Category: From Parks Victoria

A wet July and August in the Grampians has restored good flows to our creeks, rivers and wetlands and recharging an otherwise dry system.

Up until this time, park staffs were engaged in trial winter burning operations in the Wannon River heath, an area of the park long unburnt and known to house significant small mammal populations including Long Nose Potoroos & Southern Brown Bandicoots.  The objective of this experimental burning is to introduce fire at small scales into this landscape over a long period of time to help protect the old growth river frontage vegetation from large scale intense fire impacts. The results achieved to date have been mixed which is exactly what we need, some hot, some cool. Prior to the burn we undertook both fauna and flora monitoring to ensure we could assess and interpret the outcomes. It has been interesting to note the amount of diggings and foraging activity occurring in the freshly burnt areas. A camera set up in the most recent strip captured a very healthy Bandicoot scratching around.

Fire in the Grampians is more and more being viewed and used as an ecological process that should be applied to manage, protect and conserve. This may seem counter intuitive, but applied at the right time, in the right way, in the right place we can make progress towards reducing the impacts of large scale, damaging fires and promote a different fire regime based on ecological and risk principles. This is all about challenging our historic views of land management and requires support from our partners including the Department of Environment & Primary Industries, research partners including Deakin University, The University of Melbourne and the Arthur Rylah Institute.  Adaptive Management is the key to this and continuing to learn, improve and evaluate what we are doing is a major reason why we are optimistic about fire in the Grampians Landscape.

Parks Victoria wishes to past on our condolences to the Thompson Family for their recent loss. David was a passionate and tireless advocate of the Park and its establishment, whilst playing a very significant role in the FoGG’s over numerous decades. The recent memorial at Laharum was well attended and spoke volumes of the respect people from all walks of life had for David and his achievements.

Ryan Duffy
Team Leader, Cultural And Natural Values

Since November 2012, the Grampians rock-wallaby reintroduction has experienced its share of highs and lows. November  saw the largest single release of wallabies to date, with 17 animals being released at Moora Creek. This was part of a new strategy to introduce greater genetic diversity into the population which was anticipated to alleviate depressed breeding. This was certainly a high for the diverse partners involved in the Victorian Brush-tailed Rock-wallaby recovery team.

Soon after the release the program experienced a steady succession of mortalities. Wallabies are radio-tracked on a regular basis, mortalities are retrieved as quickly as possible in order to aid post mortem investigation. Few post mortems delivered conclusive results, however it appears fox predation is still one process threatening the reintroduced colony. This is despite Parks Victoria’s Grampians Ark fox baiting program delivering a Rolls Royce fox control program in proximity to the colony site.

The recent succession of mortalities has exceeded what was identified to be a manageable level of mortality for the reintroduced colony. As a result DEPI and the Victorian Brush-tailed Rock-wallaby Recovery Team decided to suspend further releases until a program review is complete in November 2013. We anticipate the review will look back over the past year to draw upon any learning’s and also look forward to determine if Moora Creek is still a suitable site and if the current strategy is likely to achieve its overall objective, to secure a second wild population of Victorian Brush-tailed Rock-wallabies.

Reintroduction programs are challenging and the highs and lows experienced since November 2012 echo this sentiment. Despite the challenges, although strategies may change our ultimate goal to secure Victorian populations of Brush-tailed Rock-wallabies remains clear.

Glenn Rudolph DEPI

Glenn started by showing photos of the experimental burn they did in the Wannon heathland mid July this year, which Dave R has alluded to in his piece. This area has not been burnt since the 60’s and is a very valuable small mammal habitat. It would be disastrous to have a large fire go through it so they wanted to see how a winter burn would help break it up. They used only 3 matches to light it, no accelerants. They waited till a day when the temperature was below 15, and the fuel moisture level was 16% and lit it in the afternoon. There was much dead grass. Flame heights reached 2 to 3 m. By 5.45 the edges were starting to self extinguish, by 6pm only small pockets were still alight, by 10 pm it was completely out. It reached 8 ha and were very happy with the outcome. They did prefire camera monitoring, and will continue post fire , and used a Tasmanian expert on button grass fires to help the planning.

