Tourism continued

The forest was within reach of day trippers. In 1869 the Lord Mayor of Melbourne organised a picnic of nearly 500 people to Fern Tree Gully, to welcome the Flying Squadron of the British Navy to Victoria. The trip took a full day, and the sailors and their ladies enjoyed the cool of the gully and marvelled at the trees and ferns. In 1889 the train line from Melbourne reached Fern Tree Gully, and Sunday excursions to the hills became very popular. In 1893 a reporter described how 'Almost every lady on her return to the train carried bunches of maiden hair, handfuls of green fern or bundles of the tall grasses which seemed to their simple trusting minds to have been produced for the ornamentation of suburban drawing rooms.' Day trips continued to be popular. In the 1920s, visitors to Mount Evelyn collected pink heath and gum tips and took them back to the city. By that stage, most of the ferns at Fern Tree Gully had gone, collected, vandalised or cleared out to make way for houses and roads.

Sassafras Gully Source - State Library of Victoria

A growing number of visitors stayed longer in the hills, spending a weekend or a week at one of the many guesthouses or hotels established in the forest. The 1920s were the heyday of forest holidays. Marysville, Healesville and Warburton all became popular holiday destinations, and in 1921 there were 81 boarding houses in the foothills of the Dandenongs. In some areas, areas of bush were sub-divided into small blocks and sold to people from the eastern suburbs who built shacks and gardens in the scrub.

Tram Tracks Myers Creek Source - State Library of Victoria

Puffing Billy Source - Rose Stereograph Co.

The forests also attracted bushwalkers who hiked along some of the trails established during the gold rush, and who walked deep into the forest to reach the scattered timber towns. Walkers' huts were established along the most popular trails, and they remained until destroyed by the 1939 fire. Bushwalkers are motivated by a variety of things: appreciation of the bush, curiosity about the environment, a sense of personal challenge, a wish to record their physical achievements, or a need to escape, temporarily, the pressures of the city.