The mossy crust of an old beech log gives way with a crunch under my boot and crumbles into woody Weet-Bix. I brush away the mahogany-coloured chips of timber and look for another place to set up my camera tripod. I’m experiencing rainforest sensory overload. Scenes tumble over and into each other as I try to find the perfect vantage, the defining image. Bracket fungi as big as pudding plates jut from the trunks of living beech trees, and wisps of lichen beard trail from overhead branches. Scarlet caps of Hygrophorus fungi push through a moist confetti of leaves on the forest floor. Stately tree ferns, each with a skirt of dead fronds girdling its trunk, flank an amber-coloured stream, and the leaves of tall dracophyllums rattle like flax as my pack brushes against them.

I could be in Fiordland, or perhaps in Nelson Lakes, but I’m not. I’m 2500 km further west, in the central highlands of Tasmania—although I could just as easily be in Patagonia, because this type of beech forest and its associated species, down even to the edible beech strawberry fungi which sprout on southern beech in the warmer months, is a botanical signature of these widely separated lands.

The connection, of course, is Gondwana. Since the 1960s the concept of New Zealand as a “moa’s ark”, tectonically adrift from the ancestral supercontinent for 80 million years, bearing a cargo of ancient biological treasures, has become part of our origin myth. Although aspects of the myth have been challenged by recent scientific discoveries (see sidebar, “Gondwana—the long goodbye”), its geological foundation is uncontested: New Zealand, South America and Australia (together with Africa, India, Antarctica, New Caledonia and New Guinea) are all chips off the old block.

In Tasmania’s Pine Valley, in Cradle Mountain–Lake St Clair National Park, the family resemblances are all around me—a case of ecological déjà vu. Besides the well-buttressed beech (which Australians call myrtle), the tree ferns (here called man ferns) and the Tasmanian equivalent of our Dr Seuss tree, called pandani, there are podocarps such as the celery-top pine (close in genetics and name to our celery pine, or tanekaha), and coprosmas, blechnum ferns and orchids.

There are many novelties, too: sassafras, whose leaves smell of sarsaparilla when crushed and make a palate-tingling tea; King Billy pine, with scaly leaves reminiscent of Norfolk pine; and something known as “horizontal”. This diabolical shrub grows upwards, then droops down under its own weight, then sends up new branches, which again grow weary of standing up, the result being a snarl of stout branches that defies human passage. Most startling of all (for a Kiwi) are eucalypts, their massive trunks thrusting through the canopy of beech and podocarp and towering above the rest of the forest—something, of course, that is never seen on this side of the Tasman.

The greenness of Tasmania—which despite two centuries of logging still retains 40 per cent forest cover—seems an anachronism in a country known for its aridity. Geographically, Tasmania is more similar to New Zealand than it is to the rest of Australia. At one time, however, the whole of Australia was blanketed in temperate, Tasmanian-style rainforest. It is only in the past two million years that climate fluctuations have dramatically reduced forest cover north of Bass Strait and made Australia “the sunburnt country”.