This Website

To most newcomers Australia was also geographically huge and concern for the environment, and for the development of a culture that fostered the ‘wise use of natural resources’, took time to evolve. This website, among other things, examines that evolution, from the early British colonial days to the 1990s and the approach taken, particularly after 1907, when the first government agency dedicated to the conservation and ‘wise use’ of natural resources was formed in the then State of Victoria.

The creation (in 1908) of a State Forest Department and of a related Forests Commission (in 1918) arguably represented the first serious attempt by government in Victoria to embrace the need to study, care for, and to manage what had previously, in community parlance, been known widely as a major element of the ‘wastelands of the Crown’.

Many people have played a role in managing these 'wastelands of the Crown'. There were those who fought for their protection and conservation from the very earliest of days, and of course those who over a long period managed the production of essential resources for a rapidly expanding Colony, and then State. This site has a focus on the people who shaped our forest environment. Their stories are an inevitable part of the narrative, because they allow us to understand the times and the circumstances under which forest management decisions, large and small, were made.

The larger forest management issues this website seeks to address include:

• The growing impacts on the natural environment and the related attempts, during the latter part of the 1800s, to secure ‘...appropriate legislation, policy and bureaucratic support... to ensure effective management and conservation of forests...’
• The battles to secure and conserve remaining areas of forest and woodland
• The challenges associated with flora and fauna that, for several decades at least, were only slowly becoming known to science
• The need to develop an adequate understanding of the management of fire in what is now acknowledged to be one of the most dangerous wildfire landscapes on Earth
• The evolution of sustainable approaches to the management of timber and the related role played by industrial organisations
• The introduction of foreign animals and plants into the environment, and the related ecological impacts
• Efforts to reforest abandoned farmland, particularly in remoter areas
• Community concerns about ‘timber supply sufficiency’ and the moves to establish plantations of both exotic and native species
• The post-Second World War housing boom and the difficulty in accessing sufficient building material
• Increasing government efforts to encourage commercial tree growing on privately-owned land
• An increasing national perspective and, more recently, an international perspective being brought to bear on land and natural resource management
• The impact of recurrent major bushfires on human communities and on natural ecosystems
• Particularly from the mid-1960s, a growing community concern for ‘gross national well-being’, as well as ‘gross national-product’
• The slow and on-going rediscovery of the relationship between ecosystem health and fire regimes
• The development of increasingly active ‘conservation’ movements and the related growing community pressure to exclude most economic activity from some areas of forest and woodland; and the expansion of the National Park estate
• Growing recognition of the rights of First Nation communities, and the development of related ‘Native Title’ legislation
• The way the Forests Commission Victoria and related organisations and governments evolved to deal with changing community expectations
• The trends, since the mid-1980s, to increasingly embed public land and natural resource organisations within large and diverse bureaucracies; and to ‘privatise’ various activities such as native forest-based timber production and softwood plantations.

Eucalyptus camaldulensis subsp camaldulensis
Geoff Lay.

Nothofagus cunninghamii
Marc Freestone.

Eucalyptus rubida
Geoff Lay.

Atherosperma moschatum
Marc Freestone.

Acacia dealbata
Geoff Lay.