Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

The September issue of the Wombat Forestcare newsletter is now available online. As usual it’s a great read. You can find it here.

The issue includes a terrific article on Currawongs, a sobering item on the effect of rodent poison on bird populations, and a terrifically informative environmental history of the Wombat Forest–especially relevant given the VEAC recommendations currently before the State Government…and much else. Strongly recommended.

As we mentioned some weeks ago, visitors to Mount Alexander have been shocked by the tree clearance operation conducted there in the last two months.

Mount Alexander: as always, the question is, could safety be achieved without environmental damage?

Enquiries as to the rationale for the works have been a bit of an adventure.

Parks Victoria assured us it was a Council matter.

Council assured us it wasn’t them and referred us back to Parks, or DELWP.

A second Parks source told us they’d agreed to the need for tree management, but it was DELWP fire managers who were responsible.

The first fire manager we spoke to told us he just arranged the contractors, but he hadn’t managed the project.

Finally, a second DELWP manager was able to give us some details. He informed us that the reason for the operation was not fire protection, but road safety. The two objectives were to remove trees leaning over the road and likely to fall; and to remove trees which reduced the parking area at the side of the road and therefore increased collision risk if maintenance workers had to stop for any reason. We’re told that a motorcyclist had crashed into one such truck forced to park in a place intruding on the roadway.

It seems that there had also been complaints by the CFA about lack of room at roadsides to manoeuvre trucks.

The overarching reason, in short, was road safety. We are assured that every tree removed was individually assessed. Any tree within 3 metres of the road, or outside that limit and ‘likely’ to fall, was targeted.

On the subject of trees leaning across the road, FOBIF understands the rationale of removal, though in the last 20 years we’ve seen nothing more than small wattles blocking half the road; and it’s quite clear that to achieve absolute safety you’d have to clear every tree within ten metres of the roadside, reducing the roadway, and the Park, to a desert. It seems to us that in many cases pruning rather than destruction would have achieved the required end…but of course that would be more expensive. The job was done by contractors, who are cheaper than a DELWP crew would have been. Would a DELWP crew have done a better job? We’ll never know.

As to providing enough space on the roadside for parking vehicles we’re  sceptical. If DELWP workers are forced to intrude on the road, they could possibly do what workers do on highways: put witches hats out, and warning signs.

Roadside works, Mount Alexander. Correct us if we’re wrong, but it looks like the works have actually reduced the amount of space on the roadside. Would judicious pruning have done the job better?

Of course, if you really wanted roadside parking space all along the road you’d have to bulldoze plenty of embankments and do all sorts of major engineering works.

And on the subject of there being enough room for vehicles to pass each other abreast: the day after the snowfall on the Mount a few weeks ago, there were hundreds of sightseers up there enjoying the snow. Cars manoeuvred around each other without any trouble. It’s a mountain road, you see, and has to be handled like one.

Lastly, on the question of safety for general traffic: if there’s concern about this [and we haven’t seen statistics for accidents on this road] one answer is perfectly clear. Reduce the speed limit. Joseph Young Drive is not a highway or a major transport link. It’s very popular with road cyclists. No one should be driving on it in a hurry–on the contrary, it’s very definitely a road from which to enjoy the environment–or was, until the recent massacre.

But reducing the speed limit would offend one of our society’s most sacred principles. Or that should possibly be sacred cows. As we’ve seen repeatedly in recent times, the environment is being made to pay for our obsession with speed and mobility.

In the last 20 years the problem most regularly confronted by FOBIF is that of track ‘improvements.’ We have complained with boring frequency to DELWP and Parks Victoria that almost every time a track is ‘improved’, the ‘improvement’ includes a widening of about a foot each side.

And we’re prepared to admit that our boring persistence has been completely useless. Usually we get the bland response, ‘Yes, the contractor was supervised; yes, our brief is to keep all works inside the track footprint. Really? Your photo shows the track has been gouged dramatically, taking out all that vegetation? That can’t be true!’ Oh, yes it can.

We believe that under new native title regulations any such widening now requires special authorisation—maybe that will bring a bit more attentiveness to the job?

In the mean time here are some recent works, courtesy of the taxpayer– you. Does it make any difference that a bit of vegetation has been scalped here and there? You decide: in our opinion the incremental effects over time make a very big difference.

Phillips Track, Maldon. This track has been significantly widened, with the occasional plant gouged out…evidently for safety reasons?

Gough’s Range State Forest: this benign track has had a good half metre added to it, for good measure.