Finding Melbourne's Nature
Finding Melbourne’s Nature is a walking conversation series exploring the wild places within the city.
Ecologist Ben Cullen walks through reserves, wetlands and remnant bushland across Melbourne/Naarm with Traditional Owners, First Nations voices, conservationists, scientists and community members, each choosing a place that matters to them.
Together they walk and talk about what lives there, what’s changed, what needs protecting, and their own journey in learning about and caring for nature.
You’ll hear footsteps on tracks, birds overhead, wind in the trees, and the city never too far away.
Finding Melbourne's Nature
Gresswell Forest with George Paras
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George Paras has spent more than four decades caring for Gresswell Forest. For more than 36 of those years, he worked as a ranger at La Trobe’s Nangak Tamboree Wildlife Sanctuary, helping restore this forest and the surrounding bushland. Today, he continues to work in ecological restoration and environmental education, and is an incredible source of knowledge when it comes to how these systems actually work.
In this episode, we walk through Gresswell Forest in Melbourne’s north-east, one of the city’s earliest ecological restoration sites. As we go, George shares stories from decades on the ground, from fish moving through Melbourne’s waterways to dormant seed banks, butterflies, sugar gliders and ancient River Red Gums.
More than anything, this is a conversation about relationships. George explains how plants, fungi, insects, birds and mammals are connected in ways we rarely notice, and why understanding those connections is key to restoring healthy landscapes.
I'd like to acknowledge the Wandru Warong people as the traditional owners of the land where this recording was made. Over the past few months, I've been walking through reserves around Melbourne, NAM, and recording conversations along the way. I've met with traditional owners and First Nations peoples, conservationists, ecologists, and others who've chosen a place that matters to them. We walk and talk about nature, what lives there, what's changed, and what needs protecting. You'll hear our footsteps, the wind in the trees, the birds overhead, and the city not too far away. This is Finding Melbourne's Nature. Today, we're walking through Greswell Forest in Melbourne's Northeast with the legendary George Paris. George spent more than 36 years as a ranger at Latrobe's Lightlike Temporary Wildlife Sanctuary, helping to restore and care for the Greswell Forest as well as the surrounding bushland. These days he works in ecological restoration and environmental education. But as we got started, George told me about his career in conservation and how it was an accident. While studying at Latrobe, Electra noticed his interest in native fish and suggested he meet the head ranger Rod Foster. That set everything in motion. George got involved in environmental groups, found mentors and a community, and stayed with it, eventually building a career working on the ground in restoration. As we walk, George shares his knowledge of decades in the field. What works, what doesn't, what it takes to bring the landscape back, and the relationships that hold it all together. Thanks, Ben. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So Greswell Forest is a place I met when I was a uni student at La Trobe in the early 80s. At the time it was being managed by La Trobe University, Wildlife Reserves Department. La Trobe Uni had a wildlife reserve established on its own land going back to the 60s when La Trobe was established. It was meant to have a place, a biological reserve, like a big outdoor lab. And there were people working on that since 1967, 68. But particularly in the 70s, the focus there started on indigenous restoration. And there were a whole lot of people that were students at La Trobe in the 70s and academics that drove the direction. And to the best of my knowledge, it's the first ecological restoration project in Melbourne, if not Victoria, where the emphasis was on recreating indigenous things. Now, at some time in the 70s, Gresle Forest as an important remnant of grassy woodland was being seen by the naturalists, the botanists, the students, the postgrads at La Trobe as a valuable resource. And the then head ranger at La Trobe University Wildlife Reserves, the late Rod Foster, he and others were collecting seed in Gresle Forest. So some of his contemporaries like Jeff Carr, Randall Robinson, Cam Betzel, others, they knew Gresel Forest was quite important. And I don't know the exact details, but somehow the interest in conserving Gresel Forest led to a campaign by the Vice-Chancellor, Professor John Scott, to approach the mental health authority, because this land was part of that greater hospital system around Mont Park. And I'll get on to why areas of bush like this survived, and it was no longer needed for its original purpose. Its original purpose was, as bush land, clean air, around the Greswell tuberculosis sanatorium. Oh really? So back in the year old days, uh people coming back from wars or whatever when there were tuberculosis were isolated. They were given good nutrition and fresh air until they recovered, until modern medicine caught up with the treatment. And of course, they had buffers around them with no cattle grazing, no agricultural activity, and a place for people to recuperate. And that's why there's a hell of a lot of bush around Greswell Hill, Gresl Forest, and all that that had survived right through the 70s. Greswell Sanatorium was no longer tuberculosis sanatorium in the 70s. It became an alcohol rehabilitation centre, Greswell Hospital for drug and alcohol rehabilitation. And so back in those days, surplus crown land that was no longer needed for health purposes could easily move to a university for education and conservation purposes without needing to be sold like surplus crown land and public assets are these days.
