Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

A solid crowd of about 80 rocked up to the second talk in the Connecting Country 2011 education program at Campbell’s Creek on August 25.

Dr Arn Tolsma gave a deeply engaging account of fire history in Australia, and in particular the South Eastern corner of the country.

He showed evidence from analysis of peat cores that over thousands of years until about 1800 the incidence of fire has varied according to climate, not from human action. Incidence of fire increased dramatically in the 19^th century.

In particular there is little evidence of widespread Aboriginal burning. Early settler witnesses of Aboriginal fires are extremely vague, and suggest that it was limited in extent, and largely confined to grassland and grassy woodland.

Arn Tolsma at Campbell's Creek: intervals between fires should be between 20 and 100 years, if ecological health is the prime consideration

On the subject of our region, he referred to the 1853 Selwyn map, which showed that river and creek lines were open and grassy, but ridge country wooded with scrubby box and stringybark: in other words, the idea that the forest was open country before settlement is false.

He showed that there is no strong evidence that Box Ironbark environments must have fire to regenerate. Using the concept of ‘tolerable fire intervals’ he argued that fires at intervals of a minimum of 20 and a maximum of 50-100 years might be beneficial for these environments. Any use of fire should be carefully planned with very clear objectives established after site, vegetation and fire history analysis.

Dr Tolsma emphasised that he was speaking of fire as a management tool for the environment, a separate issue from the use of fire as a fuel reduction method. It is clear from his talk, however, that fuel reduction zones burned, say, every five years, will  suffer ecological damage. This is consistent with the position of DSE fire managers, who frankly admit that ‘asset protection zones’ are ‘sacrificial zones’, ecologically  speaking.

Dr Tolsma is co author of the DSE/CMA publication Ecological burning in box ironbark forests [2007]. The two volumes can be found online here and here

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.

Two FOBIF members went to Walkers Swamp on the Moolort Plains recently. They wanted to observe the abundant wetland birdlife Geoff Park has been documenting on his blog, Natural Newstead, for the past year or so. It was a still and sunny morning so the swamp with its reflections of Red Gums looked at its best.

Walkers Swamp, Moolort Plains. Photo by Bronwyn Silver, 11 August 2011

Most of the birdlife was fairly distant but we did manage to capture a White-necked or Pacific Heron Ardea pacifica sunning itself and a Striated Pardalote Pardalotus striatus in a nearby tree.

White-necked or Pacific Heron. Photo by Bronwyn Silver, 11 August 2011

Striated Pardalote. Photo by Damian Kelly, 11 August 2011