY-SA 4.0