Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

Parks Victoria has closed the Loop Track to vehicles at the south end of the Diggings Park, in an effort to control the spread of a possible infestation of Cinnamon Fungus in the area. FOBIF walkers had expressed concerns some months ago about the deaths of numerous plants along Loop Track and the southern end of Porcupine Ridge Road, near the Goldfields Track. Suspecting possible presence of the fungus, Parks undertook to take soil tests and consider limiting access. This closure is the result.

Scented Bush-pea die off, Porcupine Ridge Road, Summer 2023…

‘Known variously as die back, root rot and Jarrah dieback, PC and Phytophthora, Cinnamon Fungus derives its name from the bark of Cinnamon trees where it was initially isolated in Sumatra in 1922. Phytophthora literally means plant killer and this pathogen has lived up to its name, destroying vast tracts of vegetation around the world.

‘It is listed in the top 100 of the world’s most invasive species and is Victoria’s most significant plant pathogen affecting both native ecosystems and the horticultural industry.

Dead bushes, spring 2023. Cinnamon fungus is the suspect. Walkers should clean their footwear before going into the area.

‘Cinnamon fungus was first detected in Australia in 1935 and has since spread across the country infecting hundreds of thousands of hectares of native vegetation in Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland. Heathlands, coastal woodlands and dry Eucalypt forests are most at risk.

‘Within Victoria, the pathogen has had serious impacts in the Brisbane Ranges, Grampians, Great Otway, Lower Glenelg, Point Nepean, Kinglake, Croajingalong and Wilsons Promontory National Parks in addition to Lerderderg State Park, Lake Tyers, Anglesea Heathlands and the coastal forests of east and south Gippsland.’

The pathogen (it’s not actually a fungus!) is easily spread by soil adhering to car tyres and walkers’ boots. Walkers entering affected areas should clean their gear before and after each trip. FOBIF strongly recommends that anyone entering such an area pay particular attention to footwear. Cleaning spray will be available to all participants on our monthly walks this year.

For more information check https://wild.com.au/news/prevent-cinnamon-fungus-spread/

Over 70 Victorian conservation groups, including FOBIF, signed an open letter to Victorian Premier, Jacinta Allen, late last year, urging better management of Central West forests. The letter was initiated by the VNPA and Wombat Forestcare, and reads as follows:

Congratulations on your recent appointment to Premier.

We celebrated the Victorian Government’s 2021 public commitment to create new protected areas. We applauded the decision to end native forest logging in the east of Victoria by 1 January 2024. In doing so your government acknowledged the incredible natural diversity and cultural importance of these areas.

Yet VicForests has plans to log over 60,000 hectares in the fragmented and cleared landscape of the west. If your agencies continue to log this habitat, plants and animals like Powerful Owls, Brush-tailed Phascogales and Mt Cole Grevillea risk becoming locally extinct.

It’s now time to demonstrate leadership by permanently protecting the surviving wildlife, forests and woodlands of western Victoria. It’s time to look after the complex web of natural life in these forests and restore what we have left. We call on you to immediately:

• Halt the taxpayer-funded destruction of our natural heritage and end native forest logging statewide.
• Legislate the promised Wombat-Lerderderg, Mount Buangor and Pyrenees national parks.
• Cease all firewood harvesting in Wellsford Forest and include it in the Greater Bendigo National Park.
• Enact formal protections promised for the nature-rich Cobaw Conservation Park, and other regional parks and conservation reserves.

This is a rare opportunity to create a profound legacy for future generations and:

• Provide vital habitat for over 370 rare and threatened animals and plants.
• Support First Nations joint management of new parks.
• Help reduce the impacts of climate disruption by trapping millions of tonnes of stored carbon.
• Support rural and regional livelihoods through visitation and nature-based tourism.
• Protect river headwaters that flow from these forests to create water security for farms and communities.
• Help forestry workers to transfer their skills to nature-positive jobs.

Creating new national parks and phasing out destructive native forest logging isn’t only about protecting wildlife and beautiful places. It’s about clean air and water, a liveable climate and people’s livelihoods.

FOBIF has questioned fire officers about their management of a parcel of land at the junction of Irishtown and Hunter’s Tracks in the Fryers forest.

