Forester's Log

A Forester's Log is a unique forest story, told from a forester's viewpoint-the view of John La Gerche, one of the first generation of foresters in Victoria, who managed the Ballarat-Creswick State Forest in the late nineteenth century. La Gerche's Letter Books and Pocket Books have survived to provide a rare insight into a bailiff-forester's burdens in the 1880s and 1890s. As a bailiff, he daily had to confront prop cutters and woodcarters, 'scamps and vagabonds' who constantly defied forest re