Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

FOBIF has made a number of specific suggestions in its submission to the MAS Shire council draft environment strategy. Readers will remember we criticised the draft strategy for being abstract and general…tending to waffle, in fact.

The substance of the FOBIF submission is set out below:

‘We understand that a strategy designed to direct council activities for 10 years should be general and flexible enough to accommodate changed circumstances. Nevertheless, we are disappointed by the extreme vagueness of parts of the document.

Green waste dumped near Morgan’s Track: green rubbish is potentially more harmful than other types because of its capacity to spread. We suggest that Council should check out specific ways of reducing this problem.

‘We would like to make the following points:

1. ‘On pages 10 and 12 reference is made to the ESD [‘ecologically sustainable development’] leadership, the ESD team, and the Council’s Green Team. Who are they? The fact that these terms are not defined makes the authority structure of the document quite vague.

2. ‘Page 11: Council leadership by example: ‘appropriate ecotechnologies such as LED streetlights, and using Council’s unique statutory responsibilities to further ESD aims e.g. rate rebates for properties with a conservation covenant in place.’

‘We believe such aims need to be carefully thought through in the detail. For example, we would suggest that rate rebates should be considered for any landholder with positive conservation practices. The singling out of covenanted properties is certain to create counterproductive social tension, and would effectively penalise farmers with good land management practices.

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Looking for  a few new ideas tossed up in good company?

The 2015 Mount Alexander Landcare Forum and Dinner will be held at the Campbells Creek Community Centre on Friday 19 June from 3.00 pm.

The program is as follows:

–3:00pm Welcome

–3:30pm Agroforestry & Landcare – A productive partnership? With Ben Boxshall from the Northern United Forestry Group and Wood 4 Good.

–Afternoon Tea

–4:30pm Applying Indigenous Fire Knowledge to Pasture management With Brendon Kennedy, Indigenous Facilitator from the North East CMA

–5:30pm Saving the Silver Banksias of Baynton Sidonia With Clare Claydon from Baynton Sidonia Landcare Group

–6:15pm Dinner and presentation on The Lake Bolac Eel Festival & Healing Walk with Una Allender & Brett Clarke – who will be performing some of his own songs at the forum.

The event is free to Landcare members and $10 for non members. RSVP to Max Schlachter by June 12 at max@connectingcountry.org.au or 5472 1594m

The weather on Sunday (17th May) was perfect for our FOBIF walk into the Nuggetty Range. Thirty-three people came along and it was good to see some newcomers to FOBIF on the walk.

Walkers enjoying the sun and morning tea at a high point on the Range.

The group was ably led by geologist, Brian Cuffley, who had prepared maps and an introductory handout. The Nuggetty Range, he explained

is part of the metamorphic aureole surrounding the Harcourt Granite to the north. The granite has heated and hardened the slate and sandstone bedrock and has produced a hard flinty rock called hornfels. Hornfels is very resistant to erosion, thus it has formed a range about the granite which has weathered away more rapidly.

This rock from the Nuggetty Gold Mine shows the contact between granite (right) and hornsfel (left).

Looking into the Nuggetty Gold Mine.

From the Nuggetty Gold Mine, the walk continued in a westerly direction to the lunch spot at the Rock of Ages (Mt Moorul). This location also had a terrific scenic outlook. Walkers then proceeded along the Rock of Ages Track to the beginning point on the corner of Church Street and Davies Lane, Maldon.

Our next walk will be led by Bernard Slattery in the Goughs Range. See walks page for more info.

The FOBIF AGM will be held on Monday July 27 at 7.30 pm at the Ray Bradfield Rooms, beside Victory Park Castlemaine.

The guest speaker will be Sarah Lloyd, author of the remarkable book, Where the slime mould creeps, a guide to common–and strangely beautiful–life forms you never even knew existed. Put it in the diary!

Walkers along the Moonlight Creek edge of Kalimna Park in the last week have been puzzled by the fact that DELWP seems to have gone to a lot of trouble to protect a mountain of blackberries from its recent management burn. This involved carving a fire break around the area, about 50 metres long, and grooming surrounding areas of vegetation.

The mountain of blackberries is more than it seems, however: it conceals–or mostly conceals–a nineteenth century ruin, with adjacent orchard. Looked at with that in mind, it’s quite an evocative sight.

You could walk past it and see only blackberries, but it’s actually a historic site, probably dating from the 1870s. The wall of the ruin is to the right.

FOBIF had assumed that after the fire exercise had been finished, Parks Victoria would go back and remove the blackberries from the ruin. This is not the case: it’s a depressing fact that the weed is being left there, because it is seen as a deterrent to vandals who might be inclined to come and steal stone from the building.

This isn’t great news, given that there’s a big infestation of blackberry in nearby Moonlight Creek, and this particular weed has expanded its range dramatically since the breaking of the drought. But there’s logic in the managers’ position. Vandalism, in the form of graffiti on historic sites, and removal of relics and building materials, is an international problem. And, believe it or not, weeds have some kind of a record in protecting historic sites: as an example, an Aboriginal stone arrangement in the Western District was protected for many years by an infestation of thistles!

Mount Alexander Shire has released a draft Environment Strategy 2015-2025 for public comment. The draft can be found here

FOBIF will be making a brief submission on the draft, and urges members to do likewise. At first sight, the document looks fatally infected with woolly jargon [‘The overarching challenge is to move from an exploitative relationship with our planet to a symbiotic one, both in spirit and action’] and grandiose aims [‘Environmentalism and sustainability become mainstream’], and weak on specifics—but we’ll be making a perhaps more considered response to the draft by the closing date of May 14.

Stinkwort on the Colles Rd footpath: there are outbreaks on major and minor roads in the region, and they look as if they’ve been spread by machinery.

Here’s an illustration of the way in which nice but vague aims can give the impression you’re doing one thing, when in fact you may be doing the opposite: residents may have noticed outbreaks of the noxious weed Stinkwort on many of our roadsides and tracks: Forest Creek Track in Chewton, Colles road footpath, Midland Highway, Vaughan Springs road, and Joseph Young Drive on Mt Alexander among them. These outbreaks look suspiciously as if they come from road maintenance machinery, and some of them look like Council responsibility. This has happened at least once before, when Council machines spread the weed around newly landscaped areas in the Wesley Hill industrial estate, then had to go back and eradicate it.

A check of the Shire’s Roadside Conservation Management Plan 2012-17 shows the following aims:

• ‘Improve conservation values and connectedness of roadsides to bushlands and adjacent farms.
• ‘Reduce fuel for fire and increase bushfire preparedness consistent with recommendations of Royal Commission into the Black Saturday Fires.
• ‘Reduce feral animals and control the spread of existing weeds and avoid outbreak of new weed species on roadsides.’

These laudable aims are unfortunately not backed by a more modest and practical one: ‘clean Council machinery, so that Council does not inadvertently spread weeds instead of controlling them.’ Simple [though tiresome] procedures have long existed for this, and are urged by Federal authorities as a way of limiting the $4 billion we lose every year through weed infestations.

If enough submissions make the point clearly, the Shire’s Environment Strategy might be made much tighter and more practical. Submissions are easy to make at the Shire’s link above. Have a go!