Historic Maps Reveal What Melbourne's Forests Looked Like Before the City

Researchers have used Melbourne's earliest European survey maps, held at Victoria's Public Records Office, to reconstruct what the city's forests looked like before European settlement. Colonial surveyors including Robert Hoddle, William Wedge Darke and Henry Boorn Foote marked trees on their maps between the late 1830s and mid-1850s to mark the corners of land lots for sale to British settlers, unintentionally recording the original species composition of Melbourne's urban forest.

Over 15 years, researchers combined the map data with mathematical modeling to estimate tree density, producing what they say is the first ecological reconstruction of 1840s Melbourne, after similar work was previously done across North America. Gums, the most common tree recorded in the inner suburbs, mainly referred to River Red Gums, which covered a floodplain across much of Collingwood and Richmond. Box eucalypts, including Yellow Box, Grey Box and Red Box, formed a woodland in the low hills of the inner southeast stretching from Government House through South Yarra to Toorak, Gardenvale, Brighton and Highett; only a few Yellow Box trees remain today, mostly cut down for firewood and timber.

Eastern Melbourne's forests were denser and more diverse, with Stringybark eucalypts, Wattle, Blackwood and Lightwood acacias, and native Drooping Sheoaks that surveyors mistakenly labeled Oaks. Researchers found no surviving witness trees used to mark the original lot corners, but ancient River Red Gums still stand in Kevin Bartlett Reserve and Queens Park, with high-quality remnant forest in Gresswell Forest and the Valley Conservation Reserve.

Western and northern Melbourne, by contrast, held plains of Kangaroo Grass that colonial records described as fine sheep pasture, stretching from areas including Pascoe Vale South and Coburg almost to the modern city center. Silver Banksias, recorded on the maps as Honeysuckle, once grew in less dense areas of the west but are now almost entirely absent from the landscape.