Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

Fourteen heroic walkers braved bitter winds to do a 7 kilometre circuit in Faraday for FOBIF’s July walk on Sunday. The walk covered a section of the Coliban water race and adjacent lanes. Features included some magnificent Candlebarks and a large population of Narrow-leaved Peppermints, as well as cultural heritage in the form of interesting granite structures from the 19th century race.

Candlebarks along Burgoyne’s Lane, Faraday: vegetation corridors like this offer a sometimes provocative contrast to the surrounding paddocks.

Noel Young took the photos above. Click on each to enlarge.

August’s walk will be led by Richard Piesse through the Poverty Gully area. Check the walks section of this site for details.

What is four metres square, alive, and can reduce as much air pollution as 275 trees?

Answer: a Citytree,  ‘a vertical structure filled with moss cultures and other vascular plants that clean pollution from the air. The structure also contains sensors that are able to control all the moss cultures in real time, to let operators know if they have enough of water, nutrients and salt.’ Citytrees are being installed in Berlin and other places as part of a range of solutions to air pollution.

We don’t have them in Castlemaine, but we do have plenty of moss on our streets, at least in the cooler part of the year.

Street Moss is the subject of an exhibition about to open at Falkner Gallery, 35 Templeton Street, Castlemaine this week. The exhibition opening is on this Saturday (22 July) between 2 and 4 pm and the show runs from 20 July to 3 September 2017. The gallery is open each week between 11 am and 4 pm, Thursday to Sunday.

Moss Grid, Castlemaine. Bernard Slattery, 2017

Templeton Street gutter, Castlemaine. Photo by Bronwyn Silver, 2016

Parker Street footpath, Castlemaine. Photo by Bronwyn Silver 2016

The 2017 FOBIF AGM is on at 7.30, 10 July 2017 in the Ray Bradfield Rooms. Guest speaker will be Brian Bainbridge from the Merri Creek Management Committee. All are welcome and you can find out all about it here. 

If you would like to join our committee, forms are available here.

The selection criteria are very broad for this year’s TOGS Cafe exhibition, Mountains and Waterways. All photos submitted that are taken around water and mountains in our region will be included on our Flickr site and considered for the exhibition. The closing date for photos is 1 August 2017. To find out more, see our earlier post or contact Bronwyn on 54751089.

We have included some sample photos below.

Black-fronted Dotterel. Cairn Curran. Photo by Geoff Park, 29 October 2014

Picnic Point, Cairn Curran. Photo by Geoff Park, 28 Feb 2017

Columbine Creek. Photo by Bronwyn Silver, 21 January 2017

Mount Alexander. Photo by Bernard Slattery, 26 July 2012

As outlined in a previous post, this year’s FOBIF AGM will be held at 7.30, July 10 in the Ray Bradfield Rooms. Details including how to nominate for the FOBIF Committee can be found here. Supper will be served and everyone is welcome.

Our speaker will be Brian Bainbridge, Ecological Restoration Planner, Merri Creek Management Committee. His topic will be Single species – many outcomes.

Single species conservation projects can have wide-ranging benefits when pursued in a holistic manner. Projects to secure local populations of Matted Flax Lily and Plains Yam Daisy have led Merri Creek Management Committee to build a deeper understanding of the Merri Creek’s changing ecology and the potential for landscape-scale conservation.  The projects have stimulated fresh approaches to engaging with community. 

Plains Yam Daisy

OK, it’s cold, and maybe not wet enough. Some quality reading to brighten a winter evening: the June newsletter of our neighbours, Wombat Forestcare, available online here.

Narrow leaf bitter pea, Castlemaine Botanic Gardens, Spring 2013. There are three Daviesia species in the Mount Alexander region.

This edition has the usual terrific info on fungi, the case against logging the Wombat and [among other things],  the third article in John Walter’s series on ‘egg and bacon’ plants. This one is on three species of Daviesia found in the Wombat: Hop Bitter Pea, Narrow Leaf Bitter Pea and Gorse Bitter Pea. All three can be found in the Mount Alexander region too. If you [like many of us] are frustrated by the difficulty of telling the difference between pea plants, you should find this article pretty useful.

FOBIF representatives met with Mount Alexander Shire officers last Monday to discuss roadsides in the shire. The meeting related to planning scheme amendments designed to put protection overlays on some roadsides.

FOBIF supports Council initiatives in this area, but we have been concerned about gaps in the Council maps of roadsides.

Monday’s meeting was productive, and officers have agreed to supplement current maps with relevant material from the 1998 roadsides strategy.

DELWP works on the Irishtown track, May 31: the road is seven metres wide, plus scalped verge, plus numerous runoff sections. This bush track is as wide as a highway, and much wider than the nearby Fryerstown Vaughan bitumen road.

In the meantime, DELWP has been busy grading roads in bushland around the shire, leaving many of us scratching our heads about the logic and implementation of some of these works.

The Irishtown Track, for example, has now been graded to be wider than any of the local bitumen roads, and in many verges have been scalped of vegetation. Though not as bad as DELWP’s efforts on the Fryers Ridge a couple of years ago [see here and here], the works are hard to comprehend.

For years now we’ve been putting a simple question to DELWP: how wide should a bush track be? We’ve never had an answer, but we’re guessing: wider and wider.

FOBIF has made a submission to the process of updating the Castlemaine Diggings NHP Heritage Action Plan [now known as the Heritage Landscape Management Framework].

Our view can be roughly summed up in the words of the old Heritage Plan: ‘The current forest setting is not an interpretive problem, but rather an interpretive bonus for the Park. It highlights the transience of mining, demonstrates the severe environmental impact that can result from inadequate environmental constraint, and illustrates some of the resilience of Australia’s native vegetation.’ [Our emphasis]

In Norwood Hill. This is not a natural scene, it’s part of our cultural history: the destruction of our waterways is part of the epic of gold, and needs to be explained to visitors.

Essentially, our submission urges consideration of the natural landscape as an important element in our heritage: consideration of mining ruins in isolation from the way mining affected the environment is to lose sight of one of the most important consequences of the gold rush: environmental change. That’s part of our heritage too.

The essentials of FOBIF’s submission are set out below:

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