It’s a familiar walk for Chris Taylor to a towering mountain ash tree thought to be approximately 400 years old.
The research fellow at the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University has been visiting this stretch of forest, known as Victoria’s Central Highlands, since he was 10.
“I’ve been coming here pretty much all my life. For the last 20 years as a researcher, and the 20 years before that hiking,” Taylor says.
On a wet, winter’s day, it’s hard to even see the top of the eucalypt tree through the heavy blanket of mist. Sarah Rees, a conservationist and local resident, has dubbed it “the Guardian”, as it overlooks Black Beard, one of the largest trees in Victoria.
Mountain ash – or Eucalyptus regnans – are among the tallest flowering plants in the world, reaching more than 20 storeys high and the maximum age of 550 years. But only about 1.6% of the 137,000 hectares of mountain ash forest in the Central Highlands are considered old trees.
This is largely due to logging in the area, which Taylor says has significantly altered the composition of the forest. Older trees with hollows – providing nesting space for species like the Leadbeater’s possum and the greater glider – have been replaced with younger, highly fire-prone trees.
“As a youngster, I would hike up to the top of one of the alpine peaks and look across and see continued, forested mountains,” Taylor says.
“Now, a couple decades later, you just see a patchwork of heavily disrupted landscapes, thanks to logging. You can actually see why it now qualifies as a critically endangered ecosystem.”
But there is a renewed sense of hope for the forest after the state Labor government’s decision to end native logging at the end of 2023, six years earlier than planned.
The future use of the Central Highlands area has been under review by a panel since 2021, while the government has set up the “Great Outdoors Taskforce” to examine another 1.8m hectares of forest previously used for timber harvesting.
However, there is division over what this future should look like.
While Rees has been campaigning for a decade for the creation of Great Forest national park, which would connect more than 500,000 hectares of Victorian forests and conservation reserves into one enclosed and protected area, others are vehemently opposed.
The latter group includes members of the Victorian Coalition and the outdoor recreation community, who say it will significantly limit their ability to take part in certain activities.
“In the state forest you can ride your horse or a trail bike, hunt, walk the dog, go camping without restriction in a dispersed manner, fossick for metals, fish in the river,” the Nationals MP, Melina Bath, says.
“All these traditional activities that people really enjoy also generate a lot of economic activity for the towns that people stop to buy fuel or grab a bite to eat at the pub or stay the night. Those activities are overwhelmingly banned in national parks.”
Bath has sponsored a petition to “stop the creation of any new national parks”, garnering 16,854 signatures – enough to trigger a debate in parliament’s upper house and a formal response from the minister.
She says the community is aiming to reach more than 30,000 signatures, which would make it the biggest e-petition in the Legislative Council’s history.
“The momentum of the petition shows the level of interest in this issue and the level of concern in the community that the Victorian government is going to lock up public land,” Bath says.
This is disputed by the environment minister, Steve Dimopoulos, who says the Nationals are running a “scare campaign” on the issue.
“For starters you’d never find a chain big enough to put around the forest. It’s a ridiculous proposition,” he says.
“You can do so much in national parks at the moment already, you can camp, you can walk, you can 4WD. You can even walk your dog in one.”
Dimopoulos, however, did not join the likes of Sir David Attenborough and Dr Jane Goodall in throwing his support behind the Great Forest national park proposal.
“It would be the height of rudeness for us to do what we’ve done in terms of setting up an eminent panel, setting up the Great Outdoors Taskforce, building up expectations that community will have a say, only for me to run over the top of it,” he says.
Dimopoulos says Victoria’s forests and national parks total 7.12m hectares – bigger than the entire size of Tasmania.
“It’s hard to even comprehend the size of the land we’re talking about. But there is so much opportunity – for recreation, tourism, conservation and biodiversity,” he says.
“We’ve just got to get it right and set it up for the future.”
Accusations of ‘logging by stealth’
On the other side of parliament’s chamber, the Victorian Greens also have their concerns about the future of the forest and have accused the government of “logging by stealth” under the guise of fire management and storm clean-up.
“This is not just cleaning up some dangerous trees. This is large-scale bulldozing and razing incredibly important habitat without proper checks and balances, or surveying for threatened species ahead of time,” the Greens leader, Ellen Sandell, says.
She points to an incident in May, when an endangered greater glider was found dead next to an area logged by Forest Fire Management Victoria. The government agency said it was working to create fuel breaks along the Yarra Ranges national park.
According to figures obtained by the Greens, that 19 of the previous 21 contractors working for VicForests have since moved on to five-year contracts with FFM to do this work.
Dimopoulos says just 13,000 tonnes of debris was removed in the 2023-24 financial year, with 91% going to firewood “because it’s not suitable for anything else”.
“The average annual tonnes supplied by VicForests when it was in operation was 1.2m. To say we’re doing the same thing, it’s just untrue.”
For Taylor, he’s “disappointed but not surprised” the issue has become, as he describes it, mired in “misdirection and disinformation”.
He says a national park is the “only way” to provide the best future protection for the forests, and allow for the restoration of tree cover, species diversity and making the ecosystem functional again.
“It will take a lot of work but it can be done,” Taylor says.
Rees adds: “They were here for hundreds of years before us, we should ensure they’re here after we’re gone.”