SPEAKER_01Fascinating. So that's why it's here now. Yeah, so that's why it's here. And what did it look like when you first saw the place?
SPEAKER_02Well, I started volunteering down at the wildlife reserve at La Trobe Buny in the early 80s. I was introduced to it, not because I was doing botany or zoology or ecology, I was actually an agricultural science student. And one of my animal sciences lecturers, he was on the management committee of the wildlife reserves. And he was of Scottish background and a mad keen fly fisherman. And he realised that I knew a lot about fishing and a lot about native fish. It was a growing interest of mine. And he said, George, you should go over and introduce yourself to the ranger at the Wildlife Reserve, the late Rod Foster. He knows a lot about plants, but he doesn't seem to know about fish or anything like that. They got these wetlands there, and he said, see if we get some decent fish in there so I could go fishing at lunchtime. So I became a volunteer in the Friends of the Wildlife Reserves. And there was also a student group that developed a few years later called the Ecological Society. It was basically a student naturalist club. We hung out at the reserve and did all sorts of things.
SPEAKER_01So to set the scene where it's sort of walking up a hill, how do you describe this forest in front of us?
SPEAKER_02Well these days, this southwestern part of south eastern part of Greswell Forest with its westly aspect is a lot denser than it was back then. There's been a lot of regeneration. The eucalypts, which had survived that hospital era, official clearing had ceased in the early 1900s. There was still firewood collecting. I know that from other locals. I've moved into the McLeod area and there was even a wood merchant, firewood merchant, that used to come in here in the hospital lands, and he'd target things that were easy work. And he'd target also, particularly yellow box, I found out later. So some of the lesser representation of yellow box is probably because it was selectly harvested in the early days.
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_02So it was more open. Now, of course, a lot of the seedlings of River Redgums and some of the wattles that were here in the early 80s have now grown to full height or maturity. It's a lot woodier. There's some shrubs that have come in over the years.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we're walking through now what looks like stunning bush. That when you look at an aerial photo, it looks like there's all these housing developments around it, yet in this bush right now, you don't have a feeling at all that you're surrounded by suburbia. It feels rich and big and the ground story is in fantastic condition.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, very few weeds. We had had at one stage in the 90s a huge grant from Melbourne Water. And we're grateful because Tamera Creek Management Committee pushed the boundaries as to where Melbourne water funding could go. They were the first agency that argued that this pool of money that had been developed, which was originally the Melbourne Metropolitan Border Works, Parks and Waterways Division pie of money, that other agencies that were managing substantial metropolitan open space and waterways should be able to bid for. And we did some major work in the Creek Valley that we'll walk past later. I look forward to it.
SPEAKER_01What was the hydrology like, do you think, before this area had been interfered with in any sense?
SPEAKER_02So about 20% of this 50-hectare reserve was just thickets and deltas of weeds. The bits that weren't affected by stormwater were where you had the intact understory, you had a dormant seed bank, so new indigenous plants would occasionally surprise us as the you know the mass of grassy of the grassy layer you know was suppressed. The grass layer composition changed. In areas that were more open and sunny, they were dominated by thermata. They later became dominated by uh weeping grass.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Now some botanists say, well, that's a problem. Well, is it or isn't it? Was it the previous scenario just the fireprone ecosystem that kept it open? What happened before all human intervention and land management? Uh areas might have been woodier, okay? Gullies were and riparian strips were bushier, were lusher, etc.
SPEAKER_01So and speaking of riparian, we're standing, um it's a marvellous cue for what we're standing over right now. What have we got here? Is this all stormwater or is there a natural creek line?
SPEAKER_02This is a natural creek line. This is one of the three uh tributary creek lines that go together to form the west branch of the Salt Creek that flows down to MacLeod. But on this branch here, we're sitting around a small artificial farm dam, you could call it. So this was constructed before my time. Back in the late 80s, I started putting indigenous wetland plants into it and we created a bit of an island and planted that out. So it's got swamp paper bark as well as naturally regenerated wood at lands, etc. So ended up we ended up focusing on this area and making sure that a lot of those weeds of disturbance around the periphery were dealt with through restoration because just up there, and Park's Tory has put a rootproof fence around that, is the famous wildflower patch.
SPEAKER_01The famous wildflower patch.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that was like the pinnacle of you know grassy woodland thing. That's the one with you know the most species and all of that. That was the one that after the 82, 83 fires, people took photos of it. There's slides somewhere on file of you know just wildflower meadows.
SPEAKER_01Is it still as good?