The 17 hectare zone has been carved into several smaller zones by brutal gouging of mineral earth breaks. Two of these zones have been quite savagely burned: many trees, including big ones, have been destroyed, and canopy scorch, indicating probable death, affects about half the trees in the zones.

The zone before the fire…

DEECA has informed us that this exercise was conducted ‘for training purposes only’, and that other sections in the zone will be burned for the same reason over some years.

‘Training’ fires, as we understand them, are lit to teach fire officers to investigate aspects of fire behaviour, including how a fire might have been ignited. They are obviously useful exercises for all sorts of reasons…

…and after. Many trees felled, many more canopy scorched, whose survival is in doubt.

But is it necessary to destroy the bush in order to achieve their purposes?

Interestingly, the zone in question is not listed as ‘training’ or ‘fire investigation’ in the Joint Fuel Management Plan released for consultation some months ago. In that document it appears as a ‘Landscape Management Zone,’ the intention of which is ‘To provide bushfire protection by reducing overall fuel hazard and bushfire hazard in the landscape.’ LMZ is the mildest of DEECA’s fuel management strategies. What we’ve seen at Hunter’s Track is almost bushfire intensity.

Here’s another thought: the photo below shows a sawn off stump, sprouting already in the middle of an earth break. As well as being cute, it’s a sign of hope: The bush is tenacious.

Resprouting eucalypt, Hunters track. It’s a sign of regeneration–but what kind of regeneration?

On the other hand, it poses a question: when the bush is burned severely, it regenerates profusely, creating a greater fuel hazard than existed before. DEECA acknowledges this. As an example: a zone on the other side of Hunter’s track, which had been burned some years ago, is now head high in flammable Cassinia.

And a further question: other exercises we have monitored, like Wewak Track, have shown riotous growth of some species–but the effect on the biology of the area generally is only patchily known. That is an unsettling thought.

We’ve requested an on site meeting with fire officers.

All members and supporters are welcome at the FOBIF breakup in Walmer starting at 6pm on Monday 11 December. You can find out all about it here.

Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests is having a BBQ at Bronwyn Silver’s place in Walmer on Monday 11 December.

It starts at 6 pm and the address is 1036 Muckleford-Walmer Road, Walmer.

BYO
*  food to share, including something for the BBQ if you like
*  plates, glasses, cutlery
*  drinks
*  a chair

All FOBIF members and supporters are welcome. Enquires Bronwyn: 0448751111.

Bioblitz is a great opportunity for people to get out in the bush, parks or their gardens and become citizen scientists. It increases understanding and interest in biodiversity and contributes enormously to the scientific databases of thousands of species and their distribution. There is also the exciting possibility of finding a species new to science. You can find out how to be involved here. 

This year Castlemaine Field Naturalists Club is the host for the Castlemaine region project, comprising Mount Alexander Shire and the eastern half of Hepburn Shire. Local events are shown below. 

If you haven’t seen it, get along to the Castlemaine Gallery and check out its Stonework exhibition. This exhibition combining geological exhibits and related works of art offers an intriguing set of insights into our landscape. If for no other reason, it’s worth going just to see the amazing 1853 Selwyn geological survey map of this region (see our previous post on this wonder here ).

The exhibition is described as follows:

‘There are many ways of looking at a stone. For First Nations artists with a deep knowledge of their Country, stones and rock formations have a spiritual and cultural energy as well as intrinsic and material qualities of colour, sharpness, hardness, weight.

Section of the 1853 Selwyn map. The late Gerry Gill described it as ‘full of quiet calm, still, beautiful’…but also ‘terrible, disturbing’, because it recorded a landscape in the process of dramatic transformation.

‘A different attitude to stones developed in Europe in the 19th century. Sharp-eyed natural historians turned their attention to mountains and valleys and developed a controversial new discipline – Geology. These quarrelsome thinkers challenged the traditional view, based on the Biblical studies, that the Earth was only 6,000 years old. Many artists had a working knowledge of these dangerous new ideas. And with the discovery of gold in the Castlemaine region in the early 1850s, an obsession with faults and seams, uplift and anticline was almost universal in Central Victoria.

