Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

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.

At the AGM the following members were elected unopposed to the FOBIF committee for the upcoming year:

President: Marie Jones; Vice President: Neville Cooper; Secretary: Bernard Slattery; Treasurer: Lynette Amaterstein; Committee members: Asha Bannon, Frances Cincotta, Christine Henderson, Jeremy Holland, Cassia Read, Bronwyn Silver, Jo Matthews

Local papers have recently carried items warning the public that snakes are about. Yes, they are, and the advice offered is good: be careful in areas snakes might frequent, control pets in such areas, be aware of correct procedures in case of a  bite, and so on.

Wheeler Street Castlemaine, September 20: more than five million reptiles are killed on our roads annually.

One piece of advice often missing is: watch out on the road. As we’ve pointed out numerous times, snakes are far more often victims than  aggressors. So, here’s our annual advice: keep an eye out for reptiles when you’re driving. [More than five million reptiles are killed by cars every year: see our Post]