Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

With apologies, here’s a statement of the obvious: roads aren’t just bare surfaces for carrying vehicles. They’re framed by roadside reserves, which carry some very important vegetation.

Mount Alexander Shire Council is preparing a planning scheme amendment to insert a Vegetation Protection Overlay (VPO) on some roadsides into the planning scheme. FOBIF strongly supports such a project, and has approached council seeking input into the process.

This is not the first attempt to look at ways of protecting the values of our roadsides. The last produced the Mount Alexander Roadside Management plan in 2012. It can be found online here.

Before that, a Roadsides Management Strategy was produced in 1998. In some respects this was a model document, because it carried appendices totalling 144 pages of detailed assessments of the ecological values of almost all the rural roads of the shire. This was a massive achievement of painstaking on site study by Castlemaine field naturalists over five years.  Although time has modified the assessments in this study, most of it remains very pertinent to present conditions, and we hope that Council in its present deliberations will check on its assessments. In 2008 the Catchment Management Authority also did a study of our roads. The very informative maps from this study can be found here.  It found that  19% of Mount Alexander Shire’s roadsides had high conservation value, and a further 28% were of medium conservation value: that’s 1090 kilometres of roadsides with interesting stuff worth careful management. Given the shire’s responsibilities in the matters of safety, fire management and weed control, that’s no easy task—which makes the present project all the more important.

The reason we started the last post by stating the obvious is that, maybe, the obvious is not so obvious.

On glancing through 1998 Roadsides Management Strategy we came across this sentence, referring to machinery working on roadsides: ‘Blades on slashers should be set no lower than 100 mm above the ground.’ How obvious is that? Scalping of roadsides is generally frowned upon: an argument we put to DELWP when they scalped the Fryers Ridge road two years ago.  They weren’t impressed.

The roadsides in question are struggling to revive, though our impression is that the main regeneration is not of the destroyed ground covers, but of eucalypts. Given that the aim of the exercise was [we’re told] to clear sight lines for fire vehicles, replacing low plants with trees on the road edge doesn’t seem like a great idea to us…

Local cartographer Mal ‘Jase’ Haysom has just released the latest in his series of excellent maps, this one being of the Muckleford Forest.

The map can be found at the website of Cartography Community Services, along with others in the series, which includes Kalimna Park, several maps of Castlemaine Diggings NHP, Campbells Creek walking track, Rise and Shine, Post Office Hill and Mount Alexander.

The CCM maps can also be bought at the tourist info centre at the Castlemaine Market building. They’re ridiculously cheap.

You might also want to brood on this quote from Joseph Conrad, which heads CCM’s website: ‘It is safe to say that for the majority of mankind the superiority of geography over geometry lies in the appeal of its figures.  It may be an effect of the incorrigible frivolity inherent in human nature, but most of us will agree that a map is more fascinating to look at than a figure in a treatise on conic sections – at any rate, for the simple minds which are the equipment of the majority of the dwellers on this earth.’

Think about that.

Extensive media coverage, accompanied by plenty of smoke haze: DELWP’s autumn management burning program is now underway. Although this program is regularly described as an ecological exercise, no one is really under any illusion: it’s an effort to protect communities from bushfire, and ecological considerations are often haphazard afterthoughts.

In this context, it’s worth checking a little item in the latest issue of the always interesting North Central Chat, newsletter of the NC Catchment Management Authority:

‘Northern Bendigo Landcare Group (NBLG) and Huntly Fire Brigade have collaborated on an innovative project, developing a demonstration garden with fire resistant and fire retardant native plants to complement the new Huntly Fire Station. The plants in the demonstration garden are rated as fire resistant or fire retardant by the Australian Plants Society (Victoria).

 ‘The demonstration garden was developed as a community initiative, with Northern Bendigo Landcare Group assisting with the selection of plant species and establishment of the garden.

‘Firefighter Trevor Strauch coordinated the project for the Brigade and said ‘‘all plants in the demonstration garden are indigenous to the Bendigo area, and it provides people with an opportunity to view and compare fire ready plants’’. Fire resistant plants are those that will not burn in the face of continued flame, while fire retardant plants are those that will not burn in the first pass of flame, but which may burn once they dry out. Signs with photos clearly identify the plants, their common and botanical names, their growth habit and growing requirements, and their fire rating. NBLG secretary Nicole Howie said ‘‘we are always trying to think outside the square and generate creative ways to raise awareness of indigenous vegetation and encourage connections between people and their local environment.’

It’s worth emphasising that last aim: to encourage connections between people and their local environment. To  combine that aim with a sensible concern for safety, is definitely a worthwhile exercise.

The APS list of fire retardant and fire resistant plants can be found here.

Victoria has a new biodiversity plan. Protecting Victoria’s Environment—Biodiversity 2037 was launched last week by the State Government. It can be found here. Readers may remember that FOBIF made a brief submission to the process of developing this paper last year.

The first thing to say about it is that it’s part of a long running, perhaps never ending series of such documents, all adding up to an indictment of governments which seem to go on churning out policies never to be implemented. Remember 2005’s White Paper on biodiversity? Or the 2010 National Biodiversity Strategy? Or the dozen or so other papers by different government agencies? Of course you don’t. The current paper repeats a lot of the ideas of those two, but claims to be more strategic than its predecessors. On first reading, this is not at all clear.

