The following comes from the Australian Alps national parks Co-operative Management Program.
“The Australian Alps Education Kit is designed for students, teachers and anyone else keen to learn about this spectacular region of Australia. These educational materials form an organised resource focusing on iconic, awe-inspiring and accessible areas within the Australian Alps.
The contents range from the resilient yet fragile plant communities that grow in the harsh alpine environment, to thecultural impact of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electricity Scheme; and from the First People’s connection with the mountain landscape to the Alps’ cycles of weather and climate”.
For the past two days, more than 30 people from the Central Highlands Action Group and local Toolangi and Healesville residents have been occupying a large logging coupe on Yellowdindi rd in Toolangi state forest.
Two 30m tree sits, which are suspended by ropes attached to two log-harvesters and two ‘bunnies’ with their arms locked through the tracks of a third machine have ensured that no clear-felling took place in the coupe on Monday January 16.
Much of the Toolangi forests were burnt in the fires of 2009. One Toolangi local said that “residents are concerned that following the Black Saturday fires in 2009 that clear-fell logging in the area will increase the risk of mega-fires due to the large amount of wood waste which is left behind in coupes. The resulting mono-species regeneration after logging operations is far more combustible than the mature age forests which are being removed. This is a recipe for further fire disasters”. They point to research by eminent forest ecologist Dr David Lindenmayer, which clearly indicates that clear-felling practices in the Central highlands notably increases fire risk and thus threatens the whole region.
Activists also point to other values of the forests: “These forests give us protection against climate change and provide habitat for native fauna which is such a feature of this area.”
Past Cooma, on the edge of the Southern Highlands, an innovative project is underway.
Farmers are taking part in workshops which is teaching them Indigenous land management techniques.
It’s hoped that owners will not only gain an appreciation of the methods, but also use them on their own properties.
And as part of the lessons, we’re learning about one of the oldest form of land management: fire.
Before the tractor was king, much of Australia was controlled by fire, and it’s a technique that Indigenous elder Rob Mason believes should be used more on Australian farms.
“We’re trying to do it in a way so that local landowners can have a bit more vision on their local resources,” he said.
“A farmer will look out on his area and might say, okay, I think that might a suitable area for growing peas or it might be a suitable area to put my sheep.
“Same with Aboriginal people. We look out into the areas and we actually know by animal indications that suitable areas are where they are.
“We tend to think of ideas or management plans like that for the areas, such as burning practices. That’s quite an old technique of land management, and I believe that’s totally missing from this important area here.”
Geoff Robertson owns a 270 hectare property outside of Nimmitabel, half an hour south of Cooma, and is hosting this unique workshop as part of a cultural heritage agreement he signed with the Murrumbidgee Catchment Management Authority.
“Some years back we signed up to a stewardship agreement for biodiversity,” he said.
“And when we did that we were contacted by their Indigenous unit, and we were very interested in that for all sorts of personal reasons.
“So we signed this agreement, and part of that was sharing of knowledge of traditional Aboriginal knowledge through Friends of Grasslands.”
Geoff, who has been involved for many years with Friends of Grasslands, says he wasn’t concerned that that signing the agreement would take away control over his property.
“But there was nervousness about opening oneself up to a different way of thinking, because I guess us White Australians have this side of our history that we’re not too proud of or don’t want to know about, so I guess confronting that, that’s scary,” he said.
“Since my early 20s, I’ve taken a lot of interest in Aboriginal communities.
“My first wife and I actually adopted a Torres Strait Islander child who’s now very much an adult, so we have personally within our family Indigenous people, so every day in some sense we deal with that issue of being Indigenous and not being Indigenous.”
Geoff’s property was formerly used for grazing, and he says that the Indigenous farming techniques wouldn’t interfere if the property were to return to that practice.
“In lots of properties in this area, they’re not too different to this one, so there’s nothing that would prevent what we’re doing here from happening in other parts of the country.”
But how feasible is this kind of management as an alternative, or even addition, to modern farming techniques? Monaro grazier Charlie Massy was excited by the workshop he attended at Nimmitabel.
“There is some really exciting holistic land management grazing going on in this country,” he said.
“Whilst we didn’t have ruminant herbivores in the past, Tim Flannery and others are talking about what the megafauna might have been doing and that new types of grazing might be starting to emulate that and stimulate landscape function.”Indigenous land management on farms in the Monaro
The following is from a piece by well known naturalist Bob McDonald, and taken from the ABCs ‘Drum Unleashed’ website.
Australia and Victoria in particular have been labelled among the most bushfire-prone areas of the world.
Before any analysis of the causes of the 2009 Black Saturday fires, the assumption was made publicly that the “lack of fuel reduction burning” was the “cause” of this catastrophe.
By implication it must have been Aboriginal people who burned the bush continually to maintain low fuel low loads. But did they? Just published research evaluated fire frequency using charcoal occurrence from more than 200 sites in Australasia over 70,000 years – concentrated around south-east Australia. It tells a completely different story. The results reveal how dramatic the increase in fire in the Australian mainland landscape has been since Europeans.
A bit of a reflection on mid autumn cloudy landscapes of subdued colours and moody feelings, as we get through one more fire season and almost out the other side of ‘burning’ season.
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