John Johnstone was born in Scotland and initially trained in large-scale landscaping and plantation forestry at the magnificent Gordon Castle.

After migrating to Australia and first working on an estate in South Australia, he became the curator of Maddingley Park at Bacchus Marsh in 1887 and stayed for 10 years.

In 1898, Johnstone was recruited to the Forest Department by the Conservator of Forests, George Perrin, and moved to Macedon nursery as most new staff did at that time.

After Perrin’s sudden death at Ballarat on Christmas Eve in December 1900, Johnstone was proposed as a joint Conservator, along with Mr Hugh Robert Mackay who had been Secretary to the 1897-1901 Royal Commission on State Forests and Timber Reserves.

James Blackburne was the Inspector of Forests at the time and was Perrin’s obvious successor but was over the age of sixty and held strong views and differences of position on the management of the state’s forests.

There was considerable political debate and opposition in the press to Johnstone being appointed Conservator, including him being described as just “a glorified landscape gardener”.

The eloquent Hugh MacKay was eventually appointed as the new Conservator of Forests.

Johnstone was assigned as the Superintendent of State Plantations, a role which included oversight of the Creswick nursery.

John Johnstone was both creative and productive. He developed metal pots to improve sapling growth, he designed the whimsical nursery rotunda along with its eclectic fountain. He also laid out the extensive Creswick plantations and designed a wheelbarrow and the plantation stables.

The well-regarded local MP, Alexander Peacock, is generally credited with founding the Forestry School at Creswick. Peacock was born at Creswick in 1861 and was the local politician at the time when the school was opened. He spent 44 years in State Parliament including being the 20^th Premier of Victoria in 1901. He died in October 1933 and the Memorial Gates at the entrance to the school were opened in October 1952 in his honour.

But the real credit behind the success of the Forestry School is more likely to have been John Johnstone.

The School opened on 29 October 1910, with a large delegation of Members of Parliament and their companions. Visitors toured the School, sawpit gully nursery, Creswick plantations and toasted the great endeavour. Newspapers made mention of Johnstone along with then Minister of Forests, Peter McBride, the previous Minister, Donald McLeod, the Conservator, Hugh Mackay and local MP Alexander Peacock. Speakers acknowledged Johnstone’s central role in the undertaking.

“The State was indeed fortunate in possessing such a splendid officer as Mr. Johnstone, who had proved himself to be the first man in forestry in the Commonwealth.”

The Creswick Advertiser concluded:

“Mr Johnstone has had to convince the heads of the department and the Minister, of the utility of the schemes which he originally brought forward, and the benefits likely to be conferred upon the community if they were given effect to. … It speaks volumes for the capabilities of Mr Johnstone, and his special knowledge of forestry gained after a lengthy experience, that his schemes have stood the practical test”.

But sadly, John Johnstone is generally overlooked from his rightful place in the history of forestry in Victoria. It is often said he clashed with others who then fostered grudges, was seen as an outsider, and not considered to be a genuine forester. We will never know…

Gerry Fahey (2018). https://www.victoriasforestryheritage.org.au/activities1/learning/212-vsf-origins.html

Devasting and uncontrolled bushfires swept the forests and rural farmlands in the Colony of Victoria during the 1800s.

Many of these bushfires are recorded in newspapers from the time and feature in colonial artwork.

Bushfires have undoubtedly always been a feature of Australian summers. In an average year, more than 600-1000 bushfires occur in Victoria’s National Parks and State forests, which burn about 200,000 hectares.

The largest recorded bushfires in Victoria were on Black Thursday 6 February 1851.  It’s generally accepted that these fires covered a quarter of Victoria, or approximately 5 million hectares, including Portland, Plenty Ranges, Westernport the Wimmera and Dandenong districts. Approximately 12 lives, one million sheep and thousands of cattle were lost.

In June 1858, the Victorian Parliament introduced “An Act for preventing the careless use of Fire.” But the bushfires continued.

Before the formation of fire services like the CFA, families in rural areas needed to work together to defend against bushfire to save their lives, homes, livelihoods, farms and communities. They had no choice. There were inevitably failures, as well as successes. But they were resilient and rebuilt their lives with strong community support.

In his annual report to Parliament for the year ended 30th June 1890, the Conservator for Forests, George Perrin, deals extensively with the causes and measures for the prevention of forest fire and indicates the impacts of aboriginal burning before the advent of European settlement.

He recommended the following measures to protect the State forests of Victoria.

1. All State forests should be placed in charge of intelligent foresters whose duty it would be to watch for fires, and when such occurred to obtain help and suppress them.
2. Stop “commonage” on State forests.
3. Stop the indiscriminate camping and entrance of the public upon lands devoted to forest conservancy, except under stringent regulations as to fire.
4. Placing of forest licensees and their workers, etc. under a code of regulations to protect both themselves and the forest.
5. Amend the Fire Act so that land holders who use fire  without taking appropriate precautions would be punished.
6. Fencing in of State forest to prevent traffic or restrict it to surveyed roads, where proper and efficient firebreaks could be made by employees of the Department.
7. The formation of firebreaks running across a forest at stated distances apart, or around the outside boundaries, at any point where danger from fire was most apparent.

The summer of 1886 and 1891 were also bad fire seasons in western Victoria and the Otways.

Red Tuesday occurred on 1 February 1898 when 260,000 ha were burnt, 12 people were killed and 2000 buildings were destroyed. The fires mainly affected Cranbourne, Traralgon, Neerim South and Poowong areas.

Source: Denis O’Bryan. Victoria’s Bushfire History, 1802 to Present.

Click to access Victorias-Bushfire-History-1802-to-Present.pdf

Early colonial art provides some insights into the nature and structure of the pre-European forests and woodlands.

While painters arrived on the first fleet, it was the famous professional artists like Eugene von Guerard who probably best depicted Victoria’s forests and landscapes. Surveyors like Robert Hoddle and explorers such as Major Mitchell also provided valuable historic sketches.

Some of the works are topographically and botanically accurate while others are more impressionist.

Mountains often seem a bit distorted and exaggerated, and the colours and sunlight sometimes aren’t quite right, but it’s still possible to identify the forest types, as well as the scale of the trees.

Artwork gives a glimpse into what Victoria’s native eucalypt forests might have been like before the discovery of gold and huge influx of people in 1851, which forever changed the bush.

Early paintings can sometimes help reconstruct the openness of the forests and woodlands of the precolonial period which had been under the influence of indigenous burning regimes for thousands of years.

The need to keep a campfire burning 24 hours per day would have undoubtedly cleared a lot of the fallen woody debris too.

Reference: Michael Ryan (2009). Does early Colonial Art provide an accurate guide to the nature and structure of the pre-European forests and woodlands of South-Eastern Australia? ANU. https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/server/api/core/bitstreams/46296ead-9739-4849-9932-245878fb2ea5/content

By the beginning of the 20th century Victoria’s forests were in a very sorry state following years of forest clearing and degradation.

The first five decades had been characterised by uncontrolled harvesting of forests by a powerful mining and sawmilling industry, a government desire to clear the land to establish a thriving farming sector which was overlayed by general community indifference.

But there had been a few, largely unheeded, calls for more protection and sound management of native forests from a handful of foresters.

Bushfires including the particularly devastating fires on “Black Thursday” in 1851 and “Red Tuesday” in 1898 had also damaged and destroyed large tracts of native forests.

The rate of clearing for farming was substantial. In 1855 the area under crop farming in Victoria was 98,800 acres. This increased by 74,100 acres each year for the following 59 years to reach the total of 4.45 million acres by 1914.

The identification of State Forest and Timber Reserves by Clement Hodgkinson, along with his early attempts to establish independent Forest Boards to control timber harvesting on Crown land had proved infective. The licencing system was grossly inadequate and the staff to supervise the system meagre. The forests also  remained vulnerable to political interference.

Since 1851 and the formation of the Colony of Victoria there had been many Government inquiries, three independent reports from D’A. Vincent (1887), Perrin (1890), Ribbentrop (1895), the Royal Commission (1897–1901).

There had also been impassioned speeches and separate pieces of legislation been brought unsuccessfully before the Victorian Parliament calling for the conservation of the state’s  forests and timber resources.

Meanwhile, the focus was elsewhere. The last decade of the 1800s was probably one of the most eventful in the history of the country.

Australia had suffered from economic depression, industrial strife, the Federation Drought, millions of rabbits, but saw the beginnings of great social and political reform.

The intense political activity culminated in the Federation of the colonies, with Edmund Barton as the first Prime Minister.

The first Victorian Premier in 1901 was Alexander Peacock, who is often credited with being responsible for the Forestry School at Creswick.

There had been good chance that the colonies could have remained split and even ended up as a number of separate countries !

Prior to political Federation in 1901, the colonies had, to some degree, been going their individual pathways.  At Federation, these colonies became States of Australia, each still with its own government, each retaining some of its former powers, but surrendering others to the new Commonwealth Government.

