Victoria’s ghost towns

Balook and surrounds – and the ghost of a forest

Prior to European settlement in the 1870s, much of south-eastern Victoria, including the Strzelecki Ranges, which extend to around 100 kilometres between west and east Gippsland, was cloaked with enormous trees and dense, jungle-like undergrowth. This became known as The Great Forest of South Gippsland.

The wholesale clearing of The Great Forest began when European settlers felled the ancient forests to make way for crops and cattle, and the region, for the most part, became prosperous farming country.

It was a different story in the eastern Strzelecki Ranges, a place of steeper slopes, rugged terrain, trees towering more than 80 metres and dense fern gullies, where settlers faced such hardships that the region became known as the ‘Heartbreak Hills’.

Farmers contended with bleak, often snowy, winters; noxious weeds, such as the