Glenn then started discussion on this year’s FOP.

Total burn targets – each of these includes about 1000ha of other methods of control eg slashing:

• yr1: 24,500ha,
• yr2: 27,000 ha,
• yr3: 35,000ha.

Most of the work will be done in the Serra Range area. He showed us a map of one large  complex area with different needs, which will need different patterns of burning. There was a query why such a large area selected? Answer: because they want to make the control lines on existing tracks.

We discussed the dilemma of what and when to burn of the 2006 fire area, in the light of research on how the vegetation of different vegetation classes changes in time after a fire. If we do nothing, too much of the Park will be the same age, with no space for new plants to come in. He drew a rough graph of how it would look in 5 years, 10 years. So they would like to start burning up to 100ha of the 2006 burnt area each year, except for the mature trees. There was general agreement that this made sense. We would like to see some winter burning near the old growth areas to protect them. Someone  commented that before the Mt Stapylton fire over 30 years ago the moss beds on Flat Rock were 18 inches deep, and they are only now coming back.

There was a question about monitoring the spread of the African weed orchid as the burnt part of Rocklands had lots of it. Ryan admitted they hadn’t done anything as yet, and didn’t know what they could afford to do.

Protecting the gullies as John White says presents a real problem and dilemma. They are vital refuges, but in a wildfire they are also the chimney that takes a fire up to the top. The burnt wet gullies on the Victoria Range will take 30 years to recover.

There was much discussion of need to mosaic burn and aboriginal burning practices. Also for the desirability of unburnt patch areas for refuges against the desire to have the fire blacked out. Public outcry if a planned fire escapes eg Terrick Terrick.  Discussion of indigenous practices, more burns in winter, more small burns, how to resource, how to better work with CFA inside park especially with changing  management structures and shrinking resources in PV and DSE. There was some discussion of township protection. Halls Gap has a good level of treatment of fuels. Some thought that Laharum is a problem as it is largely the fuel on private properties that causes concern.

In general unofficial discussion after, I felt that many in DEPI and Parks agree the post Black Saturday burn targets are wrong, but they are trying to live with them in the hope they will be changed.

The FOP is on the website of DEPI, and you are encouraged to  make comments.

Suzi Coates (DEPI Ballarat, cultural issues)
Suzi is herself indigenous and has worked on several interesting projects.

There are 99 known Aboriginal cultural sites in the Grampians of which 69 are rock art. All are very vulnerable to fire, as are scar trees and quarries. Damage is caused by ash, smoke, heat. And not just the fire, also the clean up and subsequent erosion. Damage to the art work (heat flaking etc), the surrounding infrastructure, and the subsurface archaeological deposits. The damage may not be apparent to casual inspection, as the micro climate has effects.

The post fire team had 3 requirements: assess and conserve, repair and replace infrastructure, assess control lines prior to remediation works.

Teams have so far gone to 23 known sites and have found 3 new ones. More are likely to be found. The teams have consisted of people from four traditional owner groups and 3 agencies.

Preliminary learnings:

• It takes time (at least 4 weeks) to get the right teams organised
• the need to use experienced staff
• the need for a formal debrief, feedback and evaluation mechanism for both successes and things needing improvement
• heritage assessment is a priority early on.

It was lucky that there had been plans for a prescribed burn in the area, so work had gone into clearing vegetation from the sites, thus there was less defoliation of the rock as less heat close by.

It will be important to use the more open bush to look for sites and register them with AAV. A team is coming soon to register and reregister sites, both within and outside the burnt area.

Partnerships, both with natural values work and cultural heritage will be essential. Traditional owners and AAV. Rock art conservationists are rare and expensive.

There was quite a bit of discussion about how non-indigenous people can get involved in cultural heritage.  Rock climbers make discoveries, some pass them on, others keep quiet over fear of losing sites. But many are passionate about preserving the sites. Other members of the public are keen to help but don’t know how to. No definite answers, but at least the question has been raised.