Some of the functions transferred to the Commonwealth included defence, foreign policy, trade, immigration, national transport, coastal navigation, postal and telegraph services.

Forest management probably received very little attention during the federation conventions which were debating and drafting a new constitution.

The State Governments ended up retaining responsibility for their public forests and bushfire control within their borders. It had been a different story with the control of rivers which was a major subject of dispute.

However, some of the powers ceded at federation had unforeseen consequences and have enabled the Commonwealth Government to increase its influence and control over forest management in the States.

The most notably example was probably the annual tussle over the issue of export woodchip licenses by the Commonwealth Government during the 1970s and 1980s. Log trucks converged on Canberra in December 1994 to encircle Parliament House which led to the Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) Act (2002).

The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act (1999) led to many legal challenges in the Federal and High Courts to forestry and bushfire practices.

The more recent Traditional Owner Settlement Act (2010) created the legal notion of “Aboriginal Title”, which is a new, and as yet not well-defined, form of third-party interest over Crown land and Crown leaseholds.

Meanwhile in 1901, the Royal Commission into Victoria’s forest was drawing to a close and was damming about the loss of State’s forests and the wastage of timber. The 14^th report even contained draft legislation for a new Forest Act, which once again failed to get political support.

At the time of Federation, Victoria’s State forests were still commonly regarded by the general public, and by most of their parliamentary representatives, as the inexhaustible “wastelands of the Crown” and ready for disposal via alienation into freehold property for the purposes of agricultural settlement.

But despite spirited rear-guard opposition by agricultural and grazing interests, the State Forest Department (SFD) finally emerged in 1907 with legislation formally setting aside timber reserves and providing for an independent, long-term and scientific approach to forests and bushfire management.

The deadly bushfires, the indiscriminate clearing of Victoria’s public land, and wastage of its forests and timber resources during the 1800s could no longer be ignored.

There had already been inquiries and independent reports including those from D’A. Vincent (1887), Perrin (1890) and Ribbentrop (1896) into the parlous state of Victoria’s state forests, but with little result.

There was no shortage of information on the state of Victoria’s forests, the loss of available crown lands to mining and settlement, the eye-watering wastage of timber and the inadequacies of forest administration.

Some of the important groundwork had recently been done by Perrin, Vickery and Blackburne in their report to Parliament in early 1897 on the “Permanent Reservation of Areas for Forest Purposes in Victoria”.

In June 1897, the Minister for Lands, Sir Robert Best, finally announced a Royal Commission into “the condition of the state forests and timber resources in the colony, with the view of ascertaining if they should be more carefully conserved, and if there is a prospect of a profitable export trade”.

The well-respected parliamentarian, Albert Lee Tucker MLA, was appointed Chairman. He had previously been President of the Board of Land and Works and Commissioner of Crown Lands and Survey between 1883 and 1886. He was well equipped for the position because of his experience as chairman of the 1878 royal commission on closed roads and member of the 1878 commission of inquiry into crown lands.

The Royal Commission consisted of ten members of Parliament, representing sawmillers, miners, woodcutters, sleeper-hewers, and settlers. The Inspector of Forests, Hugh Robert MacKay, was appointed as Secretary.

To meet its expenses, the Royal Commission was granted the sum of £150, later increased by £250. After receipt of its first progress report three further increases were made up to the magnificent sum of £800 for four years solid work.

Over its four years of sittings and public hearings across the state, the Commission completed fourteen reports (a total of 289 pages) and was working on two more before being terminated.

Under the authorship of Hugh MacKay, nine of the reports dealt with forests in specific localities, each inquiry dealing with “resources, management and control”.

One of the most damming reports was for the Wombat Forest which was considered by the Royal Commission to be a “ruined forest” because of the indiscriminate and uncontrolled cutting by miners, sawmillers, splitters and settlers. However, it was also noted as Victoria’s “most important forest” because of its immense stands of young regrowth timber, particularly messmate, stringybark, manna gum and peppermint, along with its rapid growth rate.

The other five reports focussed on a variety of themes including sleeper-hewing, forest royalties and the royalty system, fire protection in country districts, questions relating to forestry in metropolitan catchments, including Board of Works control.

The Commission’s fourteenth report outlined detailed consideration of legislation, reservations, administration and control, conservation and inspection, the protective staff, forage allowance, police patrol, working practice (including timber, improvement fellings, wattle bark, grazing, rates and charges), fixed licences, water frontages, fire protection, and technical training.

Their reports noted –

“all previous investigators who have inquired into the condition of our forests have adopted the same view”.

Their key recommendation was wresting control of the forests from ministerial influence and the powerful Lands Department and vesting them in the hands of an independent commission, to be modelled on similar bodies in Great Britain and many of the German states.

Source: Stephen Legg (1995), Debating Forestry: An Historical Geography of Forestry Policy in Victoria and South Australia, 1870 to 1939.

Royal Commission – Scope of Inquiry.

1. As to (a) state forests and timber reserves, which should be permanently reserved; (b) whether the timber reserves or any portion of them should be proclaimed state forests; (c) whether any Crown Lands in any state forest or timber reserve should be proclaimed a state forest; (d) as to which, if any, of the reservations of the areas as timber reserves or state forests should be revoked wholly or in part, and made available for selection.

2. To consider and report upon the existing system of working state forests, and as to what additional steps, if any, should be taken for the further conservation or growth of timber.

3. To report upon the existing system of licences, and particularly as to whether it is advisable to abolish wholly or in part the licensing system, and substitute there-for the royalty system.

4. To report as to whether the growth and distribution of trees to public bodies and the general public for planting should be continued, and if so on what conditions or terms such distribution should be.

5. To report as to whether any state forest or timber reserve at present inaccessible for the purpose of profitable working should be opened up.

6. To report as to whether an export trade can be established with profit, and what steps should be taken to attain that object.

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/9154474

Royal Commission on Forests – Reports.

1. 20/10/1898, 9pp.,Sleeper-hewing in Forest Reserves and on Crown Lands.

2. 8/12/1898, 9pp.,Victoria Forest: Its Resources, Management, and Control.

3. 15/3/1899, 12pp.,The Redgum Forests of Barmah and Gunbower: Their Resources, Management, and Control.

4. 27/6/1899, 14pp., Wombat Forest: Its Resources, Management, and Control.

5. 23/8/1899, 16pp., The Otway Forest: Its Resources, Management, and Control.

6. 27/9/1899, 7pp., The Stanley and Chiltern Forests: Their Resources, Management, and Control.

7. 6/12/1899, 15pp., The Forests of the County of Delatite; being the King River, Winteriga, Dueran, Toorour, Toombullup, and minor reserves: Their Resources, Management, and Control.

8. 20/12/1899, 5pp., Grazing Lands in the Parishes of Wurrin, Wangarabell, Koola, and Demdang: Genoa River Forest East Gippsland.

9. 7/3/1900, 6pp., Pastoral Lands in the Parishes of Connangorach, Mockinyah, Daahl, and Tyar, County of Lowan, known as the Black Range Forest, Upper Glenelg District.

10. 20/6/1900, 21pp., Forest Royalties and the Royalty System.

11. 18/7/1900, 26pp., Fire Protection in Country Districts: Being a report on the measures necessary to prevent the careless use of fire or the spread of bush or grass fires on public and private lands.

12. 18/9/1900, 12pp., The Pyrenees and Minor Kara Kara Reserves, North Western District, and Tambo Reserves, North Western District, and Tambo Reserves, East Gippsland; with a short review of the work of the commission.

13. 10/10/1900, 36pp., Proposed Diversion of Water from Upper Acheron for Supply of Metropolis, and question of vesting catchment area in Metropolitan Board of Works.

14. 7/3/1901, 101 pp., Forestry in Victoria, Australia. The Legislation, Control and Management requisite; with some account of the Forest Resources of the other Colonies of Australasia, and of Forestry in other Countries.

Proposed Forest Bill – 1901.

The Royal Commission in its 14^th Report of March 1901 developed a proposal for Forests Bill but it was not implemented due to delays in Parliament and lack of political support.

1. Independent control of the forest reserves, and the withdrawal of the administration from the Lands Department.

2. The dedication in perpetuity of “Reserved forests”, which term will include all permanent reserves for the growth of timber, or for climatic reasons, or for both purposes.

3. The dedication for an indefinite period of “Timber reserves”, being as a rule small areas useful for mining timber, fencing material, and fuel, and for their reduction in area or abolition, on a resolution of both Houses of Parliament only.

4. The control of “Protected forests” which term will include all unreserved mountain timber lands, and, generally, all unoccupied Crown lands, or public lands occupied for grazing or other purposes by persons having no claim to the fee-simple thereof.

5. The reasonable protection of all timber, scrub, or brushwood growing along the banks, or at the sources of rivers and streams; along the shores of lakes, lagoons, and other bodies of fresh water; on sea-coasts, or along the shores of bays, estuaries, and other inlets of the sea; on drift sands, or sand hills and ridges, or on the public roads.

