Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

The objections by FOBIF and some local residents to current proposals to build a housing development at Diamond Gully were rejected at the Victorian Administrative Appeals Tribunal in December.

The VCAT decision was reported in detail in the Midland Express [December 11]. FOBIF made a submission, but was not represented at the appeal hearing, and the panel’s findings did not refer to our grounds of objection. These were, in substance, to do with fire and forest health.

It’s worth repeating that FOBIF has consistently made plain that we have no objection to a housing development in this area—consistent with protection of high quality bushland, and avoidance of high fire risk placement of housing.

Bushland near Castlemaine: evidence submitted to the Royal Commission showed that houses closer than 50 metres from the bush stood a 50-60% chance of being destroyed under extreme bushfire conditions.

Our submission read, in part:

‘The CFA had previously made an assessment of an adjoining subdivision west of this proposal [Friends of the Iron Bark Forests v Mt Alexander Shire [2011] VCAT 2181 (22 November 2011)]. The CFA assessed the vegetation here as being “Medium Forest” and hence requiring a defendable space of 50 or 60 meter…

‘With this proposal the surrounding forest to the west and the south is the same forest block as for the adjoining subdivision but here the CFA has required a defendable space of 30 meter …The defendable space for this subdivision needs to be at least 50 meter as it was for the adjoining subdivision.’

On this subject, the following comment on fire danger to housing by Macquarie University researchers is worth quoting:

‘The single variable that explains most of the vulnerability of a home to bushfire is its distance from the bush. Research conducted by Professor John McAneney and Dr Keping Chen in 2004 and 2010 mapped the location of houses destroyed in some major historical fires and their distance to the nearest bushland interface.

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The Poverty Gully management burn [CAS 008] was a Zone 1 fuel reduction exercise covering 99.6 hectares on the Castlemaine town side of the Dingo Park road, north of Poverty Gully Track. It was conducted late last year.

The Arthur’s Track burn [CAS 107] is a Zone 2 exercise covering 243 ha on the south side of the Poverty Gully Track. The two burns, CAS 008 and 107, are contiguous, but the Arthur’s Track exercise has been broken up: an area was done in November, and we assume the rest will be finished in Autumn. This is to take account of the presence in this zone of Castlemaine Spider Orchids, and Eltham Copper Butterfly colonies.

Fire fungus growing in the ash of the Poverty Gully fuel reduction burn. Zone 1 Asset protection burns are for fuel reduction only, but it's worth asking if the safety effect could be achieved with less environmental damage.

The purpose of Zone 1 reduction burns is fuel reduction to ‘provide the highest level of localised protection to human life and property.’ According to DSE’s Code of Practice fuel treatment ‘will be carried out through a combination of planned burning and other methods such as mowing, slashing or vegetation removal.’ The aim of the operation is to remove or substantially reduce surface and suspended fuels: in effect, we’re told, a burn aims to cover 90 % of the parcel in question.

There is no provision for ecological management in Zone 1 prescriptions, and DSE officers have frankly admitted that these are sacrificial zones, ecologically speaking. In particular, it’s envisaged that these areas can be burned every five years: the Tolerable Fire Interval for bushland in our region is at least ten years: that is, for bush to be able to regenerate fully it needs at least ten years between even mild fires. The system, therefore, must inevitably produce an impoverished environment. The only concession is that the Code of Practice directs that ‘the department will seek to moderate the negative impact as far as practicable.’ This is the price the community pays for safety.

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Here are some impressions of the Poverty Gully burns. We’ve divided them into six sections, and would be interested in any further member comments. We’ve made no effort to assess the burns’ success in reducing fuel.

The interdepartmental shemozzle problem

A comical touch?—the polythene sheeting put into the water race by Coliban Water a few years ago to prevent leakage was melted and burned to a black ash or slime. There’s a slight element of madness here: as this review is being written [January 31] water is flowing through the channel from Malmsbury. This channel is

Poverty Gully channel, February 5: Most of the sheeting put in by Coliban Water to reduce leakage from the channel was destroyed by the reduction burn--not a great advertisement for inter departmental consultation.

notoriously leaky, and it’s been suggested that it should be taken out of commission—but if water is going to be brought through it, it might as well be done as efficiently as possible. It’s not great that one Government body is burning down the work of another. DSE is bound by its protocols to consult with other relevant managers before conducting its burns, but we believe Coliban Water wasn’t consulted on this one.

The large tree problem

Large old trees are not a fuel hazard targeted by reduction burns, but FOBIF has found that it’s common for DSE fires to destroy these trees. This is a big loss to biodiversity with no gain for safety, and over the years we’ve puzzled over why it inevitably happens. Among possible answers: the managers on the ground don’t really know or care about ecology [true of a minority of DSE managers]; lack of knowledge of the burn parcel as to where valuable tree assets are [with increasingly large burn parcels, this is quite likely]; and lack of resources to identify and exclude valuable trees in the burn zone [the most likely explanation].

When compared to recent DSE ‘fuel reduction’ operations, like Ashby’s Track in North Castlemaine [an out and out artificial bushfire] and Tarilta Gorge [a travesty of an ‘ecological’ burn], CAS 008 and 107 are greatly superior jobs. Relatively few

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