REHABILITATION AND MANAGEMENT OF AN ARMY TRAINING AREA

The Australian defence forces use large areas of land for all aspects of field training which include live firing and manoeuvre exercises using various types of tracked and wheeled vehicles. A major training area is at Puckapunyal, Victoria (20 000 ha) where Army training activities relate mainly to the use of tracked vehicles. Long before the Army purchased Puckapunyal as a training area in 1939 considerable degradation had taken place. Excessive farmland clearing and timber extraction, overgrazing by stock and rabbits had caused excessive sheet, tunnel and gully erosion with subsequent siltation of the local creek systems all of which are tributaries of the Goulburn River. Armoured vehicle training which started at Puckapunyal during World War II accelerated existing erosion of the slopes and waterlogging and salting on flats. The area soon became badly eroded and deposition of silt in the Goulburn River was the subject of complaint by State Authorities. As well as deleterious environmental effects outside the training area the area became more susceptible to waterlogging and reduced the area usable for training in winter to less than half of the total range. The Army was faced with two alternatives: (1) to rehabilitate the area, or (2) to abandon it with consequent loss of facilities and the certainty of having to face similar problems elsewhere in the future, given the intensive type of land use. The decision was made to rehabilitate the area and in 1971 a plan of action was developed for the restoration and long-term environmental protection. The plan was developed as a collaborative effort between various State and Federal departments. The simple aim was to establish deep-rooted perennial pasture species and plant trees on areas too steep or too stony to permit sowing. The clearing of tree stumps and wattle regrowth and the reshaping of the rilling, tunnel and gully erosion by bulldozers was an essential element of the plan. Details of the landscape rehabilitation operations carried out on such a large scale are given and the overall management of the project is discussed. © 1979.