6. The protection from wanton injury or damage of all exotics or indigenous trees planted on public or private lands, on public or municipal reserves, or on streets, roads, or lanes.

7. The demarcation on the ground of all “Reserved forests” which have hitherto not been surveyed within a fixed period.

8. The protection of the reserves and Crown lands from the misuse or careless use of fire.

9. The encouragement of tree-planting in bare districts.

10. The encouragement of persons who protect and maintain on their freehold lands, or on lands in course of alienation from the Crown, a fixed proportion of indigenous trees useful for timber and shade purposes.

Source: Royal Commission on Forests, 14th report.

Forest and bushfire management in Victoria in the 50 years between the discovery of gold in 1851, through to Federation in 1901, can best be described as chaotic.

Prior to European settlement it’s thought that nearly 88% of Victoria had been forested, with the remaining 12% made up of open grasslands, coastal and alpine heathlands, lakes and mallee deserts. By 2013, forest cover had stabilised at about 36%.

Victoria’s native forests were indiscriminately cleared by miners during the goldrush, by timber splitters, for new railway expansion and then in a mad scramble for land selection and agricultural settlement, as well as to create space for growing cities and towns.

During the 1800s, the state’s forests were still commonly regarded by the general public, and by most of their parliamentary representatives, as the inexhaustible “Wastelands of the Crown”, and ready for disposal via alienation into freehold property for the purposes of agricultural settlement.

Selling and leasing Crown Land was the State Government’s major source of revenue following the heady days of the goldrush.

Small rural municipalities also had little interest in preserving Crown lands and State forests from sale because they generated no rate revenue.

However, there were growing groups of concerned citizens and foresters. As early as 1865, the Argus Newspaper took up the cause of “protecting our forests”, arguing the substantial benefits of timber production, avoiding the wasting of soil, conserving natural streams, avoiding adverse climate impacts and beneficially distributing storm runoff.

In opposition to the policy of forest destruction, there was a small and persistent band of conservationists within government ranks, the first being the Surveyor General, Charles Whybrow Ligar, the Assistant Commissioner of Lands and Survey, Clement Hodgkinson, and the Secretary for Mines, Robert Brough Smythe, who in 1865 were acting as Commissioners to enquire into applications under the Land Act.

They quickly realised there was a “rapid and unnecessary destruction of forests”, and they recommended the extension of forest and timber reserves in the vicinity of certain mining centres, as well as the planting of trees.

On 16 September 1869, the first “Overseer of Forests and Crown Land Bailiff”, William Ferguson, was appointed by Clement Hodgkinson.

In 1871, Ferguson reported on the destruction of forests in the vicinity of the goldfields. He also wrote a similar report on the damage to Barmah forest along the Murray River.

In 1871, a Royal Commission was appointed by the Governor of the Colony, Viscount Canterbury, to examine “Foreign Industries and Forest Conservation”. The final report by Judge Samuel Henry Bindon expressed the panels strong opinion that prompt and decisive action should be taken to end the wasteful practices of timber cutting.

Also in 1871, the Australian Natives Association (ANA) was formed and joined the chorus and remained active on forest conservation matters for a prolonged period. The Field Naturalists Club of Victoria (FNCV) became involved later in 1881.

It is surprising, and perhaps ironic, that organised mining interests, including influential mining parliamentarians, were the early public advocates for forest protection, taking up the cause in the 1860s. Their advocacy was based more on the profitability of their mining interests than forest conservation. The miners wanted well-regulated state forest reserves to ensure a plentiful future supply of mining timbers at reasonable prices.

In 1871, local Forest Boards attempted to exercise some control, however the task of regulating wasteful clearing proved formidable and they were abolished in 1874.

There were also powerful forces at work by vested interests to maintain the status quo. The State Upper House of parliament was dominated by powerful mining, pastoral and grazing interests which had strongly resisted land reform.

Many of the “mining members” in the Victorian Lower House were among the most radical of parliamentarians, attacking the privilege of the Legislative Council, and giving support to land reform, tariff protection, and payment of members. Their long tradition of militancy could be traced back to the unrest on the goldfields which sparked the Eureka Rebellion in 1854.

Matters came to a head on Black Wednesday (9 January 1878) when the State Government sacked over 300 senior public servants and judges suddenly overnight without warning. The sackings were, in part, directed at the desire of the Premier, Graham Berry, to penalise those in the public service who constantly backed the intransigence of the Legislative Council which had resisted repeated attempts at reform. Berry’s election manifesto proposed a punitive land tax designed to break up the squatter class’s great pastoral properties where a handful of men owned most of Victoria’s grazing lands.

Over the decades, impassioned speeches and several separate pieces of legislation calling for the conservation of the State’s forests had all been brought unsuccessfully before the Victorian Parliament.

But the State Government only seemed to respond lethargically with inertia, inquiries and inaction.

In 1887, the Governor of Victoria, Lord Henry Brougham Loch, who had served in the Bengal cavalry and maintained a strong interest in forests, urged an external review. He had personally seen the results of forest management under the great European foresters, including Dietrich Brandis, Wilhelm Schlich and Berthold Ribbentrop.

The State Government subsequently invited Frederick d’Abernon Vincent to visit and make recommendations. At the age of 35, Vincent was well connected to British aristocracy and at the time had the role of Deputy Conservator of Forests within the Indian Forest Service.

Vincent was paid a substantial fee but only given a month to complete his task. It was winter when he arrived which severely restricted his inspections of the state’s forest lands. However, his 28-page report said in part –

• I am very unfavourably impressed with the state of the forests
• I am surprised that some effectual measures have not been taken to prevent further waste.
• The present arrangements with this view are quite puerile and so ill-conceived that they can scarcely be seriously discussed. In the first place the distinction between State Forest, Timber Reserves, and other Crown Land can only lead to difficulties.

He also recommended the establishment of a type of Commission that he was familiar with in India.

• That the Governor in Council be empowered to appoint a Commission, consisting of three members, for the purpose of administering the Act.
• That at least one of the Commissioners shall be a competent forest officer, and that the Chairman or Senior Commissioner shall have had proper professional education and training.
• That subject to the provisions of the Act, all Reserved Forests and Reserved Crown Land, proclaimed or notified as such, shall be deemed to be in the possession of the Commissioners and under their control.

To seek advice was one thing, but to take it was another, and while Vincent’s scathing report was available to subsequent inquiries and was eventually tabled in the House in 1895, it was so frank and outspoken that it was never fully published.

The first Victorian Conservator of Forests, George Perrin was appointed on 14 June 1888, a year after Vincent’s report, but his activities were greatly constrained within the powerful Lands Department.

Perrin fought strenuously for a proper system of forest control and produced his first report to Parliament on 30 June 1890. He clearly identified the issues and set out reforms to ensure Victoria would have a healthy, diverse and extensive forest estate.

It seemed that all the previous government inquiries and independent reports into the parlous state of Victoria’s state forests, including those from D’A. Vincent (1887) and Perrin (1890) had brought little result.

In 1895, Mines Department Secretary and notable bushman, geologist, explorer and scientist, Alfred William Howitt, reported to the Minister of Agriculture on the supply of Victorian eucalypts and the possibilities of a future export trade in timber. Howitt noted the continued reckless destruction of Victoria’s forests which had ensured the current dwindling timber supplies had given no margin for any substantial export trade in the foreseeable future. He also called for the immediate examination and permanent reservation of State Forests.

It seemed that all the previous government inquiries and independent reports into the parlous state of Victoria’s state forests, including those from D’A. Vincent (1887) and Perrin (1890) had brought little result.

But with forest conservation receiving more public and political sympathy, the new State government under Premier, George Turner, finally pursued a systematic and scientific approach to forestry.

In August 1895, the Commissioner of Crown Lands and Survey, Sir Robert Best, invited Inspector-General Berthold Ribbentrop from the Imperial Forest Service of India to visit the new colony.

Ribbentrop quickly noted –

1. the widespread and uncontrolled felling of trees associated with the goldrush period
2. continuing poorly controlled timber harvesting
3. increasing instances of illegal occupation of Crown Land
4. pressures for alienation of Crown Land.

His 1896 report concluded –

• State forest conservancy and management are in an extraordinary backward state.
• The forest laws of the country are inadequate.
• The area of inalienable State forest has not been increased since Mr Vincent’s report of 1887.
• The protection of forests against fires has never ever been attempted, and neglect and waste in their treatment are now as rampant.
• The income from the forests is ridiculously small, and quite out of proportion to the large supplies drawn from them; and the money spent on their protection, maintenance and improvement is entirely inadequate.
• The reasons for the self-evident mismanagement of the forest property of the country are political, and centre in the public weal (i.e. the public good, the welfare of a country or community) where this clashes with the monetary profits of individuals or classes who can exert a direct Parliamentary influence.

In May 1897, the Surveyor General – Samuel Kingston Vickery and the Inspector of Forests – James Blackburne reported to Parliament in, on the “Permanent Reservation of Areas for Forest Purposes in Victoria”. They recommended and defined more than one hundred areas across Victoria, except for the Mallee, to be permanently reserved as State forest.

