Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

A fascinating collection of old photos of our waterways collected by the Catchment Management Authority gives a bit of a sense of how far things have changed in the last sixty odd years. The picture below of the Loddon river bank upstream of Newstead, for example, shows a bank seriously prone to erosion, with erosion producing activity continuing.

1946 was the year work started on the building on Cairn Curran, in the romantic age of dam building. The project was not without its detractors, however: Newstead councillors expressed the fear that banked up water would flood the town, for example. For their pains they were the object of a tremendous blast in the Castlemaine Mail in March that year from one John Somer: ‘feebleness of brainpower’ was their problem, according to Mr Somer. Newstead was built in the wrong place, he said, seeming to look forward with some enthusiasm to the prospect of the town being flooded.

Loddon River bank near Newstead, c 1946: The top four feet, above the dark line, is 'muck, slum and sand' washed down from past dredging operations upstream. The tunneling is prospectors' work.

‘What if it is?’ he asked, before suggesting that everyone would be better off if Newstead was wiped off the map, so that a new, better town could be built on a more sensible site: ‘A new Newstead will arise in all its glory with properly designed alignments and something considerably more elegant in architecture than the higly pigly hotch potch of habitations that now exist.’

Mr Somers’ complacent contemplation of the drowning of Newstead was probably helped by the fact that he lived in Maldon. It’s also a bit hard to understand his negative portrait of a town most people [well, pretty well all people, actually] find very attractive. He did make some interesting points in his letter, however: he suggested that Aborigines, who knew the ‘vagaries of the Loddon’, made their settlements out of reach of floods, and were much more sensible than early white settlers who repeatedly went back to their houses after floods, only to be flooded again a few years later; and his description of the Loddon river flats as being covered with mining debris of ‘muck, slum and sand’ isn’t a bad description of what you can see in the photo above.

The Draft 2012-18 Regional Catchment Strategy is now out for public consultation, and anyone interested in land health in this area should be concerned to look over what the North Central Catchment Management Authority will, in theory, be using as its guide to action over the next few years. The draft will be the subject of a series of 10 public meetings in the coming weeks. In our region, the community meeting will be held at Campbells Creek Community Centre at 7 pm next Thursday 17 May.

The draft is quite startlingly brutal in its assessment of its predecessor, 2003-7 Strategy: ‘low level of ownership’ by the community, ‘rapidly outdated’, ‘lack of baseline data’, vague targets and vagueness in assigning responsibility for achieving targets are a few of the criticisms it lists of that now defunct document.

This one aims higher, but its success will depend heavily on the willingness of individuals and groups to have a go. This Strategy tries to be specific, and its approach is to begin by identifying assets in the region which can be clear targets for constructive action.

What are those assets? You can help answer that question by turning up at Campbell’s Creek on the 17^th and having your say.

This is a wonderful opportunity to have input into the Regional Catchment Strategy – it’s reviewed every 6 years or so and many things can change in that time. It’s important that the community consultations highlight programs to protect, enhance and connect native fauna and flora: these are important not just in themselves, but as partners in creating the kind of land health which can underpin production.

If the word ‘strategy’ turns you off, there are probably lots of good reasons, over use being one. The draft Castlemaine Diggings NHP management plan some years ago listed as an aim the development of ‘a list of strategies…to develop strategies…!’ The word is often used to cover up a lack of activity: it’s important that the Regional Catchment Strategy doesn’t end up like that.

Details of public meetings, and access to the Draft Strategy, can be found by going to http://nccma.bangthetable.com/.

About 70 people turned up to Sutton Grange on Tuesday night to hear Melbourne University’s Ari Hoffman deliver a stimulating talk about how landcare groups  might approach revegetation projects to cope with a rapidly changing climate. His talk was the third in the 2012 Connecting Country education program evening series.

Professor Hoffman’s absorbing talk was built on a number of propositions: the climate is changing rapidly—more rapidly than it ever has; the ability of plant communities to cope with change is directly related to genetic diversity; and that, therefore, we can enhance the ability of our vegetation communities to survive rapid change by increasing their genetic diversity.

Loddon River near Guildford, September 2010: Professor Hoffman used the example of River Red Gum to suggest that restoration works should use a proportion of plants sourced some distance from the work site, in order to enhance genetic diversity.

Professor Hoffman acknowledged that his argument potentially ran counter to the accepted thinking of Landcare groups and other land restoration practitioners: these currently operate on the belief that revegetation projects should be done with plants sourced from seeds collected locally: that plants having ‘local provenance’ will be best suited to local conditions. Ari Hoffman agreed that this is generally the case, but argued that in times of change, and in situations where plant and animal communities had been fragmented by land clearing and development, isolated populations can lack the degree of genetic diversity which could increase their resilience in the face of change. He suggested that future revegetation projects should use a provenance system roughly divided as follows: about sixty per cent ‘local’; thirty per cent sourced from a ‘medium’ distance away; and ten per cent from a significant distance away. A variety of approaches could be used, depending, for example, on whether a species used wind or birds to disperse seeds.

Professor Hoffman acknowledged that there were risks in this procedure, but noted that some natural hybridisation was common, and that experimental evidence had shown that isolated populations were strengthened by the introduction of new genetic material.

Discussion of this idea was lively, probing and constructive, and the audience stayed for a long time after the talk—encouraged by the presentation of outstanding supper desserts by Growing Abundance.