Deep in the Grampians, just off a popular four-wheel-drive track, is a gully and rock face home to a family of brush-tailed rock wallabies.

Last week the Grampians had four species of kangaroos and wallabies; this week the park has five.

Parks Victoria rangers co- ordinated a brush-tailed rock wallaby release that saw 11 wallabies released into the Grampians National Park on Wednesday last week.

Brush-tailed rock wallabies became locally extinct in the Grampians in 1998. During the 1990s their population dropped to 10.

Parks Victoria brush-tailed rock wallaby project officer Tony Corrigan said Victoria now had 60 brush-tailed rock wallabies, with 11 settling into life in the Grampians.

The Mail-Times travelled to the central Grampians on Wednesday to check how the brush-tailed rock wallabies were adapting to their new environment. We crossed our fingers and hoped for a sighting but the wallabies lived up to their nickname, The Shadow, and stayed in the shadows of a cliff face.

Tired Parks Victoria rangers, fresh off a wallaby monitoring night shift, were our guides.

There have been 12 Parks Victoria and Department of Sustainability and Environment staff involved in monitoring the 11 wallabies during the past week.

Rangers use a radio tracker to locate frequencies from collars wallabies are wearing.

Teams of two have been monitoring wallabies 24 hours a day.

But despite battling long nights, rangers feel they have achieved something worthwhile, and no-one more so than Mr Corrigan.

"For me the most exciting part of the whole thing is before last week we had four kangaroo species in the Grampians and now we have five," he said.

"You don't often get a chance to put a species back into the wild.

"The most important aspect is to get animals back into the Grampians."

The Shadow could have disappeared without people knowing or caring but conservationists, supported by generous philanthropists and government, have ensured this will not happen.