Australia: Logging of once protected College creek forest has begun in Strzelecki Ranges

Logging started in College Creek catchment in the Strzelecki Ranges six days after the Black Saturday fires devastated vast tracts on the hills that rise at the southern end of the Latrobe Valley. College Creek was one of five environmentally significant core areas declared off limits to logging by then environment minister John Thwaites in 2006. It was to have been given to the people of Victoria. The core sites were to be linked by protected wildlife corridors joining the Strzeleckis’ Tarra-Bulga National Park in the east to the Gunyah Gunyah Reserve, home of Australia’s biggest tree by girth, at its western tip.

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But last year Mr Thwaites’ successor, Gavin Jennings, jettisoned the  “cores and links” agreement and signed a new deal allowing Hancock Victorian Plantations to log College Creek and other areas that had been set aside. Environmentalists have accused Mr Jennings of caving in to the logger, which has commercial contracts to supply timber to the Maryvale pulp and paper mill.

Now 1500 hectares within the “cores and links” will be clear felled, with the 350-hectare College Creek site the first to go. Friends of Gippsland Bush secretary Susie Zent said the site was the most politically contentious forested area in the state.

“We have fought so hard to have this area saved only to have it signed away in a secret deal made against all rainforest ecologists’ advice.” College Creek is Crown Land over which Hancock holds a 60-year lease.

With the lifting of the moratorium on logging, Hancock is now logging the site before it is replanted and returned to the stewardship of the state. Unlike higher-profile state forests and national parks in the Alpine region, the Grampians and the Otways, the Strzelecki Ranges are a hodgepodge of native vegetation, remnant old growth forest, regrowth, reserves, blue gum and pine plantations, freehold and Crown land. Their chequered history of compromise and trade-off, cultivation and preservation, exploitation and sanctuary has been dictated for 60 years by the needs of the timber industry and Maryvale mill at Morwell.