Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

Check out the two photos below, taken at the same point on the Porcupine Ridge road, 11 years apart:

The top photo was taken in August 2012, at the height of a Cup Moth infestation. The bottom photo was taken last week. Notice the difference?

In 2012 the charmingly attractive and very unpleasant Cup Moth (Doratifera sp) was laying waste to our bushlands, and especially the Red Stringybark eucalypts. The bush was pretty dismal, and it wasn’t hard to find people wondering if the forest was actually going to die.

As you can see from the above photos, predictions of doom were at least premature. Tree recovery has been good. You can still, however, see signs of the past crisis, in the number of  trees which have only partly recovered, and the number which didn’t survive the attack.

Porcupine Ridge Road, February 2023: skeletal branches and dead trees are reminders of insect attack ten years ago, but forest recovery has been good.

These observations are necessarily crude. What we’d really like is to see the detailed monitoring done by managers over the last 20 years as part of their fuel reduction program. This forest has weathered a long drought, serious insect infestations and management fire over this period. What has been the result, in detail? We don’t know, because we haven’t seen the abovementioned monitoring, if it exists.

The bush on the right of the photos above is scheduled for a management burn in the next couple of years [see our posts here and here].

In case you’re confused, DELWP has changed its name: it’s now the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action.

Alison Pouliot has extended a warm welcome to all FOBIF members and supporters to the launch of her new book Underground Lovers: Encounters with Fungi, There will be several launch venues in Central Victoria including:

Friday 3 March Newham

Wednesday 15 March Hepburn Springs

Tuesday 18 April Lockwood South

Sales of FOBIF’s guides are going so well that all five books will be reprinted before autumn is over. All books have now gone through multiple reprints. Unfortunately costs have risen, and we’ve been obliged to raise the price of the eucalypt, wattle and pea guides to $15 a copy from the end of this month. All money from our sales is devoted to reprinting costs–no profits are made from our books, nearly ten thousand of which have now sold.

And a reminder: The FOBIF 25 show at the Newstead Arts Hub will be opened by Alison Pouliot at 10.30 next Saturday the 25th. Alison is a charismatic and engaging speaker. Make the trip!

Parks Victoria has completed its network of new walks centred on the Garfield Wheel trailhead in the Castlemaine Diggings NHP. Maps and descriptions can be found here.

The new walks are marked by distinctive posts, and supported by online maps you can get by downloading the free Avenza map. The supporting note packages give plenty of detail about mining practices, and one of the walks, the short Garfield Bush walk, has notes on the local vegetation and bird life.

Nature creeps back: Breutelia moss colonising a mullock heap at the Nimrod mine. Mosses and fungi are highlights of winter walking at the Welsh Village.

Note that the new walks overlap somewhat with the Welsh Village walks in FOBIF’s local walks guide. The changed conditions make some of our directions hard to follow. A new edition of this guide will soon be published incorporating changes on the ground. In the mean time, walkers using our book should follow our maps carefully (they’re better than the Avenza ones, anyway).

The new track system certainly sparks up what was perhaps a tired precinct. The accompanying heritage notes might be a bit heavy on technical detail, but some of them are provocatively interesting. Take this, on the Garfield crushing battery:

‘Quartz was tipped into the battery from the raised tramline and pounded to sand by the stampers. The battery sand was mixed with water into a slurry and forced through mesh screens onto the sloping aprons or concentrating tables (also known as blankets). These were covered by copper sheets coated with mercury, which caught and amalgamated with the gold.

‘Periodically, the gold-mercury amalgam was scraped off the copper sheets and heated to vaporise the mercury and release the gold. Once cooled, the mercury was reused. The miners involved in this process would probably have suffered from mercury poisoning.

‘Mercury is a neurotoxin which damages the part of the brain that co-ordinates movement. It also harms the kidneys and other organs. Although it is illegal to use mercury in gold mining in many countries today, there are an estimated 10-15 million unregulated gold miners operating in 70 countries. About 15% of the world’s gold is produced by small-scale miners. Mercury is still widely used, causing irreversible neurological damage to workers.’

This is an uncommon example of heritage notes straying away from local colour and into the drama of life as it’s lived, and is welcome.

There are some disappointing features in these notes, probably typical of heritage discourse generally. A few examples:

–The Quartz Hill walk notes describe puddling wheels, but somehow forget to point out that these were seriously polluting. Captain Bull tried unsuccessfully to get them banned in 1855.

Near the Nimrod mine: A eucalypt perches precariously on the impressive slate wall; feral pines are invading from the plantations; a small flowering Acacia implexa softens the scene on the left; impressive patches of Purple Coral-pea are covering the bare earth. The mining landscape has many layers: ‘heritage’ notes which concentrate on technical details about mining fail to catch the reality of a changing landscape.

–When you compare the detail given to mining techniques, not enough is made of the Pennyweight Flat children’s cemetery. This is where environmental degradation runs crash into human life, and the result is seriously haunting. A feature of this location is the fine Grey Box trees, somehow framing the devastating reality below.

–the notes on sluicing are extraordinarily bland. The long term effect on our waterways was disastrous. How hard is it to say this?

— there’s a pleasant ‘goldfields treasure hunt’ sheet for ‘Junior Rangers’: participants are invited to search for 16 goldfields features. Apart from ‘coppiced trees’, all features are shafts, chimneys, and so on. We’d like to have seen, in addition, perhaps, ‘Native cherry’. Or even ‘destroyed waterway.’ There are plenty on offer.

Breutelia affinis with fungus: highlights of a winter walk in the Welsh Village area. You could say that they are ‘goldfields treasures’ too.