Not so simple Spring

6th September 2021

Spring is the simple season. It says ‘Grow’. It says: breakout, bud and flower, push to the light that lengthens each day, go to the warmth. Don’t mind the reversals to cold weather, keep going. Grow! That frisky feeling, that’s Spring – make the most of it!

Our times are not so simple. We are locked in, so don’t go out, don’t stretch your fingers toward others. And with the warm weather starting so soon in the year, beware of summer, advancing in increments, bearing we do not know what fate. In this particular rotation around the sun, we have learned that what we thought was normal is set about with assumptions we had not noticed until they were upended.

Blackwood in bloom

Still, it’s Spring, and I am amazed. The acacia dealbata is already on the wane, but here beside it is a fine-leafed acacia whose name I don’t know about to burst into flower, golden yellow licking up the plant like a new fire in dry kindling. In the Blackwoods, the big buds of flower are out, a restrained yellow you could say except that the whole of the plant is bursting, every branch, from top to bottom, an excitation of flowers. The Blackwood is an unobtrusive tree of modest stature, but it sure knows how to flower.

This morning, I went looking for Ovens Valley wattle I had seen yesterday in Barrm Birrm. Along one of the lateral tracks then up, here, just here, through this band of Prickly Moses, here they are, wending their way from the damp country above the cemetery, spreading steadily along the slope. Cascades of pale yellow, but, my deep apologies living plant, you are not from here. I must bid you adieu with the short sharp pruning saw that sits on my hip.

A small Ovens Valley Wattle

Deceased Ovens Valley Wattle, and check that monster in the distance behind it

 A few months ago, our Landcare group looked at our term deposit and decided there were better things it could be doing than earning almost no interest. We engaged contractors to poison the exotic wattles in Barrm Birrm, and in a sweep from the northern end, they made it almost to the cemetery. I’m out mopping up the stragglers.

After that, we will hold that line, year by year, each not so simple Spring, walking gently through the bush, eyes alert for the flare of yellow that shows the young seedlings, ready to discourage them …. with a firm tug that bares the roots.  

Easy to pull out when they are small

 Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare, ross.colliver@bigpond.com

 

Signing up for another decade

21 August, 2021

I’ve just clocked my 69th birthday, and it’s got me thinking about what’s changing as I get older. I can do all the outside work I always have done, but I work more slowly. I walk down hillsides carefully. I take more breaks.

I pay more attention to what I’m doing. 

I’m out preparing the vegetable patch for spring planting, and I pace myself. The early afternoon sunshine hits the side of my face. The valley is full of birdsong, the wind is just the particular way it is today, lifting gently along the valley.

I think I’ve got more persistence as I get older. In Landcare meetings, the grey heads sometimes look at each other and lament: ‘Where are the young people? Who is going to carry on this work?’ Well, a few have shown up, but being old doesn’t worry me, because persistence outweighs the physical limitations of aging.

Looking after a patch of land takes a long time. It’s a matter of decades, not months. What matters is getting organised to keep at it. What matters is making the effort itself, not just the result. When I was younger, I didn’t think in terms of decades. I rushed at things, wanting a quick result. The land works to a long timeframe, and I feel mine stretching out as I get older.

I understand as well a little more of the way the world works. The reason a place like Barrm Birrm either slowly degrades or slowly recovers is partly a matter of what we do in Riddells Creek Landcare, but it’s also up to the walkers from town, and the trail bike rides, and the Shire. That gorgeous hillside of grasses and trees lies at the edge of a growing town and a growing city. More people use the place, but maybe attitudes are changing towards care for land. It all affects this place. What we do fits in alongside those other influences.

The recent IPCC report shocked me, as it was designed to do. I have committed to clearing the newly sprouting gorse in a gully in Barrm Birrm near my house. I spend an hour there every couple of days. It’s out of the wind in the gully, and sweet to be amongst the grasses and bursaria and fallen timber. This is not something that will stop the ravages coming, but the gully appreciates it.

I have to dig deep to get the roots out—there, got another one. It’s slow work, but I’m going to get this gully clear of gorse sometime in the next couple of years. There will be more after that, but I reckon I’m good for another decade.