SPEAKER_02No. No, not not not not as good, but there's a longer history there. But interestingly, there's a whole story here. We would become like West wetland plant, wetland restoration experts. We were helping others on small projects. We were running courses of how to improve your wetland, you know, for hobby farmers, for people in other land management agencies, etc. And we had a field day here where we even had uh uh fish biologist John McGuckin with some of his survey equipment here. And we did a survey here because we thought we could bring it here because someone had dumped some goldfish here. And we thought, oh, we'll demonstrate, you know, the techniques and maybe get a few of those goldfish out, which we did. And in the middle of the workshop, he picked up two individual climbing a Galaxius.
SPEAKER_01How's that work?
SPEAKER_02The Galaxis Breverpenis.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Now this is a fish that back then managed to get past that 1967 lump of concrete that people call dye. It's I'm not gonna call it falls, it's a weir. Yeah. Right? So those fish breed in the estuary. And they and diadromus, they head upstream and colonize the roots. And out of all the galaxia family and galaxia species, they're the ones that are more capable of getting up past wet surfaces. You know, if you've ever been on a fish survey and got Galaxy Brevapinus in the bucket, you go to pour the water out, some of them are climbing up the sides of the bucket, you know, the last to sort of, you know, exit the bucket. So you think about those two fish that were found up here, they have come up the Yarra, all the way to Heidelberg. At Heidelberg, near Warringle Park, they've done a left turn up Salt Creek, past the old Anglican historical church there, where there's a you know sort of bluestone channel from the 1800s, etc. They've crossed under Rosanna Road into that concreted drain section. You think Melbourne Water pouted a lot of in the post-war years? There was one agency that poured more than Melbourne Water, it was the Dandelong Valley Authority. Concrete drains were dirty in the 60s and 70s. And this thing came up to about Edgar Street, then entered a drain, a barrel drain, and proceeded upstream for almost a kilometre under Lower Plenty Road, Rosanna near the service station, and saw sunlight again at Rosanna Parklands. And these fish would have gone up through Rosanna Parklands, nice bit of you know, open waterway, all the way to behind the McLeod Tennis Courts near McLeod Railway Station, and would have entered another barrel drain that went all the way up to that retarding basin at Harry Potter Reserve that we passed on the way here, where they would they would have seen sky at one caged pit, and their drive, they would have kept going right up that drain, right up through the Dunvegan estate, and we came in at the south end gate of Greswell Forest, near the Dunvegan Park, uh near the corners of Vincent Street, and they would have then found Greswell Forest and thought, wow, and got into this habitat that you'd newly created with beautiful plants. Get here too. So we've got to see this land management, bush land that we manage is part of the continuum. It's like now there's people putting up maps of the Yarra showing all its tentacles. So we we're all part of that. Life in a catchment. And so those two ambassadors of their species, there's a whole story of what goes on there. And you start thinking about there was one fishway attempt on at Dyes Falls using the old historical raceway. That worked to some extent, but it also served to uh threaten the heritage, you know, the bluestone mill raceway. So they built a new one next few years later. And so you go to Dyes Falls on the north side, and there's this whole caged fishway. The reality is very few fish get past it. A lot do, but it's high velocity, even though it's got sort of spots and whatever. And for small-bodied native fish, of which millions depend on being you know born in the estuary or the salem waters, they like the shallow riffles. So what happens there? A lot of fish, I'd say I I don't know the science, would just live out their life in that big sort of salem kayak circuit, not find their way into the fishway. If anything, they're probably going to the far side of Galaxia Point on the south side where it's the shallow beach side of the Yarra. And you know, some of those smaller fish would prefer to think here. But things like Climb Galaxius have made it up the kunung, uh the Mullum. So a lot of the area that's been impacted by North East Link works was that wonderful restoration bit of the kunang. When the Eastern Freeway was linked, they uh did some wonderful work with wetlands, artificial creeks, re-vegetation along there, and that's been redug up again.
SPEAKER_01Wow, so the potentially the fish here have a relationship with the Yarrow River and the estuary parts right out of towards the bay.
SPEAKER_02Yep. And at some point they probably move downstream again if they get the urge to breed.
SPEAKER_01This is what blows me away is like thinking about all these relationships that we we don't understand and how much of an impact it has when we have development and things that could break that um tenuous length that we have and that that that journey that you've described of where the fish have travelled, that's incredible to think. There've been that whole journey to get to a place that's safe and healthy here. And live out there, you know, sort of adult life pre-breeding. And a huge thanks to you for giving them a safe and comfortable home.
SPEAKER_02There's a lot of things we don't see, these aren't seen things. Yeah. Like we we look at the uh surface vegetation, we don't look at the subterranean seed bank. So restoration, long-term, we're trying to exhaust the weed seeds, but we've probably got uh propagules, whether they're seed or corms or bobs or spores, orchids, lilies, whatever, dinnellas, just by simply resting the land that come up from that dormant seed. When they demolish some of those Mont Park uh buildings, some that have been there for 80 years, one of the peas that came up in the area, previously unrecorded in the area.
