Even before the gold rush of the 1850s, timber splitters invaded Victoria’s eastern forests including the Dandenong Ranges which were close to the city.
Mr. J. W. Beilby established a sawmill at Ferntree Gully in about 1850 and a small township sprang up around it. He later claimed that his was the first sawmill established in Victoria.
However, the credit for Melbourne’s pioneer sawmill can be attributed to Alison and Knight which started up in 1841.
The early explorers noted magnificent trees growing in the wet gullies of the mountains. The records are mostly unreliable and often exaggerated but one tree in the Dandenong Ranges was measured in 1859 by the Surveyor-General Clement Hodgkinson at 300 feet tall.
Mr George Washington Robinson, an early pioneer and later shire engineer who lived at Narre Warren between 1854 and 1862, is said to have measured several mountain ash at 340 feet or better.
However, indiscriminate and unregulated cutting by splitters and timber getters was continuing to have a major impact on the forests across the state.
The first legislative power to reserve timbered areas of the Colony was an amendment of the Lands Act in 1862 which enabled the Governor-in-Council to proclaim areas for the “preservation and growth of timber” A total of 116,000 acres were reserved under this provision.
In 1867 the State Government instructed John Harvey to survey a Timber Reserve in the nearby Dandenong Ranges. Harvey initially identified some 32,940 acres, but on 1 April 1867 a reduced 26,500 acres of the “Dandenong and Woori Yalloak State Forest” was officially declared.
A “Board of Lands and Works” was authorised to issue licences to cut timber inside the new reserves. The first recorded Crown Land Bailiff to be appointed to enforce the new regulations in the Dandenongs was George Charles Dickson in 1868.
But by 1878 the demand for land near Melbourne resulted in 10,000 acres the Timber Reserve sliced off and being made available for selection and private sale.
The clearing of land and felling of large trees for the new settlements easily supplied Melbourne’s timber demand so harvesting ceased in the government Timber Reserve for a time.
Later during Melbourne’s economic depression of the 1890s a further 10,000 acres of the Timber Reserve was made available by the Minister for Lands, John McIntyre for families to purchase and settle. The eastern Strzelecki Ranges in Gippsland was opened up at the same time.
The boundaries of the original Timber Reserve continued to be slowly whittled away until the Forests Commission finally took control of the State Forest in 1907 and the alienation of public land virtually stopped.
By the 1930s, most of the 26,500 acres of original the Timber Reserve had vanished. All that remained were some stream reserves, the Olinda Forest comprising 3326 acres and the Monbulk Forest (which included Sherbrooke) with a further 2050 acres. A parcel of 556 acres of the Timber Reserve had been set aside in 1882 as the Ferntree Gully National Park.
James O’Donohue was the first forester in the Dandenong Ranges from about 1915 and a small plot of pine trees was planted by him in Sherbrooke Forest which became a popular picnic ground.
Timber harvesting was regulated under licence including Sherbrooke Forest. There were tramlines in both Hardy and Monbulk gullies drawing logs to the trestle bridge near Belgrave and there was also a sawmill on Coles Ridge.
The public land area increased in June 1950 by another 689 acres with the purchase of the Doongalla estate at the Basin.
Following the 1962 bushfires the State Government embarked on a long-term land buyback program which saw the area of State forest increase, most notably on the fire prone western face of the Ranges.
There were other acquisitions including the historic Nicholas gardens.
In 1957, the Forests Commission set aside Sherbrooke Forest Park as the first of many parks and reserves including Lerderderg Gorge, You Yangs, Mt Cole, Grampians and Mt Baw Baw.
The Dandenong Ranges National Park was proclaimed in 1987 which consolidated all the public land under one tenure.
Source: Helen Coulsen (1959). The story of the Dandenongs.
Victoria’s Forests & Bushfire Heritage 