Category Archives: News

Mount Alexander Shire hosted a consultation with interested citizens last week to consider a management plan for the Botanical Gardens flora and fauna reserve. The plan would be implemented in tandem with the gardens conservation management plan, which was open … Continue reading →

What does the phrase ‘extensive vegetation modification’ mean? Answer: in Heritage speak, it’s a reference to what happened to our landscape during the gold rush. It’s code for: trashed landscapes, ruined waterways, denuded forest lands. Why do heritage documents use … Continue reading →

The new plan does make some advances on the old on the twin questions of environmental damage and Aboriginal dispossession. For a start, it explicitly tries to incorporate a role for indigenous questions in park interpretation: ‘In 2013 settlement of … Continue reading →

Registrations are now open for the Wetland Plant Identification Course 2019 run byDamien Cook and Elaine Bayes. The course starts on 31 October 2019. To find out more click on the image above.  

VEAC has released its final recommendations on the Central West forest. The full report with the executive summary and related documents can be found here. The final recommendations take account of responses to the draft, issued last year: but the … Continue reading →

This year’s FOBIF exhibition will be a general one about our local Box-Ironbark Forests. TOGS Cafe in Castlemaine will host the exhibition in September and October 2019.   It will be our 6th photo exhibition at TOGS and our 10th overall. … Continue reading →

Local frog expert, Elaine Bayes, has forwarded the latest information on Australia’s first National Frog Count: In just one year, FrogID has generated the equivalent of 13% of all frog records collected in Australia over the last 240 years. The … Continue reading →

It has a pretty name, and a pretty flower—after all, it was introduced into this country as a garden plant. Now it’s one of the worst invasive weeds in the country, a menace to the environment and agriculture. You guessed … Continue reading →

How long should we plan for? An interesting hint can be found in the May issue of the newsletter of the Australian Forest History Society, in a story by Roger Underwood, about New College Oxford, founded in 1379: ‘The chapel … Continue reading →