SPEAKER_01Lying dormant in the soil just ready to come.
SPEAKER_02Goodya uh Medico Giana, yeah. And Michael Sincota, who was working with us at the time, he sort of found that. So we knew Goodyear, a lot of folia occurred in some places near here, etc. was growing on this. So these are the things uh people don't see.
SPEAKER_01What's beneath the ground?
SPEAKER_02When you talk about the seed bank still being intact even after 80 years, maybe more, um, does it give you hope when we think about Melbourne conservation that um we could turn some things around and yes, you've got to see the restoration potential in every sod of open space we have. You know, we we saw that era, the growth in private consultants and developers ticking boxes, they're reporting on sites and they're being uh scored lowly because no one is there to do this enduring longitudinal work of just leaving bloody rest in the land and dealing with a small number of weeds to show the full potential of these sites. So sites are being written off, they're being scored, there's now a more modern scoring thing.
SPEAKER_01So what you're saying is that the condition we see it in now might not represent what the potential condition is based on underlying seed sources or um restorative efforts.
SPEAKER_02Um and and I've been uh lucky, you know, people look at you like a freak, what you've worked for the same you know job for that many decades. Like, you know, what sort sort of freak are you? Can't survive in the real competitive world of you know career advancement. But I've seen places that were totally wrested, that were farmed on the campus wildlife reserve, in the wildlife sanctuary, that the land was rested long enough that dormant seed bank things came up in areas that had been grazed as part of the Mont Park Psychiatric Hospital, the Great Hospital in the post-war one years, was a dairy farm, was a market garden. There were bits that were more ploughed and more fertilized and bits that weren't, people bits that were just cleared and burnt and grazed. And we saw how many dinalinas come back in the fourth decade of my career there.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02There were places on the edge of La Trobe where two species of pterostylus have come up. There's some that have come up here. Terastylus has never accorded around here. To see Terastylus, yeah. Go to the east side of Melbourne, the northeast of Melbourne, St. Helena, and beyond, and all the terrace is and you see all those orchid photos that naturals take. So even in and so I've had long discussions with uh one of the guys uh that became arranged in Park Victoria uh uh and a park planner, Gary French, and he became a keen orchid conservationist orchid enthusiast and conservationist, and now in retirement is actively involved in orchid conservation. And there were places up in Pliny Gorge where you'd see an echidna dicking, had done some scarif micro disturbance, probably got into an ant nest, sugar ant nest or something like that, and all of a sudden you'd find certain orchids coming up there, and they weren't in the immediate surrounding area, so you can't say they just uh came up or were there all along. And we think that even the finest spores probably survive in these granaries, you know, they're then in ant chambers, the apothecaries of the seed bank, just like peas and wattlesed do, below the surface, where it takes a very intense fire, intense disturbance, in the case of uh uh Goodya, Bedico Giana, or whatever, to come back, but in the same way, even finer spores potentially could be existing in that humidity crib of the right humidity, the right temperature buffering, whatever, and with fungi and germinate after an echidna event. Is that bit of disturbance? Yes, some things to get it going. But it's not just disturbance, it's an echidna, it's an ant nest. Anyway, we'll head into the uh wildflower patch.
SPEAKER_01Um with so much of your career being around restorative actions and understanding things, I guess we don't have many people like you who've spent, did you say, four decades in this space and watched things and experimented with things? Um how do you find the way that things are being managed these days? And do you think do you see people coming through who can pick up that mantle of where you left off?
SPEAKER_02I don't see a lot of it. Yeah. Look at look at this area. We're we're standing the most biodiverse part of Gresel Forest. Someone's been in here with chainsaw chopping down old wattles. What were they thinking? Yeah, I don't know. That old dead wattles are a fire hazard?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I don't know.
SPEAKER_02In the middle of nowhere, nowhere near the boundaries. They've created this disturbance. Do you realise that this area here, Gresel Forest and Gresle Hill, the high bits of ground that aren't affected by drainage are also very important for so many butterflies. My eyes were open to you know the plant, insect, ant butterfly associations or grizzle forests early on, by a mate of mine who was also involved in those student organisations who went on to become Australia's butterfly expert, Dr. Michael Braby. So we're good mates. We used to volunteer together under Rod Foster's Tutilage, and I learned about the Imperial Blue Butterflies Association between the ant young wattles. He introduced me to this butterfly that occurs in very old senescent wattles. And it's uh the azure blue, or it's called something else now, and it's tendered by an ant that lives in the hollows of old senescent wattles, the hollows that have been created by beetle larvae. You know, you get those very old death-warmed-up black wattles, for example, or golden wattles. Yep. Those last few years old wattles are the essential food plant for that butterfly. And sent by a species of ant that lives in those old senescent wattles in the hollows created previously by a whole succession of beetles that live in wattles. And of course, why does everything live in wattles? Because they're nitrogen fixers, they're loaded with amino acids. What are the wattles trying to do? They're trying to fight off all these herbivores. While they're young, they're producing all the nasty herbivore-deturing chemicals they can, the tannins, the alpha toxins, the you know, whatever that legumes do to stop themselves being eaten. And as they senesse, they're losing this war. They become this living city with millions of invertebrates and fungal succession and galls, and there's a whole, there's tones of books being written by the scientists, entomologists like Tim Yu, who was my boss, he's written tomes about you know uh insect wattle associations. And when there's been studies done in the 70s on the invertebrate life on different trees, in random, in proper experimental plots that were trade that planted all these wattles, pinate, non-pinate, those with fire loads, local to Melbourne, non-local to Melbourne. And you know who won for the most biodiversity on individual trees?
