“There’s something going on up in the hills and I’d really like you to come and see it.”
A local resident looks over a forestry site on the Toora-Gunyah Road. Photo: George Nicoll
It was 1997 and Julie Constable had bumped into one of her ex-students on the street in Foster. The Foster Secondary College teacher turned local librarian was taken aback as her former pupil explained that there was logging happening in the state forest northeast of Foster, in the south Gippsland region.
“We went up there and there was this huge devastation,” Julie says. “It went for about 6km along the Toora-Gunyah Road, a huge swathe of really beautiful old mountain ash rainforest had been clear-felled … It was just a big mess.”
This chance interaction sparked a fight for Julie that has been going for almost 30 years. “I don’t know why he picked on me,” she jokes.
It has been a long and complex fight for Julie and her partner. They have worked with and for numerous groups working to protect different parts of the vast bushland north of Foster, organised petitions to parliament with more than 7000 signatures and spoken at rallies with Bob Brown, the founder of the Australian Greens.
Julie says her urgent priority is regenerating the ‘Cores and Links’, a corridor of bushland that will connect the Gunyah Rainforest Reserve to Tarra Bulga National Park. This patch of bushland is currently managed by Hancock Victorian Plantations (HVP) but is due to be returned to public hands by 2028, joining the existing Brataualung Forest Park.
Julie says it is important that HVP are held to account and restore the forest before it is handed back to the public. “Some areas have come back earlier than 2028, but other areas that are still to be regenerated won’t be added to the park until 2028,” she says.
Every year on March 21, the world marks the International Day of Forests. With the handover of the Cores and Links corridor approaching, Julie hopes the day will draw attention to the need to restore and protect our local bushland.
