How green is my gully

In the grey/brown bleakness of our bushlands at the moment you can still find a rare green spot–like the one below. Unfortunately in this case the reason for the green isn’t a natural one: it’s an apparently long standing leak in the Poverty Gully water race, which is currently flowing.

Below the Poverty Gully water race, Fryers Forest, February 17: the healthy sedge population is fed by persistent leaks from the race.

Water is put into this race a few times a year when allocations are available, to serve a small number of customers with rights. Over the years there have been mutterings about closing it down, and saving the water for use of the wider communities of Kyneton and Castlemaine.Maybe an even better use would be to put additional environmental flows into the suffering Coliban River.

The wastage of water through the primitive channel [constructed in the mid 1870s] must be enormous, though we’ve never been able to get a figure from Coliban water as to how much is lost through leakage and evaporation between Malmsbury and Castlemaine. The case can’t have been helped by the fact that a DELWP fuel reduction operation in 2013 inadvertently burned to cinders a lot of plastic sheeting put into the race as a water proofing exercise!

Leakage from the race, February 17: the race is a rough and ready construction, built in the 1870s, and leaks an unknown quantity of water.