SPEAKER_03Who?
SPEAKER_02The indigenous ones. Yeah. And out of all the indigenous ones, the pinnates, that ugly acacia mercei and acacia dilbata, was scoring up to 600 and 700 taxa of invertebrates on individual trees. On individual trees. Right? The exotics, wattles from New South Wales or West Australia, were below 200.
SPEAKER_01So to understand biodiversity and life, we need to understand the role that these species play and and get a better feel for that. What do you think the best way to disseminate that information is out to people? How do we teach people about these intricacies?
SPEAKER_02Well, you join the bloody field, Matt. Go out with mentors. Yeah, yeah. I was lucky, you know, you mentioned some of them, you know. People like uh Cam Beardsall had immense patience for me. Yeah as a young, you know, volunteer or you know, early industry star. People like Randall Robinson, Darcy Duggan. They had great encouragement, great approaches to, you know, make you think about what was going on out there.
SPEAKER_01We've got a bit of a chorus for people maybe able to hear of the birds around us at this place. Is the bird diversity at Greswell Forest quite significant?
SPEAKER_02It is. It's less uh than it used to be when it started here. Like we used to get a lot more insectivores, uh crested shrike tits, but Greswell Forest and La Troy Beuny wildlife centres still turn up some jeb. So if you follow the social media, you'll still see we get a whole lot of the robins turn up here. We've had uh you know scarlet honey eaters, we've had uh the robins in particular have stayed the the distance. We don't uh we still get uh swift parrots in here, occasionally stopping over in this McLeodla Tribunium. We're still it still is a good place for bushland birds. And you can see uh heaps of dinulla lina. When I started here, it was referred to as uh dinola lonifolia. Jeff Carr used to call it the nutfield form. And we knew it wasn't uh dinulla lonifolia, and it wasn't Dianulla Revoluta. And he eventually went on and you know he published the things, and we now know it it's uh endemic to central southern Victoria, its epicenter of you know, it's almost northern Melbourne.
SPEAKER_01So for people who might not realise that's a nationally endangered species that's pretty prolific in here for the year.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, but we used to manage it at the time, knowing it was different. Ah, okay. Uh even though we didn't have a botanical name for it. And we knew it was different to other lonifolias, which are also found in here, along with Dianella Revoluta.
SPEAKER_01So if someone's a land manager and they're thinking about the patch of bush that they're managing, or it whether it's their garden or whether it's a big bush land reserve, what advice would you have for them in terms of thinking about how to plot it out and how to make sure that they went about it the right way?
SPEAKER_02Look, I think it's uh synonymous, uh, or similar to moving into a new house, similar advice. I wouldn't make any radical changes until you've lived at least a year and seen it in all seasons. And then you start on your triage, you think, what can I fix? And what you can fix is the alien flora. And there's a triage, just a witch alien flora. Even the old advice of the Bradley sisters still holds true today in terms of a strategic approach. Start with your best years, your outliers. So patience. Patience. Fix what you can fix, what is obvious, in a uh in a way that's sympathetic, minimal impact, got to get people out of vehicles, out of excavators, all this stuff that you know the state agents isn't doing by redeploying these forestry contractors that overcapitalising these machines, that's what it takes. It takes bush land restorationists, regenerators, our TAFES, our punching out how many neat or resource management students, whatever the diplomas call these days, conservation land management or whatever it's called, it's changed names. There's great people that need work.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely, and I think that's why volunteering at a local reserve or a friends group can be really good because you can you can have all sorts of things change around you, but uh you can still play a role in that reserve's future.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, on one recent social media post uh there was someone on the Field Naturalist Club of Victoria Facebook page asking for advice to get into this career, and I can't remember it was it might have been uh uh Greg Mueller uh responded you're better off getting a day job as a plumber and working two days a week and spending the rest five days volunteering in this environment. And there's a lot of people that do that too. Hello, how are you?