‘With rocks in mind, works by Louis Buvelot, Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin, W. B. McInnes, Elma Roach and Penleigh Boyd show landscapes that are dynamic and alive, constantly weathering, warping, folding, eroding, erupting or sinking.

‘Contemporary artists, sculptors, photographers and jewellers also reveal unexpected aspects of rock and stone: geometry, ritual, even relationships to memory and trauma. Contemporary artists include Stephen Bram, Alvin Darcy Briggs, Pete Curly, Brodie Ellis, Sally Marsland and Felix Wilson.

‘The exhibition also includes historical maps: the work of geologists and cartographers from the Geological Survey of Victoria, who in the 19th century meticulously surveyed and mapped both the visible and the subterranean flows of rock and sediment. While in the 20th century, local amateur enthusiasts returning home with pockets full of stones, have created the rock collections which fill the museum cases. Specimens of minerals and fossils ground the exhibition in the physical world and introduce the viewer to the concept of deep time.’

Forest Fire management proposes to burn 311 hectares of the Maldon Historic Reserve, near the railway reserve. There are a few questions, contradictions and complexities attached to this burn proposal: see our Posts, with a map, here, here and here. The area is a biodiversity hotspot, and environmentalists have concerns about this exercise. They met with fire officers last week to discuss some of them. Local representatives from Maldon, Muckleford and Castlemaine, including FOBIF, were organised by the Friends of the Maldon Historic Reserve.

Grevillea micrantha, Maldon Historic Reserve: it’s critically endangered, and its reaction to fire is uncertain.

Whatever the complexities, fire officers are adamant that this patch of bushland has reached a ‘trigger point’ of fuel accumulation, and needs reduction. The group walked over a section of the zone, near Donkey Farm track, and several ideas were fielded on the challenge of reconciling the apparently contradictory aims in fire management.

Among other ideas raised, Indigenous ranger Trent Nelson described the forest in this area as ‘sick’, and in need of ‘gardening’. The idea of ‘forest gardening’ is new to most people. You can find it explained here. It is quite different from the approaches currently practised by forest managers, including the proposed reduction burns.

One thing all do agree on: the area in question is particularly rich in biodiversity (it’s looking great right now). What no one is confident about is, how fire affects the various species of plants in the area. Of particular interest is the presence of Grevillea micrantha, a critically endangered species. How will it react to fire? It would seem logical that managers would have access to detailed research info on this question, which would enable them to go about their business more effectively. It seems they don’t.

As we’ve emphasised before, management of anything complex should be based on detailed knowledge. This is blindingly obvious when you’re talking, for example, of the maintenance of an Airbus A340. It seems, though, that in the management of an infinitely more complex phenomenon, a native forest, broad brush techniques will have to do: and though fire officers bend over backwards to accommodate biodiversity concerns, fuel reduction overrules other considerations.

The burn will go ahead in autumn. A second thing everyone seems to agree on now: a patchy cool burn is better than a large area hot one, both from a fuel reduction and a biodiversity point of view.

A packed house attended FOBIF’s AGM last Monday to hear Cassia Read’s talk ‘Gardening the Goldfields: you can have your roses and Blue Wrens too?’

Cassia giving her talk. Photo Asha Bannon

A major theme in the info-packed talk was to present the garden as part of the wider environment, as well as an island in it. Of course, gardens meet the aesthetic, practical and emotional needs of the resident-gardener—but they also can provide food, shelter, water and habitat for local native wildlife. Cassia encouraged listeners to see their gardens as links in the neighbourhood to other gardens and to local bushland, critical stopping points for mixed-flocks of bushland birds, that forage across the local urban landscape.

Insects, bugs, and creeping things get a bad press generally, but they were heroes in this vision, signs and sources of health in the garden. Above all, the talk was not prescriptive: Cassia urged gardeners to open mindedly observe what was happening in the garden, to be prepared to try things, to look around the neighbourhood to see how their gardens could complement others.

One of the photos in Cassia’s talk: Julie Hurley’s fledgling garden.

We’re hoping Cassia’s talk will be a preview of a Gardening the Goldfields book FOBIF is looking to publish in…the near future.