22 August 2000
Today, the Council published its 2000 Endangered Places listing which includes the Preolenna/Moorleah/Flowerdale Valley as one of three Tasmanian places. The others are the Mersey Marine Board Building at Devonport and the Alpine Huts on Ben Lomond.
The Endangered Places listing is published on the website: http://www.austnattrust.com.au
The endangered places have been chosen because of the immediacy of the threat of:-
• damage and destruction
• neglect and abandonment
• lack of resources and maintenance
• inappropriate development and management, both to and around the place
• redevelopment.
The citation for the nomination says:
"The region under threat is the rural hinterland to the south of Wynyard bounded by the Flowerdale and Inglis Rivers and their catchments in the north west of Tasmania (including the Jessie Gorge). It is a classic late Victorian (Flowerdale/Moorleah) and Federation (Preolenna) European settled cultural landscape characterised by rolling hills, conifer windbreaks, blackwood-lined gullies and creeks reflecting the result of a diversity of agricultural pursuits set against old growth remnants of native forest along the rivers. It is an area of great beauty and social cohesion.
Colleen and Daryl Dibley have nominated this cultural landscape because it is in serious danger of destruction. The dairy and family farms are being acquired by plantation developers, the farm infrastructure destroyed, the basaltic soils ripped and planted to Eucalyptus nitens and Pinus radiata. There is loss of social cohesion, loss of diversity in the landscape, loss of community infrastructure and lack of planning controls. 'The pace and enormous effect renders our community unsustainable.'"
/cgi-bin/Count.cgi?df=cdibley.08