SPEAKER_03G'day good, what are you finding?
SPEAKER_02Oh, we're just having a walk down memory lane here, looking at uh some of the biodiversity in Greswell Forest in the Nature Conservation Reserve. Yeah, and Ben Cullen here, he's a podcaster, and because I've had many years of working in this field and used to work on this patch in the La Trobini days, yeah. Uh he's we're having a conversation, a recorded conversation, I must warn you.
SPEAKER_01Oh yeah. Yeah, you might be a feature in it now. Have you been walking in this area a lot?
SPEAKER_00Uh yeah, I discovered it during COVID. I grew up in Rosanna. We used to ride our bikes around in what was Mont Park then, but I wasn't really aware of this area. Um but since COVID I've been coming here pretty regularly and I really enjoy this little area. Um and I do a little bit of weeding in here, and I'm just looking and needs a bit more weeding.
SPEAKER_01We were just talking about the exact same thing about the value of people doing that little bit of weeding, yeah. So assisted regeneration.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I've worked in bush regeneration for 20 years. Oh wow.
SPEAKER_01Can I hit you with a real basic question, or perhaps it's a hard question, but for people to try and understand why is it so important to protect patches like this, particularly around Greater Melbourne, there's little patches left, and some are at risk today, some may be at risk tomorrow, but why is it so important to protect patches like Greswell Forest that we're in right now?
SPEAKER_02Look, some of people used to complain about you know the urban environment conservation movement as being misplaced, you know, there's millions of hectares out there, why are you borrowing this? And now we're seeing the emerging science, you know, by people at RMIT and University of Melbourne, urban ecology. We're seeing, you know, people like Professor Sarah Beckase, her team, Jacina Humphreys, new project she's working on. And we're now learning that that theoretical ecology, that single large reserves were more important than smaller ones, and the emerging evidence is that a whole lot of smaller nodes of biodiversity can be important habitat and note right, and even though they may not appear contiguous, like there was a lot of stuff done on wildlife corridors, a lot of it in West Australia, etc., and so on. Uh people write popular books like Roll and Breck with what wildlife corridors, the team saunders and all that in West Australia. And now the emerging science is that all these little reserves in the Melbourne area that we've been fighting for, or that we've been parochially uh consistently volunteering in, all these various French groups, are actually important nodes of biodiversity. So having and at a time of change, remnants are very important. Which gets me back to my earlier criticism, how many consultants have written off small remnants simply because they've been damaged goods without seeing their full potential under appropriate management? And appropriate management isn't necessarily more expensive.
SPEAKER_01It's not about just seeing the moment in time, it's about seeing the potential and the opportunity within that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and the same goes for the big forest too.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. What are some of the special things around here in terms of invertebrates, mammals? What are what are what are some of the exciting things that uh exist in this place?
SPEAKER_02Well, one of the most exciting things that's made a comeback. Back when I was a volunteer in the early 80s, the late Rod Foster would say there were sugar gliders somewhere in the hospitals near the big sugar gums. Never saw them, hadn't been detected, but he reckons they had been. I'm not sure who else knew about them. I think Cam Beertz might have known about them. Anyway, back in the 90s when I was working there, we got this federal money unemployment scheme. We employed these 25 long-time unemployed. You think that's a big task in its own right, but we did. And between Bruce Smith and Chris Robbins, who was employed as a team leader for that project, and Adrian Daniel, who was Dr. Adrian Daniel, our you know, uh our Nazi professor, our sort of ecologist who was the education arm of our uh department, they went about uh devising a nesting box for sugar gliders. Specifically. Yeah. And so Bruce came up with Chris Robbins, this box where there was a spout, so birds couldn't get in and use it, like we had issues with uh common minor and other things, uh with a hole too small for any of the possums. Instead of the hole being at the top, the hole was at the bottom, so they went up the spout and into the chamber. And so that's become the bee's knees. It's the nest box that gliders have been known to leave their natural homes to move into.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_02The upgrade. So by 96 we started testing these various things. Gliders turned up using them at La Trobe.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, great.