Ribbentrop’s scathing report finally prompted the Commissioner of Crown Lands and Survey, Sir Robert Best, to call a Royal Commission into the State’s forest and timber reserves which began in 1897 and produced 14 separate reports before closing in 1901.

Berthold Ribbentrop’s Report – 1896.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zsh52b9UR9Q55oei_xyhVAoL-3f4HTGV/view

Frederick D’A Vincent Report – 1887.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZIDm66H8h97vNhenr5iSBeR6479WyYpX/view

George Perrin Report – 1890.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DbCppBtgE7enCppw037yq8p_egaalpRj/view

Vickery and Blackburne report to Parliament- 1897.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1F-L_HRlmrzBb2Hv69tt6o5HguTG-NxRq/view

George Samuel Perrin was born England on 28 November 1849 and in 1880 became a forester with the Woods and Forests Department of South Australia. From 1886 to 1887 he was Conservator of Forests in Tasmania.

In 1888, the Lands Minister, John Lamont Dow, brought two bills before Parliament: a measure for the Conservation of Timber, and a less ambitious bill to promote Wattle Tree Cultivation. The first was stymied but the latter was finally passed.

On 23 June 1888 Dow recruited Perrin to a newly created position of “Conservator of Forests”, with a generous remuneration of £750 a year to implement the legislation and to form a Forests Branch within the Department of Lands and Survey.

Unfortunately, Perrin’s influence over forest preservation was not in proportion to his salary, and he constantly found himself at odds with the dominant ethic of the Government and the Lands Department to alienate land for settlement.

It took six months before “a suitable room was placed at the disposal of the Branch” and even then, Perrin had to share it with others.

Perrin also complained about the lack of clerical support, so in 1890 Augustus Warren Crooke, later to become a Forest Conservator, transferred from the Lands Department as Chief Clerk, to bring the number of staff in the Forest Branch to the grand total of three.

Up to the time of Perrin’s appointment, William Ferguson had been Inspector of Forests, but he was mainly confined to establishing the State Nursery at Macedon. Other nurseries included Sawpit Gully (Creswick), You Yangs, Havelock and Tintarra (Gunbower).

Despite having little power or authority, Perrin made headway and appointed a number of foresters over the next 12 years. They included John La Gerche at Creswick, William Code at Heathcote, Howard Stoney at Bairnsdale, Thomas Orde at Beaufort, McCann at Sandhurst and Leech, McNamara, Hennessy and Griffin. There was also Joseph Firth (Macedon), John Blair (You Yangs) and Love (Gunbower) as plantation officers.

Perrin recruited John Johnstone in 1898 from Maddingley Park at Bacchus Marsh.  Johnstone was initially stationed at Macedon but moved to Creswick in 1900 and was instrumental, but largely unrecognised, for the establishment of the School of Forestry.

In 1889, Perrin reintroduced a limited royalty system on sawmillers. He boasted that –

The mining and sawmilling groups weren’t pleased but felt that, although “overzealous”, Perrin was conscientious and fair. But it was also alleged that –

“the Conservator of Forests was a crank and would make Collins street a forest if he had his way”.

Controlling forest grazing as well as timber cutting, particularly in the red gum forests along the Murray River, was something that Perrin felt very strongly about. He said in 1894 that the Barmah Forests were

“one of the grandest public estates in the colony”.

Perrin delivered his first Report to Parliament on 30 June 1890 which contained a number of illustrations. His visionary report was vigorous and clearly identified the many issues in the forest estate. It also set out reforms to ensure that Victoria would have a healthy, diverse and extensive forest estate for years to come. His report included measures for training of foresters, thinning of forests, control of sawmilling, supply of mining timber, controlling the wastage associated with sleeper cutting, application of silviculture, protection from bushfire, major licence reforms and nurseries.

He was also at constant loggerheads with the Railways Department over the wasteful cutting of sleepers.  He urged that sleeper hewer[s] should be excluded from the forest and made clear his belief that individuals hewing timber bore the majority of responsibility for the destruction of Victoria’s timber, not sawmillers.

He strove, but without success, to get the Government of the day to pass through Parliament a Bill which had been prepared to secure better control and protection of the reserves.

Unfortunately, it would seem he was continually undermined by the Lands Department bureaucracy and the politics of the time.

However, the State Government announced in June 1897 a major Royal Commission into the parlous state of Victorian forests.  It had been a long time coming and the inquiry produced 14 separate reports before closing in 1901.

In a related move, the Premier Graham Berry also called for Perrin, along with the Surveyor General – Samuel Kingston Vickery and the Inspector of Forests – James Blackburne to identify Crown lands suitable for investigation as potential State Forests.

Working off the detailed County plans they identified nearly 4 million acres, excluding the Mallee country, but they remained mindful of the desirability of interfering “as little as possible with further settlement”, and at the same time gave particular attention to the needs of mining industry timber.

The most important areas the panel recommended for reservation were the Wombat Forest (Daylesford—Trentham) —145,000 acres, Otways — 140,000 acres, Croajingolong (East Gippsland) — 411,000 acres.

Their recommendations, of course, were not adopted in full at the time, but in 1898, an area of 118,000 acres was added to the reserve system.

George Perrin was on friendly terms with the Government Botanist Ferdinand Mueller and they shared knowledge of the Australian bush. Spinning gum, Eucalyptus perriniana, is named after him.

Perrin died unexpectedly on Christmas Eve 1900, at Craigs Hotel in Ballarat, aged 51, after a long period of failing health, and Augustus Warren Crooke was placed in temporary charge.

By the time of his death, Perrin had built a very respectable Forest Branch with one chief inspector, one inspector, twenty-three foresters, two acting foresters and forty other forest foremen and similar supervisory staff. Labourers were hired as required for seasonal work and ten trainees were posted across various State forests at that time.

His major legacy was undoubtedly a Forest Branch well positioned for the changes ahead associated with the release of the Royal Commission findings in 1901 and the subsequent bumpy ride to eventually pass the necessary legislation to create a separate State Forest Department in 1907.

https://www.victoriasforestryheritage.org.au/forest-estate/the-early-years/186-1890-report-of-the-first-conservator.html

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/206969286

The political jousting over the alienation and sale of Victoria’s valuable Crown Land estate began many years before the Colony separated from NSW in 1851. It continued unabated over the following decades as self-interested and wealthy squatters (pastoralists), who dominated the Upper House of Parliament, were fiercely pitted against those keen to see a home on the land for ex-miners and working-class families.

Many of the “mining members” in the Victorian Lower House were among the most radical of parliamentarians, attacking the privilege of the Legislative Council, and giving support to land reform, tariff protection, and payment of members. Their long tradition of militancy could be traced back to the anti-government unrest on the goldfields which sparked the Eureka Rebellion in 1854.

Loopholes in the many well-intentioned Land Acts of the mid to late 1800s had progressively allowed the squatters to claim the best of the available agricultural land, particularly on the open plains of the western district.

The consequences of the Land Act (1869) were so unsatisfactory that a Royal Commission was held between 1878 and 1879.

But still the political push continued from those in the Lower House of Parliament to make more agricultural land available for the yeomanry.

The unmapped forests of the rugged Otways and eastern Strzelecki Ranges, along with the steep mountains of the Victorian alps, and the remote forests of far-east Gippsland, had been largely ignored by the Lands Department. Prospective settlers had also avoided these areas because they were too far from markets, the terrain was too difficult, and the forests were too thick.

Settlement had begun in the foothills of the Otway ranges as early as the 1840s, but by the mid-1870s there were only about 100 selectors.

In 1873, the Minister for Lands set aside 193,000 acres as a Timber Reserve, but after a heated public debate and a change of Minister in 1879, virtually all the Crown land in the Otways (apart from a 36,000-acre tract around Cape Otway, and land which had already been selected) was made available. Blocks were surveyed and put up for selection and the available land around Apollo Bay, which had access to the port, was taken up immediately.

The Land Act (1884) and subsequent Land Act (1890) were the last of the nineteenth-century legislation to make large tracts of unallocated Crown land available for small-scale farming.

Matters came to a head in the 1890s when a severe economic recession hit Melbourne after the heady days of the goldrush.

Many state politicians believed that rural Victoria offered better opportunities for families, but most of the easier farming land had already been selected.  

Besides, new settlers in the 1890s had fewer choices so moved into the remaining unalienated Crown lands in the Otway and eastern Strzelecki Ranges. At the same time, large parts of the Dandenong Ranges Timber Reserve, which had previously been set aside in 1867, were revoked in 1893 by the Minister for Lands, John McIntyre, to allow for more settlement. He later justified the decision with this explanation.

“I acted on the principle that men upon the land were better than gum trees”.

Once again, rather than tackle the stranglehold of the squattocracy, the reservation of State forests from alienation to protect valuable timber resources was sacrificed to political expediency.

Ahead of the new wave of Melbourne settlers was the Herculean task of clearing the giant trees and trying to get their produce to market on soggy or non-existent roads.

