Once a year we produce the Mountain Journal magazine. It is distributed through mountain and valley towns from Melbourne to Canberra each autumn. 2024 will see the fourth print edition, and will be back from the printers in the next couple of weeks and distributed after that.
In the meantime, please enjoy this PDF of the magazine MJ4.
In the long running campaign to have the NSW government do something about the huge number of feral horses that are causing damage in the Kosciuszko National Park, recent efforts to reduce horse numbers has been welcomed by environmentalists.
Figures announced by the NSW government on 29th January show that 3,530 feral horses have been removed from Kosciuszko since the Plan’s commencement – by re-homing, removal to knackery, aerial and ground shooting, and shooting in yards. However, the Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek has announced that she may intervene to ensure a ‘zero-tolerance approach’ to feral horses in the park if the environmental impacts remain too high.
Continue reading “Plibersek puts NSW on notice over feral horse numbers”
On January 1, 2024, all native forest logging on public lands in the east of the state will end. This is a wonderful win for forests, animals, landscapes and the climate, and comes after decades of hard work by many thousands of people.
In recent years Friends of the Earth (FoE) has been campaigning to protect areas of high conservation forest in the north east of the state from logging. We are proud to have played a significant role in the long campaign to gain an end to native forest logging in the east of Victoria.
Here is a brief summary of the recent campaign in the north east and the high country.
Continue reading “Native forest logging stops in VIC high country on JAN 1!”
It is quite a few years ago now that I stood on the high point of Mt Blowhard, near Hotham, and watched the Dargo High Plains burning (yet again). That led me on my ‘firefighting journey’ – I went back home and joined the CFA. In the years since then I have seen the reality of more frequent fires in the mountains and the fact that sometimes we don’t have enough firefighters to stop small lightning strike fires from turning into mega blazes.
One example – a couple of lightning strikes near Mt Tabletop on December 31, 2019 (during the Black Summer) were not able to be stopped. They grew into a fire of more than 40,000 ha that threatened the township of Dinner Plain twice and homes in the Cobungra valley.
That’s where this idea came from – an additional force of remote area firefighters who can be tasked with assisting the wonderful state government firefighters employed by FFMV.
The proposal will be discussed during a free online forum being hosted on Thursday December 14 at 7pm.
Continue reading “FORUM: The Future of Firefighting in Victoria”
The Victorian State of the Environment (SoE) 2023 Report has been released. These are five-yearly report cards produced by the state government which measure the health of our natural environment – our land, water, air and ecosystems. The report covers three key areas:
The Greens labelled it ‘a damning new report (which) has found Victoria’s ecosystems and threatened species are in a far more dire situation now than they were five years ago’.
They say ‘It found that biodiversity and climate change indicators were particularly bad, with more than 75% of biodiversity indicators (32 of the 42) deteriorating or unclear, and 73% of climate change health measures (11 out of 15) also deteriorating or unclear. Only 1 out of 57 were classed as good (which related to the number of Victorians taking action to protect nature)’.
While I don’t have time to do a deep analysis of the report (which is available here), a quick look at the categories related to mountain areas are all fairly depressing. In short, there are no positive trends that are obvious.
Continue reading “Victorian State of the Environment 2023 Report released”
Firefighters say dry lightning has caused more than a dozen fires across Queensland this week, sparking concerns for authorities battling El Niño conditions.
As reported by the ABC, senior meteorologist Steve Hadley from the Bureau of Meteorology said dry lightning occurred when there was no significant rainfall, particularly during “overarching dry conditions”.
“Sometimes with not enough significant rainfall, of a few millimetres or more, that can mean lightning is essentially happening over drier areas and drier terrain with no rain to follow it up,” he said.
“Then you can get some fires starting from that depending on how the landscape is at that time.”
The threat from dry lightning caused fires continues to increase in mountain environments. To take one example, multiple lightning strikes across the Victorian high country on December 31, 2019 resulted in fires developing, including the 44,000 ha Cobungra fire which threatened Omeo, Anglers Rest, and Cobungra.
Widespread wildfires in early 2016 caused devastating damage across large areas of the Tasmanian World Heritage Area, including significant sections of vegetation which is not fire adapted, such as Pencil Pine forests.
At the time, and in follow up investigations, it became clear that increased fire risk due to climate change posed an existential threat to these vegetation types. Then additional research confirmed that there was a trend towards more extreme fire seasons. Some researchers suggested that we reached a ‘tipping point’ sometime around the year 2000 and that, since then, there has been an increase in the number of lightning-caused fires and an increase in the average size of the fires, “resulting in a marked increase in the area burnt”.
