How Gippsland was made

Have you ever wondered just how Gippsland was put together? Our pre-history has plenty of tales to tell and even though there was no-one much around at the time we have managed to piece together quite a lot of it.

Now, I am no archaeologist, no geographer, nor a geophysicist. I even have trouble spelling words like that. I am a Gippslander, though, and I do know just a little about how my province was formed.

Let's go back to the beginning, or near enough to the beginning to be close without getting into controversy about the nature of that beginning. I don't know anywhere near enough to get involved in that one.

About 220 million years ago, give or take a month or two, there was a super-continent we later called Pangea, which included all the land masses we have today.

This was not called Pangea at the time because there was no need for postal addresses, there not yet being any postmen.

There were things on this continent which had crawled out of the sea but often went back and there were a few of the first reptiles slithering about, but there were definitely no mail boxes.

Pangea broke up after about 120 million years, to form Gondwanaland and Laurasia. Gippsland, with the rest of Australia stuck to its back, was part of Gondwanaland.

This was, alas, a fairly unstable piece of real estate which began to break up all over the place. Within a mere 80 million years or so there was a block of land which vaguely resembled and would come to be Australia, drifting ever so gently between two great oceans.

Only 25 million years ago Australia had shed Antarctica and was racing northward into a warmer climate, with Queensland leading the way. It was travelling at about six centimetres a year.

Gippsland was not doing too well at this stage. South of the Great Divide there was a series of lakes and swamps where the Latrobe Valley now lies, so that part has not changed too much.

This was when the organic deposits which became our brown coal fields were laid down.

About 250,000 years ago another creature began to wander about the place.

He might have been a monkey who was smarter than some other monkeys. He may have come from Eden itself (or Merimbula?) and he might or might not have been a creature of divine creation. He might have been all of these. It doesn't really matter.

What really matters is that our great-to-theumpteenth-power-grandfather and grandmother were very late in the piece.

We've only been on this planet about a quarter-million years, which is not long when you think that the Earth was formed somewhere around 46,000 million years ago.

That is not exactly yesterday, and I find it comforting that the thing seems quite durable.

The Aborigines of about 80,000 years ago were all feeling the cold just a little bit because an Ice Age was going on at the time and all the animals with fur coats wanted to keep them.

Tasmania was covered in ice (it has not changed all that much) and there was permanent ice all over the Australian Alps. This was the age of territorial expansion for Gippsland.

With all that water locked up in great sheets of ice the sea was about a hundred metres lower than it is today.

It was possible to walk from Warragul to Hobart, though it seems unlikely that anyone would have wanted to do so.

Perhaps we could even claim that Tasmania is historically part of Gippsland, should we want to do that. Why would we?

New Guinea was also part of Australia (or the land mass that became Australia) and there was a land bridge right across to mainland Asia. It is probable that this is when the first aborigines invaded Australia, but we don't really know.

The eastern edge of the continent was nearest to the collision zone between the Pacific and Asian tectonic plates, large platforms of rock upon which the continents sit.

This meant that the forces and reactions of the plates colliding threw up great mountain ranges, creating volcanoes and other tourist attractions right along our eastern coastline.

Suddenly (in geological terms) the rivers which flowed to the east coast were blocked and instead flowed into the Murray-Darling system and had to go a long way to find the sea.

The rivers on the seaward side were shorter and steeper. These rivers wore their way down into the hills.

The winds and the rain helped, washing all the nutrients into the valleys, where the rivers could carry them down into the sea. As the rivers slowed on the coastal plain, though, those silts were deposited and produced some of our best soils. The silt jetties of the Mitchell are a clear sign of how much silt can be deposited by a river willing to work hard at it.

Gippsland was formed, and the soils were generally rich and deep, though nowhere more so than under the Great Swamp and on the Orbost-Marlo flats.

Those mountains, which we call the Great Divide, provided the material for a long coastal plain of surpassing loveliness.

The Strzeleckis were formed at much the same time as the Divide as the continents slowly ground along.

The asthenosphere (and you're getting that word from a man who has trouble spelling geophysicist) found a few weak spots and poured upward through cracks and fissures around Warragul and Drouin and the solidified lava formed a ridge linking the two mountain chains. Over millennia, it also formed the deep, rich red soils that area enjoys.

The rivers flowing down from the Dandenong to Port Phillip Heads, or where the Heads would one day come to be, became slower and slower as they silted up in their lower reaches. Imperceptibly they began to speed up again and the reason became obvious over the next few thousand years.

Fault lines each side of the bay allowed Port Phillip to subside, cutting the heads off a dozen rivers (and the Heads appeared).

The Yarra was once a much longer river and might have been quite impressive down past Portsea.

There was a long line of rock pushed upward to form the Peninsula, firmly anchored in the rock below, so that every jolt and shake of the raft upon which we float is felt in the cutlery and crockery of Moorooduc and Mornington,

At sea, the land bridge to Tasmania was disappearing. The ice had finished scraping and grinding the tops off our mountains and was melting. The seas rose.

The hard old granites of the Bass Strait islands were left above the water but there was now a strait waiting for George Bass to discover it.

It was not that the land sank. The sea rose, and much of the Gippsland coastal plain was submerged, with no legal redress.

The currents from the west and the east mat at Wilson Promontory, which was a collection of islands at that point, and as they met they dropped sand they'd been moving along, and this formed the Yanakie Isthmus, slowly linking Wilsons Promontory to the mainland.

It was no longer possible to walk to Tasmania, but at least you could walk to South East Cape before the water stopped you. The Gippsland Lakes were being created at much the same time.

The sea threw up sand that the winds turned into dunes, and the rivers coming down from the mountains and the Latrobe Valley had little or no access to the sea. Their waters gradually filled what became the Gippsland Lakes.

By that time Gippsland was pretty well completed, but be warned. Most of those processes are still going on, slowly, imperceptibly, steadily…