Using an excavator with a mulching head, all of the bamboo and most of the privet was mulched to the ground in a week-long operation that finished on Friday, November 6.

Over the coming weeks, once the bamboo has regrown to about a foot in height it will be sprayed with the herbicide glyphosate. 

The International Agency for Research on Cancer, the specialised cancer agency of the World Health Organization, has classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans”. 

However, no spraying will take place over water, the work will be completed using experienced contractors and a brand registered for use near waterways will be used. 

Many people will have memories of playing in the bamboo forest as they grew up, or of the house that was where the forest used to stand. 

For about three months, long-time Bega Valley resident Stan West lived in that house. 

This was back in the summer of 1946, and the then 12-year-old Mr West called the little house home along with seven siblings and two parents.

The small house, probably made of galvanised iron, was already very old when he moved in. 

“It was one of the pioneer jobs, I’d say,” Mr West said. 

“We must have gone to sleep standing up in that house, it was so small.” 

“Surviving” was the main thing he remembered about living in the house because of the amount of children who lived there – the majority of which were boys. 

However, he also remembered playing football on the Bega River bank or bed, going bean picking at Murrays Flat to earn a dollar and how there used to be a footbridge across the river near the junction where the Bega and Brogo rivers meet. 

There was no bamboo on the banks of the river when Mr West lived at the house and he was not sure how it got there.

He said Mrs Lambert moved into the house when his family left and she could have planted it. 

His wife Joan had a different idea – she thought the bamboo may have been carried to the location in a flood. 

South East Local Land Services senior land services officer Shannon Brennan said when they had been mulching the bamboo last week they found old bricks that could have come from Mr West’s childhood home. 

She said there had also been a glass bottle tip at the site and when they mulched all the bamboo they could see the holes of where people had gone to dig up the bottles.

As the bottles were quite old, Ms Brennan thought people would dig them up because they were valuable and people would collect them. 

The Wests recently saw the area where the bamboo forest used to stand.

While Ms West was pleased to see it removed Mr West was not.

“I think a bit of Bega’s history went down the drain,” he said.