Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

Memberships and donations are rolling in

FOBIF wishes to thank all its members for the generous donations they have made both last financial year and this current year. In fact the donations received have totalled fifty percent of the membership payments.

Your generosity will enable FOBIF to continue with its projects to help keep the biodiversity of the Box-Ironbark Forests healthy and safe into the future.

If you haven’t yet paid your membership, forms are available here.

Certificate of Appreciation

Lisa Chesters, Federal Member for Bendigo, presented a certificate of appreciation to FOBIF in recognition of our contribution to strengthening community and supporting the volunteer sector as part of International Volunteer Day December 2015.  These are fine words and well deserved – and it was appreciated by the FOBIF Committee on behalf of our members.  Well done everyone!

As explained in an earlier post, this year’s first FOBIF walk will take place on 20 March and will be a combined FOBIF/Connecting Country event. The walk on private property in Strangways (near Newstead) will be led by Andrew Skeoch (Listening Earth) and Tanya Loos (Connecting Country). Have a look at our walks page to find out more.

The walk will be part of the Feather Five Festival which will take place during the weekend of 19-20 March (click here for media release). More about the festival can also be found by clicking on the poster below and at the Connecting Country website.

You will need to book for this first walk as places are limited (booking closes 17th March 2016).  Book online at http://www.trybooking.com/KEHE. As with other FOBIF walks there is no charge and we will meet at 9.30 at Continuing Education in Templeton Street. Parking is limited at the property so buses will be used to transport walkers to the starting point. The use of this booking system is a one-off as future FOBIF walks will not need to limit the number of walkers.

Click to enlarge.

Mount Alexander Shire is currently investigating the possibility of setting up an ‘off lead dog park’ at the north end of the Botanical Gardens, abutting Froome’s Road, and west of Barkers Creek. The idea of an off lead park in Castlemaine has quite a long history, and details of council deliberations can be found on the Council’s website, here, here and here.

In the Castlemaine gardens, west of Barkers Creek: some concerns need to be allayed about the current proposal.

The area would be provided with ‘a fully fenced perimeter, animal drinking water, selfclosing gates, shade, seating, rubbish bins and waste bag dispensers’. FOBIF believes that an off lead park is a good and common sense idea, but the location of the current proposal right next to the ‘bush’ section of the gardens gives cause for concern. Although the area is to be fenced, we’re worried that dogs might be able to get into the bush section, home to colonies of the Eltham Copper Butterfly. Perhaps more seriously, the area in question is known to have infestations of needle grass weeds, which could be spread on dog fur. Serious weed removal should obviously precede implementation of the park plan.

The proposal is well advanced, but is subject to various planning requirements. We’ll report on it in future posts.

This year’s FOBIF walks’ program has been finalised and can be viewed here. The first walk  (20 March) will be a combined FOBIF/Connecting Country event. The focus will be on birds and three experts will lead several short walks on Andrew Skeoch and Sarah Koschak’s property near Newstead. The meeting spot is still Continuing Education in Templeton Street (9.30am). However if you would like to meet in Newstead instead, ring Bronwyn Silver 5475 1089 or Tanya Loos 5472 1594 for details about an alternative meeting spot. More information on the walk can be found here.

There seems to be some kind of controversy bubbling about the Australian flag and Australia day in Castlemaine. FOBIF doesn’t get involved with debates of this kind, but we’re always looking for an excuse to celebrate, anyway.

And if we need to commemorate events which took place in 1788, how about this: in that year the Eucalyptus genus was first named for science, and the first description of a Eucalypt species published.

Messmates on Mount Alexander: it’s a tree which can vary in size from a small mallee to a forest giant, depending on conditions. Australians are a pretty variable lot.

Seeds of an unknown species had been collected from Bruny Island in Tasmania on Cook’s 1777 expedition, and taken to England. It took until 1786 for them to be got out and studied, by an amateur French botanist, Charles Louis L’Heritier de Brutelle, who invented the name, Eucalyptus, and called the tree in question, Eucalyptus obliqua—now commonly known as Messmate. The publication in which this was revealed to the world for the first time: Hortus Anglicus, publication date, Paris 1788.

Unfortunately, it seems that scholars have found that the book didn’t actually appear till 1789—but we don’t care. Isn’t it good Aussie practice to accept that near enough is good enough? And if you want to celebrate something Australian, surely  it’s hard to get anything more Australian than a Eucalypt?

Goldfields landscapes are dotted with mullock heaps: and one of the curiosities of these heaps of apparently useless rock is that they often feature quite healthy trees. How can these trees get a foothold in material you definitely wouldn’t be spreading around your garden?

