Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

Sunny weather made for a great FOBIF walk on 21 August. There were thirty walkers on this excursion to the Muckleford bushlands. Paul Hampton from Muckleford Landcare was the leader with Doug Ralph providing a commentary on the mining history of the area. As usual Frances Cincotta shared her expert knowledge of the local plants. It was wonderful to see early wildflowers, particularly the many massive clumps of Greenhoods.

FOBIF walkers in Muckleford Bushlands. Photo by Marie Jones

During the morning, walkers detoured from the track to view see exclusion zones that were established ten years ago. Viewing the Sticky Boronia Boronia anemonifolia that had benefitted from this protection was a highlight of the day.

Sticky Boronia and Frances Cincotta explaining the history and purpose of the exclusion zone. Photos by Noel Young

We have received a reply from the Mount Alexander Shire to our concerns about the incremental widening of the Kalimna Tourist road. We have been assured by the Infrastructure manager and Superintendent of works that road crews are aware of the problem, and conscious of the natural values on roadsides like this one.

We have no reason to doubt these assurances, but the brute fact remains that the road is getting wider. The sad sign half concealed in vegetation at the top of Lyttleton Street, warning us: ‘Danger–Narrow Road’ is a sign of a past era. The road is now over eight metres wide in places, and the widening is most pronounced on slopes, where workers have had to put in gutters to get excess water away.

Kalimna Tourist road: the problem of incremental widening needs to be looked at for unsealed roads generally.

It’s not our business to be telling Council how to do its job, but there is clearly a problem here. A similar problem arose two years ago in the National Heritage Park. When FOBIF complained to Parks Victoria about road widening, Parks responded by drawing up more specific guidelines for road maintenance. This may be an option for Council, and we have written suggesting it as a possible solution.

Harder to identify than Robins are the Thornbills – small and very active, often higher up in foliage, but some species frequent the ground at times.

The most common is the Brown Thornbill Acanthiza pusilla, which really on closer inspection is not overall brown but varies and has striations. Alas, people confuse this with the Striated Thornbill which is similar in size.

Brown Thornbill. Castlemaine. Photo by Damian Kelly, April 2011

The Buff-rumped Thornbill Acanthiza reguloidesis is common throughout a lot of the forests and often more easily seen as it forages along the ground and amongst low foliage.

Buff-rumped Thornbill. Walmer South Nature Conservation Reserve. Photo by Damian Kelly, 8 August 2011

FOBIF members have noted a rash of rubbish dumping in our public lands recently. All of it is unsightly, and some disgusting: the prize in this latter category going to the person who has dumped large amounts of meat offcuts in the Poverty Gully area.

It’s bad enough that piles of old mattresses and sundry household items are littering the bush—including plenty of stuff that would easily fit into a household or even street bin. What is much more serious is the dumping of garden rubbish, much of which is the source of serious weed outbreaks. It’s worth remembering that weeds cost Australian agriculture $4 billion a year, and that most of them are garden escapes. A few months ago FOBIF members discovered an infestation of English broom on Mount Alexander which was promptly dealt with by Parks Victoria: the potential for this weed to get into adjoining private land was high, and the costs would have been serious. We are pretty sure that the infestation was caused by dumping of garden rubbish.

FOBIF has written to Mount Alexander Shire urging the issue of free garden rubbish vouchers to residents. Although we don’t think this is a magic solution to the problem, we do believe that cost of tipping garden rubbish does deter people from doing the right thing. Anything which would ease this problem—and the burden on public land managers who have to deal with it – should be tried.

FOBIF is following up its initial 2010 attack on bridal creeper around the giant yellow box alongside the Great Dividing Trail, with another shot at making an impact on this unpleasant weed. The site is a hundred metres from the point where the GDT crosses Forest Creek, and is a veritable wilderness of every imaginable bad weed in this area.

Our efforts are clearly very modest, and a more coordinated effort will be needed taking into consideration the values of the area, the extensive revegetation work done by landcare groups from Golden Point right through to Castlemaine, and the important issues of flood mitigation and fire risk minimisation. Tentative efforts to devise a coordinated plan for Forest Creek have been mooted in recent years, and now Max Schlacter, a Melbourne University post graduate student, has undertaken to prepare such a plan, in cooperation with Connecting Country and interested other groups. We will update on this project as it develops.

The Friends of Kalimna Park have also embarked on an ambitious bridal creeper clearance program along Moonlight Creek, on the eastern edge of the Park.