Section 3 - Diversity in landcare

Diversity has been one of the foundations of landcare— thousands of independent groups contributing to the movement’s collective effort to look after Australia’s natural environment.

In summary, the landcare ethic is a caring attitude to Australia and action to repair and protect our land, as symbolised by the landcare logo of two hands holding Australia.

Founded on the notion of community action, the landcare ethic is not limited to landcare groups. Countless individuals and community groups live it every day.

Bushcare, Coastcare, Dune Care and Rivercare groups—in many cases, with government support—look after Australia’s native vegetation, coastal environments and rivers and waterways.

Urban landcare and ‘friends’ groups nurture the natural environment in towns and cities, while Waterwatch and Frogwatch groups monitor the health of creeks and rivers.

This section highlights how some non-agricultural groups are dealing with environmental issues. All of them have in common a commitment to repairing and protecting the land through direct community action.

Urban landcare

In Australia’s cities, towns and villages, people are working together to look after precious parts of their local environments—often small bushland reserves—to protect and maintain them for the benefit of the whole community.

No friends of the freeway

Group: Friends of Merri Creek
Location: Northern suburbs of Melbourne, Vic.
Formed: 1988
Focus: Protecting riparian species and threatened species

The threat of a freeway along a vital tributary to the Yarra River spurred the formation of the Friends of Merri Creek group in 1988.

Merri Creek flows through Melbourne’s northern suburbs and is the Yarra’s longest tributary, running from the Great Dividing Range into the river.

Concerned about the impact of the proposed new F2 freeway, the residents banded together to oppose it. They succeeded and went on to protect and revegetate the creek valley, providing much-needed open space in Melbourne’s inner-northern suburbs.

Although the group lost a Federal Court case against another section of the freeway in July 2003, its campaign gained strong support across the northern suburbs. This led to the freeway being realigned to reduce the impact on the creek and nearby heritage-listed native grasslands.

The group now has nearly 300 financial members who have helped transform the southern section of the creek from little more than a ‘rat infested drain’ in the 1960s to a highly desirable place to visit and live near.

‘Our activities include planting, weeding, mulching, litter collection, water-quality monitoring and tours to surviving native grasslands along the creek,’ said secretary Ray Radford.

^{Merri Creek activities include planting, weeding, mulching, litter collection and water-quality monitoring.}

‘Members have planted nearly 49 000 native plants since 2000, and in the past five years almost 1800 people have attended some 170 activities organised by the group.

‘Landcare Australia has contributed to some of our proudest projects,’ said Ray. ‘These include the creation, revegetation and ongoing management of Merri Park Wetlands at Northcote and plantings along the creek to compensate for tree removal for an electricity transmission line.’

The Friends were the first to discover two critically endangered fauna along the creek—the Growling Grass Frog in 2000 and the Golden Sun Moth in 2003. The group held the first community surveys of golden sun moths, in 2005 and 2006, and developed a useful methodology to survey them.

‘Unlike most “friends” groups, we play a major role in the overall planning and management of the waterway through our involvement in the Merri Creek Management Committee, where we have six representatives,’ said Ray.

‘Visitors to Merri Creek can see first-hand the benefits of urban landcare. Wildlife such as yellow-tailed black cockatoos, echidnas, kangaroos and wallabies are appearing more regularly around the creek.’

^{Once a ‘rat-infested drain’, Merri Creek has become a highly desirable place to visit and live near.}

Bushcare

The Bushcare program conserves and restores habitat for Australia’s native plants and wildlife. Thousands of Bushcare groups consisting of community volunteers, assisted by government and non-government organisations, are doing this important work in their spare time, mostly on public land in urban areas.

Development threat to biodiversity

Group: Booroobin Bushcare
Location: Booroobin, Sunshine Coast Hinterland, Qld
Formed: 2003
Focus: Rainforest regeneration in peri-urban areas

Rapid development in rural areas in southeast Queensland over the past 10 years is greatly challenging the area’s unique biodiversity.

Booroobin, on the Blackall Range, has gone from five large farms to 80 ‘lifestyle’ blocks. Nearly all the new residents, from Australia and overseas, have come from cities.

