Background
Doug Ralph was the fifth generation descendant of ancestors who came to Mount Alexander in the Goldrush of the 1850s, and he was born in Castlemaine, living in the area all of his life and working as a self-employed carpenter.
Doug Ralph was the fifth generation descendant of ancestors who came to Mount Alexander in the Goldrush of the 1850s, and he was born in Castlemaine, living in the area all of his life and working as a self-employed carpenter.
Doug Ralph became acquainted with a specific forest type found in Central Victoria, the Box-Ironbark, and built his knowledge of its ecology, geology, botany, biology and history during his lifelong study of a very specific area, the Fryers Forest and the catchment of Columbine Creek in particular, and it is for this thorough local knowledge, applicable to far-reaching discovery, that he became known. As contributor of, and consultant about, such discrete expertise he is acknowledged in a number of diverse reports. He was a contributor to the formation of, and first president of, Connecting Country, a community-based not-for-profit organisation that "operates at a landscape scale to increase, enhance and restore biodiversity across the Mount Alexander Shire and surrounds in Central Victoria".
"Historically, the early white settlers described the land as “park-like” – the forests had big trees with space in between.
That’s what (British explorer) Major Mitchell described when he came through this area. But they cut down the big trees and when you do that you get a denser, coppiced, multi stemmed growth.
Once grazing stops, life comes back from nowhere. Where I live there were cattle for over 100 years, but the land is repairing itself.
Even where you’ve had the worst impacts of mining, where the land has been sluiced, it’s regenerating.
You can strip the land bare but a seed will still germinate, a blade of grass will still come up." He was a Greens candidate in the 2002 Victorian State Election and again in 2006. In 2010 he stood in the Electoral district of Murray Valley for the Victorian Legislative Assembly. Ralph presented The History Show on 9.49 Main FM under the banner "there is never one way to look at history".
Self-educated through his own field explorations and research in public archives, he was an advocate of the practice of the "citizen-historian".
Ralph appears in, and was consultant for, a film written & co-produced by January Wositzky about the Monster Meeting of 15 December 1851, in which between 14,000 and 20,000 miners took part, the biggest protest leading up to the Eureka Rebellion of 1854.
Doug Ralph contested the seat of Bendigo in the 1996 federal election for the Greens, for whom he won 2,534 votes (327%), which represented a significant level support for the new party. He contested the 2008 Victorian Council Elections standing for the Greens in Calder Ward.