Bunya, chopped down to make way for a road, to live on as material in 500 guitars 🌲🎸| ABC Australia

When guitar maker Matthew Semmens heard a landmark bunya pine tree would be cut down and turned into wood chips he went into rescue mode.
"I freaked out," he said. "I was like, 'we've got to save this tree and use it in the local community building guitars'."
The beloved tree stood along the roadside for at least 80 years, then retained as the centre of a busy roundabout as traffic got busier around it.
In 2023 the bunya was finally cut down to make way for construction of the final section of the $481 million Newcastle inner-city bypass, which has been in the planning for decades.
📽 Video produced by Jesmine Cheong and edited by Anthony Scully.
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