The Land Act required genuine or bonafide selectors to annually “improve” the land by clearing and making improvements, while some more unscrupulous settlers acquired the Crown land to simply cut down all the trees and sell-off all the timber, leaving a stark and denuded landscape. But, either way, the forest was destroyed just the same.

The rainfall was higher in the dense mountain ash forests, and it was wrongly assumed the land was fertile because of the giant trees that grew there.  It proved to be a disaster.

The deadly bushfires, the indiscriminate clearing of Victoria’s public land, and the wastage of its forests and timber resources during the 1800s could no longer be ignored. In late 1897, the State government gave a very wide-ranging brief to a Royal Commission to examine the destruction of the State’s native forests.

The Commission, which sat for four years until 1901, produced 14 separate reports, which are remarkable both in their scope and for their careful description, mostly for the first time, of the principal forests of Victoria together with their condition.

It is equally astonishing how far timber getting had extended into the Victorian bush over a period of less than fifty years since the discovery of gold in 1851.

The Otway Ranges Report was produced in 1899 and describes the magnificent wet forests and how they once contained extremely valuable and high-quality mountain ash, blue gum, messmate and blackwood – perhaps the finest forests in Australia.

But the Otway forests were rapidly succumbing to pressures for land selection. The tragedy was that much of the best forest country was on relatively steep land with high rainfall and a short growing season so that it was not well suited for agriculture.

The destruction of mountain ash and blue gum in the Beech Forest area was appalling. On scores of land selections trees with a height to the first branch from 120 to 200 feet were ringed barked. The ringing work was valued by the Lands Department as an improvement at 3/- an acre. But sawmillers in the district were appalled at the wastage and considered the value of the timber destroyed “would have paid the national debt”.

Immense quantities of magnificent young timber were also destroyed by the 1898 bushfire.

The story of land alienation in the Otways set-out in the Royal Commission report reveals an extraordinarily confused saga –

“In the year 1879 the temporary reservation of the eastern area of 193,000 acres was cancelled with the object of making certain lands in the Apollo Bay district available for selection, about 36,000 acres only of the southern portion being retained. In 1886 Beech Forest was thrown open for selection. In 1890 such portions of this extensive tract as were unoccupied by the bona fide selector or the speculator were withdrawn from further selection on account of the value of the timber but were again made available for settlement in April 1893. In December of the same year and again in 1895 the western part of the area (36,000 acres) at the extremity of the Peninsula known as the `Otway State Forest’ and containing 18,000 acres, was thrown open for selection”.

The report also suggested –

“It is doubtful whether in any other part of the colony there is to be found such a variety of valuable timber trees as in the Otway peninsula”.

It also found that settlement in the Otways had been a –

“great administrative blunder and that most of the timbered areas should have been reserved for timber harvesting and water supply”.

The conclusion of the Royal Commission report on the Otway Ranges, was that in the short space of fifteen years immense tracts of the finest forests in Australia had been devastated by axe and fire in the pursuit of settlement.

It was the same story in the eastern Strzelecki Ranges which became known as “The Heartbreak Hills”, where many families simply walked off the land.

Voices opposing the wasteful clearing, such as from the Conservator of Forests George Perrin, went unheeded by the powerful Lands Department.

As early as 1887, the Minister for Lands, John Dow, had been expressing regret that the magnificent blue gum ridges throughout south Gippsland had been alienated by the Crown and that

“every acre of this land has passed into the hands of private selectors”.

The 1897-1901 Royal Commission into the destruction of the state’s native forests proved a significant turning point in forest conservation in Victoria.

However, another push for alienation in the western Otways in the early 1920s, led by the Minister for Lands David Oman, was successfully rebutted by the Forests Commission, but at the expense of the new FCV Chairman, Owen Jones.

But the great irony was that large areas of these wet forests in the Otways and Strzelecki Ranges were, at great expense, reforested and replanted by the Forests Commission and private forest growers from the 1930s onwards.

https://prov.vic.gov.au/explore-collection/provenance-journal/provenance-2015/reading-papers

Clement Hodgkinson was as an English naturalist, explorer, senior public servant and surveyor.

Born at Southampton in 1818, he studied civil engineering in France before working at topographical fieldwork and mechanical drawing in England.

He arrived at Melbourne in December 1851 intending to become a pastoralist but instead joined the Surveyor-General’s Office in January 1852.

Clement rose to become Assistant Commissioner of Crown Lands and Survey from 1861 to 1874 where he exercised virtually complete control over the daily management of almost all Crown land reserves in Victoria.

Hodgkinson was widely acknowledged by his contemporaries, including the influential State government botanist Baron Ferdinand Von Mueller, as the “Father of Victorian forestry”.

The parliamentary inquiry in 1864-65 “On the Advisableness of Establishing State Forests” was led by Hodgkinson, together with the Surveyor General – Charles Whybrow Ligar and the Secretary for Mines – Robert Brough Smythe. Their report wholeheartedly recommended setting aside large State forest reserves in the vicinity of the goldfields at Ballarat, Sandhurst (Bendigo), Castlemaine, Ararat, Maryborough, Inglewood, Beechworth and other centres.

Following the inquiry and despite spirited opposition from agricultural, mining and grazing interests, Hodgkinson was almost single-handedly responsible for creating the first Timber Reserves in 1867. Many of these areas are now among Victoria’s finest National Parks and include Sherbrooke Forest.

Hodgkinson also appointed William Ferguson in 1868 as the first “Caretaker and Overseer of Forests”. Among other things, Ferguson established the first State Nursery at Macedon in 1872.

Hodgkinson served on many committees of inquiry, not least being the 1871 Royal Commission into “Foreign Industries & Forest”, a subject of major interest. He formulated the subsequent legislation to form Forest Boards in 1871.

Clement Hodgkinson retired from public service in 1874 but briefly returned to civic duties in 1883 to sit on a new Committee of Management to inspect the City Gardens.

He was also involved in what would become the Royal Society of Victoria, which discussed and advised the colonial government on scientific issues.

https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/hodgkinson-clement-3774

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/5771520

Flushed with tremendous wealth generated by the goldfields, the Victorian government invested over £9 million in the decade between 1854 and 1864 to build just 254 miles of railway, while private companies invested another £1.8 million.

The Victorian Railways Department was established in 1856, and the rail network rapidly began to radiate out from Melbourne. The first major country lines were to Echuca and Geelong to capitalise on freight traffic.

By 1870, construction of the lines to Ballarat, Sandhurst (Bendigo), and Echuca had been completed. While in the city, the suburban lines to the south and east were still privately owned, although the separate companies had amalgamated into one.

The tramways opened in 1884 which also rapidly spread across Melbourne’s inner suburbs.

Following hard on the heels of legislation to alienate and settle rural Victoria, two Acts of Parliament were passed in December 1880, and December 1884, which authorised the construction of 89 new railway lines, more than doubling Victoria’s network to over 2,900 miles by 1892. It included provisions to direct £200,000 per annum from the sale of public forests to fund the railway borrowings.

The legislation became notoriously known as the “Octopus Acts” in reference to the tentacle like web of tracks it created.

But the period was also characterised by blatant political interference in railway planning, with some parliamentarians shamelessly lobbying to have railways built through their own electorates, or even to serve land developments in which they had a direct financial interest.

The most famous example of political meddling was by the State Premier, Sir Thomas Bent, who was also the Treasurer and Minister for Railways. He had significant landholdings near Brighton and unashamedly approved a tramline from St Kilda, which led right past his properties to the new suburb of Bentleigh which he then pompously named in his own honour.

And it wasn’t just politicians, there are many stories of railway surveyors and engineers being lavishly entertained at country pubs and accommodation houses by local businessmen seeking to secure a more favourable alignment. Just think how many Railway Hotels there are across rural Victoria.

The period between 1880 and 1890 was then marked by a frenzy of railway construction as branch lines were constructed to serve new agricultural communities and to support suburban land speculation.

This network required nearly five million wooden sleepers, mostly from durable timbers like red gum sourced from the Murray River, ironbark near Bendigo and yellow stringybark and grey box from Gippsland.

In Victoria, sleepers typically measured 9 inches wide by 4.5 inches thick and 9 feet long, which roughly equated to a volume of 30 superficial feet.

During the 1880s, the annual demand for sleepers, just for maintenance and upgrades, was over 46,000, but in the subsequent decade the demand skyrocketed. In 1898 it passed 200,000, with 610,000 used for all purposes.

Thousands of sleeper cutters were employed and only the best quality timbers were acceptable to the Railways Department. They  also preferred sleepers hewn by hand with a broad axe and adze rather than sawn. This was a very wasteful practice, with one or two sleepers cut from a tree with the remainder left to rot.

The newly appointed Conservator of Forests, George Perrin, was at constant loggerheads with the Railways Department over the wasteful cutting of sleepers.  He unsuccessfully urged that sleeper hewers should be excluded from the forest and made clear his belief that they bore the bulk of responsibility for the destruction of Victoria’s valuable forest timber resources.

