It has. I've done some digging and cant find much on why it was all done but I know there is historical documentation out there. I remember reading some good historical stuff on the water corp website about 10 years back but they've dumbed down the website since then.
Basically, most of the land from the Perth coast to Southern Cross pretty much used to be continuous cleared farmland. If you look now on any satellite image you can see that there is now a 20-50km wide belt of forest all down the Darling Scarp, particularly in the catchment areas. I used to ride dirt bikes in there, illegally, back in the 90's and 2000's. Lots of people still do, also 4WD enthusiasts. There are lots of old roads and even a few ruined houses and fencelines. It's why they used that area for Rally Australia in the 90's, good roads but no traffic. There were a few reasons for reforesting it but the main ones were salinity and increased turbidity due to more run-off and erosion. All the dams were getting salty and cloudy.
At first they tried replanting with pine forests but that didnt work because nothing grows under the trees - too dark and too much pine resin - and the water just runs right off into the rivers, still full of silt. So they had to go back to native plantings. There are still a few pine plantations though.
Less runoff means less streamflow though, which is only a fraction now of what it was, while there are a lot more people in SW WA, which is why most water comes from groundwater or desalination these days.
Putting in a buffer also stopped the locusts which used to arrive in plague proportions but you hardly ever see in Perth any more.
It also says salinity was a problem even only 7 years after Mundaring was built - and replanting was undertaken in 1909. It was still a problem in 1926 though. 1956 they started buying back the land for replanting. Stopped the buybacks in 1965.
Similarly, all the land around the goldfields towns was cleared for steam power and wood for the mines. Up to 100km from the mines themselves eventually. The old woodlines are good for riding dirt bikes along. This caused massive problems with dust storms and so on during summer whenever a thunderstorm was around. I've got lots of photos from Leonora in 1989. That area still gets them a lot because it was never reforested. If you drive to Leonora you notice that about 20km from town, all the trees disappear. Or at least you used to - I havent been back for a while. About 50 years back they replanted around Kalgoorlie, Coolgardie, Kambalda etc... though and they dont get dust storms anything like they used to.
It is reasonable to assume that something similar, a buyback of some form, resulted in the formation of the Julimar State Forest - probably why there is still a farm inside the forest area on the satellite images.
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