Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

An interesting additional factor in DELWP’s challenge in Kalimna is that the recent state budget allocated $2.05 million for biodiversity work in the Greater Bendigo NP and Kalimna Park.

At the time of writing it’s not clear what this money is for, but one outcome of the funding will be the employment of traditional owner rangers to work in these parks. It remains to be seen whether indigenous input into management will influence approaches to fire in Kalimna.

The Dja Dja Wurrung Country Plan, published in 2017, has an interestingly positive approach to land healing. If you want to find out more on this, there’ll be a drop in session next Sunday in Castlemaine to inform the public about the draft co management plan for Dja Dja Wurrung parks in the box ironbark region. The session will be held in the Ray Bradfield room, next to Victory Park, from 10 am to 12 noon.

Preparation of the Draft Joint Management Plan for the Dja Dja Wurrung Parks was supported by a CSIRO-led consortium including Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation, Dja Dja Wurrung Enterprises, and Conservation Management in consultation with Parks Victoria and Department of Environment, Land, Water & Planning (DELWP).

Aboriginal joint management of six Box Ironbark parks was proclaimed in 2016. The parks in question are Greater Bendigo National Park, Kara Kara National Park, Hepburn Regional Park, Kooyoora State Park, Wehla Nature Conservation Reserve and Paddy’s Range State Park.

None of these parks is in the Mount Alexander region, but the management strategies proposed for them will surely be of interest to us. Rock up and find out.

Our latest FOBIF publication, Wattles of the Mount Alexander Shire, will be launched next Saturday morning, 28 April in the Phee Broadway Theatre Foyer at 11 am.  You can find all the details here.

If you can’t make the launch, the book will be available from Stoneman’s Bookroom from 28 April. You will also be able to buy it online from the FOBIF website. Cost is $10.

Here are a some sample pages on Golden Wattle:

Ever wanted to go on a walk in our local bush with plenty of birds to observe along the way? Damian Kelly’s new publication, Castlemaine bird walks: a guide to walks and birds in the Castlemaine district, will give you lots of ideas about where to go.

This comprehensive 202 page book has 4 to 5 pages on over 40 walks. Each description covers birds you might come across, a site description, and text and a map of the walk itself. Informative photos of birds and the local landscape are on most pages.

There are also useful sections on topics such as how to identify birds, bird watching – tricks of the trade, and birds of the Castlemaine region.

A companion website to the book allows for information sharing and updates. 

Castlemaine Bird Walks will be an invaluable resource for locals and visitors to our area who want to explore our bushlands and observe and identify birds.

The Wettenhall Environment Trust provided a grant to help with publication costs. 

The book is available at Stonemans Bookshop in Castlemaine or directly through the website. The cost is $20.

Do you have an opinion on our local creeks? Mount Alexander Shire is looking for responses to its Castlemaine Creekways management plan. The plan is open for consultation till May 8. It can be found online here.

The ‘creekways’ in question are Barkers Creek from the Botanical Gardens to the confluence with Forest Creek; Forest Creek from Colles Road to the confluence; and Campbells Creek from the confluence to Cemetery Road. Council is manager of these stretches of the waterways under licence from the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning.

Forest Creek in spate in Castlemaine, 2011: channelisation like this is one way of controlling floodwaters, but it has its disadvantages.

The Plan aims to improve the waterways ecologically via cooperation with the relevant landcare groups and to develop the trail network so as to increase public access. Naturally these aims involve a commitment to manage the risks involved: risk management is named as ‘the foundation of the plan’ and the risks in question are listed as fire, flooding and (interestingly) trees (see post below).

It’s fair to say that in the last ten years the most controversial thing about our creeks has been their tendency to flood in wet years: just type ‘creeks’ and ‘floods’ into the search box above to get a sample of the responses to creek flooding. The current plan canvasses various flood protection options like channelization, drains and levees. All have merits and defects—the main one being that they tend to shift the flood problem downstream. The brute fact is that when more water pours into the catchment than can be held in a waterway, it will flow onto the flood plain: and generations of unwise settlement on flood plains have presented us with most of our current flood management problems.

The Plan sets up the ambitious aim of linking the three creeks ‘into a continuous network to:

–connect the townships of Castlemaine, Chewton and Campbells Creek

–provide safe routes to destinations e.g. schools

–cater for different recreation groups e.g. young, old, and varied fitness/ability levels o enable access to places of interest e.g. the creek confluence o provide and showcase links to history – social/cultural/geological

–encourage active community stewardship.’

How all this is to be achieved is not specified.

You can provide a written submission entitled Castlemaine Urban Creekways Management Plan submission by:
Email: info@mountalexander.vic.gov.au
Post: Mount Alexander Shire, PO Box 185, Castlemaine Vic 3450
In person: Civic Centre, Corner Lyttleton Street and Lloyd Street, Castlemaine.

A curious feature of the Creekways Plan is its bland listing of ‘trees’ as one of the three main risks to humans from the creeks.

We all know trees can do a lot of damage when they fall or drop branches. You need to use your common sense when around old Red Gums, for example. But users of Forest and Campbells Creeks tracks in the last couple of months have been puzzled by what seems to be an amazing over reaction to this danger.

Blackwood (Acacia melanoxylon) cut down and painted near Forest creek: Blackwood are a long-lived species that have excellent timber. They typically do not drop limbs until very old (50 years plus). The pictured tree had no signs of any rotting and was located three metres from the edge of the track.. Photo and text: Karl Just

The photo above shows the kind of lopping which has been done along Forest and Campbell’s creeks. In many if not most cases it’s  hard to see the danger offered by the massacred trees. It’s also very clear that the kind of assessments which categorised these trees as dangerous paid no attention to their biodiversity role.

It’s a bizarre feature of our society that nature is very often seen as a menace out of all proportion to its real danger: so snakes are much more feared than motor cars. In the case of trees, a recent investigation found that in the ten years 2007-16 277 people died in Australia ‘struck by a thrown, projected or falling object’–presumably a small number of these would have been falling branches. In the same period 523 died falling out of bed. Figure that out.

Stinkwort choking the Colles Road footpath. This noxious weed appears to have been spread by council or Vicroads vehicles.

While this tree lopping was being done, the footpath linking the Forest Creek track to the Pennyweight cemetery was being overgrown (again) by Stinkwort (Dittrichia graveolens), more or less pushing people to walk on the road verge. A proper concern for safety might see footpath clearing, not hacking at small trees, as a priority.

And while we’re about it: as we’ve pointed out before, the roadsides of the shire are infested with this Stinkwort, very likely spread by council maintenance vehicles. This is a noxious weed, and under state law municipalities are required to ‘manage noxious weeds …on land they manage’. According to Ern Perkins’ Wild Plants of the Castlemaine District, Stinkwort ‘taints dairy products and meat, can cause stock death by poisoning and bowel damage by the fluffy seed heads, and can cause dermatitis in humans’.

Here’s another example of puzzling tree management, courtesy of Karl Just:

Prior to being pruned, this Silver Wattle was high quality habitat for the regionally rare Satin Azure butterfly, a small population of which occurs along Forest Creek. This butterfly species relies on an association with meat ants and Wire-leaf Mistletoe. The best habitat trees are wattles supporting mistletoe that have good access for the attendant ant species. This requires wattle branches that touch the ground next to meat ant nests, so that the ants can then easily access to the mistletoe in the upper branches where the butterfly larvae live. The pictured wattle was previously the best example of the wattle-ant association along Forest Creek but the weeping branches were removed, even though they posed no hazard. Photo and text: Karl Just