Forest Forever
JAMES and PRUE WOODFORD

Photo Angus Molyneux

At Easter in 2004 we signed the Cudbugga Creek Voluntary Conservation Agreement. We had bought our land a year earlier and knew from the moment we took possession that we had become the custodians of an extraordinary property.

It was sold as rural farmland and priced accordingly – 50 acres of paddock and 70 of forest. The uncleared area was considered to be virtually worthless because of its nutrient-poor sandy soils.

The previous owner had kept stock out of the forest and so its undergrowth was largely intact.

The paddocks had been heavily grazed, right down to the foreshore of Coila Lake and so we inherited a number of active erosion gullies.

Although the forest had once been selectively logged there were still many enormous trees, including a stand of old iron barks that we were told are among the biggest examples of their species. It also contains thousands if not millions of burrawangs making it incredibly inhospitable for humans!

Cudbugga Forest is also where one tributary of Cudbugga Creek begins its short journey to Coila Lake.
The creek is under a lot of pressure from neighbouring farmers who have built large dams. As a result of the conservation agreement around half of Cudbugga Creek’s catchment is guaranteed to always remain unregulated.

We live in an area where there is a huge amount of pressure to subdivide, clear and develop. Seachangers are sweeping in and we often see the bulldozers at work flattening forest to make way for houses.

We wanted to do whatever we could to protect our forest from our children (you never know what they’re going to grow up like!) and any other potential future owners if ever we had to sell.

While investigating how to make sure no-one ever got their paws into our forest we began to research what was the best option for the management of our paddocks. We decided on a native hardwood plantation, which requires a number of approvals including from the local Aboriginal community.

When a representative of Cobowra Land Council came out, she discovered, within minutes, that our property was also a significant Aboriginal site, with many stone tools lying on the ground, especially close to the lake. The find did not mean the end of our plans to establish a plantation – it just meant we needed to be aware of the existence of the cultural heritage.

To us the artefacts were yet another reason why we thought it crucial to protect our land. We immediately decided to include our entire lake foreshore within the Voluntary Conservation Agreement.

The agreement means the protected area is still ours. In other words it is private property. But we have signed legally binding contracts on how it will be managed – most crucially it can never be subdivided, cleared or grazed. We have, however, reserved the right to harvest from the forest some timber for a house.

In return we have been given funding to take away the old barbed wire and mesh fence and replace it with plain strand wire as well as money for replanting degraded areas along the lake. A botanist came and did a full assessment as did a surveyor – both reports would have cost many hundreds of dollars.

But, the financial benefits are minimal - as we were clearly told you do not sign a Voluntary Conservation Agreement if you want to make money.

The biggest pleasure is knowing that as long as the current property law system survives no-one will be able to harm our land. Apart from that though we are sure the agreement has actually increased the value of our forest because it was, until April 2004, just a big slab of land that no-one knew what to do with. It is now a nature reserve and to us every single one of its trees is priceless.

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