Greater Bendigo National Park, Natural reserve with Box-Ironbark forest in Victoria, Australia.
Greater Bendigo National Park is a forest reserve in central Victoria covering around 17,000 hectares. The landscape contains woodlands, wetland areas, and native grasslands mixed throughout its terrain.
The area was shaped over 150 years by gold mining, logging, and eucalyptus oil production. These activities transformed the landscape and left marks visible in the forest today.
The park lies on the country of the Dja Dja Wurrung, whose presence around present-day Bendigo reaches back thousands of years before European sheep graziers arrived in the 1830s and 1840s. The gold rushes of the 1850s then brought diggers who turned over the ground piece by piece; their tunnels, dams and old stream diversions can still be found in the park today.
The park surrounds Bendigo, about 130 km north-west of Melbourne, and is reached by road from the city. Tracks pass old gold-mining features such as tunnels, dams and stream diversions, so surfaces can be uneven. Dogs may enter on leads in certain areas; conditions change with the season.
Only about 17 percent of the original Box-Ironbark forest type survives in Victoria, making this park exceptionally important for protecting this rare ecosystem. Saving this woodland type here helps preserve a landscape that nearly disappeared from the region.
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