Elephants give new life to storm-damaged trees

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[Emergency Management Victoria logo]

[Footage of elephants wading in water, splashing and playing, swinging their trunks, in their new enclosure at the zoo]

Emma Fist, Elephant Keeper, Werribee Open Range Zoo: We have 9 elephants here at Werribee Open Range Zoo. We have one bull Luk Chai and then we have a herd of 5 females and their 3 offspring which Luk Chai is the father of.

[Footage of oversized semi-trailers driving down freeway transporting elephants]

Mark Pilgrim, Director, Werribee Open Range Zoo: The first discussions around bringing the elephants from Melbourne Zoo to Werribee I understand happened probably about 12 years ago and as the first principles around growing the herd, breeding the herd and as the herd grows needing more space for the elephants and clearly that’s a huge undertaking to send them to Werribee, our open-range zoo and give them the space that they require. And some of the recycled materials were crucial for us to allow this to happen and for example the upright posts are all recycled rail track and there’s over 1,000 fence posts in this project. If you look at the horizontals that’s actually recycled elevator cable but it’s very hard material to recycle so actually reusing it here was fantastic.

[Footage of recycled fence posts and cables the elephant’s new enclosure and grounds at Werribee zoo]

Emma Fist: We wanted to base the facility on natural biology, elephants out in the wild, so really important that we’re able to mimic that with natural timber structures, the different changes in terrain, the pools. Having really large pieces of timber are great for proactive skin care for the elephants. And if they really have like an itch or a scratch, there’s nothing better than getting a large piece of timber rubbing up against it. So it’s really important that they’re big but then it also provides that complexity to the elephants in their environment as well.

[Footage of June 2021 storm with storm debris and fallen trees damaging a home]

Christian George, Director, Programs, Emergency Recovery Victoria: There was a storm in 2021 that basically resulted in large volumes of fallen and dangerous timber and Emergency Recovery Victoria assisted in a state-coordinated clean-up program to remove that timber. One of the I suppose philosophies we adopted was ‘highest and best use’ so rather than the traditional sort of mulching stockpiling and burning we looked to basically have a system put in place that would turn this into viable timber product and we were very happy to partner with Zoos Victoria and we ended up with lots of different products including the sort of bench seats you see me sitting on here today. You can walk around here and see tree stakes, you can see root balls that the elephants like to sort of roll around and play with, bench seats and lots of other things. I mean this site’s just an amazing application of recycled materials across the entire precinct, but we’re happy to have contributed just a small piece of that.

[Footage of Romsey Green Waste Facility with workers and machinery at timber mill]

Mark Pilgrim: We received something like 10,000 pieces of recycled timber from Emergency Recovery Victoria. Just seeing what was, you know, recovered wood being used in that way is fantastic.

Christian George: I just encourage everyone to get down here and have a look at what an amazing sort of precinct it is and have a look at some of the products that are being used to create it.

[Emergency Recovery Victoria logo]

[End transcript]

Updated 20 June 2025

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Elephants give new life to storm-damaged trees

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