From the Bush Track to the Strzeleckis.

Lisa Barrand (1984) still remembers stepping off the school bus in 1979 and being met by nothing but the smell of the bush. There was no clear view of Homestead 1 from the driveway, just a single track winding through scrub, students walking in before they could even see where they were headed.

“Right from the get-go, you were immersed in nature.”

Many years on, that immersion has shaped a life that looks, by her own admission, “eclectic.” Lisa built a career teaching strategy through a systems thinking lens and now works with not-for-profits that want to change the world. She raised three children who each came through Woodleigh in turn – a relationship with the school spanning 1979 to 2017. And in the last few years, almost by accident, she has become one of the driving forces behind a fight to protect what remains of Gippsland’s native forests.

It began with a piece of land. In 2023, Lisa and her husband, Craig, went looking for somewhere to support ecological restoration. They found a block near Turtons Creek, Gippsland – steep gullies of remnant rainforest protected by a Trust for Nature covenant, a place filled with tree ferns, epiphytes and mountain ash so old the whole place, she says, “makes you feel like you’re in a scene from Avatar.”

Lisa and Craig’s goal of a nature sanctuary became something bigger once they and their new neighbours began to notice what was happening just beyond their boundary. Gullies of ancient rainforest, tucked between the ridgelines of state and Crown land, were being put at risk from logging, with the protective mountain ash trees on the hillsides being cut down and replanted with pine, a monoculture species replacing complex ecosystems that had taken decades to establish. Zoomed out to a satellite view, the destruction wasn’t isolated. It was visible at a landscape scale.

“It’s something I don’t think many people realise is happening – but we’re going to have to live with it unless something changes.”

So, together with their neighbours, they founded Gippsland Forest Guardians, a small, community-led environmental advocacy group.

Much of Gippsland’s plantation forestry sits on Crown land – public land, licensed in perpetuity to a single company following a one-off payment in the late 1990s. Forestry itself is entirely legal on that land, and Gippsland Forest Guardians isn’t an activist group; Lisa is careful to point that out. It's about advocacy: the group’s argument isn’t that logging shouldn’t happen, it’s that companies should follow the rules.

The group’s first major discovery came in a logging area known as Fella’s Coupe, where they found critically endangered slender tree ferns – plants protected under Victoria’s Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act. When they flagged this to Hancock Victoria Plantations (HVP), their initial response was that the Act simply didn’t apply to them. 

Logging was eventually halted at the site, by which point HVP had already cleared roughly half of it, and the company has committed to regenerating the remainder back to native forest – an outcome Lisa describes as an unprecedented win in the Strzeleckis. It's a start, but as Lisa puts it, it’s only “one tiny postage stamp” in a much bigger picture. What looked like an isolated case turned out to be part of how the company managed its entire Strzelecki estate.

The stakes, Lisa explains, come down to what can and can’t be undone. Rainforest, once destroyed, doesn’t regrow on any human timescale. Current estimates suggest it takes around 400 years to re-establish, climate and fire depending, of course. Rainforest needs protection with native vegetation buffer areas, ideally with the mountain ash forests indigenous to the Strzeleckis. When these mountain ash areas are converted to pine plantations, they are similarly difficult to get back. HVP claims these areas are not native forest but "plantation", and that is the challenge for Gippsland Forest Guardians. Fortunately, under the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the world’s largest forestry sustainability certification scheme, “conversion” from native forest to an exotic plantation species is one of the most serious certification breaches possible. Lisa and the GFG team are trying to ensure that these rules are being followed.

That initial discovery at Fella’s Coupe has since snowballed into a two-year process of formal complaints, audits and counter-audits, culminating in a request for an official interpretation from the FSC’s international body in Bonn, Germany, asking: “Is it acceptable to regenerate a harvested native species plantation with an introduced species like pine?” Their answer? In a word, “No". Back home, Australia is now working through a third attempt at a national interpretation consistent with that ruling. It’s work that, if upheld, would apply to every FSC-certified forestry operation in the country.

"That’s an accident," Lisa says of how far the campaign has travelled. “We didn’t plan to do that." But if the ruling holds, it stands to be genuinely transformative, not just for the Strzeleckis, but for all native species plantations across Australia.

For Lisa, the connective tissue between this work and her own Woodleigh education is direct. When she and outdoor education staff first proposed taking Year 12 students to Turtons Creek as a living case study, she wasn’t sure how they’d respond to the leeches, the mud and the steep, wet terrain. Instead, she says, students have been enthralled, and more than that, motivated to act. They’ve written letters to the relevant minister and to the Forest Stewardship Council, letters serious enough that FSC’s own team leader later called Lisa directly, asking to be put in touch with the class about their feedback.

“I don’t need to teach them about the forest when they’re in the forest,” she says. “Being there, noticing, that’s where the connection comes from. And responsibility follows the connection. You don’t need to ask for it.”
It’s a philosophy she connects squarely to Woodleigh’s values of experience, connection and responsibility. Ideas she first absorbed, without knowing it, as a student stepping off the bus in 1979.

Lisa is candid that the work can be exhausting, and that global news, from stalled climate agreements to the scale of the challenge in front of her, has knocked her confidence at times. What keeps her going, she says, isn’t certainty that things will work out, but the community she’s found in doing something about it: “At the end of the day, all we have is our relationships with other people.”

Gippsland Forest Guardians is now moving toward registered charity status, and welcomes new supporters through its newsletter, on Instagram, or at the T-shirt printing days it runs from Woodleigh’s Outdoor Ed Building. For Lisa, the appeal has never really been about the forest alone.

“It’s all the community that we’ve built down there,” she says. “They’re amazing, smart and committed people. It’s deeply satisfying, and a lot of fun, to be working together.”

A Regenerative Future.
Woodleigh School.