Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

The photo below shows solar panels at the foot of the Fryers Forest fire tower. One has been smashed by rocks tossed over the quite high fence surrounding the tower.

Attacks on fire towers are not unheard of—reports from Gippsland last year included a depressing list of destructive actions: broken windows, graffiti, damaged ladders. One fire watcher reported being shot at…

There’s no easy solution to the problems of stupidity and mindless destructiveness: but given the importance of arson and vandalism in the fire equation, it’s hard to over emphasise the value of community education in making people aware of the responsibility we all have in dealing with the fire threat: more evidence that fire management is a lot more than just fuel reduction.

Mount Alexander Shire decided last week to continue using Glyphosate as part of its weed killing programs. The chemical is a constituent of the widely used weedkiller Roundup. There is evidence that, at least in some usages, it may cause serious health problems, including cancer: courts in the US have recently awarded huge damages against producer Bayer Montsanto because of the health impacts on workers heavily involved in using the chemical; and legal and political wrangles in Europe have increased pressure on agricultural producers to come up with an alternative.

Stinkwort on a Castlemaine roadside: it’s a pity Council is controlling weeds and apparently spreading them at the same time.

Glyphosate is, however, still authorised for use in Australia, and research is not conclusive about the level at which it becomes harmful not only to people, but to soil fertility.

In the mean time, here’s a simpler weed control challenge for the shire: how about we stop spreading weeds around on our machines?

A very large proportion of local roads which have undergone works of some kind in recent years have been infested with Stinkwort. It’s very clear that the weed has been spread on council machinery.

According to the late Ern Perkins’s Castlemaine Plant List, Stinkwort ‘ is a noxious weed and listed Restricted in central Victoria.  It grows strongly during the dry late summer months when most other vegetation is dormant. The plant taints dairy products and meat, can cause stock death by poisoning and bowel damage by the fluffy seed heads, and can cause dermatitis in humans.’

FOBIF has been hammering this drum for nearly ten years now. Protocols for cleaning machinery are pretty accessible. We’ve written to Council to suggest they be acted on.

Readers will remember our irritation at the plethora of Television commercials for recreational vehicles, encouraging irresponsible and environmentally damaging driving practices. We’ve decided to see if we can get an opinion on this matter from responsible authorities, and have written the  enquiry below to the Minister Road Safety, the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries and others. We’re not optimistic about a response. The gist of the letter follows [we’ll print responses if any as they come]:

We draw your attention to the current Television advertising campaign for Suzuki with the slogan ‘for fun’s sake’. The video can be found at https://www.bestadsontv.com/ad/102250/Suzuki-For-Funs-Sake . It has run frequently on broadcasts of AFL football. The film features a car careering through water and mud, and mindlessly circling a suburban roundabout.

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FOBIF has supported an objection by the Muckleford Forest Friends group to a mining exploration application for the forest by Kalamazoo resources.

Our objection is based on extreme caution about such exploration, mixed with bad experience with exploration and sampling exercises in the past. If you want an example, have a look at Dunn’s Reef in the adjoining Maldon Historic Reserve: the surrounding bush still hasn’t recovered from reckless bulldozing dating back 15 years.

The relevant parts of the Friends’ objection are set out below:

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Dja Dja Wurrung project officer Harley Douglas met with representatives from the Friends of Kalimna Park last weekend to discuss a projected management plan for the park. FOBIF was represented at the meeting.

The state government has allocated $200,000 for the development of the plan in the park and at Wildflower Drive in Bendigo. Further finance is available for implementation of the plan.

As we’ve previously reported, the Dja Dja Wurrung co-management plan Dhelkunya Ja (Healing Country) offers numerous creative possibilities for improved management of public land in our region (see our posts here here and here). We’ll report on further developments in this area in due course.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious even to those not interested in conservation that deer are now a serious problem in large areas of Victoria. Reports of serious damage to wineries, and safety concerns over illegal shooting and potential road accidents appear to have increase political pressure for control that the trashing of our bushland hasn’t been able to do.

