Newsletter: Is the Gippsland panther real?

Birds are gonna eat all my peaches...

Author

Jacob Wallace
March 20, 2026

⏱️ This Friday edition of our newsletter is a six-minute read.

👋 Hello Gippslanders, it’s Jacob here.

Welcome to the Friday edition of our newsletter; it’s been another busy week for me covering news from across the region. Before we dive in, I’d like to give you a short update on my peach tree.

🍑 Peach update. I don’t mind sharing “my” peaches with the local birds, but I’d like to have some for myself. I caught this cockatoo stealing one of my prized fruits, after spying king parrots helping themselves earlier in the week.

I’ve wrapped some of the peaches with mesh bags but they don’t seem to be deterring the birds. If you have any suggestions on how I can protect my peaches I’d love to hear them.

Send me an email at [email protected].

👀 Looking ahead. In this week’s newsletter we’re talking about:

  • 🐑 How to make your dam healthier and save water;

  • 🛻 Australia’s obsession with big utes and trucks;

  • 🎧 My appearance on the National Account’s podcast, where I talked to Archie Milligan about fertiliser prices, and;

  • 🐆 Whether the Gippsland panther is real or a hoax.

🎤 I had a great chat with Sale resident Alan Lewis yesterday. He was the town planner and engineer for the City of Sale between 1968 and 1984. Since 2013 he’s been taking tourists up and down the Thomas River and explaining the region’s history on his Port of Sale Heritage Cruises.

Lewis told me about how much the town he loves has changed over the years and what he hopes to do with his 112-year-old cruise boat Rubeena. We’ll have more on Lewis in coming days.

❝

I felt I made the town a more pedestrian-friendly space, I tried to keep the urban scale and maintain the walking paths. I wanted to make it more people-friendly.

Alan Lewis, former City of Sale town planner and owner of Port of Sale Heritage Cruises

🎊 WHAT’S ON THIS WEEK 🎟️

🧺 FARMERS MARKETS 🥧

🚀 Alright, let’s jump into the Monitor’s latest yarns!

🔍 HEARD THIS WEEK👂

Keeping a clean dam might seem - on the surface - like a trivial thing for a farmer to add to their laundry list of priorities, but a healthy hole of water can have several knock-on effects, including happier animals and less water evaporation. 

What’s happening: At Paul and Samantha Crock’s farm in Fish Creek on Thursday, the Greening Gippsland’s Dams Project is hosting an event to help farmers and landowners learn about keeping a healthy dam.

Project coordinator Kirby Leary told the Monitor that greening a dam is a “low cost, low input way of improving your farm, not just in terms of biodiversity, but also farm health, stock health and productivity”.

Step one, fencing: “A lot of dams have bare ground around the edges because cattle are accessing it,” Leary said. “Bare ground is basically the thing you never want as a farmer.”

  • Farmers avoid bare ground because it can lead to a rapid degeneration of soil health, which can impact a farm’s productivity.

By fencing off a dam and installing a trough for cattle to drink from, grass cover will grow back naturally.

“The water is still there for the animals. We just want them to drink it in a different way,” Leary said.

  • Leary said the barrier doesn't have to be a great fence. It can be a simple, single electric wire to deter cattle.

🎧 THE NATIONAL ACCOUNT PODCAST 🚜

This week I talked to my colleague Archie Milligan from the National Account about a story I wrote on how the conflict in the Middle East is impacting fertiliser prices in Australia.

Take a look at my chat with Archie below.

LOOKING NATIONALLY 👀

I enjoyed this piece Archie put together on the tax incentives that are driving Australia’s obsession with large utes and trucks.

I didn’t know that larger utes over $80,500 get exempted from Australia’s luxury goods tax because their principle purpose is to carry goods. This is one of a few reasons why we’ve seen an increase in large utes on our roads.

Take a look at Archie’s video on the subject below.

🎥 Watch: Is the Gippsland panther real?

While asking Leongatha residents whether they thought the rumours about a big cat living in Gippsland were real, I found a bloke who reckons he saw it in the 1970s.

Take a look at my interview with him below.

Thanks for catching up with us this week at the Monitor. I hope you enjoyed this Friday issue of our newsletter.

If you have a story you’d like to share with me or if you know how to stop cockatoos from eating my peaches, then feel free to send me an email at [email protected].

I’ll be back in your inbox on Wednesday next week with more chats with locals, informative news and event guides.

Cheers,
Jacob & the Gippsland Monitor team

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