Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

FOBIF and Castlemaine Field Naturalists representatives met with fire officers in the Fryers Forest in February to discuss differences of opinion about fire. The discussion was lengthy and clarified [again] the difference in outlook of the two groups. The following points of contention were discussed:

1. The question of litter as a dangerous fuel .
2. The question of tussocks as fuel
3. The question raised by research: do long unburned forests burn less fiercely in bushfires?
4. The question of damage caused by canopy scorch.
5. The destruction of big trees in management burns, both accidental and deliberate
6. Fire and forest health: what do we know about the long term effect of management burns, both on biodiversity and on flammability?
7. The consequence of rating public safety as ‘number one’, and environmental health ‘number two’: does this inevitably lead to biodiversity damage in remoter forests?
8. A subject which didn’t come up: how the zoning system works. In particular, what’s the rationale behind ‘burn exclusion zones’?
9. Small burns/large burns: what’s the desirability and practicality of these?

Here are some details:

Litter

For managers, 75% of the fuel danger lies in surface and near surface fuels—ie, litter. There are two perspectives on litter:

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Our May walk next Sunday starts at the Monster Meeting site on Golden Point Road and follows the Forest Creek Track from Chewton to Expedition Pass Reservoir (Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park). We’ll meet at the Community House as usual to car pool, and pick up extra participants at the Chewton Post Office on the way to the starting point. See the program for details!

The guest speaker at the monthly meeting of the Castlemaine Field Naturalists will be Professor Tim Entwisle.

Professor Entwisle is an author, botanist and former director of botanic gardens in Melbourne, Sydney and London. He also lived for a few years at Yapeen and completed his final years of secondary school at Castlemaine High School. His 2022 memoir “Evergreen: the Botanical Life of a Plant Punk” will be the subject of his talk this coming Friday. He will explain why he became a botanist (and phycologist) and some of the highlights of his three decades working in, and visiting, botanic gardens around the world.

Tim will also share with us the story of a seaweed (an alga) called Entwisleia bella, and how this came to be named after him. (He’ll bring some books for sale and signing).

It’s on  this Friday 12^th April, 7.30pm, Uniting Church Fellowship Room, Lyttleton St. Castlemaine

All are welcome.

Loddon River, Baringhup: walk along stories

Walking along the Loddon River for 8 km, we go north from Baringhup. It is on public and private land with a mix of natural, cultural and historical layers. Traversing farmland and the edge of the Moorlort Plains, it is flat and gently undulating, there will be a few fences to climb and some unformed tracks. 

Meet at 9.30 am outside 30 Templeton Street, Castlemaine (Castlemaine Community House)  or 9.45 am at O’Sullivan-Tilley Memorial Park Baringhup Sturdy shoes, long pants and gaiters if possible, as it will be grassy and uneven with a few fences to climb.

Bring lunch and morning tea.

This is a one-way walk, and we have the Community Bus to shuttle people back to their cars.

For more info call Gen Blades 0431 371 065 or Lisa Hall 0488 102 191.

Here’s a press release from the Conservation Regulator this week:

Readers will remember FOBIF’s occasional tilt at one of Australia’s weirdest windmills: the car commercial. We doubt whether the advertising industry will ever invent a more cretinous TV ad than AAMI’s attempt to persuade us that children should prefer to be driven to school rather than scoot along under their own power. Even so, we thought we’d offer Toyota Hilux as a genuine contender for the crown of worst commercial ever. You can find it here. It’s getting a good run in sports TV programs currently.

If you can struggle past the twee and rather queasy joke about the car being a beloved child, you’ll notice the usual images—the car being driven recklessly at the sea’s edge, for example:

Dumb and dumber: the current Hilux ad.

Many people will see this and think…Hang on: isn’t sea water pretty corrosive? Yes, it is. In fact, there’s a line in fine print below the image: ‘Pre-production model shown. Wash with fresh water immediately after salt water exposure.’ In other words: ‘Charge along the beach—then, rush home and spend a happy time washing the salt off your car!’

Such ads are completely at odds with the supposed advertising standards, but the Code of Practice and the Ad Standards Bureau are useless in controlling  them.Our reader Greg Jacobs, responding to this issue in 2019, summed it up pretty well:

‘The car ads are stupid in many ways -smashing thru the areas you have supposedly come to explore –you don’t camp on riverbanks re flood, mosquitoes, cold off the water. You don’t smash your way up a mountainside -proper 4 wheel drive clubs hate these types (RACV doesn’t answer to rolled vehicles on hillsides). You don’t drive to or park on the edges of cliffs–something to do with health and safety? You don’t drive beyond your capability nor your car’s capability –some vehicles promoted are heavy ,oversized tubs. You don’t speed thru forests on dirt roads– other suckers may be coming the other way and you may hit a tree or two when you hit the gravel.’

