In the 1970s and 1980s, the Army undertook a land rehabilitation program, as decades of heavy use had caused major land degradation. At the time, it was "one of the largest single landscape revegetation operations yet attempted in Australia and perhaps anywhere." Wilkie summarises the project as follows: Historical land use impacts and heavy military usage, with little attention paid to land management or maintenance, eventually left the area barren and denuded. Although attempts at revegetation occurred in the 1950s, by the 1960s parts of the site were impassable because of waterlogging and severe erosion. For the tanks of the armored division, these areas were unsafe and unusable. One newspaper described it as the “most desolate and barren military camp in Victoria.”