FOBIF has joined its name to an open letter calling for a strong and effective feral deer management strategy for Victoria. The letter was coordinated by the Victorian National Parks Association, and has been signed by over 90 Landcare organisations, leading ecologists, agricultural groups and a range of other affected organisations and groups from across the state. The substance of the letter is as follows:

We are concerned that Victoria’s Draft Deer Management Strategy (2018) fell far short of addressing the considerable problems feral deer bring to peri-urban and regional communities, and to wetlands, catchments and the natural environment. We offer here some recommendations for the final strategy; it is a critical opportunity to control deer populations and to reverse the increasing impacts they are having.We agree with the rough estimate for the state’s deer population, as documented in the draft strategy, at ‘between several hundred thousand up to one million or more’. The population is growing rapidly at an exponential rate, and far exceeds the capacity for control by recreational hunters. Research into the native habitats of the four main species of deer in Victoria indicates that they can continue to extend their range, potentially occupying almost every habitat in the nation. Victoria’s biodiversity is at risk. Deer are seriously impacting Victoria’s finest natural areas, from the coast to the Grampians, from rainforest gullies to the high country. Almost every type of native plant is browsed by Sambar Deer, and trampling, breaking and ringbarking plants by antler rubbing all add to those impacts. Decades of volunteer and government-funded revegetation programs across Victoria have already been damaged or are now threatened by deer. The two largest species of deer, Sambar and Red, are both adapted to wet climates and make extensive use of bogs and wetlands where their wallowing, trampling and browsing has a major impact on water quality and quantity in our catchments.The livelihoods of farmers, especially in orchards, vineyards and market gardens, are being threatened; even backyards and gardens are invaded. The growth of illegal hunting due to the easy availability of deer has become a safety concern in many rural and semi-rural areas. Deer are an increasing hazard on our roads.

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The route for FOBIF’s April walk, next Sunday the 21st, has been changed. It will now start at the Hunters track dam, on the corner of Irishtown Track, and cover about 5 km, partly on tracks, some through bush along the Salters creek bed; there’ll be a couple of rough steep climbs. We suggest if people usually use walking poles they’d find them helpful. As it’s Easter Sunday and a short walk we plan to be back in town by 1 pm. For more information contact Julie Hurley or Rex Odgers 0427 002 913.

Viewers of sporting coverage on television last Friday might have noticed, if they weren’t asleep, a commercial for Suzuki, which featured a car tearing through a muddy road, then reversing, bouncing over some obstacle [possibly a dead body?]. The clip also featured a car being driven with brio round and round a suburban roundabout, accompanied by the slogan, ‘for fun’s sake’. You can look at the ad here   If you concentrate very hard, you’ll see at the bottom of the screen at the start the words ‘filmed under safe and controlled conditions’.

Image from a Suzuki TV commercial. The commercial’s main message is that sedate driving is for boring conformists.

Do such ads, which proudly feature environmental vandalism and unsafe driving, influence driver behaviour?

It’s an interesting question. The voluntary code of practice for motor vehicle advertising of the Federal Chamber of Automotive industries seems to suggest that they’re at least undesirable. The code features, among other things, the following:

… ‘use of disclaimers indicating that a particular scene or advertisement was produced under controlled conditions; using expert drivers….should be avoided.’[Our emphasis]

… ‘Advertisers should ensure that advertisements for motor vehicles do not portray…deliberate and significant environmental damage, particularly in advertising for off-road vehicles.’

Car advertisements regularly violate the second of these conditions and often promote unsafe driving. For some reason showing cars skidding through dust and gravel is a favourite theme of most of them. Skidding out donuts is another regular. Our favourite is a Toyota clip which shows a poor oppressed suburban bloke who sees a massive Toyota truck pull up alongside him in traffic. He instantly fantasises about skidding around sand dunes in that truck…then subsides into repressed good behaviour. But will he stay that way? Will the next episode show him in a cowboy hat, ripping up the country in a car which, as the ad proudly declares, ‘eats utes for breakfast.’ Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, we can see the effects of such propaganda on our roads and in our bushland. And we can pretty safely conclude that voluntary codes of conduct are a bit of a joke.

If you want to complain about a particular ad, you can do it at the Advertising Standards Bureau. Click here.

Signs of ‘fun’ on public highway, Taradale, June 2016: sights like these are common on our roads, and they are actively encouraged by TV advertising.