From the Editor

Greetings from the still so very dry Grampians. And fire ravaged too. The January fires on the Victoria Range burnt almost a quarter of the Park; the March fires in the Dadswell Bridge area were successfully extinguished while still small but  had the potential to cause severe damage to a quite different ecosystem.  Our Park staff have had a torrid time, and now face months of hard work. We offer them our sympathy and our thanks.

It has of course also impacted on our FOGG activities. We were going to talk with Park staff about our activity programme, but that is now postponed until April 24.

Your committee has also found it hard to get together, with distractions from births (lovely) and illness (horrid).

Have you thought whether you could be on our committee? We make use of email quite a bit, so you don’t have to live locally. We have a policy of changing the president at regular intervals, and Proo has indicated this is her last year in the position. You have until September to think about it.

Just in as I was about to print this, and apologies that it is now so late, the Government has released its new guidelines on commercial development in national parks. Proo has an initial response below. You can read them on http://www.dse.vic.gov.au/recreation-and-tourism/tourism-investment-opportunities-in-national-parks.

And also just in, another quick response from one of our members. See her letter on p 6.