More than 250 square miles of forests at the center of Victoria state in Australia have become new national parks.
Parliament passed the law to create the parks back in November 2025, and this week they take effect, creating Mount Buangor National Park, Pyrenees National Park, and the largest: Wombat-Lerderderg National Park.
The Victoria National Parks Association (VNPA) is celebrating the event with fellow private campaigners, Wombat Forestcare and the Wilderness Society, among others.
“Today we get to see the protection these forests deserve. It’s a fantastic day for nature and for Victorians, we have three new national parks! Congratulations to the Carroll Government for getting it done,” said VNPA Executive Director Matt Ruchel in a statement to mark the occasion.
The 3 are Victoria’s first new national parks of substantial size in 15 years, and together protect hundreds of rare and threatened plants, animals, and fungi, including platypuses, greater gliders, goannas, Mount Cole grevilleas, brush-tailed phascogales, mountain skinks, and powerful Owls.
“We are delighted that the state government has officially recognized the importance of these central-west forests for their plants and animals and acted to conserve them,” said Gayle Osborne, a founding member of Wombat Forestcare, one of the groups who campaigned for the parks’ creation.
“These forests are such important habitat for so many plants, animals, and fungi. If we want our koalas, gliders, and owls to be here into the future we must protect their habitat.”
Wombat Forestcare launched a campaign in 2010, hosting a public conference in Hepburn that brought the community together around a vision for protected forests in the central west. Over the following years, its volunteers produced detailed ecological reports on the landscape zones that are now national park, work that was central to securing the government investigation that recommended their creation.
They lie on lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung, Eastern Maar, Wadawurrung, Wurundjeri, Gunaikurnai, and Taungurung peoples, who have cared for these landscapes for thousands of years.
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Parks Victoria now joins them in caring for these forests, and together they will work on management plans over the next 12 months to continue that thousand-year stewardship.
“We’re ready to help shape these plans, to make sure wildlife and people are both looked after and the parks have the resources they need to thrive,” said Ruchel.
“For years we worked with local community groups to search for threatened animals, survey rare plants and, through years of delays, kept writing letter after letter. Today that hard work becomes permanent protection.”
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