From Canberra’s Bushland Ridges to the Australian Alps

Highlights

The Australian Capital Territory packs a remarkable change of scenery into a relatively small area. Around Canberra, low wooded hills and ridgelines rise directly from the suburbs, while open grasslands and broad valleys give way to increasingly rugged country towards the south. Canberra Nature Park alone brings together 39 reserves scattered through and around the city, protecting many of the hills, ridges, grasslands and woodlands that give the national capital its distinctive setting.

Further south, the landscape changes considerably in Namadgi National Park. Covering 106,095 hectares and almost half of the ACT, Namadgi protects part of the northern Australian Alps, with mountain forests, granite outcrops, high valleys and subalpine country. Together with places such as Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve and the Murrumbidgee River corridor, these protected landscapes make the transition from urban Canberra to the ranges unusually clear. It is possible to look across the city from a rocky ridge and, elsewhere in the same territory, find yourself surrounded by extensive mountain country.

Natural environment

The ACT lies within the higher country of south-eastern Australia, and changes in elevation produce a surprisingly varied collection of habitats. Official environmental information identifies open grasslands, low open woodlands, tall wet forests, subalpine heathlands and wetlands among the territory’s natural ecosystems. Namadgi contains much of the higher-elevation landscape, while the lower country around Canberra retains important grassland and grassy woodland communities.

Canberra Nature Park plays an especially important role in conserving what remains of these lower-elevation ecosystems. More than a third of its area supports critically endangered Yellow Box–Blakely’s Red Gum Grassy Woodland, while about 10 per cent supports critically endangered Natural Temperate Grassland. The reserves are not simply isolated pockets of bushland. Many form connected habitat corridors through urban Canberra and into larger areas of surrounding woodland, river country and forest.

This mixture of protected mountains, forests, woodlands, grasslands and waterways is one of the defining characteristics of walking country in the ACT. The landscape can feel distinctly dry and open on Canberra’s ridges, then become cooler and more heavily forested as elevation increases towards Namadgi and the Australian Alps.

Culture and Heritage

The landscape of the ACT also records more recent periods of pastoral settlement, forestry and the creation of Canberra as the national capital. Remnants of nineteenth and early twentieth-century rural activity survive within several protected areas, including homesteads, huts and other evidence of farming and grazing. In Canberra Nature Park, some surviving historic places relate to former landholdings that were later resumed and subdivided, including land used for returned-soldier settlement after the First World War.

Canberra’s planned relationship with its surrounding hills is itself part of the territory’s story. Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin’s winning design for the national capital gave the surrounding landscape a central role in the city’s form. That relationship remains easy to read today, with many undeveloped ridges and hills preserved within and between suburbs rather than being absorbed entirely into the urban area.

Forestry has also left a visible mark. Before the 2003 Canberra bushfires, about 16,000 hectares of the ACT’s managed forestry estate consisted of pine plantations. Around 10,500 hectares of plantation were destroyed in the fires, after which some areas were replanted while others were given different uses or boundaries. The result is a territory where protected native landscapes, historic rural country, plantation forests and a deliberately planned city sit unusually close together.