High Country Arborist Reports

You want to put an extension on the back of the house, and there is a tree on the block, or on the neighbour's side within five metres of the fence. That is the point most councils stop and ask for a tree report before they will look at the application any further. Getting one is the entire job at High Country Arborist Reports. We do not prune and we do not remove, which is deliberate: the advice you get from us has no work attached to it that we might be hoping to sell you afterwards.

Ben Keys writes them. Ben spent years as a climbing arborist in Melbourne before going back to Melbourne Polytechnic for the formal end of it, and now holds a Diploma of Arboriculture at AQF Level 5 alongside a Certificate III. There is also a Bachelor of Arts in journalism in there, which turns out to matter more than it sounds when the document has to be read and acted on by a council officer who is not an arborist. Ben is a QTRA registered user, number 6747, so the risk a tree poses gets a defensible figure attached rather than an opinion, and the practice carries ten million dollars of indemnity cover and twenty million of public liability.

The patch is the High Country and north east Victoria: the Alpine Shire through Bright, Myrtleford and Mount Beauty, Indigo Shire through Beechworth and Chiltern, Wangaratta, Mansfield Shire, and across the border into the Albury and Wodonga region. We also travel for work in East Gippsland and the Wellington Shire. It is country where a tree's exposure, its root architecture and the species characteristics that hold in this altitude and climate are not the same as they are in a Melbourne street, and a report written from a desk somewhere else tends to show it.

What we produce runs to four broad kinds. One is a tree risk assessment paired with a removal application, the documentation a council wants in hand before it will approve taking down a protected tree. Where a site has a project attached to it, reports for developers assess the trees against AS 4970-2025 for the protection of trees on development sites, with any pruning recommended against AS 4373-2007. The planning and environmental compliance side is covered by native vegetation assessments. And for the owner who simply wants to know whether the thing in the front yard can be saved, there are tree health assessments and consultations.

The order of events is the same every time. You get a quote first, setting out what the work will cost. Once you confirm it, we book a site visit and assess the trees that matter. Then the written report comes to you by email, and for most standard jobs that lands within five to seven business days of the visit. Ring 0406 840 457 or email through the site, tell us what the council has asked for, and we will price it.