Creating A Super-Park

The forests of Victoria’s Central Highlands are a picturesque greenbelt crucial to Melbourne’s water supply and could soon be included in a huge new national park.

- Jeremy Bourke

OF THE MANY trees filling the landscape northeast of Melbourne, mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans) – Earth’s tallest flowering plant – is the area’s most famed species. Yet our guide, Steve Meacher, chooses myrtle beech to explain how the plants of Toolangi State Forest function as a community. Myrtle beech (Nothofagus cunninghamii) grows to 35m, compared with the 70m-plus achieved by mountain ash. But the beech is more durable, with individual trees living more than 400 years, and hosts a diversity of life. “Unlike gum trees [like mountain ash], its bark is permanent so can supply a substrate many other species can inhabit,” Steve explains. “It hosts ferns, liverworts, lichens and a range of mosses.

“They’re forming a community and within that a variety of creatures can live, mostly insects and spiders. And there’ll be other things that feed on them. Different possums like different parts of the tree, for example, and so they can live in the same environment without competing. Each species has its sweet spot.”

The lesson Steve is teaching me is that for Victoria this pocket of forests is itself a sweet spot, one of few such areas left in the state. The Australian Conservation Foundation says more than 66 per cent of Victoria’s native vegetation has been cleared since European colonisation. It estimates that only 1.2 per cent of oldgrowth mountain ash in the state’s Central Highlands remains unlogged and unburnt since 1939, when the last major fire in these parts occurred before 2009’s Black Saturday fires.