THE REASON WHY A Case for Victoria’s Great Forest National Park
I stopped counting trees along the route when I got to three thousand, seven hundred and eleven. It had seemed a good idea to start with, an alternative to the mantra “left foot, right foot, relax, breathe”. But just 22 kays into the 275-odd kilometre long run I was undertaking through Victoria’s proposed Great Forest National Park (GFNP), less than a tenth of the way into the traverse, I was reminded of the enormity of this forest and of this run. In any case, I’d already counted enough trees to get a sense as to what was at stake here.
This is land of immense ecological and cultural value. It is home to some of the planet’s most carbon-dense forest, forest that replenishes our oxygen supplies. Home to mountain ash (Eucalyptus reg nans), the tallest flowering plant on Earth. Home to clear creeks and waterways that supply nearby Melbourne/Naarm with some of the highest quality drinking water in the world. Home to Bundjil/wedge-tailed eagles, sooty owls, powerful owls, feathertail gliders, greater gliders, yellow-bellied gliders, Buln Buln/superb lyrebirds, Baw Baw frogs (Victoria’s only endemic frog) and the smoky mouse. And it is not just home to, but is the last remaining home to Victoria’s state fauna emblem, the critically endangered Wollert/Leadbeater’s possum.
I’d consider even just one of these factors to be reason enough to protect the proposed park, which would stretch across Victoria’s Central Highlands, the lands of the Taungurung, Wurundjeri and Gunaikurnai people. Currently, the area has 184,000ha in protected lands, spread across many small, fragmented reserves located around towns including Healesville, Kinglake, Toolangi, Warburton, Marysville and Wood’s Point. Under the GFNP proposal, these reserves would be expanded dramatically, incorporated into a single, contiguous reserve system totalling 536,755ha.
Connecting these reserves would allow the area to have greater resilience against the myriad threats facing the mountain ash forest ecosystem and its inhabitants. Threats like logging (legal and illegal), as well as increased fire severity, frequency, and intensity. A larger, contiguous national park would