In addition to the provision of millions of sleepers, timber bridges also demonstrated the fundamental significance that State forests played in the rapid development of the new colony of Victoria.

From the early 1870s, the Victorian Railways maintained a policy of building all new bridges from timber to reduce costs, except in special circumstances which required the use of more permanent materials like brick, steel and concrete.

Although cheaper to construct, the timber bridges required more frequent and expensive on-going maintenance. Most of the key elements such as sleepers, girders, cross beams, piles etc would have been progressively replaced with locally sourced hardwoods.

Over 2000 wooden bridges were built on the railway network but most of these lines are now closed following the advent of better roads and vehicles.

The bridges then fell victim to decay, neglect, floods and bushfires, but a few operational bridges remain, mostly on heritage railways like Puffing Billy and Maldon.

The railways developed in conjunction with postal and telegraph services to provide communications for regional communities.

The Victorian Acclimatisation Society was founded in 1861 by Edward Wilson, editor of The Argus newspaper and a private collector, whose motto was “if it lives, we want it”.

The Society was governed by the colony’s most eminent scientists who believed that Australia’s plants and animals were greatly inferior to those in Europe, providing only “a little sport and an occasional meal”.

The Society was primarily responsible for the introduction of deer, starlings, Indian mynas, sparrows and European carp into the Murray River.

Wilson even suggested to the Governor of Victoria that monkeys be released into the Australian bush “for the amusement of the wayfarer, whom their gambols would delight as he lay under some gum tree in the forest on a sultry day.” Fortunately, his request was refused.

Victorian government botanist, Ferdinand von Mueller, a noted member of the Society, distributed thousands of living plants and packets of seed to gardens throughout the colony between 1857 and 1858. Von Mueller is often credited with the spread of blackberry, which now uncontrollably chokes the bush and waterways.

The release of 24 wild rabbits by Thomas Austin in October 1859 on his property near Winchelsea was also to have huge and lasting impacts on native forests and agricultural lands.

Foxes were introduced to combat the rabbits, but this experiment failed, and foxes became a new environmental pest.

Lack of ecological knowledge meant that the consequences of these introductions were generally unforeseen. It was later said of the Victorian Acclimatation Society that “there was never a body of men so foolishly, so vigorously, and so disastrously wrong”.

Domestic animals – such as dogs, cats, pigs and goats – either escaped or were released into the wild.

The list is long with other pests like black rats and scotch thistles which were inadvertently introduced by settlers.

And the later arrival of the soil-borne disease Phytophthora cinnamomi and the honey fungus, Armillaria luteobubalina, devasted large tracts of the southern eucalypt forests in Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia.

As gold revenues declined, selling Crown Land to accommodate the thousands of new arrivals on farms and settlements became the next untapped frontier of wealth for the new colonial government.

Producing enough food for the expanding population was another important consideration.

Besides, farming was believed to provide a “healthy and pleasant pursuit” for ex-miners who might otherwise become “discontented and dangerous to public safety”. For many Irish immigrant families (like my own), who had been driven from their homeland by the potato famine, poverty and repression, a new life in agriculture in Victoria presented a more attractive alternative.

“Yeoman Ideal” was a popular and romantic belief in the worthy and noble figure of an enterprising and independent family-based farmer being the cornerstone of a prosperous rural society. It became a guiding principle of Victoria’s land settlement schemes.

To people from Great Britain – where every inch of land had been owned and traded for centuries – it must have seemed incredible that settlers in the new colonies of Australia could simply trek into the bush, mark out a large parcel of land and claim ownership without reference to anyone else.

The British Government, which claimed all land in Australia as terra nullius, stepped in and tried several different ways to regulate the system of private land ownership.

Not long after John Batman sailed up the Yarra River in 1835 to establish Melbourne, the squatters began arriving in Victoria, mostly from Van Diemen’s Land and NSW to illegally claim large areas of grazing land. The Henty Brothers had been squatting on Crown land at Portland from 1834.

In other examples, the Colonial government in Sydney either sponsored or sanctioned privately funded expeditions to search for new grazing lands and in return granted generous concessions.

By the end of 1838, according to the Crown Lands Commissioner, there were 57 squatters in the Port Phillip District.

“Squatters” carved out large estates on Crown Land they called runs and there was little the colonial government could do to stop them. They often objected to the term because it had originally been applied to ex-convicts who had illegally occupied small parcels on land. Instead, they saw themselves as “pastoralists”, an antipodean aristocracy living on large estates and homesteads built from the profits of the wool trade. But critics dismissed their upper-class pretensions by calling them the “squattocracy”.

In 1844, the Governor of New South Wales, George Gipps, required squatters to pay a yearly £10 licence fee and limited the size of each run. The license enabled the squatters to become legitimate pastoralists and to set up where they chose on Crown Land to graze cattle and sheep while waiting for it to be surveyed. The only limitation was that there would be three miles between stations.

Pastoralists then had a right to raise livestock on their “run” but licences could also be sold, and stations were constantly changing hands.

“Pre-emptive rights” were established in 1847 for squatters who had settled and made improvements to their land. They were permitted to purchase 640 acres (1 square mile) at the minimum upset price of £1 per acre. In this way the homestead, land and improvements could be secured before any surrounding land was made available to the public.

The squatters, who had good knowledge of their runs, claimed the best sections of land in a practice known as “peacocking”. The pre-emptive rights system was deeply flawed and widely abused.

By 1845, fewer than 240 wealthy squatters held all Victoria’s pastoral licences and proved a powerful political and economic force. They founded the exclusive Melbourne Club in 1838, which still exists today.

Prior to separation from NSW in 1851, there were five million sheep in the Port Philip District, but only 77,345 people. Wool was particularly profitable for these early pastoralists, and from the 1820s economic growth was based on the sale of fine wool to England which deeply shaped many Australian beliefs and identity.

After self-government was granted to Victoria in 1851, land continued to be administered under Imperial Acts and Orders-in-Council of the Governor of New South Wales. The first meeting of the Victorian Parliament wasn’t until November 1856.

At the time, the State’s forests and Crown Lands were still commonly regarded by the general public, and by most of their parliamentary representatives, as the inexhaustible “Wastelands of the Crown”, and ready for disposal via alienation and sale into freehold property for the purposes of agricultural settlement.

Influential and vocal segments of the community continually criticised the State Government for not exploiting and developing these remote and untamed lands.

But the Squattocracy and Land Barons were not about to cede their vast western district estates to settlers, nor their power in the Upper House of the Victorian Parliament. A pattern of conflict between the two Houses of Parliament continued for the next twenty years.

This growing resentment led to the formation in 1857 of the “Land Convention”, which began campaigning for reform. It was successful, and the Victorian Government introduced the Sale of Crown Lands Act (1860), also known as the Nicholson Act.  

The Nicholson Act released 3 million acres of Crown Land for settlement and offered allotments between 80–640 acres of surveyed land at £1 per acre. Settlers could pay for half the allotment and lease the other half for up to seven years at one shilling per acre per year. Once the remaining balance was paid, they received a Crown Grant.

While there were some serious flaws in implementation of the Nicholson Act, this provision made an incredible difference to advancing land settlement. It also generated considerable and much-needed revenue into the colonial State Government coffers.

But the Nicholson Act provoked continuing confrontation with the squatters.

Access to water remained hotly contested, especially on the dry plains of northern Victoria. Pre-emptive rights typically secured access to reliable water in creeks or rivers. But in a visionary move, the Colonial Government established Crown Land frontages, which are narrow strips of public land along major rivers and streams. The law also forbade control of dual water frontages to prevent pastoralists from strategically monopolising all the permanent waterways for their own private use. A practice that could unfairly lock up the water resources and thereby excluding vast tracts of adjoining agricultural land from other settlers.

European settlement quickened with the passing of the Sale and Occupation of Crown Lands Act (1862), which was known as the Duffy Act, and attempted to resolve the conflict between squatters, gold seekers and small-scale farmers. The Duffy Act and subsequent amendments under the Grant Act (1865) released a further 10 million acres. The Act was accompanied by “the big map” which was one of the largest maps ever made in Australia, measuring 15 feet by 20 feet.

The term “Cocky” arose around 1870 to describe struggling farmers and settlers trying to scratch a living from the soil like cockatoos. But the nickname grew to reflect a sense of pride and self-assuredness, highlighting their resilience and connection to the land.

Importantly, a Section 41 of the Amending Land Act (1865), or Grant Act, allowed the Governor-in-Council to “…reserve from sale any Crown Lands which were required for the growth and preservation of timber…”. The Governor also approved the granting, cancellation, revocation, and transfer of licenses. The Act made provisions for bridges and level crossings.

The later Land Act (1869) allowed for the selection of up to 320 acres, including unsurveyed land, via the process of licensing, leasing and grants. A licence could be issued for three years at an annual rent of 2 shillings per acre, paid half yearly in advance. After that, the selector could apply for a seven-year lease at the same rent. After paying a total of £1 (20 shillings) per acre, the selector could apply for a Crown Grant, that is, land held by the Crown could be granted to the selector as the new owner.

