Will the real Lone Pine Please stand up?

Lone Pine is synonymous with the terrible tragedy that unfolded after the landing of 16,000 Anzacs at Gallipoli, Turkiye, April 25 1915. On the hill above what is now known as Anzac Cove, there stood a prominent Turkish Red Pine tree (Pinus brutia) which used served as a useful guide for guns firing from the allied ships off-shore. Realising this, the Turks shelled the tree and it fell, reducing the effectiveness of the enemy fire. By the time the Gallipoli campaign was lost by the invaders, more than 8,000 Anzacs had lost their life on the peninsula, along with a staggering 85,000 Turks.

One of the Australians who survived, Sgt Thomas Keith McDowell, souveneired a pine cone from the tree that the Turks had shelled. After the war be brought the cone back to Australia and gave it to his aunt who lived in western Victoria. About ten years later the aunt planted seeds from the fateful cone and grew four seedlings. On the 8^th of May 1933, almost twenty years after the pine cone had made its way from Gallipoli to Australia, one of the seedlings was planted as a memorial at Wattle Park in Melbourne. Another was planted soon after on the 20^th of May at The Sisters (near Terang, Victoria), one on the 11^th June at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, and early the following year (21 January 1934) the fourth seedling was planted in the Warrnambool Botanic Garden.

The Melbourne War Memorial tree died in 2012 but a progeny raised from the tree was replanted there in 2016, the same year as the tree at The Sisters died. The Wattle Park and Warrnambool Botanic Garden trees are still thriving today. There was another tree established on a golf course at Paeroa in New Zealand in 1948, with genetic analysis showing it is a direct descendent of the McDowell tree but probably came from a cone on the Melbourne Shrine of Remebrance tree. The Warrnambool Botanic Garden tree had a progeny planted at Lexton, Victoria in 2010. Many memorial trees were also repoduced from the the tree at the Melbourne Botanic Garden and distrubuted through Legacy Australia. The Paeroa tree in New Zealand has also been used to produce more memorial trees in New Zealand in recent years.

The trees which grew from the original four seedlings are an extrordinary part of Australia's war history and there can be few more historic trees in the country. Only time will tell how long the two remaining trees survive but no doubt like the Melbourne and Paeroa trees they wil be survived by their offspring. I have been lucky enough to visit the Wattle Park, Warrnambool and New Zealand trees. Along with some others that originate from another Lone Pine story! More on that shortly.