Few of them have had experience in the practical maintenance of their properties, and only seven knew they were living in a rainforest region—but none knew what type.

A dairy region for 100 years, Booroobin straddles the headwaters of two great rivers, the Mary and the Stanley. It retains many remnants of healthy rainforest, but since the removal of cattle invasive weeds have become the greatest threat.

^{Booroobin Bushcare—preserving the area’s unique biodiversity.}

The threat to biodiversity—especially endangered species like the Coxen’s fig-parrot—and to waterways and roadsides, and from weeds, led to the formation of Booroobin Bushcare in 2003.

Besides publishing a newsletter, the group runs workshops and does free property visits for new arrivals to the area. It is also reintroducing and protecting native rainforest vegetation along three kilometres of the region’s major road, and has established a rainforest nursery to propagate thousands of endemic native plants for residents.

‘Before we started, nobody knew their neighbours,’ said Booroobin Bushcare founder Jeanette Nobes.

‘Now everyone is proud of their community. The sense of ownership that has developed is the key to the success of this neighbourhood model of landcare.’

^{Residents didn’t know they were living in a rainforest region.}

Community monitoring

Thousands of community groups around Australia have become involved in monitoring natural resources. The Australian Government established the best-known program, Waterwatch, in 1993. Now nearly 3000 Waterwatch groups monitor water quality at over 7000 sites.

Waterwatch groups conduct biological and habitat assessments, as well as physical and chemical water tests. Frogwatch programs monitor native frogs and, in many cases, help create habitat to protect them.

Restoring the ‘bush capital’

Group: CAMPFIRE
Location: Canberra, ACT
Formed: 2003
Focus: Monitoring the impacts of bushfire on waterways

When a group of committed volunteers started monitoring Canberra’s waterways in 1994, they had no idea how significant the information they had been collecting would become.

The January 2003 bushfires not only burnt more than 70 per cent of the ACT, including most of its parks and reserves, but also destroyed years of community effort to restore Canberra as the nation’s ‘bush capital’. The impact on a landcare network already struggling with drought was huge.

Landcare, Parkcare and Waterwatch volunteers realised that the data they had collected on waterway health over the years could be used to determine accurately the impact of the fires on the territory’s waterways, and track their recovery.

ACT Waterwatch facilitator Nigel Philpot started organising immediately after the fires, when people were keen to volunteer for recovery efforts.

The project to investigate the ecological effects of bushfires on waterways became known as CAMPFIRE—Community Assessment Monitoring Program for Fire Impacted River Ecology.

It was a joint effort between ACT Waterwatch, Environment ACT, the Envirofund program and the Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) for Freshwater Ecology.

The CRC donated time and knowledge, helped train volunteers, and ran ‘mystery solution nights’ to check monitoring methods and verify the reliability of the data collected.

^{L to R: Richard McPhetres, Kolin Toivonen and David Hatherly hand-seeding an old forestry road on National Tree Day, 2008.}

CAMPFIRE uses over 200 volunteers from 30 community groups to monitor more than 50 sites each month. Their data on turbidity, salinity levels, water temperatures, pH levels, dissolved oxygen, phosphorous, algae, riverbank vegetation recovery and macro-invertebrates has been used to track waterway recovery.

The data is also used to guide NRM groups rehabilitating streams and catchments, and to promote the importance of protection and conservation of significant waterways.

CAMPFIRE has identified opportunities for the community to become involved in on-ground remedial action, including riparian revegetation and stream stability projects, weed control and litter removal.

Not only the natural environment benefited. CAMPFIRE also built a community network that helped people recover from the fires by strengthening social relationships, generating leadership roles and encouraging physical and emotional healing.

At the end of the program’s first year, volunteer numbers remained the same strength—a feat for any volunteer program.

Rivercare

The Rivercare program aims to improve Australia’s rivers, streams, wetlands and groundwater by supporting the community to monitor and protect them. Rivercare groups repair areas around waterways, by protecting native vegetation, removing weeds and putting up fences to keep out stock.

