Mount Black Walk (3km)

Long, dry ridges of box and ironbark run between Heathcote and Graytown, giving Heathcote-Graytown National Park a very different feel from Victoria's wetter mountain parks. This is part of the broader box-ironbark belt of north-central Victoria, a landscape shaped by shallow soils, open forest and woodland, and long, hot summers. Within the park, Red Ironbark and Grey Box are common across much of the forest, while higher ground around Mount Black carries heathy dry forest with Red Stringybark and a notable understorey of tall grey grass trees.

The country here has been worked hard for a long time, and that history still sits close to the surface. Gold rushes at McIvor from 1853 and at Spring Creek from 1868 pushed settlement into the district, and the surrounding forests were then drawn into timber cutting, firewood collection and other extractive uses. Graytown itself survives largely as a historical trace, and the park still contains evidence of old mining areas, former town sites and forest industry camps rather than a neat separation between nature and history.

That layering continued through the twentieth century. During World War II, Italian and German prisoners were held at the Graytown prisoner of war camp established in 1941, and after the war the site was used as an immigrant camp and later for forestry operations. Elsewhere, Depression-era "susso" camps and plantation work left their own marks. It is one of those inland parks where the bush is inseparable from the social history of central Victoria.

Aboriginal cultural heritage is also part of the park's fabric, with surveys around Mount Black identifying artefact scatters and scarred trees, and with other places likely to remain unrecorded across creeklines and valleys. Current park information notes that part of the park sits within the Taungurung Recognition and Settlement Agreement area. For walkers, that means this is not just remnant forest on the edge of farming country, but a cultural landscape where old travel routes, resource use, mining and woodland ecology all meet in the same dry, resilient country.