Yinnar, Yinnar South Landcare group is planting a forest in the Billy's Creek Valley in Jeeralang, Victoria. This project aims to increase biodiversity and to be part of a potential continuous future corridor or bio-link between the Tarra Bulga and Morwell National Parks.
Our project aims to restore tree canopy and enhance and re-create wet forest conditions to improve habitat for arboreal fauna such as greater gliders, South Gippsland koalas and powerful owls.
Our re-vegetation block, is a steep 33ha site. The Grand Strzelecki [walking] Track is located along Billy's Creek at the bottom of the block. Unfortunately it looks as though this section of the track will remain closed after sustaining serious flood damage in 2021.
Our re-veg site is protected from logging and farming under the agreement that created the Strzelecki Cores and Links and set aside areas of ecological value as custodial land. Hancock Victorian Plantations (HVP) is the land manager and they have worked with us on this project.
This is a brief summary of what we’ve achieved so far:
Dec 2018: Blackberries sprayed in the riparian zone along Billy’s Creek
Summer 2018 –19 Collected seed for direct seeding and grew seedlings for the site in our group’s greenhouse.
June 2019: Three teacher education students from Federation Uni in Churchill on placement with our group hiked in to the block with two of our group members. They took photos to document the track and the vegetation found along it. This was our first visit to the western end of our project site.
June 2019: Seed from 26 species of locally indigenous plants was mixed with sand, sawdust and smoked vermiculite and broadcast into the dead blackberry canes.
August 2019: The Gippsland Intrepid Landcare Group joined us to plant seedlings and create our very own cloud-forest on the east side of the block where there was vehicle access. Contractors finished that year’s planting and then did more in 2020.
August 2019: Bronwyn Teesdale spoke at our AGM about the advantages of direct seeding as a planting method and showed us various methods for doing it. We concluded that our site is so steep that it will need to be niche seeded using hand tools.
The next day, we worked with the Friends of Morwell National Park to niche seed a test site on Blue Gum Hill. This site is very similar to our re-veg block, but much more accessible for monitoring.
http://morwellnp.pangaean.net/browser/Friends/Newsletters/2019_09.pdf
UPDATE In August 2020 some of the test area that was seeded had future canopy trees growing strongly.
http://morwellnp.pangaean.net/browser/Friends/Newsletters/2020_09.pdf
UPDATE 2022 Feral sheep, goats and deer have decimated our test planting in the National Park

Sept 2019: We planted supplementary plants as tube stock in the Billy’s Creek riparian zone and saw the first signs of new plants coming through from seed.
October 2019: We held a plant identification day with Latrobe Valley Field Naturalists Club members in the forest around the Jeeralang North Hall. We then went back there in summer 2019-20 to collect seed for planting in 2020.
Nov 2019 – April 2020 Collected more seed. Grew more tubestock.
Jan 2020 More blackberries sprayed in the riparian zone
Jan- March 2020 Held three expert-led seed collection workshops with Jenny Wolswinkel from Seeds of Gippsland. (Workshop funding was from one of our other projects.)
April 2020: Reconnoitered a different access route on a neighbouring property. Did a plant survey along this track.
May to Sept. 2020: Used the new, drier and faster access track to visit the block several times to broadcast seed and plant supplementary tube stock in the riparian zone. This route has only six creek crossings each way. Our previous route in along the Grand Strzelecki track had twenty-six.
June 2020 cleaned up tree guards on the east side planting. Contractor planted additional tubestock to extend this area. Trialed planting browser deterrent species in this area where we can monitor success. Our browser-guard budget is now all spent.
October 2020 two hardy souls practised for rogaining by marking our boundary and venturing into areas of the block with intact forest where they found waterfalls and tree ferns and vegetation consistent with the Strzelecki Warm Temperate Rainforest vegetation community.
Our group is very concerned about browsing animals on our site, so the east side 2019 and 2020 planting has some plants in browser guards. Wallabies we can live with, but sheep, deer and cows have no place in a native forest.
Before our major direct seeding effort in winter 2021, we hoped to be able to organise for deer numbers to be reduced on neighbouring properties and to identify the owners of the sheep and cows that we’ve seen on our re-vegetation site. This proved to be a bit beyond us.
However, we were successful in July 2021 in an application for a Gallagher Electric Fencing Grant. We have used this to construct a browser-exclusion fence on part of the block so that some areas of planting will get to grow without being browsed They will then then hopefully spread their seeds into other areas of the block. UPDATE 2022 Actually, wallabies and wombats and maybe bush rats are doing more damage than we were aware of. We need to reverse-engineer the electric fence to do a better job of excluding them.
We were flat out collecting seed in the 2020-21 summer. In August 2021 we made a major effort to direct seed the areas at the west end of our site that are currently covered in pasture grasses and/or invasive weeds. We also seeded another area of blackberries closer to the creek that was sprayed the previous summer.
Our three -year Victorian Landcare Grant for this project was successfully acquitted in October 2021. We are continuing to work on the block with donated funds and recycled tree guards from other projects. It's a challenging site, but we love it!
We don't love the damage being done to the beautiful remnant forest on our block and in the National Park by deer, feral sheep and goats and we commend their elimination to anybody who is listening.