Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

To celebrate World Environment Day in our Shire, an community fair will take place in the Castlemaine Market Building from 9am-1pm on Sunday 3^rd June. Whether people are interested protecting our diverse plants and animals, or sustainability initiatives and green technology opportunities, the fair will be a great source of information on what is happening locally.

The ‘mini expo’ format will give visitors an opportunity to talk to representatives from local environmental organisations, community groups and government agencies including: Connecting Country, Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests, Landcare, Mount Alexander Sustainability Group, Trust for Nature, Parks Victoria, Mount Alexander Shire Council and Castlemaine Community House – Growing Abundance.

Among the attractions of the day is the opportunity to see a specimen of the rare and endangered Southern Shepherds Purse – a plant growing in the Mount Alexander Regional Park and nowhere else in the world!

The Castlemaine Farmers Market and Castlemaine Market Building Art Showcase 2012 will be on at the same time.

Kirsten from Trust for Nautre with Swifty the Parrot at last year's World Environment Day

There are still places available at Alison Pouliot’s Fungi Ecology Workshop this coming weekend in Inglewood.

The workshop details are posted at:

http://wedderburncmnnews.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/alison-pouliot-fungi-workshops.html

Eighteen people turned out for the May FOBIF walk led by Barbara Guerin and Lionel Jenkins. The walk was largely focussed on the area’s mining history and Dominique Lavie took a series of terrific photos which are reproduced below.

The morning began with a walk to the top of the Monk with views like the one below.

View to the east from the Monk.

Along Cobblers Gully there were many overgrown remains of an early mining settlement.

Remains of the Cobblers Gully settlement.

The walk along Spring Gully is covered one of Victoria’s most intact collections of quartz reef mines with well preserved machinery foundations and mullock heaps.  The mines worked from the mid-1850s to the late 1930s.

Spring Gully Mine and Battery ruins

Mullock heap, Spring Gully.

Lunch was enjoyed overlooking an enormous quartz tailing dam.

Walkers having lunch at a crushed quartz dam, Spring Gully.

The walk back was mainly off-track. Towards the end we came across this extraordinary chimney pictured below. It was discovered after the walk that according to notes made by Jack Cocks on the Eureka Reef and surrounds the chimney is in the area of the Eureka South mine, which was not particularly rich and closed in the early 1900s.  The reason for the chimney is unclear as the building next to it is not big enough to have housed a steam boiler. It may have been a roasting kiln for mineral recovered from the Eureka Mine battery.

Thanks to Barbara and Lionel for leading their first FOBIF walk and to Dom for her photos. The next walk will be to Tarilta Gorge. Doug Ralph will be the leader.

Readers who have followed the intermittent controversies over whether vegetation along creek valleys raises flood levels might be interested in the picture below, showing Campbell’s Creek, looking downstream from the Gaulton St bridge in 1946:

Campbell's Creek, looking downstream from the Gaulton St Bridge, 1946. Lack of vegetation didn't improve flood levels

This is a photo of part of the above scene in 2011:

The same section of creek, 2011: the cliff where the creek takes a sharp turn to the left is visible in the background. This section of the creek featured in complaints that vegetation caused flooding in the last year.

The photo shows the result of years of revegetation work. Vegetation in the creek was blamed by a local businessman for raising flood levels last year. What is frustrating about such claims is that they could easily be judged if only the relevant authorities could refer to accurate flood  maps which would show water levels reached in previous floods–when there was little or no tree cover along the creek. Amazingly, it seems that such mapping is not available–not here, and not elsewhere in the state: which means that many planning decisions are made without vital knowledge of the places they’e dealing with. In the absence of such knowledge, we thought we’d run an occasional series of very short items recalling past floods [ones that happened when there was very little vegetation cover around our waterways], starting with 1909.

Continue reading →