By Adam Carey
Private landowners appear to have destroyed about 40 hectares of protected native grassland that is earmarked for state purchase as part of a reserve for critically endangered plants and animals.
The rural property, near Melton, was dug up and stripped of vegetation late last year and early this year, in defiance of state and Commonwealth environmental laws mandating its preservation.
Commonwealth, state and local government agencies are understood to be investigating the potential serious breach of environmental laws.
Excavators cleared the property between August and January, creating a rocky “moonscape” out of a large grassy field that has been earmarked as part of the Western Grasslands Reserve, a haven for the remaining 1 per cent of a habitat that once stretched to South Australia.
The Mount Cottrell property is protected under federal and state environment laws, and has a public acquisition overlay. It had not yet been surveyed to gauge its environmental values.
Grassy Plains Network Facilitator Dr Adrian Marshall said the loss of the grassland was devastating, and the public would never know what critically endangered flora and fauna might have called the property home.
“Critically endangered is the last step before extinction, and that grassland is irreplaceable,” Marshall said.
“These developers need to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. They won’t stop until someone makes a very expensive example of them.”
The case has emerged days after another landowner was fined $260,000 for illegally clearing protected grasslands in Truganina.
You Min Wu, 62, was fined $70,000 and his company Centreland fined a further $100,000 plus $90,000 in legal costs on February 18, after Wu pleaded guilty to destroying 19 hectares of native vegetation in a conservation area. The contractor who cleared the land was previously fined $210,000 in June.
Wu purchased the property for $11 million in 2021. This masthead is not suggesting Wu or Centreland were involved in the clearing of the Mount Cottrell property.
The City of Melton pursued Wu through the courts, but would not say if it intends to pursue the owners of the property in Mount Cottrell. A spokesperson said the council was aware of the matter but had no comment at this time.
Marshall said Melton council had been alerted to the clearing activity last year but declined to intervene, failing in its responsibility to uphold the law under the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act.
“They have stood back and watched while obvious illegal clearing has taken place before their eyes. They knew about it but did nothing,” he said.
The Department of Energy, Environment, and Climate Action said the matter was being investigated.
“DEECA and the Commonwealth are working with Melton City Council who is investigating the removal of native vegetation at a private property in Mount Cottrell,” a department spokesperson said.
Environmental Justice Australia co-chief executive officer and lawyer Elizabeth McKinnon said Australia’s state and federal environment laws were failing to protect rare and precious species.
“Even as endangered species inch closer to extinction, we see repeated and clear breaches of environmental laws around Australia,” McKinnon said. “State and federal government need to enforce these laws, or they are not worth the paper they are written on.”
Melton-based environmental protectors – some of whom have volunteered in the area for decades – are dismayed by the destruction.
Melton-based environmental protectors Daryl Akers and Dee Smith were appalled to see the recent destruction of part of the Western Grassland Reserve.Credit: Paul Jeffers
Dee Smith is a conservation and ecology student who also works with Parks Victoria to regenerate areas of the Western Grasslands Reserve just a few hundred metres from the cleared site.
Smith said she was frustrated to see such careless destruction.
“To see something that has already been marked out as part of the Western Grasslands Reserve just blatantly cleared is very upsetting,” Smith said.
Long-time Melton resident and environmental volunteer Daryl Akers visited the site last week and said it was “disgusting to see it destroyed”.
“It’s just a moonscape,” he said.
Akers lamented that even though most of Victoria’s native grasslands have been erased, too few people are fighting to preserve what remains.
“In North America people take pride in their prairie country,” he said. “There is a history of Native Americans and of buffalo roaming across the land, and so they’ve got some nostalgia... We have no such sentiment for our grassland, it’s just real estate.”
The Western Grassland Reserve is an incomplete project to create a 15,000-hectare haven for critically endangered native grasslands, wildflowers, and animals just west of Melbourne. The grassland was established in 2009 when the state government extended Melbourne’s urban growth boundary. So far, the Victorian government has acquired about 26 percent of the land.
The owner listed on the Mount Cotterell property’s title died in 2018 and The Age’s efforts to trace anyone else linked to it were unsuccessful.
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