Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

Damien Cook

The Friends of Campbells Creek Landcare Group needs helpers to plant hundreds of plants into one of the only remaining creek-side wetlands left in our district.

The group is holding a wetland information day and working bee this Sunday the 10th of December.

Ian Higgins, the group’s environment officer said “we are lucky to have Damien Cook coming along to tell us how wetlands are faring in our region and advise us on improving our own”. Damien, a keen naturalist for 30 years, is a professional ecologist specialising in wetland and riparian restoration.

You can read more about arrangements for the day on this Friends of Campbells Creek web page.

Indigenous history shouldn’t just be the archaeology of a society frozen in the past: it should open up ‘glorious’ prospects: of a time when indigenous people will be accepted as leaders in this community. This is the view expressed by Rodney Carter, CEO of the Dja Dja Wurrung Aboriginal Clans corporation last Friday.

Mr Carter was speaking at the launch of Bain Attwood’s book The good country in Castlemaine. The Phee Broadway theatre was full for the launch of this important local history, and those present were privileged to witness an interesting contrast in styles, between the eloquent brevity of Jaara speakers Uncle Rick Nelson and Rodney Carter, and the more academic presentations of author Bain Attwood and presenter Dr Rani Kerin.

The good country: the Dja Dja Wurrung, the settlers and the protectors, is the first full length history which tries to give a voice to the Jaara people as active agents in the epic social changes of the nineteenth century. Without avoiding the reality of violence and dispossession, it tries to show how indigenous people reacted with intelligence and flexibility to the overwhelming forces ranged against them: in other words, it retrieves their lost voices, and shows them actively engaging with the new society being created on the ruins of their culture.

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At a ceremony in Melbourne last week senior Jaara elder Uncle Brien Nelson was included in the Victorian Aboriginal honour roll.

For many years Uncle Brien has been one of this community’s most distinguished cultural leaders. In 2009 he was made an honorary associate of Latrobe University, for which he has made a number of films with Gerry Gill, who described him at the time as a ‘pre-eminent Aboriginal leader, who has made an extraordinary lifelong contribution to the recognition of indigenous culture and reconciliation.’ Uncle Brien’s response was a characteristic mixture of eloquence and self effacement, including his summing up: ‘I never thought I’d be honoured by anything or anyone. I was happy just to be there.’  This time he was too ill to attend the ceremony, but his daughter played a video in which he said, in the same spirit: ‘Thank you for taking the time to listen to a person’s dreams.’

Guess what? Long unburnt box ironbark environments are more likely to recover from drought stress than ones which have been recently burned!

This is one of the findings of the ‘Either side of the Big Wet’ research project, the gloomy findings of which were outlined at the Arthur Rylah Institute last Monday.

The project was designed to measure how environments responded to the millennium drought [1997-2010], and their resilience [how they recovered] during the wet years [2010-2011] and after [to 2016]. The findings were pretty depressing, but for those prepared to look, there are lessons in them for land managers.

The research area included 120 transects across the Box Ironbark region from St Arnaud eastwards towards Rushworth, and four important sections of the Murray floodplain from Chowilla in the west to Barmah in the west. ‘Resilience’ was defined as the ability of species to recover after stress.

Monday’s presentations were necessarily heavily statistical in emphasis, but they can be brutally summarised as follows:

–Most bird species were found in fewer transects and were less abundant in 2016 compared to 1997, in spite of a partial recovery in the wet years 2010-2011.

–Plains amphibians were doing even worse, with ‘little evidence of breeding activity’.

–Box ironbark vegetation showed decreases in litter, large trees and higher shrubs and increases in dead saplings and hollows. The wet years weren’t enough to arrest the decline. Sites surrounded by woodlands declined more during the drought, but recovered better. Significantly [from FOBIF’s point of view] vegetation showed higher resilience in long unburnt areas.

–On floodplain vegetation, it was found that the proportion of woodland classified as ‘good’ declined from 60% to 28% over the period. It seems that ‘big wet’ years between droughts are not enough to arrest declines.

Overall, the research seemed to conclude that the legacy of big droughts lives on, that short wet periods don’t bring full recovery, and what recovery they do bring is eroded by subsequent dry spells.

Further, the area in question faces pressure from climate change and expanding human populations, with consequent exploitation of water resources and land for residences.

The project was conducted by researchers from Melbourne and Canberra universities and the ARI.