But wait there's more!

The trail bikes are busy in Barrm Birrm, and the early wattles are coming into flower. The owners of private land on the western reach of Barrm Birrm, that stretches north of Royal Parade, want a deal to give land into the public estate in return for permission to build on just part of their acreage. Perhaps ‘Government’ will pick up the tab to buy the lots in the Shone and Schultz land. Perhaps.

Who will then throw a fence around the new reserve and put in the signage, mend the fences the bikers and 4WDers snip through and the replace the signs they deface, until a grudging peace is won? Who wants this battle, when there are so many others at hand? Who will support the slow rehabilitation of the fairly degraded land in the western reach, and keep up the work on woody weeds in the eastern slopes?

And here we are with the whole township invited to consider Sector Advantage’s proposal for 1290 lots on Amess Road, a prelude to the regulatory hurdles. 1290 lots pushed into a muddy landscape of trucks coming and going, then tradies and houses popping up and slowly, and finally the arrival of our new town residents, who at 2.5 people per residence will grow us close to double the current township, their kids riding their bikes to the primary school and their large vehicles gathering in Station Street on Friday afternoon for cartons of beer and bags of chips and sundries for dinner.

By the time you read this missive, we will have turned all these imponderables over at Riddells Creek Landcare’s AGM, early August, to gather together the likely impacts of the new development, and work out a few good questions. Perhaps we will find other brave Davids, with our slingshots and carefully chosen stones, ready to test Goliath.

At RCL, we’re curious to see how much attention Sector Advantage has paid to the landscape in which its 1290 residences will reside. Will Sandy Creek, which becomes Dry Creek as it trickles under the Kilmore Road, and that creek further north on the other side of the Dromkeen hill, become dense green incursions into suburbia, wilder places? How will water move across the estate? Walkways, common space that connects people – how welcoming with that be, to humans and to native birdlife? Will this be a precinct of exotic trees co-opted by gangs of Indian Mynahs, their raw persistent shouts, and nasty narrow streets jammed in to accommodate cookie-cutter houses? We will soon know all.

My own inclination is to start thinking how to make the heart of Riddell a place where it’s safe to walk with a pram, or to ride a bike or drive a car. How will we all get to the railway station without skittling pedestrians? Where will we stand in the sun talking to someone you haven’t seen in a while. How do we make a convivial place, for 2,500 more people. With a creek running through it.

But wait, there’s more! The environment groups of Riddell will have signed an agreement with Western Water, to jointly organise discussion about how to expand the capacity of the sewerage treatment works. Expand capacity, that is, while keeping Jacksons Creek and our little bit of the Maribyrnong catchment in rude good health. Riddells Creek Landcare won’t do the planning, that’s Western Water’s end of things, but our job will be to ask good questions, look at the data, assess the risks. And up discussion as a town to look at the options, weigh them up, and reach a considered point of view. We’re a species that tends to assume the environment can mop it all up, Can we deal with our waste without imposing too much on the environment?

As we start to wonder if the warm will even come back, it looks like September will a time for talking and thinking about the place we live. Here’s to wise decisions, and dodging the hype, and not falling into despair. 

Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare

The uses of old people

Faced with the ageing body, which demands so much more maintenance as the years accumulate, a kind of loving patience develops towards what used to work but now can’t be taken for granted. 

It’s a short step to know that it’s the same with the country we live in: maintenance is required. Care. Things deteriorate unless you look after them. You can’t just throw away a landscape and buy a new one. You’re in it, it’s big and slow and the work of looking after it is constant. If you don’t put in the time and effort, you will suffer the consequences. If you do make the effort, then life is better.

When Landcare committees bemoan the absence of younger people in their ranks, I think they ought to value the sensibilities that only mature with age, and make this part of their offer to young people. 

Visit your local Landcare committee, and you’ll see a lot of grey hair. Believe it or not, these old folk were rebels in their time. They took up landcare in their twenties and thirties, battling the scepticism of their peers, and they changed the country, so that now we’re used to seeing creeks shaded with trees and paddocks with shelterbelts. They changed expectations too, so that looking after the natural systems of a property and its wider landscape is now the norm, not the exception.

But the rebels are headed for their seventies, they’re tired and they feel like a break. Where are the young people? Where is the raw energy and smarts of those just breaking into agriculture? What about the kids asking for climate action? Why don’t they get on a train and learn what it takes to look after a river? That youthful energy is one pole, but the other is the gravity of older people; oh alright – old people! They appreciate the need for constant care, but what else do they bring?

