Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

As outlined in a previous post, this year’s FOBIF AGM will be held at 7.30, July 10 in the Ray Bradfield Rooms. Details including how to nominate for the FOBIF Committee can be found here. Supper will be served and everyone is welcome.

Our speaker will be Brian Bainbridge, Ecological Restoration Planner, Merri Creek Management Committee. His topic will be Single species – many outcomes.

Single species conservation projects can have wide-ranging benefits when pursued in a holistic manner. Projects to secure local populations of Matted Flax Lily and Plains Yam Daisy have led Merri Creek Management Committee to build a deeper understanding of the Merri Creek’s changing ecology and the potential for landscape-scale conservation.  The projects have stimulated fresh approaches to engaging with community. 

Plains Yam Daisy

Last Tuesday the Mount Alexander Shire held an info session on plans to construct flood control levees along Campbells Creek.

The proposed levee plan is the result of consultations on the 2015 Flood Management plan. This extensive document can be found here. It arose out of the 2011 floods, said to be a one in a hundred year event, and has been modified after consultation.

Campbells Creek footbridge, September 2016. Under current proposals, footbridges over the creek will not have railings: flood debris will be able to float over them.

Current levee proposals include:

• Construction of a levee at the northern end of Gingell Street
  • Construction of a levee at the southern end of Gingell Street
  • Construction of a levee adjacent to the Castlemaine Central Cabin and Van Park
  • Upgrade and extension of the existing Elizabeth Street levee
  • Upgrade and extension of the existing Campbells Creek township levee
  • Reinstatement of an existing levee near National School Lane
  • Waterway improvement works downstream of the Alexandra Street Bridge, Campbells Creek.

The proposed levees are designed to resist one in twenty or one in a hundred year floods, depending on the location.

The 2015 plan’s proposal to build a 2 metre high levee along the creek opposite the Railway Hotel has been abandoned after strong community opposition. The current plan proposes a one metre high levee.

The proposals, which are estimated to cost $3.5 million dollars, have not so far been subjected to a cost benefit analysis. One third of the cost would be borne by Council.

One interesting feature of the various reports on the floods is that they demolished the idea, circulated at the time, that Landcare plantings had worsened the problem. A flood model was used ‘to test the effects of removing vegetation from the waterways. This resulted in marginally lower flood levels in the creeks but not significantly enough to prevent over-floor flooding to affected properties.’

It is significant that proposed works deal with the ‘Castlemaine-Campbells Creek flood plain’: in other words, authorities are dealing with the brute fact that past planning decisions have allowed building on that flood plain, with all the resultant problems.

The Victorian Environment Assessment Council has opened an investigation into the public forests of the central west area. These include the Wombat, the Wellsford and the Pyrenees forests. All these were proposed for logging under Vicforests Forest utilisation plan 2017.

The purpose of the VEAC investigation is to:

1. a) identify and evaluate the condition, natural and biodiversity values and cultural, social and economic values and the current uses of public land in the specified area; and
2. b) make recommendations for the balanced use and appropriate management arrangements to conserve and enhance the natural and cultural values.

Submissions to the investigation are invited until 21 August 2017. They can be sent to  veac@delwp.vic.gov.au To make an online submission click here

Drop-in community forums will be held in locations in or near the investigation area in July 2017.  Details will be provided shortly.

A draft proposals paper and a final report are to be prepared, with the final report due by March 2019.

OK, it’s cold, and maybe not wet enough. Some quality reading to brighten a winter evening: the June newsletter of our neighbours, Wombat Forestcare, available online here.

Narrow leaf bitter pea, Castlemaine Botanic Gardens, Spring 2013. There are three Daviesia species in the Mount Alexander region.

This edition has the usual terrific info on fungi, the case against logging the Wombat and [among other things],  the third article in John Walter’s series on ‘egg and bacon’ plants. This one is on three species of Daviesia found in the Wombat: Hop Bitter Pea, Narrow Leaf Bitter Pea and Gorse Bitter Pea. All three can be found in the Mount Alexander region too. If you [like many of us] are frustrated by the difficulty of telling the difference between pea plants, you should find this article pretty useful.

The 2017 FOBIF AGM will be held on Monday July 10 at 7.30 pm at the Ray Bradfield Rooms, beside Victory Park, Castlemaine.

Brian Bainbridge

Our speaker this year will be Brian Bainbridge who has recently moved up to our district. For many years Brian has been a member of the Merri Creek Management Committee formed in 1989 to preserve and restore the natural and cultural values of the creek. He has been employed as the Ecological Restoration Planner and involved with Plains Yam Daisy and the Golden Sun Moth projects. More details of his talk will be posted on this site soon. An interview with Brian can be found here.

Do you want to play a role on the FOBIF committee? Or nominate someone else to the committee? All that’s needed is a piece of paper signed by the nominee, a nominator and a seconder–all FOBIF members. There’s no need of an official form, but for convenience, here’s a sample: Continue reading →

FOBIF representatives met with Mount Alexander Shire officers last Monday to discuss roadsides in the shire. The meeting related to planning scheme amendments designed to put protection overlays on some roadsides.

FOBIF supports Council initiatives in this area, but we have been concerned about gaps in the Council maps of roadsides.

Monday’s meeting was productive, and officers have agreed to supplement current maps with relevant material from the 1998 roadsides strategy.

DELWP works on the Irishtown track, May 31: the road is seven metres wide, plus scalped verge, plus numerous runoff sections. This bush track is as wide as a highway, and much wider than the nearby Fryerstown Vaughan bitumen road.

In the meantime, DELWP has been busy grading roads in bushland around the shire, leaving many of us scratching our heads about the logic and implementation of some of these works.

The Irishtown Track, for example, has now been graded to be wider than any of the local bitumen roads, and in many verges have been scalped of vegetation. Though not as bad as DELWP’s efforts on the Fryers Ridge a couple of years ago [see here and here], the works are hard to comprehend.

For years now we’ve been putting a simple question to DELWP: how wide should a bush track be? We’ve never had an answer, but we’re guessing: wider and wider.

FOBIF has made a submission to the process of updating the Castlemaine Diggings NHP Heritage Action Plan [now known as the Heritage Landscape Management Framework].

Our view can be roughly summed up in the words of the old Heritage Plan: ‘The current forest setting is not an interpretive problem, but rather an interpretive bonus for the Park. It 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.’ [Our emphasis]

In Norwood Hill. This is not a natural scene, it’s part of our cultural history: the destruction of our waterways is part of the epic of gold, and needs to be explained to visitors.

Essentially, our submission urges consideration of the natural landscape as an important element in our heritage: consideration of mining ruins in isolation from the way mining affected the environment is to lose sight of one of the most important consequences of the gold rush: environmental change. That’s part of our heritage too.

The essentials of FOBIF’s submission are set out below:

Continue reading →

A solid group of walkers was guided by Jeremy Holland through some remote corners of Mount Alexander east on Sunday. The walk started with a pleasant stroll  along the water race, before angling up the mountain south of Aqueduct Creek: a reasonably strenuous ascent through lovely bushland [including some magnificent Red Gums and monumental granite boulders]. We returned along the Ballantinia Track. The walk was enhanced by a dense mist, which obscured possible views but more than made up for it by endowing the bush with an intriguingly mysterious air.

Is anybody there? Jeremy Holland and Lionel Guerin survey the mist.

Many thanks to Jeremy for navigating us through a route none of us had seen before, to corners of the Mount rarely visited. And our thanks to Coliban Water for permission to walk along this closed section of the race.

Part of the group negotiating the ridge through Manna Gum woodland south of Aqueduct Creek, ascending to Ballantiinia Track.

June’s walk will be led by Ian Higgins along Campbell’s Creek. Check the walks program on this website for details.

St John’s Wort is a terrible pest on the Mount, but on Sunday it hosted hundreds of picturesque spider webs, like this one. Photo: Dominique Lavie

More walk photos follow:

Continue reading →