SPEAKER_02Anyway, so the population started getting busters. We were able to show people at night, whatever we knew, these insectivores, whatever. They were even detected, even before the Mr. Boxes got there, in a survey of surplus land in the Laurundel Hospital site at the north end. So uh, who was it? It was Lincoln Kern from practical ecology, employed one of the naturalists I knew, Bob Taylor, and they found them up in this little grassland patch. You talk about small patches at the north of Laurundel Hospital near Pliny Road. And they found gliders up there. Yeah, and they found more at the south end. And a couple of years later, someone found one dead on Pliny Road. This is the multiple duplicated Pliny Road. So they had been potentially moving between Bundura Park and things in low densities. Anyway, so we didn't rolled them out, we started sold them. Everyone, the people started putting them up in the bush, they became a survey tool. Gliders and Fascagales and Yellowfoot endocrinists would move into them, so you can they could even be used to detect the presence of things. Anyway, I get this call from Rob Ewell from Land Care Victoria. Rob was a you know really good supporter of urban forestry, conservation, etc. He goes, George, I got this pro I've got some people, some money, and they want to do a project. They're from the Bank of Melbourne. Can you think of a project? And I thought, you know, disgust the phone. It's gotta happen then, it's gotta happen. And 40 people, I've got a project. Crazy idea. We got this glider population down at La Trobe, and we're managing Gresel Habitat Link and Gresel Forest, but no gliders. It had to happen in a weekend. We put up 40 nesting boxes from the back of La Trobe along Main Drive, across near the Gresle Grange Lakes, which we were co-managing, parts of the Strath Island Gulf Course habitat link all the way up to the northwesternmost corner of Gresel Forest. 40 nesting boxes. Wow. Anyway, by the following year, we got up on the ladders, had a look inside, 50% of them had been used. You saw the telltale glider things, and the couple we found them in. Within a year to a year and a half, we're finding them in Grasel Forest. Anyway, two and a half years later, down in that grassland patch, we're doing a little ecological burn. Lo and behold, two years later, gliders had made it down there, and in this little burn, a glider leaps out of the shittiest little tree that you can imagine, cleared out whatever. We think, shit. Then some years later, a group down at Friends of Salt Creek Rose on the parklands, they turned up there, and Professor Mike Clark lives down there, and he was fine. So they turned up there. And this is all because of this Nest Box comeback. So there's hope. Yeah, there's hope. There's hope. Can we fix it? We can try.
SPEAKER_01We can try for sure.
SPEAKER_02We can go down trying. Oh, by the way, one of the things that's returned to Melbourne area, which was absent in the early 80s started, is common bronze wing pigeon. Yeah. Now, most of their diet is hard seeds, like wattle. So you think of that 70s, all those employment programs, planting wattles up and down the Darbin and everywhere else. Our tolerance of wattles, our planting wattles, our encouragement of wattles in re-vegetation areas, and voila, bronze rings made a comeback. And so I owe I owe their recovery or their recolonisation element to the population of wattles and wattle seed, seed bank that they're constantly picking up. But I saw another thing a few years ago, one cherry ballard at a trobe laid in fruit, full of bronze wings.
SPEAKER_01Really?
SPEAKER_02So they were feeding on the ripe cherry ballard fruit, which also has a hard seed. Now pigeons have a crop, so they ingest little pebbles, stone gravel, and they use that to scarify, to break up the seed, which they then digest. So I suspect that the recovery of cherry bellite has followed the recovery of bronze wing pigeons in the northern Melbourne area. And the recovery of bronzewing pigeons followed the recovery of wattles and having a mass unseen resource of wattle seed on the ground.
SPEAKER_01Wow, that's that blows my mind. And oh it's still that same thing of thinking what relationships do we not know about? What what potential is there for us by supporting indigenous vegetation to rehabilitate the habitat for things to come back?
SPEAKER_02And having the patience for things to start for for things. Well, we're working with nature, not against it.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_02We've got to remind ourselves can we work with nature?
SPEAKER_01If someone's feeling helpless and want to do something about nature, they're keen to learn and they're keen to get out there and do something. Something, what would you encourage them to do?
SPEAKER_02Look, it's a big dive to get involved in an existing group. But you may consider a course that's been run in across Melbourne and in some rural areas every year. Nature Should's course is a really good one. I'm wearing the shirt today.
SPEAKER_03Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_02Because I think it it has introduced people that I don't already meet in these long established groups. Yeah. And people turned up, so two people that had never been to a working bee after the recent course at uh Hume, Merribeck, and Mooney Valley. I get this call on Saturday morning because I'd shared the information about the Friends of Organ Pipes, which is a well-established group. And they said, Oh, we're in this car park and Dunny. Do you know where this work bee is? I said, No, I don't, but let me make a call and um I'll put you in touch with uh someone I know. And I um had Robert Irvine's number, passed it on to them, they managed to phone it, found their way to the work and bee. Anyway, the Friends of Organpipes National Park sent me their newsletter. Next newsletter I got last this week, there are their faces joined into this group. So Harumi is new to Australia, from Japan, whatever, she's up there doing this stuff. So I think Nature Stewards is an ideal course for those people who aren't already into it. You want to take it to the next level, right, and you're a volunteer, whatever you found your way into some groups, you do the habitat conservation and management course. Where there's both hardcore volunteers and industry people alongside the course.
SPEAKER_01And what has this connection with nature done to you personally? What's it meant to you?
