Picipes 'melanopus group'

The fruitbody consists of a cap atop a stem (which may be central to lateral). The flattish to funnel-shaped cap has a corky texture and may grow to 10 centimetres in diameter and be a centimetre or more thick (but specimens are often markedly smaller and thinner). The upper surface of the cap is smooth or velvety to the touch but may have some radial wrinkles. It is some shade of brown (e.g. grey brown, reddish-brown, blackish-brown). The underside is white to off-white and has numerous small pores, 3 to 8 per millimetre (so you may need a magnifying glass to see them). The stem is black (or very dark brown), at least in the lower half.

Fruitbodies may appear in groups and grow from wood or from the ground (but then from buried wood). 

Picipes badius and Picipes melanopus are the species that might be found in the Canberra Nature Map region and microscopic features distinguish the two. For a long time the names Polyporus badius  and Polyporus melanopus were used for these species, the move to the new genus Picipes occurring in the Zmitrovich & Kovalenko paper listed below (with further thoughts about the genus, and a key to species, in the Zhou et al. paper).

The name Picipes is derived from two Latin words for 'pitch-black' & 'foot' and melanopus from two Greek words for 'black'  &  'foot'.

Look-alikes

The black 'foot' means you should not mistake this group. Amauroderma rude has a brown stem with white pores on the underside of the cap and those pores turn red when scraped (not so in the melanopus group). Polyporus arcularius, a common species in this region, has a brownish stem and the pores are radially elongated (not so in the Picipes melanopus group).

References

Zhou, J.-L.; Zhu, L.; Chen, H. & Cui, B.-K. (2016). Taxonomy and Phylogeny of Polyporus Group Melanopus (Polyporales, Basidiomycota) from China, PLoS ONE, 11(8): e0159495. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0159495

Zmitrovich, I.V. & Kovalenko, A.E. (2016). Lentinoid and Polyporoid fungi, two generic conglomerates containing important medicinal mushrooms in molecular perspective, International Journal of Medicinal Mushrooms, 18, 23–38.