Licence holders were also specifically barred from mining their selections under Section 20.

The Land Act (1884) was a revision of the earlier Land Act (1869), but under Sections 32 and 42 selectors had to pay the same price for land, £1 per acre, regardless of its quality.

This Act also allowed a grazing lease of up to 1,000 acres at an annual rent between 2d and 4d per acre, but the land could not be purchased and would revert to the Crown by 29 December 1898.

The 1884 Act also required selectors to make improvements, but those with poor-quality land could not make enough income to pay for the improvements.

For example, lessees of grazing areas were required under Section 32 to destroy all vermin within three years, enclose the land with fencing within three years and not remove timber except for use on the selection.

While licensees of agricultural selections under section 42 were required to destroy all vermin within two years, fence the land within six years, cultivate at least 1 acre in 10 during the licence period, occupy the land for at least five years and make improvements to the value of £1 per acre within six years. If these conditions were met, they could apply for a lease or Crown grant.

Needless to say, there was a lot of grumbling from cockies about the onerous provision of the 1884 Land Act. In 1898, the Commissioner for Crown Lands and Survey, Sir Robert Best, introduced fairer legislation to enable closer settlement and a new concept of land classification.

Settlers paid £1 per acre for half of an allotment but were required to make “improvements” regardless of its quality. They leased the other half for up to seven years at one shilling per acre per year and could pay off the balance at any time to receive a Crown Grant, which gave them ownership of the land.

However, Victoria was emerging from a financial depression in the 1890s associated with a post-goldrush hangover. It was also in the midst of the serious Federation Drought.

The Best Land Act (1898) also included a concession for existing agricultural leaseholders who were not able to pay arrears of rent.

The clearing of forests and timber by the early pastoralists for their sheep and cattle was intensified by the hopeful men who aimed to grow crops on their selections particularly from the 1860s onwards.

The latter tackled the more thickly forested areas which the squatters had avoided, such as the Otways and the great forests of South Gippsland.

The big trees were ringbarked in spring when the sap had risen. With a sharp axe the selector took off a one-foot strip of bark all around the tree and to make sure of killing large stems, chopped into the sap wood.

Although the tree remained standing, it soon lost its branches. This was a cheap way of “improving” the land as required by the selection acts. A competent axeman could kill three or four acres of trees a day.

The forested areas were frequently cleared of trees by fire which, more often than not, was not restricted to the landowner’s property but allowed to spread to adjoining forests.

The settlers were also permitted to obtain timber for their own use free of charge and this concession did little to instil a forest conscience in the community. A culture of forest destruction developed, almost without thought of the consequences.

During the 1800s, the State’s forests were controlled by the powerful Lands Department whose primary function was to survey, map and sell land for settlement.

Between 1849 and 1871 Victoria was divided into 37 counties and nearly 2914 parishes. These parishes were progressively surveyed by the Lands Department into allotments. This in turn allowed the colonial government to record the sale and transfer of land from the crown to selectors.

The Torrens Title system was introduced in Victoria in 1862 which provided a single record, or “Certificate of Title”, as conclusive evidence of land ownership.  It gave confidence to land buyers.

However, there were still many serious allegations of coercion, and even corruption, within the corridors of power including the Lands Department, by those who sought to profit handsomely from the release and sale of Crown Land.

There was also evidence of “land banking” and “dummy bidding” whereby shady and wealthy speculators deceptively obtained land without actually occupying it, with the view to future sales and profits.

Furthermore, the colonial government viewed forests and wood as something that should be available for next-to-nothing for the large number of people battling to make a subsistence living from the earth. The government exerted only the lightest of controls in the form of annual licences to obtain timber for a modest sum, with no restrictions on species, sizes or quantity. Vast quantities of timber were felled by squatters and selectors and wasted.

While timber cutting for the mines during the goldrush had huge impact on the State’s forests, they were often left to regenerate naturally. Whereas clearing for agriculture was the primary cause of permanent forest removal.

By 1878, about 40% of the Colony had been alienated which coincided with its first surplus of food.

Not surprisingly, the Colonial Government had little appetite for changing the status-quo and introducing restrictive forest legislation.

However, the era of land alienation basically came to an abrupt end around 1925, with only minor acreages after that. Foresters and the newly formed Forests Commission played an important part in that massive change by pushing back against the Lands Department and calls for more land to be released.

The other key forces were a rising “forest conscience” within the community, and the political pressure of the big gold mining companies and the parliamentarians representing mining town electorates. They were seeing a timber drought firsthand with shortages of structural timber for pit props and firewood for boilers to run mining machinery. Shortages due in large part to deforestation in central Victoria caused by mining with no reforestation or planting.

The Marvellous Melbourne we enjoy today began to take shape in 1854 and was paying for it in gold. They were heady times.

The MCG, Flinders Street Railway Station, Port Melbourne’s Station Pier, the University of Melbourne, both St Paul’s and St Patrick’s Cathedrals, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Customs House on the Yarra, while the Melbourne Museum and the State Library shared a site in Swanston Street. All of these and many more venerated public landmarks got their modest start in 1854.

The first edition of the Melbourne Age was also printed on 17 October 1854.

Melbourne’s own “Crystal Palace” was constructed of glass and wood in 1854 on the corner of William and La Trobe streets (now the site of the Royal Mint). It boasted 23,000 square feet of floor space and was built in just 70 days. The first of its type in Australia, it was designed to show off the gold-rich colony.

Australia’s first steam-powered city train, operated by the Hobsons Bay Railway Company, choofed on its first short journey on June 12, 1854, a full year before Sydney had any form of railway.

The thirsty citizens of Melbourne received their first public water supply in 1854, when a 150,000-gallon tank was built in East Melbourne, initially storing water raised by a steam pump from the Yarra River before the Yan Yean Reservoir came on stream three years later.

The goldrush lured thousands of hopefuls from around the world: Americans fresh from their own rush in California, arrived alongside Germans, Scandinavians, South Africans, Brits and Chinese among others.

Australian history was being made in other ways on the goldfields that were feeding Melbourne’s enormous wealth. And before 1854 was done, out on the Ballarat diggings, a ragtag gathering of miners fed-up with unjust treatment from the colonial authorities made the Eureka Stockade and the Eureka flag hopelessly romantic symbols of rebellion within the Australian story.

The explosion in immigration and the consequent demand for imported goods, presented Victoria’s administrators with their own bottomless money pit.

In addition to the hated mining licences, duties were levied on all imported luxuries brought into the suddenly wealthy colony, while a tax was levied on the export of gold. Customs revenue in 1850, immediately before the goldrush, was only £84,000, but by 1854 customs officers collected the same amount in a month.

To avoid the tax, ships carrying Chinese passengers dropped them off in Sydney, Port Adelaide and Robe in South Australia – requiring them to traipse many hundreds of kilometres on foot to the goldfields.

When the huge number of gold-seeking immigrants, at first housed in tents and crowded lodgings, finally turned their attention to more permanent accommodation, housebuilding leapt to a new level of activity with a 50% increase in the first few years of the 1860s. Steam powered sawmills together with the mass production of nails, and access to corrugated iron (rather than English thatch which was very fire prone), enabled thousands of new timber houses to be built. This added considerably to the pressure on the native forests.

But the goldrush and Melbourne boom petered out by 1880s and was inevitably followed by a financial crash in 1891, which combined with the Federation Drought from 1895 to 1902, depressed economic conditions for a decade or more.

But in February 1854, an Act to Restrain the Careless Use of Fire was passed.

Source: Tony Wright – Melbourne Age

https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/melbourne-was-leaping-out-of-its-skin-a-new-age-began-in-the-year-that-shaped-our-city-20241001-p5kewk.html

The distance from Melbourne to Sydney often frustrated and delayed important government decision making when Port Phillip was still a reluctantly dependent outpost of New South Wales. It was one of the main reasons that Port Phillip residents passionately advocated for a separate and independent government.

A Separation Association was formed following a public meeting in Melbourne in 1840 to protest about the perceived indifference by Sydney administrators, as well as the unequal distribution of public infrastructure funding. The Association then petitioned the British Parliament in London. Maybe as an appeasement the Port Phillip District was granted minority representation in the New South Wales Legislative Council in 1842.

Finally, on 1 July 1851, after years of agitation, the District of Port Phillip separated from NSW to become the independent Colony of Victoria. Although the first meeting of the Victorian Parliament wasn’t until November 1856.

Meanwhile, there had been evidence of small quantities of gold in Victoria as early as 1849. The Black Thursday bushfires in February 1851 removed the thick undergrowth and opened up the forests, the rivers and outcrops of rock for eager prospectors.

The new Victorian Governor, Charles La Trobe, assembled a Gold Discovery Committee on 9 June 1851 which offered sizable rewards to anyone who found payable amounts of gold within 200 miles of Melbourne. The response was immediate because the precious metal had already been discovered, but the prospectors had kept quiet.