Ross Colliver
Riddells Creek Landcare ross.colliver@bigpond.com

What's good for the world

16 July 2021

The young stag is looking hard at me from the cover of the Victorian Landcare magazine.  I got half way through, and put it aside, in despair. Do you know the South African weed orchid, which landed in WA, spread to SA, and appeared near Bacchus March in 1991? It’s a small plant that looks a bit like a native orchid. Each plant releases 2.5 million seeds a year (!!), which can be blown kilometres or spread easily by machinery, vehicles and on footwear.

Add this to panic veldt grass, gorse, serrated tussock, blackberry, wheel cactus, tree dahlia, pittosporum, and to foxes, cats, deer ….. What are we doing? 

Sweet Pittosporum getting ready to meet its maker

My heavy heart wasn’t helped by Tim Flannery, the Science Show RN with ‘Solutions here now for the climate disaster’.  Despite the upbeat title, the future is terrifying. Next on the same show came an update on the fire season in North America. Terrifying. As we swing toward summer, I no longer imagine balmy heat, but the radio tuned to bushfires, and the smell of smoke.

At Riddell, we are cool and damp and a long way from the rising ocean, and have catastrophe-free time to keep weaning our politicians off coal and gas, shifting to renewables, and building strong connections locally, so that when the crises do come, we will have a web of friendship and support.  The deepest personal challenge is our own assumptions. Wendell Berry said it plainly enough:

“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.” 

A very good way to get know that world is to weed it. Get to know the weed trees in Barrm Birrm—Sallow Wattle, Cootamundra Wattle, Ovens Valley Wattle, Sweet Pittosporum, plus a happy little opportunist called Bluebell Creeper. All beautiful plants, that have migrated from the gardens of residential Riddells Creek. They shade out and destroy the grasses and mosses that run under the open forest on these slopes. So out, out, out they go! With the big ones gone, we can pull the seedlings by hand, as we stroll.

Join RCL members 5, 12, 19 September, 10-12, at 288 Gap Road to walk through the flowering natives of Barrm Birrm and do some recreational weeding. Or join Greening of Riddell first Saturday of the month, 9.30, at the car park beside Wybejong Park.

Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare, ross.colliver@bigpond.com

 

Belonging

14 June 2021

I trundled my luggage through Melbourne Airport at 7 pm on a Saturday. Completely empty. The flight from Perth had been empty too: in the middle of a lockdown, who wants to come to Melbourne except for people like me, workers returning home.

I had thought long and hard about catching that plane. Perth, 19°, sunny day after day. Why not stay by the beach for another couple of weeks? The Leeuwin Current was still running, and I had settled back into the swim from Cott to North Cott, a good long swim with the swell of the ocean under me.

4pm Cottesloe Beach

 But Cottesloe is not my place now, and those well-groomed, pleased-with-themselves people drinking coffee at Il Lido, they’re not my people. I took a cab up to the edge of the ranges and overcast, rainy Riddells Creek. This is my home, my place, where my people are.

 A little town, people getting away from the big city and those that did the same 40 or 20 or 10 years ago, who look warily at the newbies, and sigh, and know it’s the way of the world. Riddell, where the post office people know me, where I drop in on friends who put the kettle on and say ‘how are you then – have you been away?’

 I’ve been listening to Stephen Jenkinson on Youtube. He's a Canadian with a lot to say about the mess we’re in. He says its hard work to repair the world when we’re broken ourselves.  Don’t know our ancestors, lost our traditions, left our neighbourhood, always on the move to the next big thing, chasing comfort.  Watching a Zoom conversation with him (search Youtube for Jenkinson and Bodhi Be), there’s a couple of old guys shooting the breeze, and then around 18 minutes in, my ears perked up.

 ‘The ability to belong’, says Jenkinson, ‘is the willingness to sit still long enough to forsake all the other options but the one that’s before you. Take up the work of occupying a place, not the entitlement of doing so.’

 I hear the Shire is putting gates across the roads of Barrm Birrm. There’s weed trees in there that need cutting, but it’s hard to get started. What’s happened to the traffic management study of Riddell the Shire said they were doing? And yes, the Amess Road developers will be back with something that suits them. We’ll win a bit of ground, but not what really suits the coming times, just the tired old game of profit and growth.

But that’s the work of belonging, of occupying a place.

Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare, ross.colliver@bigpond.com