Endemic plants and environmental art: a new gallery aims to rebuild tourism in Victoria’s Grampians | Rural Australia
A new art gallery dedicated to environmental art was heralded as a “green healing shot için for tourism in Grampia, after being shot with two summer forest fire.
The Wama Foundation, built in a three -hour car from Melbourne, was built in July, which was built in West Victoria’s Halls GAP 10 minutes. The first stage of the 16 hectares of the project is the endemic botanical gardens and domestic pastures in the National Environmental Art Center and its surrounding surrounding area.
In the second stage, there will be accessible boards, nature playgrounds and sculpture traces.
Grampia Wimmera Mallee Tourism CEO Marc Sleeman said that the region was the “reconstruction period after two challenging summer. Bushfires passed through the Gariwert/Grampians in 2024 and 2025. More than 135,000 hectares of national park and agricultural land were burned.
Sleeman says Wama is an important part of the region’s long -term healing strategy.
“It gives people a new and new reason to visit, and this new green rescue shooting as a new job opened,” he said. “A few years later, a few years later, it gives our community and businesses a sense of positivity and hope, and from the perspective of attraction for the wider region, it is really one of these Gamechangers for Grampians.”
WAMA Foundation Temporary CEO Ange Turrell said that the Art Center will attract new visitors to the region and help maintain its unique biological diversity.
With the influence of 80% of Gariwerd National Park, Gariwer, the Botanic garden and nearby domestic pastures serve as live examples of how to protect and restore the fragile flora of the region.
Gardens are home to about 500 domestic plants, including 30 endemic species. Many of them are rare, endangered or critically dangerous, like Gariwerd Grevillea Grevillea Gariwerdensis, And rarely Strike Microstegia, February 2024 gathered from Cassell Mountain before Bushfires.
“This is more than a garden, Tur Turrell said. “It is a shelter that preserves biodiversity and provides access to plants that the people will never encounter otherwise.”
The garden surrounds the new National Environmental Art Center – the first gallery in Australia is dedicated to exhibiting and reflecting the natural world.
The opening exhibition of the gallery, End & Been is investigating the climate crisis. Curator José da Silva said the audience of the exhibition invited the audience to think about the common realities of global heating from melting of the glacier ice in Europe to the forest fires at the gallery.
“By connecting these narratives to each other, Silva encourages the connection of ecological systems, the comprehensive consequences of a heated planet and to think of urgent need for both local and global reactions to environmental crises,” Silva said.
Sleeman says that the new region will help to position the grampians as a brand where art and nature meet.
“It will be a cultural and environmental turning point,” he said.
