Gippsland West MP Alan Brown, second from right, receives a community petition of over
1100 signatures for the creation of a Western Port National Park from Meryl Tobin, Bill Sims and Rita Pearce, 1996. The petition was unsuccessful. Photo: Meryl Tobin
1100 signatures for the creation of a Western Port National Park from Meryl Tobin, Bill Sims and Rita Pearce, 1996. The petition was unsuccessful. Photo: Meryl Tobin
By Rob Parsons
THE Western Port Woodlands are back on the front page, and rightly so. Bass Coast Shire Council has asked the Planning Minister for interim controls. The Save Western Port Woodlands group and its allies continue to press for lasting protection. New pressures on the forest, from expanding extraction and from infrastructure cutting through remnant vegetation for the energy transition, have made the question urgent again. Urgent, but not new.
There was a fight 30 years ago that most current commentary has forgotten, and it is worth recovering, because it tells us something useful about how forests get protected and how community pressure translates into planning law.
THE Western Port Woodlands are back on the front page, and rightly so. Bass Coast Shire Council has asked the Planning Minister for interim controls. The Save Western Port Woodlands group and its allies continue to press for lasting protection. New pressures on the forest, from expanding extraction and from infrastructure cutting through remnant vegetation for the energy transition, have made the question urgent again. Urgent, but not new.
There was a fight 30 years ago that most current commentary has forgotten, and it is worth recovering, because it tells us something useful about how forests get protected and how community pressure translates into planning law.
In the mid-1990s, the state government of the day set out to plan Melbourne's long-term sand supply. The coarse sand of this coast made the Western Port area impossible to leave out. A Strategy was drafted. The community here read it, understood what it could mean for the reserves stretching from The Gurdies through Grantville, and drew a line. Public land was not on the table.
Sand Supplies quarry, inside the Gurdies Nature Conservation Reserve, 2022. The Regional Sand Strategy ensured there would be no new sand quarries in nature reserves.
That was the community's position from the first meeting, and it did not shift. The Sand Extraction Strategy Lang Lang to Grantville was gazetted on the community's terms. Public land was excluded from extraction. A handful of blocks already tied up in earlier tenure could not be unwound and remained outside the carve-out. Everything else that today makes up the Western Port Woodlands sat, and still sits, inside it.
That result did not come from the political class. It came from the community. Meryl and Hartley Tobin, working through the South Gippsland Conservation Society, were central to the effort. Anne Westwood, who today sits as a community representative on the Grantville Quarries Reference Group, worked alongside them through a separate group and was part of the same community effort.
They did not demand. They requested, and they put forward a proper, reasoned and well considered case. Alan Brown, then Deputy Leader of the Party and our local member, recalls the outcome as "good, well-meaning people working together to get a good outcome in the community interest."
The politicians of the day, Alan Brown himself and Rob Maclellan as Planning Minister, listened, backed the request, and delivered the protection that still holds today. That listening mattered and deserves recognition. But the position that shaped the outcome was drawn up around kitchen tables and hall meetings by residents who understood exactly what they were being asked to accept and what they were not.
Some of those residents are still with us. Their memory is one of the more valuable assets this community holds, and it should be treated as one.
Recovering that history matters now for two reasons. The first is that the framework built in the 1990s is the reason there is a forest left to argue over in 2026. Every current campaign, every submission, every council resolution, every ministerial letter is being made on ground the community already secured once. Acknowledging that is not a distraction from the current fight. It is a foundation for it. A campaign that knows what has already been won is stronger than one that begins each time from scratch.
The second is that the pressures on the woodlands today are pressures on the edges of that original carve-out, not new territory being fought over from zero. Expanded extraction at the perimeter of protected land. Infrastructure corridors that clear remnant vegetation on Crown land for reasons the 1990s Strategy did not have to contemplate. Interim planning controls that would reinforce a boundary rather than draw a new one. In each case the useful question is not only what should be done next, but how the existing framework can be made to hold under new pressure. That question is easier to answer when we know what the framework was designed to do and what the community insisted it deliver.
None of this is a criticism of the current campaign. It is a request that the campaign be given the deep roots it actually has. The people fighting for the woodlands today are the inheritors of a long tradition of local advocacy that has, more than once, changed state policy on this coast. They deserve to know that. So do the councillors, the candidates, and the ministers whose desks the current submissions are landing on.
That history should not have to be recovered again in another 30 years. It should be part of how we talk about the woodlands now.
That result did not come from the political class. It came from the community. Meryl and Hartley Tobin, working through the South Gippsland Conservation Society, were central to the effort. Anne Westwood, who today sits as a community representative on the Grantville Quarries Reference Group, worked alongside them through a separate group and was part of the same community effort.
They did not demand. They requested, and they put forward a proper, reasoned and well considered case. Alan Brown, then Deputy Leader of the Party and our local member, recalls the outcome as "good, well-meaning people working together to get a good outcome in the community interest."
The politicians of the day, Alan Brown himself and Rob Maclellan as Planning Minister, listened, backed the request, and delivered the protection that still holds today. That listening mattered and deserves recognition. But the position that shaped the outcome was drawn up around kitchen tables and hall meetings by residents who understood exactly what they were being asked to accept and what they were not.
Some of those residents are still with us. Their memory is one of the more valuable assets this community holds, and it should be treated as one.
Recovering that history matters now for two reasons. The first is that the framework built in the 1990s is the reason there is a forest left to argue over in 2026. Every current campaign, every submission, every council resolution, every ministerial letter is being made on ground the community already secured once. Acknowledging that is not a distraction from the current fight. It is a foundation for it. A campaign that knows what has already been won is stronger than one that begins each time from scratch.
The second is that the pressures on the woodlands today are pressures on the edges of that original carve-out, not new territory being fought over from zero. Expanded extraction at the perimeter of protected land. Infrastructure corridors that clear remnant vegetation on Crown land for reasons the 1990s Strategy did not have to contemplate. Interim planning controls that would reinforce a boundary rather than draw a new one. In each case the useful question is not only what should be done next, but how the existing framework can be made to hold under new pressure. That question is easier to answer when we know what the framework was designed to do and what the community insisted it deliver.
None of this is a criticism of the current campaign. It is a request that the campaign be given the deep roots it actually has. The people fighting for the woodlands today are the inheritors of a long tradition of local advocacy that has, more than once, changed state policy on this coast. They deserve to know that. So do the councillors, the candidates, and the ministers whose desks the current submissions are landing on.
That history should not have to be recovered again in another 30 years. It should be part of how we talk about the woodlands now.