Within weeks of Victoria’s formal separation from NSW, news broke out about gold discoveries at Warrandyte and Clunes, and by the following month new finds were also made public about Castlemaine, Bendigo and Ballarat. Further discoveries were made at Beechworth in 1852, Bright, Omeo, Chiltern (1858–59) and Walhalla (1862).

Governor La Trobe visited Ballarat and witnessed a team of five men dig out 136 ounces of gold in one day and another 120 ounces on the following day. The richness of these finds was staggering.

Prior to the goldrush, Victoria was primarily a pastoral settlement with a European population of 77,345. But when gold was discovered, the population suddenly swelled. Three years afterwards in 1854, the population had tripled to 231,925 and by 1857 it had reached 410,766.

The economy deteriorated into a shambles for a time as people deserted jobs and farms to head to the goldfields. Vessels arriving with hopeful diggers at Williamstown in Port Phillip Bay were often left abandoned as the crews jumped ship.

The 1850s goldrush led to heady and unrestrained prosperity for the new colony, and the City of Melbourne became its financial capital. Many magnificent public buildings were constructed, and the rail system began to radiate from its centre.

However, the urgent need for timber to feed the gold fields had a profound and lasting impact on Victoria’s native forests. They were being progressively and indiscriminately cleared, in ever-increasing concentric circles, for mining and building timbers.

The Government had become beholden to the needs of the mining industry and practically no restrictions were placed in the way of its easy and cheap procurement of timber.

No value whatever was given to the boundless forests, and it was only because of the necessity of going further and further afield for pit props, laths and other wood necessities for the mines that any thought was given to the conservation of forests.

The spirit of forest destruction engendered by the powerful mining community became a state characteristic for many years to come.

Power for sawmills and mines was primarily supplied by steam, and in 1873, it is estimated that some 1150 steam boilers in the gold mining industry were indiscriminately devouring over one million tons of firewood each year.

By 1859, there were 71 sawmills but during the 1860s, this number expanded to 141.

The gold mining frenzy not only devastated the native forests, but it also churned the soils, the landscape, and the waterways, which left scars that took decades to repair.

Indeed, gold made Victoria and Melbourne, but at a terrible cost to the native forests.

After some years of agitation, Queen Victoria signed the Australian Colonies Government Acton 5 August 1850 to separate the Port Phillip District from NSW to create the new independent Colony of Victoria.

When the news reached Melbourne from London on 11 November 1850 it was announced with great flourish under a tree at the northern end of the current Flagstaff Gardens.

The news about forming a new colony was then signalled to Melbourne residents by lighting a huge bonfire on Flagstaff Hill and putting up posters around the city.

Four days later on the 15 November, Governor Charles La Trobe led official celebrations in the Royal Botanic Gardens under a giant red gum that became known as the Separation Tree.

The legislation didn’t come into full effect until 1 July 1851.

Sadly, this magnificent tree was vandalised in 2010, and again in 2013, and subsequently died.

1788 to 1851 – reshaping of the forests…

The present-day State of Victoria had a hesitant start.

George Bass sailed from Sydney in 1797 in an open whaleboat with a crew of six on an epic and perilous journey to explore the southern coast. He travelled around the southern tip of Wilsons Promontory to land at the entrance to Western Port Bay near present-day Flinders.

Shortly after in February 1802, Lieutenant John Murray, aboard the Lady Nelson, entered Port Phillip Bay and formally took possession for Britain. Captain Matthew Flinders arrived 10 weeks later and climbed two major peaks at Arthurs Seat and the You Yangs. Their combined reports to Governor King influenced the decision to establish Victoria’s first official settlement in the following year.

Lieutenant-Colonel David Collins first settled at Sullivan Bay near present-day Sorrento with a group of British convicts in October 1803. However, a lack of fresh water, poor sandy soil and shortages of timber suitable for building, together with violent clashes with the local Aboriginals, led to Collins to recommend a move to the Derwent River in Van Diemen’s Land, and upon receiving permission, he left in two ships on 30 January and 20 May 1804 to establish Hobart.

Between 1801-04 the voyage of the French explorer Nicolas Baudin charted much of the southern coastline including Western Port Bay and French Island. He included the description of “La Terre Napoleon”, covering much of what is now Victoria and South Australia. Onboard was artist Charles Alexandre Lesueur who drew exquisite sketches of the east coast of Tasmania in 1802 which show many small plumes of smoke from Aboriginal fires.

Starting from NSW in October 1824, Hamilton Hume and William Hovell began an expedition southward to find new grazing land. They spent three days attempting to cross the Great Dividing Range at Mt Disappointment but were thwarted by the thick mountain forests. They eventually reached Corio Bay on 16 December, but because of navigational errors and omissions they mistakenly concluded that they had reached Western Port. However, their enthusiastic reports led NSW Governor Sir Ralph Darling to establish another short-lived convict settlement at Corinella at Western Port in November 1826, in part to protect the approaches from French explorers.

Between 1829 and 1830, Charles Napier Sturt led an expedition along the Murray River, sparking interest in the vast red gum forests and potential for settlement of land to the south.

Meanwhile, the Henty brothers established a permanent settlement near Portland in 1834. They had been disappointed with the Swan River in Western Australia and were unable to secure a land grant in Tasmania, so they squatted illegally with their flocks of sheep.

Major Thomas Mitchell’s famous overland expedition arrived at Portland in August 1836, and he was surprised to find the small but prosperous community living off the fertile farmland. He termed the region “Australia Felix” which is Latin for “Fortunate Australia”.

A year later in 1835, Australian grazier, entrepreneur and explorer, John Batman, led an expedition from Tasmania and claimed to have negotiated the purchase of over 600,000 acres of land between Port Phillip and Corio Bays from eight Wurundjeri elders in exchange for tools, blankets and food. He also famously identified a spot on the Yarra River which was to become the City of Melbourne and noted in his diary of 8 June 1835, “this will be the place for a village”. But Batman’s treaty was deemed illegal and subsequently rejected by Sydney-based Governor Sir Richard Bourke because Batman had no authority over Crown Land.

Crown Land was the principal asset of the British colonial government and its major source of power and revenue. To discourage similar illicit ventures in land dealing, the Sydney Government made Port Phillip a formal administrative division of New South Wales in September 1836 and established a magistrate’s office at Melbourne to administer new land regulations.

Pastoral runs spread over the following two years as far as Winchelsea, Inverleigh and Bacchus Marsh in the west, and Woodend and Kilmore in the north.

Timber licence regulations were also established under the Land Act which proved largely ineffective.

The timber industry was one of the first to establish in Melbourne to provide the raw materials for construction of buildings, wharves and fences. However, the pioneers of Port Phillip were largely from Tasmania, and they preferred to ship timber from sawmills and forests around Launceston and Hobart.

Melbourne’s first steam-powered sawmill was established by Alison and Knight in 1841 on the south-east corner of Collins and King Streets. And the first timber tramway in Victoria was built on the Portland jetty in 1846 to move loads between ships and the shore.

The main early explorers who ventured into the deep forests and mountains peaks of Gippsland included Angus McMillan in 1839 and Count Paul Strzelecki in 1840.

Prior to European discovery and settlement, Victoria was the home to many indigenous nations who had occupied the land for thousands of years and, over that time, had accumulated a deep knowledge and wisdom of the natural rhythms of the bush and fire.

The pre-colonial Aboriginal population of Victoria was estimated to be about 70,000, but European diseases such as smallpox decimated communities and reduced this number to less than 15,000.

Major impacts on native forests also occurred with the dispossession of Aboriginal people from their traditional lands between 1836 and 1842 associated with the establishment of extensive sheep runs. By 1845, fewer than 240 wealthy squatters held all the pastoral licences and became a powerful political and economic force in Victoria. There was often conflict between the new settlers and aboriginal communities over land and resources.

A map produced by the Mines Department in 1869 indicates that prior to European settlement, nearly 88% of Victoria had been forested, with the remaining 12% made up of open grasslands, coastal and alpine heathlands, lakes and mallee deserts. Alienation and sale of Crown Land with associated clearing of native forests for mining, roads, railways, pastures, agriculture, cities, towns and settlements over the subsequent century reduced this figure to about 36% by 2013.

The first European seafarers, explorers, surveyors and settlers witnessed and commented on aboriginal groups frequently lighting small and low intensity fires to burn the scrub. They also noted the open grassy forests and woodlands which they encountered.

Disruptions to the complex patchwork associated with traditional indigenous burning patterns undoubtedly led to profound changes to the state of Victoria’s native forests, particularly of the structure of the understory.

There is also strong evidence from pollen and charcoal particles found in lake sediments to suggest that major bushfires were more intense and more frequent following the arrival of Europeans.

By the late 1840s only about 75,000 Europeans occupied Victoria with Melbourne, Williamstown, Geelong and Portland as the dominant settlements. But the gold rush beginning in 1851 created a flood of miners and new settlers looking for land which led to major and lasting impacts on Victoria’s forests.