The Falls Forest Retreat - described as "a Gondwana rainforest sanctuary" is at John's River, nestled at the foot of Middle Brother mountain, a major Hastings/Camden Haven/Manning landmark.
Dr Mary E. White, who is a paleobotanist, a specialist in pre-historic plants and their environment, bought the 200 acre property in 2003 and has covenanted a large proportion of it to preserve its vegetation for all time.
Her "primary intention" in buying the land was to covenant "the forests, which have Gondwanan rainforest remnants that date back as virtually unchanged ecosystems through 60 million years," she says.
Dr White is currently negotiating to buy out areas of Joint Venture Forestry eucalypt forests established by a previous owner.
Former Governor-General Michael Jeffery - who Dr White met as a result of in 2009 being made a Member (AM) in the General Division of the Order of Australia for service to botany as a researcher and through the promotion of increased understanding and awareness of the natural world - is a keen environmentalist and is helping her with the forestry negotiations, she says.
When she takes full ownership of the forest areas they will be covenanted through the Foundation for National Parks & Wildlife too, she says, meaning "you cannot remove any natural vegetation - it's biodiversity protection".
"I am also writing a small local book called Landscapes in the Making from the Manning to the Hastings and it's going to deal with all the major landscape features and give you the background history of things like the Three Brothers," she says.
"Because this piece of Australia that we're sitting on here - thisunderneath us - 200 million years ago this was at 85 degrees South, and the South pole was at Bourke, and here, these mountains are all that is left of an enormous 'Mount Fuji' volcano a mile high, that was sitting on the very edge of the continent and the New Zealand sub-continent - a huge ancient land mass, was being subducted under the edge of our continent and was shoving up the Great Divide."
"And you know these sort of things - that story and a completely different story...Big Nellie, for instance (near Hannam Vale), it tells you about Australia moving northwards as an island continent and passing over a hot spot in the crust ofthe earth, and that's at only, I think, 18 million years ago."
"And so all these geological stories are of great interest to locals, to schools and to visitors."