SPEAKER_02Oh look, it's uh it's an ongoing connection. I mean, I'm an immigrant to this country. When we came out, uh even though it was only a toddler, it was completely different. We you know, we we grew up, well we were growing up, in a mountain village in the Palaponnese. Uh village that had no electricity, no plumbing to every house. There was one village spring that mum would go fill water containers to. And mum was like this crazy naturalist. She knew every plant and animal, every weed, every whatever. She worked hard, she worked hard during the war years, during the famine, during the civil war, whatever. Dad was a bit older, he'd lived through all that. And here we were in industrial Yarreville, surrounded by factories, fumes. Every summer night you'd open your window, and depending which way the breeze was blowing, you'd get smorgans, the tannery, you know, Australia Carbon Black, ICI, Petrol Refineries Australia, Odors from the Maverick, whatever. Could Island, you name it. And they and they hated it. And then we started going on picnics in family groups, people from our village. Dad got his uh station wagon back in 1972. That was the freedom machine. Every weekend there'd be a picnic somewhere out west. We'd jump in the car, you know, a hamper, maybe another family, kids in the back, two families to a station wagon, go out and have a picnic. They loved it. There were places like Jeruard Gorge, you know, New Anthony's cutting. I've got photos from the 70s there with mum and dad at that historic bridge down by the creek. We'd go in search of lion parks that we couldn't afford the tickets to. You know, we'd end up at Melton Reservoir, we'd end up at Werrib South, we'd buy produce. And so we were out in nature all the time. And then we had some relatives with Mitsu Rosanna. And once you got on the east side of the city, you could drive almost this uninterrupted greenery along the Yarra Boulevard to the back of uh Heidelberg and the Yarrow there to visit them in Rosanna. Parks everywhere. And so we just started getting out. And my mother, who's 91 now, still loves. They moved to Heidelberg in the in 1992, uh 82, 83, and they've got a huge green place, and they've got indigenous plants and garden for my influence. And yeah, it's just part of a natural transition. And when I um started inquiring things when I was in the university age, I was the first non-English kid at some of these conservation groups. Oh really. Yeah, so I I found a natural home there. There were some great old mentors. One of the things I mentioned in uh the 90s, I got this grant to do all the woody weeds in this section of the salt creek from here all the way down. Wow. Either side of the creek and its various Anna branches was like this 20-foot deep patch of blackberries with hawthorns in it, some cotoniastas, some prunus, you know, and all that sort of thing. And we got into it on a big scale, like even this lamandra patch here had a whole lot of blackberry canes all around it and so on.
SPEAKER_01Wow, and it looks so fantastic now.
SPEAKER_02So these are remnant lamandras, and there was another remnant patch near the grassland area there. And this was the site of the first butterfly reintroduction project in Australia, inspired by Mike Braby, and we got the local school involved, and then Greenwood High, and there was this uh cohort of students called doing a subject called practical science. They were the non-academic stream. The kids called it veggie science. And we collected seed and propagated more laundras, and then we discovered the other patch, and we started, they were growing it in the school, and then he organized an excursion where we went out to all the places, like from Mitchum right around to you know, in an arc around Melbourne to eight different sites with school kids at the right time of year and collected eggs and larvae and brought them here and positioned them on these.
SPEAKER_01Really?
SPEAKER_02The Simomas Skipper butterfly exclusively grazes on Lamandra longifolia. Lo and behold, we saw butterflies. But the real test was the following year they were here again. Wow. And two years later they found at the far end of Greslin that other patch which we had liberated from weeds, and a year later they turned up at La Trove, 2.4 kilometres away.
SPEAKER_01Is the butterfly still around?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. So this is one of the two oldest trees in the reserve, probably 800 years old.
SPEAKER_01Oh my god, that took me by surprise. We just looked one way and there's this huge tree.
SPEAKER_02So this is the poster tree of you know, you see the you know, the multi-story habitat tree. But I was here with a bunch of school teachers one day, yeah, and uh they had a like a day off from teaching, but no students, you know, and in service it was like a gradual cluster of schools around here. And I was looking at them, and I was giving a talk and point out, and one of the teachers came up here and she's looking at her, and because I'm looking at her, I look here and there's something there that was jet black. Oh like almost charcoal. And I come up here and right here, this is about 20 years ago, in this little fissure was single men's corners for a gold squaddle bat.
SPEAKER_01No. I think there's no better place to leave it than right at a gold squaddle bat. There's so many more stories with George, but we'll have to leave it there for today. I encourage you check him out on social media, you can keep track of where he might be doing a talk and have a look at the Nature Stewards course as well. If you're interested in hearing more episodes of Finding Melbourne's Nature, you can check him out on your favourite streaming services, or otherwise check out finding Melbourne's Nature.com and see all the episodes there. Thanks for joining us, and please get in touch, I'd love to hear what you're thinking of the series.