What draws us across these climes, hopping from one place to the other, sticking bits of time together into some kind of scrapbook autobiography? It’s most likely that the Araucaria, fabled descendant of the Glossopteris fern, was once a global phenomenon, those spiny, almost scaly branches common to countless climates. Like the petrified residue of a long-dispersed echo, Glossopteris fossils are found in all the southern continents: when that enormous mass known as Gondwanaland split apart, its fragments took the fern around the planet. These days the Glossopteris fossil can be found in South America, Africa, Australia and Antarctica, along with India, New Zealand, Madagascar and parts of the Middle East. The members of the Araucaria family, however, are its only surviving ancestors. They remain in the forests of southern Brazil, Argentina and Chile, and in large stands in New Caledonia, New Guinea and Australia, including Norfolk Island.

So Araucaria species have a highly disjunct distribution. Some consider their occurrence in both Australia and South America the sign of an intriguing vicariance but, considering the tree’s ancient lineage and its former abundance in the Northern Hemisphere, it may be that these two locations are but the remains of a much larger distribution. That the name exists across two such distant continents, however, is anything but relictual. Australia and the western edge of South America have been edging towards each other ever since they detached from the mega-continent; what’s more, recent nomenclative ties—what are barely pricks in the fabric of geological time—have brought them into neighbourly relation virtually instantaneously.