Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

The next two FOBIF walks (16 August and 20 September) are cancelled due to reintroduction of government restrictions on the number of people allowed to walk together. Hopefully we will be able to resume our walks on 18 October which will be the last walk for the year. Check out this website for updates. Details of the October walk are on our walks page.

FOBIF’s recommended lockdown reading for this week is a short article on a Golf Course!

The article by Megan Backhouse can be found here.

It’s to do with management of native vegetation on the Royal Melbourne course: ‘The club’s Black Rock golf courses ­… contain some of Melbourne’s best remaining patches of the sand-heathland habitat that once existed on low, coastal plains everywhere from St Kilda to Frankston.’ This vegetation is carefully managed to coexist with the sport of golf.

The club’s horticulture manager Jim Moodie has to work to get golfers to see what he’s doing: not all players appreciate native vegetation. Some, in fact, don’t even see it. One player told journalist Megan Backhouse, without rancour, that ‘there aren’t any plants’ in one carefully signposted area. Clearly, the management program needs an educational component.

Among other methods used by Jim Moodie , is ‘a tight schedule of ecological burns. The fires are conducted in March and April, with each area burned no more than once every eight years to give time for plants to re-establish and to return a good seed bank to the soil.’ Each burn ‘lasts for about 20 minutes.’

‘After the fire, shrubs such as Leptospermum myrsinoides, which had become old and woody, re-shoot from the base or from seeds in the soil and take on a more wispy habit. With the height knocked back, more light is allowed in, which gives small grasses, sundews and other low-lying wildflowers a chance to thrive. The burning also stimulates the germination of seeds in the soil and helps to regenerate orchids, with some starting to flower more prolifically and, sometimes, previously unseen ones reappearing.’

A twenty minute fire! Now, that’s serious micro management, accompanied by impressive attention to detail…and over areas that are tiny compared to DELWP’s smallest burn area.

We shouldn’t forget that Royal Melbourne has lots of money, and can afford to be enlightened.

DELWP and Parks Victoria, by contrast, manage vast areas, and are cash strapped. They can plead that it’s impossible to manage public land like that . True—up to a point. Yet we should expect some level of attention to detail from them, and some level of careful organisation and informed management.

All of the above seem to have been lacking in last month’s catastrophic Maldon land grooming exercise.

Late last month Forest Fire Management crews groomed a significant area of Parks Victoria managed land on the south eastern edge of Maldon township.

Grooming (that is, slashing to ground level) is common fuel reduction technique close to urban areas, in preference to reduction burns.

One of the workers conducting the exercise told Maldon Landcare that the area was ‘weeds and dead stuff’. The problem is that in fact it contained one of the most successful and biodiverse areas of land restoration in the region.

Phoenix Street revegetation plot: two trees and a couple of shrubs left to show for 16 years of restoration work.

The land in question contained a plot of 7000 square metres of impressive biodiversity, the product of 16 years of restoration work. Work in the area was started in 1990 by Maldon Land Protection Group, and extensive plantings were put into this 7000 square metre block by Maldon Urban Landcare in 2004. Maintenance work has continued since then.  An account of the project can be found here.

The destruction of sixteen years work in a few days is a demoralising blow to Landcarers: not the best way to encourage volunteers to work on restoring public land. Here are a number of questions arising from this exercise:

1. The land in question is not listed for action in the current Fire Operations Plan. So how does it fit into DELWP’s fire protection strategy?
2. Given that the works are not listed in the Fire Operations plan, community members could not have been aware of them in advance. So why was there no effort to notify interested groups of the impending works?
3. Further: does no one in DELWP check on the biodiversity value of land before starting work on it?
4. And: were the workers briefed about the nature of the land they were clearing? Well, obviously not: so, why not?

FOBIF has tried contacting DELWP fire management with these questions. We’ll let you know if we get an answer.

Maybe as important as all of the above is this: workers should be fully briefed.

The golfer’s artless comment that ‘there aren’t any plants’ in a recently burned patch exactly replicates the comment made by one of the workers to Maldon Landcare: ‘they were grooming weeds and dead stuff.’

Those ‘weeds and dead stuff’ were healthy native plants, many of them obviously in flower.

It comes down to two things:

First: all the land management policy documents and protocols in the world are useless if the workers on the ground are not well informed about the job, and fully on side with the conservation side of it;

And second: fire protection should never be seen as completely separate from (or even in opposition to) biodiversity and ecological health. As long as these two are separate we’ll  continue to get disasters like this one.

Prevailing wisdom in the political class envisages big population increases in Victoria in the next few decades. Whether these increases are a good idea, or will prove to be illusions after COVID 19 is not clear, but in any case the state parliament is running an enquiry into ‘the current and future arrangements to secure environmental infrastructure…for a growing population in Melbourne and across regional centres.’

In the Lushington Hill bushland reserve. Areas of bushland in urban or urban fringe areas are part of what the enquiry wants to ‘secure’ for the benefit of people.

‘Environmental infrastructure’ sounds complicated, but is simple: it includes ‘parks and open space, sporting fields, forest and bushland, wildlife corridors and waterways’. The enquiry is mainly interested in land ‘within or close to urbanised areas.’

You don’t have to be very sharp to get that this list includes the very thing that DELWP staff have just devastated in Maldon: bushland close to an urban area, popular for recreation by townspeople. We’re hearing a lot about the very real mental health problems caused by COVID 19 and the resultant lockdown: pleasant places close to home are a substantial benefit to mental health, and should be looked after, not trashed by the very people trusted to manage them.

We suggest that readers have a go at submitting on this one. A few words would be enough, to plant the idea that one good way to ‘secure environmental infrastructure’ would be for government employees to refrain from destroying environmental assets.

Submissions are due on September 28 via

Email to eii@parliament.vic.gov.au; or

eSubmission at www.parliament.vic.gov.au/eii; or

Hard copy to:The Committee ManagerLegislative Assembly Environment and Planning Committee, Parliament House, Spring Street,EAST MELBOURNE  VIC  3002

Email or eSubmissions are preferred, owing to staff problems arising from the virus.