Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

Thirty five people braved bleak winter weather to attend FOBIF’s Annual General Meeting last Monday. They were rewarded with an enormously entertaining and instructive talk by Martin Scuffins on birds of prey. Martin, who runs the Leigh Valley Hawk and Owl Sanctuary, was assisted by his rescued kestrel, Kevvie, who seemed to be a very experienced public performer.

Martin’s message was that the key to healthy predator populations–and therefore to a healthy environment– was good habitat management, and serious efforts to manage the way increasing human populations interact with the natural world. The Leigh Valley centre plays an important role in educating people on these matters.

Monday’s meeting saw the following members elected or re elected to the committee:

President: Marie Jones

Vice President: Neville Cooper

Treasurer: Lynette Amaterstein

Secretary: Naomi Raftery

Committee members: Jeremy Holland, Frank Panter, Bronwyn Silver, Bernard Slattery.

Much fun was had listening, cooking, tasting, painting, weaving and playing last week as Aunty Julie McHale lead three great sessions last week for the FOBIF 2016 Winter School Holiday program.

An adopted elder of the Dja Dja Wurrung, Aunty Julie skillfully shared her knowledge and stories with over thirty local children during the course of the week.

The program was run at the Fryerstown School, which with its outdoor fire pit, provided local primary school children, parents and carers with the scene for learning about local indigenous culture.

Each session started with Julie leading an acknowledgement of country and followed by a Teaching of the story of Bunjil which is a story about Creation and is told at the beginning of any cultural activities.

Kids got stuck into some cooking, with damper, originally made with Kangaroo Grass seed, and dried bush fruit and acacia seed mixed through.

Depending on the day and age of the children, next was some weaving with bush materials or painting with natural coloured paint.

Games from the desert were adapted and shared, faces painted in preparation for dancing and then we cracked open our damper to finish.

A big thank-you to Julie and her helpers, volunteer Louise Jiricek and Mount Alexander Shire Council for their support for the program though their 2016-17 Community Grants program.

A cool winter day provided pleasant walking conditions for 19 participants on FOBIF’s June walk. Jeremy Holland led the group across some interesting isolated hills and ridges south of Italian Hill, before swinging past Sailor’s Gully and the Tubal Cain mine on a return trip to Vaughan Springs.

Walkers were struck by early appearance of Golden Wattle blossom; the damper gullies provided many terrific fungi sightings; and Sailors Gully featured spectacular carpets of moss. The first photo is by Win Jodell and the rest by Bernard Slattery.

The next FOBIF walk on 17 July will be led by Bernard Slattery. Click here for details.

Our highly successful FOBIF exhibition, Trees of the Mount Alexander Region, is finally finishing this weekend after a month at TOGS Cafe in Castlemaine in March and almost a month now at the Newstead Railway Arts Hub. So if you haven’t managed to catch it yet, take a trip to Newstead between 9 am and 4 pm this Saturday or Sunday. All the details are here. You can also download an online catalogue (14 MG) of the show here . This document includes a thumbnail version of every photo with accompanying notes.

Patrick Kavanagh’s photo here is a good example of the terrific quality and fascinating subject matter of photos in this show.

Our trees are hosts to an amazing variety of life forms, and the macro lens can reveal sights barely visible (or effectively invisible) to the naked eye: in this case, what could seem to be an anonymous brown crust on a Grey Box (Eucalyptus microcarpa) leaf turns out to be a beautifully formed ‘shell’: the Shell Lerp (Spondyliaspis bancrofti). We’re not sure what the smaller scattered objects are.