Words by Nicole McMahon, Photograph by Oliver Strewe

A friend told me there was something at Queens Park I needed to see. A true icon, he said. So we went for an afternoon stroll. And there she was. A Moreton Bay fig, Ficus macrophylla, standing in the full presence of her own strength. I stopped where I was. There is no other way to describe it. You do not walk up to a tree like this, you arrive in front of her.

She has been here a very long time, through Sydney summers and Sydney storms, growing steadily while the world around her hurried on. She stands proud and powerful, her canopy stretched wide over the grass for anybody who cares to wander in. And she does not hold all that strength for herself. She is the strength of so many living things.

Trees like her can reach fifty metres in the right climate. A fig this size is what ecologists call a keystone species, which is a rather wonderful way of saying that everything around her leans on her. Fig trees fruit out of step with one another, so somewhere nearby there is nearly always fruit, and that fruit carries flying foxes and birds through the lean months. Her hollows and folds make homes for insects, geckos and possums. Those great buttress roots, spilling across the ground like slow water, hold the soil steady while she holds everybody else up. She is quietly caring for a whole neighbourhood of living things, and most of us walk straight past without ever knowing.

Queens Park was established in 1888, so this ground has been watching Sydney change for generations. Imagine everything she has sheltered in that time. The picnics, the dogs, the quiet conversations, the first kisses, the people who came here to think something through, and all the children who have wandered in among her roots to see what they could discover. All of it unfolding beneath her while she simply kept growing.

She was worth the trip. If you go, stand among those roots and look up. She has room for all of us.

Our short take: this one we walked to ourselves, in Queens Park at Waverley. Park history from Centennial Parklands, which records Queens Park as created with Centennial Park for Sydney's 1888 centenary. Photograph: Oliver Strewe.