Great Otway National Park
national park in Australia
The Great Otway National Park is a national park located in the Barwon South West region of Victoria, Australia. The 103,185-hectare (254,980-acre) national park is situated approximately 162 kilometres (101 mi) southwest of Melbourne, in the Otway Ranges, a low coastal mountain range; its highest peak is Mount Cowley, 670 metres (2,198 feet), and is within the park. The park contains a diverse range of landscapes and vegetation types.
History
Commercial logging began in the Otway Ranges in the 1880s. As roads and railways improved, logging increased massively, peaking in 1961, almost entirely stripping the Otway Ranges of its old-growth forest and causing land degradation issues, but has since been greatly reduced. The forest standing today highlights the lengthy period needed to regrow the giant trees of the past and to reproduce the ecological complexity close to that of the original wild forests. Historically, several bushfires have burnt through the park's predecessor reserves, shaping its ecology and plant and animal diversity. The last major fire was part of the Ash Wednesday bushfires that swept southeastern Australia in 1983.
The park was declared in 2004 when Otway National Park, Angahook-Lorne State Park, Carlisle State Park, Melba Gully State Park, areas of the Otway State Forest and a number of Crown Land reserves were combined into one park. The parks were combined after a campaign by the local community and the Otway Ranges Environment Network and was officially gazetted on 11 December 2005.
“Great Otway National Park” enters the record as national park in Australia. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Great, Otway and National can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Great Otway National Park” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Great, Otway and National provides the most credible route into that argument.
The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q68472. VIAF identifies the subject as 249385414. The Library of Congress control number is sh2017003311. Authority coordinates are -38.773, 143.557. 6 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1961, 1983, 2004 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Great Otway National Park” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.