For example, here are three targets:

Protecting Victoria’s environment 2016: ‘ All Victorians connecting with nature [by 2037]’.

National Biodiversity Strategy 2010: ‘Priority for action 1: engaging all Australians.’

Victorian Biodiversity White Paper 2005: ‘Goal: to encourage all Victorians to work together as effective stewards of our land, water and biodiversity.’

Worthwhile objectives, all of them. How successful have the earlier strategies been in achieving them? We don’t find out from this one. It’s pretty clear that you can’t have a healthy environment without people’s support: without that, governments will never have the nerve to act appropriately. This documents admits, remarkably,  that we actually don’t know what people think.   One of its aims is to ‘Undertake research to understand the community’s level of awareness of biodiversity and its relevance to them.’ In other words, we’re starting all over again.

Having registered this depressing fact, we need to look at the current document, and ask: what does it add up to?

It adds up to money. Here’s a key passage:

‘The degraded health of Victoria’s biodiversity is the result of many individual decisions and actions, or inactions, over two centuries. Under-investment in planning, management, protection, evaluation and reporting for biodiversity and the natural environment has been conspicuous. Even today, decision makers in government, business and land management too often fail to fully consider the impacts of their actions on biodiversity – and are not routinely required to do so.

‘There has been persistent under-investment in programs and measures to address the legacy of biodiversity loss (particularly for terrestrial biodiversity) and to counter-balance the ongoing losses that occur due to decisions and activities today…’

Unfortunately the document doesn’t follow up statements like this by guaranteeing appropriate funding for the environment. Instead, it gestures at new efficiencies, strategic approaches, and ‘Victorian Government-backed funding model that leverages government investment to create more significant investment in biodiversity conservation across Victoria.’ The 64 dollar question is, by whom? This could be a creative approach to engaging private commitment to conservation. It could also be a slide into the kind of sinister proposals we’ve been offered lately which amount to privatising parts of our National Parks [see our Parkwatch post below].

In any case, the success or otherwise of biodiversity conservation won’t depend on brilliant short term ideas. It will hang on the long term proper resourcing of those departments responsible for managing our public land: that’s the real implication of the above passages, and it’s to be hoped the treasurer, Tim Pallas, takes them seriously.

The document is full of praiseworthy but often vague aspirations, but on occasions it does get specific, as in this:

‘Estimate of relative area required to deliver statewide targets [by 2037]:

• 4 million hectares of control of pest herbivores (e.g. deer, rabbits, goats, feral horses) in priority locations.
• 1.5 million hectares of control of pest predators (e.g. foxes, feral cats) in priority locations.
• 1.5 million hectares of weed control in priority locations.
• 200,000 hectares of revegetation in priority areas for connectivity between habitats.
• 200,000 hectares of new permanently protected areas on private land.’

These figures are a standing indictment of neglect on the part of past governments, and of the failure of past Biodiversity strategies. Feral animals like horses and deer, for example, continue to wreak spectacular havoc in the Alps while governments nervously consider targets over the next 20 years; overstressed land managers confess that feral plants are more or less out of control; and the state is proposing to open logging in our vulnerable western forests. Will this document make a difference? We’ll see.

Here are some interestingly provocative quotes from Biodiversity 2037:

• ‘Native plants and animals have an intrinsic right to exist, thrive and flourish.’ But elsewhere in the document we read: ‘Human-induced changes to the environment have, in some situations, led to native species such as kangaroos, Noisy Miners, sea urchins, Sweet Pittosporum and Burgan becoming locally overabundant, often to the detriment of other native species. Coordinated planning and implementation may be needed to address over-abundance where there are significant impacts on biodiversity assets.’ This would seem to point in the direction of culling, though the document hedges its bets by considering ‘non-lethal methods of managing wildlife impacts’.
• ‘Climate change and population growth are expected to exacerbate existing threats and bring new challenges for Victoria’s biodiversity.’…But there’s no mention in the document of what, if anything,  to do about population growth.
• ‘Effective monitoring and evaluation will require increased, systematic and consistent data collection to ensure that management effectiveness and the assumptions built into the program (e.g. the impact of climate change) are clearly understood.’ It’s a pity that’s in the future tense: such monitoring should have been underpinning government actions for decades.
• ‘Continue to provide world class nature-based experiences through Zoos Victoria, Museum Victoria, Parks Victoria, the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, Philip Island Nature Park and alpine resorts.’ Mmm…the alpine resorts? Downhill skiing takes place on hills with a view, but is it a ‘nature based’ experience?

The Biodiversity document, like its predecessors, contains much of value. The fact that it’s so like its predecessors, however, suggests that there’s a long way to go.

The March edition of the VNPA’s Parkwatch magazine is now out, and can be found online here. It contains, among much else, informative stuff about Crusoe Reservoir, between Castlemaine and Bendigo; plans to log the wonderful Wellsford Forest, north of Bendigo; and details on truly awful projects to introduce commercial operations into the Alpine NP, Mount Buffalo NP and Wilson’s Prom. The outcome of some of these issues will be a real indicator of how serious the State Government is about biodiversity [see above].