Have you ever wondered what your Melbourne suburb looked like before all the streets and houses?

For the expanding outer suburbs of Melbourne we have photos, satellite images and living memories. But what about the city's older inner suburbs built well over a century ago?

The answers can be found by piecing together some of the city’s earliest European maps stored in Victoria’s Public Records Office (PROV).

These maps were created between the late 1830’s and mid-1850’s by colonial surveyors like Robert Hoddle, William Wedge Darke and Henry Boorn Foote who traversed different parts of what would become metropolitan Melbourne with convict survey parties to partition land for sale to British settlers.

In doing so, they marked the course of creeks and rivers, locations of swamps, the routes of early roads and the nature of the soil.

And, luckily for our research, they also marked trees to determine the corner of allotments.

There, in this 180-year-old script, is the species composition of Melbourne’s original urban forest. Over the last 15 years, we’ve worked to try to reconstruct these landscapes.

And now, we have our first ecological view of 1840’s Melbourne.

Historic survey maps over present day Melbourne

Gum Yellow Box Oak/Sheoak Wattle Stringybark Banksia/Honeysuckle Lightwood Blackwood White Gum Tea Tree Other

While this kind of reconstruction has been done across North America, this is the first time that all the pieces of this ecological puzzle have been brought together for Melbourne.

To do this, we needed not only the information in the maps, but complex mathematical modelling to extrapolate the data and determine the likely density of trees in the area.

We overlayed the PROV maps over current-day Melbourne. And the results contain some incredible detail.

The original tables and maps recorded trees by their old common names, not the species names we use now. But by taking those old names and reading them against the native vegetation still growing in Melbourne, ecologists can pin down exactly which species the surveyors saw.

The next most common tree listed is the “Box”.

This term describes eucalypts with flaky or scaly bark that stays on the tree rather than coming off in ribbons.

There are a number of different species of box-type eucalypts.

But using descriptions of the soils, we can find out whether they were Yellow Box (Eucalyptus melliodora), Grey Box (Eucalyptus microcarpa) or Red Box (Eucalyptus polyanthemos).

Our second new map uses modelling to predict the density and composition of these 200-year-old forests.

This map shows there was a woodland or forest of Yellow Box in the low hills of the inner southeast, stretching from where Government House now sits through South Yarra to Toorak and south to Gardenvale, Brighton and Highett.

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Despite their prevalence in the 1840s, today only a few Yellow Box trees remain – the majority cut down for firewood and timber.

The few that still exist can be found at the Royal Botanic Gardens Observatory Gate entrance, in the city's south east at Moorabbin Station and in the bayside suburb of Highett.

The early forests of eastern Melbourne, on the other hand, were denser and more diverse.

The old lists feature names like "Stringybark", which could be one of many eucalypts with thick, fibrous bark that you can pull off in long strips, "Wattle" (likely Acacia mearnsii) and other common Acacia trees like "Blackwood" (Acacia melanoxylon) and "Lightwood" (Acacia implexa).

The "Oaks" listed on the map are not European or North American oaks (Quercus sp) but native Drooping Sheoaks (Allocasuarina verticillata).

Melbourne’s reconstructed forests

Estimated tree density

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 28 30

Naturally, our reconstructed forests are more accurate for the areas with more marked trees, but this map offers our best picture yet of these ancient forests.

Witness and remnant trees

If we look at our first map, some of the original marked trees – otherwise known as 'witness trees' – are in curious locations .

There was a pair of large "Box" trees where The National Theatre in St Kilda now stands, and a row of "Gums" running through the current path of the Birrarung-Yarra River between the inner-city suburbs of Cremorne and South Yarra.

Despite much searching, we couldn’t find any witness trees still standing in their locations.

This is perhaps because the surveyed trees were used as markers for new roads – another pattern that emerged from our maps.

But remnant trees – which are trees that predate European colonisation or have grown naturally from original forests – are still common in some areas.

Ancient River Red Gums still stand in two of Melbourne's fairly central green spaces, Kevin Bartlett Reserve and Queens Park.

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Gresswell Forest in the north and Valley Conservation Reserve in the city's south both have good quality remnant trees, which gives us a glimpse into the forests that once filled the landscape.

Forgotten woodlands and lost grasslands

Historically, Greater Melbourne was not only made up of forests of Gums and Box trees.

Tree density drops in the western and northern areas of our map, but they weren't empty.

These were plains of Kangaroo Grass (Themeda triandra), often labelled as “fine sheep pasture”, that drove European colonisation from Tasmania and New South Wales into Victoria.

Descriptions of these open plains in the north including in Pascoe Vale South and Coburg tell us these plains extended almost to where our modern city now stands.

Silver Banksias used to be abundant in the west, but are almost completely absent now. Picture: iNaturalist/harveylam

River Red Gums used to dominate much of Melbourne's landscape. Picture: iNaturalist/Ossifrage94

Yellow Boxes were often cut down for firewood and timber due to their tall, straight trunks. Picture: iNaturalist/spookpadda

The early forests of eastern Melbourne were dense and diverse. Picture: iNaturalist/ossifrage94

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Then there are the Forgotten Woodlands of the west. The trees listed as “Honeysuckle” in most cases refer to Silver Banksias (Banksia marginata).

These grew in less dense areas of the map. But today, they are totally missing.

There are still some rare examples of remnant Silver Banksia trees away from the city in western Victoria, but the large numbers of them that once grew alongside Drooping Sheoaks now only exist in tiny, isolated pockets.

Victoria's Arthur Rylah Institute for Environmental Research is working to identify the former locations of many of these woodlands and there are now efforts underway to replant them.

The puzzle remains incomplete

This first map is just the beginning for our team.

We hope to build a broader picture of these forests, piecing together information from the maps, early paintings and more.

We’ve already found some new maps that can help us expand the picture for northwest Melbourne.

It's also vital to acknowledge the value of Indigenous knowledge to this project.

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We have presented our preliminary results to Traditional Owners, and we're now working to ensure the knowledge of the Wurundjeri, Bunurong and Wadawurrung peoples are an integral part of our future research.

Where conditions allow, we hope to replant these same species in their original locations, returning a familiar ecology to this land.

For now, these maps allow us to take a look back 200 years at Melbourne's lost rolling grasslands and native woodlands.

Map of the Month is a project from the University of Melbourne (Melbourne Centre for Cities, Melbourne Data Analytics Platform and Pursuit) using maps to spark important policy conversations across metropolitan Melbourne. Academics, community leaders and government representatives from across Melbourne contribute to the maps and accompanying stories.

This research was partially funded by the City of Melbourne and would not have been possible without assistance from the Public Record Office Victoria and State Library of Victoria staff.

The maps were produced by Dr Emily Fitzgerald and Dr Noel Faux using data from the Public Record Office Victoria and the Victorian Department of Energy Environment and Climate Action digitised by Dr Patricia Torquato.