You may be wondering, who or what is the ‘conservation regulator’ mentioned in our above post? We confess we didn’t know either. To find out, check the relevant website here. The interesting part is under the heading ‘Regulatory priorities’. The Regulator’s priorities for 2023–24 are:

• illegal campfires
• illegal take of firewood
• cruelty to wildlife
• protection of threatened species
• illegal commercial timber harvesting
• illegal vehicle use.’

Under ‘illegal vehicle use’ we find:

‘Victoria has a well-established network of formed roads and tracks available for public use in state forests, parks and reserves.

‘Despite this infrastructure, the Conservation Regulator continues to detect increasing illegal vehicle use across natural terrain, walking trails, cycling trails, closed roads, restricted access areas, in streams and on informal single tracks.’ [FOBIF emphasis]

The Regulator claims to ‘conduct frequent patrols and use surveillance technology to identify illegal off-road vehicle use.’ We haven’t seen any of these patrols, but anyway, we have a suggestion: if you want to detect illegal vehicle use in streams, just turn on the TV! Before long you’ll almost certainly see something like this:

Current Toyota TV ad: could this be called, ‘incitement to break the road laws’?

That’s right–it’s our current nominee for Moron of the century: the Hilux ad. We wouldn’t like to single out Toyota, though. The company is not alone in its moronic promotion of bad driving habits. Maybe the regulator should compile a collection of car commercials and take them to the Ad Standards Bureau?

The Victorian Goldfields World Heritage bid team regularly updates details of the bid and its international contacts, and invites local responses to the idea of World Heritage for the goldfields. FOBIF has responded with a request to meet with the team, with the letter below:

Thank you for the opportunity to engage with you on the subject of World Heritage. We are not opposed to this project, but do have serious concerns about what it might mean.

We would appreciate the chance to discuss with you the issues outlined below, to do with the reality of the gold rushes, and the manner in which they are presented today:

Brown’s Gully: a world heritage destroyed waterway?

Three major transformations happened with the discovery of gold in Central Victoria. They’re interlinked, and can’t be separated:

1. Massive immigration largely caused by the gold rush created a completely new society, with all its virtues and defects.
2. The natural environment was almost completely trashed, with every waterway degraded, and natural vegetation stripped from the landscape.
3. The destruction of indigenous culture and society was dramatically advanced: already weakened by disease and violent dispossession, Aborigines now saw their country almost eradicated.

Any serious effort to appreciate what happened in the 19^th century should deal honestly with all these questions. Unfortunately, discussion of ‘heritage’ is usually anchored in this Macquarie definition of the word: ‘the culture, traditions and natural assets preserved from one generation to the other.’ In other words, it’s stuff we want to remember, not the stuff we’d rather not take responsibility for.

So the ‘heritage’ we have in the goldfields is often seen as…gold, the people who worked for it and the nice buildings it created. It seems that mainstream Australian society has difficulty accepting that the wreckage of our environment and that of Indigenous culture are part of that heritage. So in heritage discussions these two indisputable realities of our history are usually treated as sideshows to the main event.

Pennyweight Flat childrens cemetery: goldfields landscapes are paradoxical: celebrated for gold, haunted by a sense of loss.

This neglect can reach pretty crass levels. Consider the National Heritage declaration of the Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park. As evidence of ‘outstanding heritage value to the nation because of the place’s importance in the course, or pattern, of Australia’s natural or cultural history’, we get this explanation:

‘The goldfield, which played a major role in drawing overseas immigrants to the colony, and in raising from the ground so much of the golden wealth which flowed into Australian and overseas markets, played a substantial part in all those changes which gold wrought on Victoria and Australia: increased population, increased wealth, the growth in manufacturing, the improvement in transport, the development of regional centres and townships, the further development of a middle class, democratization of political institutions, reform of land laws, the genesis of an Australian Chinese community, and so forth…’

The absence of reference to environmental damage, and the effect on Indigenous life is striking.

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There have been two Heritage Action plans produced for the Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park: the first in 2002, and the second in 2017. This last has been inexplicably kept under wraps by Parks Victoria.

How do these documents deal with FACT 2 and FACT 3 above?

The 2002 Heritage Action Plan explicitly set questions to do with Aboriginal Heritage aside—not as a dismissal, but as a major separate project. The Plan did, however, draw attention to environmental damage, and made the point that the local bushland could be presented in a way that ‘highlights the transience of mining, demonstrates the severe environmental impact that can result from inadequate environmental constraint, and illustrates some of the resilience of Australia’s native vegetation.’ (page 29)

The above points, we hope, are not tangential to a World Heritage bid. After all, anyone who ventures into our Diggings Park—or even the environs of Hepburn Springs— will be instantly struck by the eroded gullies which scar our landscapes, remnants of ruined streams. These are ruined landscapes, and any World Heritage bid should present them as such—not as romantic signs of a golden age.

We would be happy to meet with you to discuss these matters at a mutually convenient time.