“After the land was cleared, the farmers would plough the land,” Beverley says. One early account documented in The Land of the Lyre Bird: A Story of Early Settlement was particularly gruesome. “When he had it laid out on the table -it would have been at least metre long or more - some assistants walked into the room and jumped in fright because they thought it was a snake.”ĭespite its uniqueness and value to science, it would be a long time before much was understood about the worm’s habitat, particularly its complex, preferably soaking wet, burrowing systems. They sent them to the University of Melbourne where Professor Frederick McCoy then described it.

That was the first time anyone had heard of giant earthworms. According to Beverley, the first records of the earthworm come from the 1870s when farmers were surveying land across the Moe-to-Bunyip railway line along Brandy Creek in Warragal, Victoria.

Land clearing across southern Gippsland began back in the late 1800s and by the 1930s there was nothing but roads, some creeks and pasture.

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