Eucalyptus nortonii [L]and Eucalyptus melliodora [R] on a mullock heap at Spring Gully: vegetation can colonise surprisingly unpromising locations, and mullock heaps are among the more surprising.

We put this question to Castlemaine geologist Julian Hollis, and he suggested that one answer might be that pyrites in the heaps decay to a soluble material called melanterite, an iron sulphate which is sometimes used as a fertilizer: so, contrary to what we might think, there are plant nutrients in these rock heaps. Julian was open minded about what other explanations there might be, however. Suggestions welcome.

Attentive readers will have noticed the brief kerfuffle in January on the release of the Parks Victoria 2014-5 Annual Report. You can read the report here.

Interest has centred around the fact that Government funding to PV had been slashed by 37% in the time of the Coalition State Government. This statistic should come as no surprise to anyone following the fortunes of Parks and DELWP over the years. The relevant table can be found on page 25 of the report. It shows that Government funding in 2011 was $110 million, in 2012 it went to $122 million, then dropped steeply, to $76 million by 2015.

The result, of course, is that PV is less able to do what it’s supposed to do, in the way of basic land management, weed and feral animal control, research, education and other programs.

In the December issue of Parkwatch, Robert Bender calculates that  staff numbers at Parks Victoria have decreased by 6-7% per year since 2011. Making a crude but useful calculation, he finds that in 2011 each Parks employee was responsible for looking after 3700 hectares of land; by 2015 it was 4540 hectares. The obvious increase in workload inevitably means that, no matter how dedicated a given ranger [or support person] might be, the task of doing the job properly is becoming impossible. It’s not surprising that there are press reports talk of increasing  pressure, stress and demoralisation in PV.

Not that you’d know about pressure and stress by reading the Parks Victoria Report. As is the nature of these documents, it’s nicely illustrated, and full of good news. It might be unfair to call the general tone gaga, but not very unfair. Here’s the introduction, by Chairman of Parks Victoria Board, Andrew Fairley:

PV Annual Report: ‘our throat has been cut, and we’re feeling just fine.’

‘At Parks Victoria, we believe the future is one of excellence, so we have changed how we operated during 2014–15 to significantly improve the way we deliver our services. … The deployment of a new operating model and a new structure in our regions, complemented by realignment across our Corporate Services divisions, has brought considerable transformation to our business…The Parks Victoria Board is extremely excited by these changes…’ Page 8

Get it? What it means  is, ‘Government funding dropped from $96 million to $76 million last year, and we’re doing great!’

A more sober version of the same thing is contained in the financial part of the Report , which nevertheless manages to say that PV ‘achieved’ a deficit of $6 million:

‘Parks Victoria achieved a net result from transactions of $6.226 million deficit for the 30 June 2015 financial year. This was in line with expectations and follows a challenging financial period due to a decline in funding for Parks Victoria’s core operations [FOBIF emphasis].Throughout the 2014–15 financial year Parks Victoria continued to drive operational improvements through a restructure of its Regional Services operations. ..’ page 25

It’s pretty clear from this report that budget cuts are only one problem for Parks. Just as important is the corporate speak that dresses up savage budget cuts as ‘improvements’.

In the meantime, what’s happening in the Parks themselves? We do have great parks, but this Report, though it does have some useful info, won’t give you a real idea of the serious challenges the park system faces.

The Report papers over so many cracks that, like any rose tinted view of things, it quickly loses credibility. It blandly suggests on page 18, for example, that the feral horse and deer problems are under control in the Alps: this is a depressing evasion of the real facts. On page 17 we are told that major research projects on biodiversity in Box Ironbark regions have been ‘incorporat[ed] into bushfire planning.’ To say the least, this is premature.

Blackberry and briar rose, Cobblers Gully: the PV Annual Report claims that 40% of Parks’ area was ‘treated’ in one year.

Further, there are claims that are counter intuitive to the reader. On page 48 we read that the ‘Number of hectares treated to minimise the impact of pest plants, pest animals, and overabundant native animals and plants (including meeting ecological fire and watering objectives)’ is 1,683,824. This is over 40% of the land administered by PV–in one year! A lot depends on what you mean by ‘treated’–but would anyone claim that 40% of our parks are significantly weed free? Park Victoria rangers do a valiant job, but it’s hard to imagine they’d claim to be so on top of the weed and pest animal problem.

All the same, if you can skip the corporate speak, and maintain a reasonably sceptical perspective on the claims for a near perfect performance, the Report does give you an idea of the range of Parks Victoria’s activities. It’s a pity such documents veer so wildly towards propaganda that even their legitimate claims look dodgy.

We’ll have a look at a few more aspects of this report in future posts.