On the mainland, fires increased significantly from about the same time. There were major fires in the Victorian high country in 1998, 2002/3, 2006/7, 2013 and 2019/20. Fires are becoming more common and more intense across the Alps.
It turns out that something similar was happening around the country. Fire regimes around Australia shifted abruptly 20 years ago.
Continue reading “‘Fire regimes around Australia shifted abruptly 20 years ago’”
In the 2023 print edition of Mountain Journal (available as a pdf here), we acknowledged the legacy of Maisie Fawcett. Maisie was an ecological pioneer who is remembered for her ground breaking work in the Victorian high country. In this story from Karina Miotto, Latrobe University, Maisie’s legacy is considered in the broader context of her work as a woman operating in a time where society – and science – were heavily dominated by men.
A quiet achievement took place last summer in the Victorian Alps. Scientists gathered to re-measure botanical plots first set up more than 75 years ago by one of the pioneering women in science. This is the story of that woman.
Continue reading “Maisie Fawcett and her eternal legacy for Australian science”
North East Victoria is home to more than 2,000 hectares of Alpine Peatlands, an endangered ecological community listed under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (1999).
Alpine Peatlands, or Alpine Sphagnum Bogs and Associated Fens, are a priority ecological community for the North East Catchment Management Authority (CMA) supported through a five-year project to protect and enhance these unique environments.
This five-year, cross-regional project is coordinated by the Victorian Alpine Peatlands Project Coordinating Committee (VAPCC) and delivered in collaboration across three CMA regions (North East, East Gippsland and West Gippsland) with Parks Victoria. This project is funded by the Australian Government’s National Landcare Program.
Now a new video has been released at https://youtu.be/QmyxVs7lXHA, developed by North East CMA to mark completion of the Cross Regional Victorian Alpine Peatlands Protection Project. Partners in the video are Parks Victoria, East Gippsland CMA, West Gippsland CMA and Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation.
Continue reading “New video celebrates alpine peatland protection”
On 26 October 2018 the Victorian Government, the Taungurung Land and Waters Council Aboriginal Corporation (TLaWCAC), and the Taungurung Traditional Owner group signed a number of agreements under the Traditional Owner Settlement Act 2010 (Vic), which means that ownership of nine Victorian parks and reserves, including Mt Buffalo National Park and a section of the Alpine National Park, and up to five ‘surplus’ public land parcels have been transferred to the Taungurung Traditional Owner Group.
It should be noted that there is an ongoing territorial dispute between the Taungurung people and clans that identify as Ngurai Illum Wurrung, Waywurru and Dhudhuroa, and has the potential to affect the state’s treaty negotiations. This impacts the agreement in the east of the area, which includes Mt Buffalo and the Alpine national park.
It has now been announced that Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation (GLaWAC) has been ‘re-negotiat(ing) the Gunaikurnai Recognition Settlement Agreement with the State of Victoria’, and ‘we’re excited by the addition of four new joint managed parks as part of our Early Outcomes package’.
Continue reading “Gunaikurnai to jointly manage Baw Baw, Alpine and other high country parks”
In March, Friends of the Earth (FoE) campaigners visited north eastern Victoria as part of a longer trip highlighting threats to the landscapes of the high country. While we were focused on the threat posed to native forests by logging, locals in the Upper Ovens wanted to show us some of the current harvesting of pine plantations in the area.
While pine (Pinus radiata) plantations have been located across the north east for decades, and provide valuable timber and local employment, the logging practices in many instances are appalling. This led to FoE making a series of recommendations to the land manager, Hancocks Plantations Victoria (HVP), about how to reduce the environmental impacts of future harvesting.
As part of it’s state budget process for 2023/24, the Victorian government has announced that it will bring forward the shut down date for native forest logging across the state from 2030 to January 1, 2024. This is a huge development, and follows an intensification of environmental campaigning, a series of court cases that stopped logging in significant parts of the state, and a new environment minister following the re-election of the Andrews government in November 2022.
This means the state will be spared another six years of intensive logging and allow us to start the generations long work of restoring a landscape that has been deeply impacted by intensive logging and repeat fires in recent decades.
The full details on ‘what next’ – that is, how the shut down will be managed and what logging will occur before January 1 – are yet to be released. This is expected in coming weeks. There will also be an ‘expanded transition support package’ of $200 million ‘in support for workers and their families to transition away from native timber logging earlier than planned’.
Continue reading “An end to logging in VIC: what does it mean for the forests of the high country?”
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