Page 2627 - Week 07 - Thursday, 1 August 2019
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The Molonglo River Reserve is public land under the Territory Plan. It is reserved for the purpose of conserving the natural environment and the public use of the area for recreation, education and research. The plan will guide management and recreation use of the Molonglo River Reserve over the next 10 years.
Before I talk about the plan I would like to provide some history of the area that now makes up the Molonglo River Reserve. Aboriginal people have moved through this landscape for tens of thousands of years. The river corridor provided an important source of water, food and camp sites, and a route through the region for ceremonial purposes. Today the river reserve remains a significant place in Aboriginal stories and cultural practices. Numerous sites along the reserve retain evidence of Aboriginal occupation.
The Molonglo River was first encountered by Europeans in the 1820s near the present Lake Burley Griffin. The adjacent grassy plains and access to good water made it attractive for sheep grazing and it began to be settled by pastoralists from about 1823. Following acquisition of the land that formed the ACT in 1911, land in rural areas was not immediately required and it was leased to landholders. Land along the river corridor still contains remnants from the pastoral era occupation.
Urban infrastructure, such as the sludge ponds for the Weston Creek sewerage works, is located along the river corridor slopes and now requires remediation. The sludge ponds were redundant after the lower Molonglo water treatment control centre was developed downstream in 1978. The entire river corridor became a formal part of Canberra’s open space system in the 1970s.
Substantial areas of land near Mount Stromlo were established as pine forests from the 1920s to provide construction timber for the growing city. Over the following decades these pine forests and their trail networks became an important recreation resource for walkers, runners, cyclists, horse riders and rally people. Severe bushfires in 2001 and 2003 led to the government reconsidering maintaining pine plantations on Canberra’s vulnerable north-western margins.
Memories of this recreational land use are still strong and Stromlo Forest Park is being developed to provide recreation opportunities similar to those that existed in the Stromlo pine forest. New trails are being developed to provide connections from residential areas to Stromlo Forest Park, the arboretum, along the river corridor, and to the wider Canberra network of recreational trails, including the centenary trail and the bicentennial national trail.
With this history in mind, I would like to bring members back to the Molonglo River Reserve as it is today. It is Canberra’s newest reserve—approximately 1,280 hectares in area and 23 kilometres long. It extends from the Scrivener Dam in the central part of Canberra to the Murrumbidgee River at the foothills of the mountain ranges to the west.
The river corridor provides a scenic centrepiece to the developing suburbs of the Molonglo Valley, where most residents will live less than a kilometre from the river.
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