Although there are more than a hundred Quaternary pollen diagrams from the non-arid tropics, very few are from strictly lowland ever-wet rainforest. Nevertheless, those from more upland or seasonal sites imply major changes of size and location of all tropical forests which must have had repercussions on the composition of and niche realization in the lowland ever-wet forest. Among the ecologically most important implications are that these features of the forest have been constantly changing at varying rates for at least a million years and still are changing. While it is no longer possible necessarily to associate diversity with changelessness, the alternative extreme view that diversity is the outcome of Quaternary environmental change has yet to be demonstrated palynologically. The courses of expansions of some trees in the early stages of establishment of an Australian rainforest in the Holocene are fitted to standard population growth curves and the significance of fine resolution pollen analysis for the study of rainforest ecology is demonstrated.