"The past is never fully gone. It is absorbed into the present and the future. It stays to shape what we are and what we do."
Sir William Deane, Governor-General of Australia, Inaugural Vincent Lingiari Memorial Lecture, August 1996.

1830's and Before - Forests Prior to Colonisation

Ian Hastings, 2018 (bio)

"With this “Victoria’s forestry heritage” website and, indeed for any other ‘heritage' documentation, it can help in understanding the ‘now’ and future options and directions if there is some idea of what has been inherited. From a forestry perspective, there is the question of the condition and nature of the native forests across Victoria up to and at the time of European settlement."

References:

Curr, E.M. (1883/1968). Recollections of squatting in Victoria, then called the Port Phillip district (from 1841 to 1851). George Robertson, Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide (1883); Adelaide, Libraries Board of South Australia (1968).
Egloff, B. (2017). Lightning strikes: rethinking the nexus between Australian Indigenous land management and natural forces. Australian Forestry, 2017, Vol 80 No 5, pp275-285.
Gammage, Bill (2011). The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Allen & Unwin, 434 pp.
Griffiths, Tom (2001). Forests of Ash: an environmental history. Cambridge University Press, 227 pp.
Hateley, R.F. (2010). The Victorian Bush: its ‘original and natural’ condition. Polybracta Press, Melbourne, 207 pp.
Jones, R.M. (1969). Fire-stick farming. Australian Natural History. Vol 16: pp224-228.
Wilde, Sally (1988). Forests old, pastures new. Shire of Warragul, Warragul, 328 pp.
Woodgate, P. & Black, P. (1988). Forest Cover Change in Victoria 1869 – 1987. Department of Conservation, Forests and Lands, Victoria.