Old people know you can be wrong. We all make mistakes, yes, that’s an antidote to missteps that come with any serious purpose. But older people know that you can be head down a wrong track for many years and not know it, in a job, in a relationship, or with a grand plan, and then the trail peters out. Or you can arrive and find this is not what you wanted. The disappointment leads some to retreat from the world, to play it safe. For others, being wrong pushes them to look harder at their enthusiasms and to question what they take for granted. Older people are more sceptical and hard-nosed, and carry their enthusiasms more lightly. 

Old people know action leads to understanding. Landscapes are complicated. Having done a lot to look after properties and places, having been through the mill more than once, older people are wary of simple solutions. They are wary too of trying to know everything before starting. You don’t know what you don’t know until you get started; only then do you discover what will turn an idea into reality. Not knowing is not easy to bear, but older people have learnt to live with this. 

Old people know change takes time. They might wish things would happen faster, but older people know that changing people’s attitudes and behaviour takes a long time, just like changing landscapes. So find satisfaction with each step along the path, not just with the elusive end result. Things are exciting at the start, but when that wears off, there’s still work to be done. Older people remind themselves of what’s important, and keep going. 

Older people are grumpy, cantankerous and hard to please. Let’s celebrate their knowledge as part of learning how to living responsibly in this country.

Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare

Deep Creek

We’re in sight of the airport when the big white bus turns left through a tight entrance gate, along a looping road then down, down, to drop us 200 metres from our destination. Deep Creek. We’re at a bend where the creek has carved its way through larva to leave cliffs of polished rock. 

It feels like we’re actually inside the lava flow. Here at the bottom there are stands of red gum and sweet bursaria, and pools of standing water, fresh not stagnant, so water must be moving. Early winter and the rains not yet come, but the creek is fed by water seeping out from the rock all along its length.

 

Deep Creek starts on the north side of the Macedon Range, in the dip between the Central Macedon massif and the granites of the Cobaw Range. It winds its way east, east to the north of Lancefield, then south through the volcanic plain, in serpentine loops, slowly, taking its time. You can’t see it from the Lancefield Road, which travels on the flat high country, but drive a couple of kilometres east and the road will suddenly drop into the valley. Down here are remnants of the ecosystems that got established as the creek worked its way down through the lava flow. Damaged by grazing, where the sheep and cattle have been kept out, those ecosystems are recovering.

We’re here to see what the owner has done to bring back the vegetation along the creek. Dean Platt, a freelance ecologist working on contract to Melbourne Water’s Stream Frontage Program, has set up a day visiting five sites along Deep Creek. He has called the trip ‘The Red Gum Valleys of the Maribyrnong’. Manna gum likes the wetter valleys of the Macedon Range, but in the steep-sided valleys of Deep Creek and its tributaries, it’s the red gum that thrives. You’ll see it too out on the plain, coping with a more exposed position, and Dean thinks that as the climate dries, the red gum will move slowly north up the valleys.

Modern times, human time, creek time, geological time: here they intersect and get tangled up. In the sands to the side of the creek I find the shell of a large freshwater mussel. How long since the creek grew mussels this big, big enough for a good feed? The Wurundjeri are still around, but they’re not eating mussels out of Deep Creek any more.

In a thousand years, who will be living around here? Another plane lumbers its way into the sky, headed for Singapore or Dubai.

Looking back up the slope of the hill we’ve come down, the serrated tussock gleams metallic in the afternoon light. It looks like it grew up here, but it’s a weed that has displaced the native grasses, colonising country cleared for sheep. Lines of shrubs and trees have been planted into the contour, in hopes of a slow shading out of the tussock, and indeed under the remnant gums, the native ground cover hangs on. Another plane takes off.

We’re all people who are looking after our own bit of creek. This is a chance to see what others are doing, to feel encouraged by their progress, and to understand more about what works and what doesn’t. With us for the day are the small band of agency staff who know this country well and who look after it as much as funding and the voracious demands of a growing city will allow.

As we move from site to site, the bus is a hum of conversation. We live scattered through this country, so this is a rare opportunity to meet others, to learn from them and to share aloud the frustrations and pleasures of caring for the land.

We’re either stupid or brave to be thinking about protecting the natural systems of these valleys, but when I walk along the creek bottom, with the red gums dense and the bursaria shedding seed, it feels like a good thing to do, and despite the imponderables of a drying climate, the right thing to do. 

 

Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare