Goooood day fellow pinmapples I hope you have been safe and well exploring the world once again!.
This weekend we headed out for a bush walk with the Eynesbury Environmental Group in the Victorian Grey Box Forrest located in Melbourne's West in a smallish community called Eynesbury.
This bush walk isn't just any old bush walks and the significance of this location to the broader Victorian state far extends beyond it's rich Aboriginal culture of the Wadawurrung people.
As seen in the video we are welcomed to country by Barry Gilson and he takes us on a tour of much of the land including scar trees that were once carved out to make coolomons, shields and canoes.
The Grey Box Forest is 288 hectares and is the largest remaining forests of it's kind south of the Great Dividing Range. So if you want to see what Victoria looked like prior to English settlement this is one of the only places left that you can still experience the real Australian bush.
Just to clarify as there are many parts of Australia that still have large vegitation but Victoria has quite a number of different climates and environments with Victoria being highly populated much of its flat planes were clear of all the trees to make way for agriculture. As a result much of Victoria is now bare, this is kind of Victoria's actual Ferntree Gully, the last rainforest kind of story.
As we walk through some tracks you will notice that the grases are native (although there are weeds) but if you take special notice to the ground you will notice how clear it is. That is because for thousands of years much of this land was controlled by fire and archiological and environmental investigation has been able to map out where fire was used and how.
As we get to the peak of our walk we reach the Eynesbury waterfall, although I didn't get a good angle on it as it started to rain and I didn't want to slip in the area uphere is cleared and maintained. Fire was used to ensure the clearing remained and Aboriginal huts with stone base remnents still remain today.
As the linked article above further describes there are over 133 native birds that come here to breed and some are on the endangered species list which require protection. As such the area does not allow residents who reside close by to own a cat due to their destructive nature of the native wild life.
Koala's, Kangaroos, reptiles and a broad range of native Australian animals can be found in the Grey Box Forrest for many this is the last stint at life as Australia's urban sprawl continues to push outwards into former farm land and areas such as this one.
It is a stark reminder that we need to remember to protect the land around us as it isn't promised forever.
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