Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

Our FOBIF Flickr site now has some stunning photos on this year’s exhibition theme, Mountains and Waterways. The exhibition dates have been moved to August/September but there is still plenty of time to send in your photos.

Details of how to be part of the exhibition either through Flickr or your photographs being chosen to be hung at TOGS Cafe can be found here. The closing date for photos is now 1 August 2017 and the show will run from 24 August to 28 September. If you have any queries about submitting photos, contact Bronwyn on 54751089 or bsilver@mmnet.com.au.

View from Mount Alexander at dawn. Photo by Bernard Slattery, June 2016

River Red Gum, Loddon River, Vaughan Springs. Photo by Damian Kelly, April 2017

Golden Orb-weaver, Mount Alexander. Photo by Noel Young, March 2017

Doug Ralph Celebration Day

Teana Amor has just completed a film, ‘Doug Ralph Celebration Day‘, which is available through YouTube. This is a comprehensive film about the day people came together in the Botanic Gardens on 7 March 2015 to remember Doug who was the founding president of Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests. It includes the many speeches, crowd scenes, photos of Doug and has a great musical accompaniment. 

A 2015 FOBIF post on Doug’s life can be found here

Local cartographer Mal ‘Jase’ Haysom has just released the latest in his series of excellent maps, this one being of the Muckleford Forest.

The map can be found at the website of Cartography Community Services, along with others in the series, which includes Kalimna Park, several maps of Castlemaine Diggings NHP, Campbells Creek walking track, Rise and Shine, Post Office Hill and Mount Alexander.

Muckleford forest: it can be a bit of a maze, but help is at hand in the form of the latest CCM map.

The CCM maps can also be bought at the tourist info centre at the Castlemaine Market building. They’re ridiculously cheap.

You might also want to brood on this quote from Joseph Conrad, which heads CCM’s website: ‘It is safe to say that for the majority of mankind the superiority of geography over geometry lies in the appeal of its figures.  It may be an effect of the incorrigible frivolity inherent in human nature, but most of us will agree that a map is more fascinating to look at than a figure in a treatise on conic sections – at any rate, for the simple minds which are the equipment of the majority of the dwellers on this earth.’

Think about that.

Victoria has a new biodiversity plan. Protecting Victoria’s Environment—Biodiversity 2037 was launched last week by the State Government. It can be found here. Readers may remember that FOBIF made a brief submission to the process of developing this paper last year.

A selection from FOBIF’s library: there are stacks of strategies, but the actions are what count.

The first thing to say about it is that it’s part of a long running, perhaps never ending series of such documents, all adding up to an indictment of governments which seem to go on churning out policies never to be implemented. Remember 2005’s White Paper on biodiversity? Or the 2010 National Biodiversity Strategy? Or the dozen or so other papers by different government agencies? Of course you don’t. The current paper repeats a lot of the ideas of those two, but claims to be more strategic than its predecessors. On first reading, this is not at all clear.

For example, here are three targets:

Protecting Victoria’s environment 2016: ‘ All Victorians connecting with nature [by 2037]’.

National Biodiversity Strategy 2010: ‘Priority for action 1: engaging all Australians.’

Victorian Biodiversity White Paper 2005: ‘Goal: to encourage all Victorians to work together as effective stewards of our land, water and biodiversity.’

Worthwhile objectives, all of them. How successful have the earlier strategies been in achieving them? We don’t find out from this one. It’s pretty clear that you can’t have a healthy environment without people’s support: without that, governments will never have the nerve to act appropriately. This documents admits, remarkably,  that we actually don’t know what people think.   One of its aims is to ‘Undertake research to understand the community’s level of awareness of biodiversity and its relevance to them.’ In other words, we’re starting all over again.