Setting old wrongs to right

Group: Mt Roland Rivercare
Location: Kentish, Tas.
Formed: 1999
Focus: Bringing the Dasher and Minnow Rivers back to health

When the first Europeans began settling around Mt Roland in Tasmania’s north-west in the 1840s, they began clearing the land for agriculture and grazing.

They dug channels to straighten the rivers— the Dasher and the Minnow, tributaries of the Mersey River, near Cradle Mountain— and carried out other earthworks.

Their efforts, however, had the unintended consequence of degrading parts of the rivers. The damage was made worse by more recent farming practices.

Concerned residents formed Mt Roland Rivercare in 1999 to restore the health of the rivers.

First, they developed rivercare plans, then built rock riffles and placed large woody debris at strategic locations in the rivers to slow water flows, create pools and improve fish habitat.

^{Water riffles and debris help slow water flows and improve fish habitat.}

Working with landowners, they put up nearly 50 kilometres of fencing, installed about 120 off-stream watering troughs, removed willows and planted 28 hectares with 23 000 native plants. This dramatically reduced bank erosion and improved water quality.

Trout, blackfish and eels have returned to the Dasher River, and recently a rare galaxia species was recorded there for the first time.

The group has drafted a 20-year plan to develop community capacity and encourage continual improvement of the river zones.

Its education and information initiatives include projects with local schoolchildren, such as the Day in the Life of a River competition. A water-monitoring program provides a monthly snapshot of the general health of rivers in the catchment.

^{Mt Roland Rivercare’s David Walker inspecting a riffle.}

Dune Care and Coastcare

Dune Care and Coastcare are community volunteers caring for their coast. Many community groups—such as the NSW Dunecare program—were doing coastal environmental work back in the 1980s, before the Australian Government established the first Coastcare program in 1995.

About 60 000 active Coastcare volunteers in 2000 Coastcare groups around the country are taking on problems such as dune erosion, loss of native plants and animals, stormwater pollution, weeds and control of human access to ecologically sensitive areas.

Starting from scratch

Group: Angels Beach Dune Care and Reafforestation Group
Location: North Coast, NSW
Formed: 1989
Focus: Weeds, access, amenities and indigenous cultural needs at Angels Beach

Before 1989, Angels Beach on the New South Wales north coast was deeply scarred by gold and sand mining, cattle grazing, illegal camping and rubbish dumping.

Criss-crossed by tracks and weed-infested, the beach had no proper access ways, viewing platforms or public amenities.

The beach was closely connected with a massacre of Bundjalung people in the 1850s and was a traditional Indigenous meeting place.

Five local residents, including three retirees, with a vision to restore and conserve their beach and prevent further deterioration consulted with the New South Wales Soil Conservation Service and Ballina Shire Council.

Their organiser, Shirley White, called a public meeting, and Angels Beach Dune Care and Reafforestation Group was formed.

‘Volunteers started working, with no manuals, books or guidelines; no funding sources for tools or materials; no Jobskills work teams; few advisers or support officers; and no contract bush regenerators,’ said current coordinator Lee Andresen.

^{Building viewing platforms}

^{Local residents had a vision to conserve their beach.}

^{Angels Beach—volunteers started from scratch to conserve and restore the beach.}

‘They began with no previous experience or specialised skills other than home gardening, and simply employed their powers of observation and common sense. They had to learn everything by discovery, on the job.

‘We were applying a whole-of-landscape approach. Initially derided as over-ambitious and unscientific, it’s now regarded as the most appropriate strategy for large, severely degraded zones.’

Despite setbacks—including a major fire in 1992, and sometimes uneasy relationships with local residents—Angels Beach is one of the state’s most successful and awarded coastal restoration projects, with 21 regional, state and national awards to its name.

The group has established an important relationship with the area’s original residents, the Bundjalung survivors and descendants of the 1850s massacre.

‘Through the Jali Local Aboriginal Land Council, we obtained permission to work on beach restoration on sacred and culturally sensitive land under their custodianship,’ said Lee.

‘A number of lessons have come out of 18 years of work. They include the need for a long-term, big-picture vision and to vigorously educate the public at every opportunity. And they include the importance of wholehearted respect for Indigenous heritage and culture.’

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