Although people from Adelaide use their 4 wheel drives to go to Victor Harbor to escape their daily work routines and relax in nature, the landscape around the coastline is an altered landscape. Apart from the Deep Creek Conservation Park in the south west corner of the Fleurieu Peninsula the landscape is farming country.
The native bush or scrub has been cleared for the grazing of sheep and cattle. The landscape has a bare or denuded look. It is stripped, stark country.
There is very little native bush left outside the conservation parks. Most of what is left is on the side of the unsealed back country roads, or along the various creek beds that run through private property.
Remnant roadside vegetation is a distinctive feature of rural environments in southern Australia and there is ongoing and incremental degradation of this vegetation, often due to illegal clearance. Roadside vegetation is in a general state of decline throughout South Australia and it is increasingly uncommon to find roadsides that contain high quality remnant native vegetation.
If roadside vegetation is often the only remaining original vegetation in cleared landscapes, then this may bethe only hoe for soem species in that locality. There is not enough to form a linear habitat network for vertebrates and invertebrates.