Two hours north west of Melbourne, the tall forest of the Wombat and the gorges of the Lerderderg have been walked, photographed and watched over by local people for a very long time. On 5 October they become one national park. Wombat Lerderderg National Park joins about 20,000 hectares of the existing Lerderderg State Park with about 24,000 hectares of the Wombat State Forest, and on the same day Mount Buangor National Park, 5,300 hectares, and Pyrenees National Park, 15,126 hectares, come into being beside it, with the new Cobaw and Hepburn conservation parks alongside. More than 65,000 hectares of new national park, the first in Victoria in over a decade, passed into law in 2025 and pass to Parks Victoria on the first Monday in October. Greater gliders live in the hollows here, platypus in the creeks, powerful owls and gang gang cockatoos in the canopy, and growling grass frogs call from the wetter ground.
None of it happened by itself. Gayle Osborne of Wombat Forestcare has spent years cataloguing the gliders and owls of the Wombat and taking people in to meet them. Wendy Radford of the Bendigo and District Environment Council and Sera Blair, who coordinates NatureWatch surveys, put volunteers on the ground counting what lived there, and nature photographer David Tatnall made the pictures that let everyone else see it. Behind the decision, says the Victorian National Parks Association, which walked beside them the whole way, sit decades of community care. For the rest of us the invitation is simple. Firth Park, deep in the Wombat near Trentham, has a campground on a lake. O'Briens Crossing on the Lerderderg has a walk in camp by the river, and the Pyrenees have spring wildflowers on the way to the summit. From 5 October, all of it carries a name that says it will stay this way.
Sources and links
Our short take: from the Victorian Government's new parks page and the Premier's announcement, and the Victorian National Parks Association's account of the people behind the parks. Photograph: Wombat State Forest near Daylesford by Darceyhs, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
