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
Nepean Peninsula with Gidja Walker
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Gidja Walker OAM has spent more than four decades helping people understand and care for the Mornington Peninsula. An ecologist, ethnobotanist and artist, she has an extraordinary ability to see the connections between geology, plants, animals, water, history and culture.
In this episode, we spend time with Gidja on the southern Nepean Peninsula, exploring the Coastal Moonah Wodlands and Calcareous Swales that make this part of Melbourne so distinctive.
Our conversation moves through ancient Moonah, fungi and orchids, lost fauna, the wildlife living in Gidja’s own garden, and the importance of protecting the remnants of vegetation that have survived around us. Along the way, Gidja reflects on a lifetime spent observing, learning and working to protect the natural world.
I'd like to acknowledge the Bunerong Boonerong 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 protect us. 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 on the southern Pine Peninsula with Kitcher Walker OAM. Gidja is a distinguished ecologist, ethnobotanist, and artist who's been over four decades helping people understand and care for the morning to Natura. In this episode, we spent time in Costa Muna Woodlands and beautiful Castera Squares, talking about what makes this part of Punchula so distinct. Gidja has a way of describing ecological interactions that feel almost poetic. Through her, geology, plants, animals, water, history, and culture begin to connect, revealing the deep relationships that exist in places like this. Please enjoy. Well, I guess it's turned on now, so I did want to just say I look up to you so much, Gidia. I admire you, you've taught me so much, and you really uh have so much knowledge. It's incredible, and I'm forever happy to be learning from you. So thank you for everything you've done.
SPEAKER_01Oh, thank you. That's fantastic. I mean that's what keeps you going is young people sort of learning stuff and being enthused, and and sometimes you don't know what whether what you've said has had any impact on anybody, really. So having a bit of feedback's actually quite good at this stage of my life where I'm trying to retire.
SPEAKER_00Well, you've shaped me and so many other people, and I'd be really keen to talk about that. But starting off, would it be okay to introduce yourself?
SPEAKER_01So um I'm Gidge Walker, I'm I'm an ecologist based on the Mornington Peninsula. But I've over my life I've probably nearly 50 years of um working on beak, which I prefer that word now, beak, because it's more than country, it's it's the whole interconnections of sky, earth, water. I've spent time doing a lot of work on salt marshes, alpine grasslands and alpine vegetation, western grasslands, and these days I spend my time between looking at the water around Lake Ayr and the Great Artesian Basin, and spending time on the Monero and Narago country and travelling a bit in painting, and I mix my art now with my science, which I'm quite enjoying. The Mornington Peninsula is an interesting place to be based. It's the most biodiverse area of the state. It has more different plants, animals, and weeds, feral things. I mean, most of it you can't see, and there's more biodiversity under the earth than there is above it. But spending time on beak, on Bunnerong country is really valuable because it gives you so many insights into so much different vegetation. Most of the reason for that biodiversity is based in the underlying geology and soil types, and whereas the Western Plains is a basalt plain that stretches from Melbourne to South Australia. Here we've got a number of different rocks and soil types, we've got mountains, aspect, we've got a variation in climate, and you can hear the rain now. It can be cold down here and really warm in Rose, button it's not that far away, and you come up Bonio Road and you hit the wall of fog. And down here on the southern peninsula is quite unique with its alkaline soils and doesn't have the typical gum trees that you get in other places. So in terms of focusing on the southern Nepam Peninsula, it's been a fascinating journey of learning, and I learn all the time, if you're not learning a dead. But on the Nepam Peninsula, when I first described coastal Munar Woodland back in the 90s, I thought it was over the whole of the Nepam Peninsula, and it took me a while of going back and realising, ah no, the swales are different. And that's what they were describing when Robert Brown came here and walked from Sorrento over to the ocean beach. He'd just describing it as being open and parklike, with well-spaced honeysuckle trees, which are the Cosbanksia, with spaced shrubs such as croton, which is a rare bitter bush, and daisies, which is probably Seneseo Adorata, and coarse grasslands and herb fields with convulvulus, lilies, daisies, groves of Fabrizia, which is Coast Tea tree, and stylia, which is the coast beard heath. And it was quite a different vegetation type to what occurs on the ridges. And the ridges are formed from gene calcarinite blown from bass straight and made up of shells, so it's they're highly alkaline, and the muna that grows on them seems to be a forever tree that just goes on living, and it doesn't seem to reach an age class where it just dies. It's very important to the bunarong that tree, and trying to age it is difficult because you take a core or a cross section, but the middle's often rotten out. But we did take a cross section once to the herbarium, and people looked at the growth rings, and it gets really dense, and it's in the hundreds of years, and then I see ones that are huge base, you know, like really big bases, it must be in there thousands of years. And because it layers and maybe some hills where the moon's only like a couple of metres high, but it's been buried in sand, if that's all one tree, then that would be amazing. So at the moment, currently I'm trying to get the clonality looked at, but it requires a grant of $30,000, which is what I earn in a year, really. But um I'm good at selling the environment, I'm just crap at selling myself. But um if we can get the clonality sorted out, then that may go some way in in seeing how significant that species is. And as a species, Jim Willis thought it originated on the Air Peninsula and went east and west to Western Australia and across to here. But I think having spent time in the Flinders Rangers, it actually originated there, and then as the sea levels went down, it went east and west. But it'd be interesting to look at the genetics of it as well in those different areas. And um, Victoria University is interested in doing that, and I just haven't been able to find a student to look at it. But uh um one day when I was out and looking at moonars on Millau on Phillip Island, and I asked the women I was with, oh, why are the moonars here in the red clay? And I went down to the beach and there was a band of white stuff and I thought, oh, that looks like guano. And I said, Did there used to be penguins and shear waters here? And they went, Oh yeah, I remember when I was a kid and and and so I tested the pH of it and it was pH ten and oh hi grey thrush. Oh you're good at that? Yeah, I I like doing bird sounds. It was on my knee yesterday. Really? Yeah, it's quite tame. Um, so the and and when I got the pH kit and dropped it on, and it went drop and it and a bit of it got onto the root hairs of amuna that was going through that guano, um, it went bright red. So I suspect there's a micro rhizal, um, like some sort of fungi growing on the roots that neutralises the alkalinity because if it's highly alkaline the soil, then the plants can't take up iron and they go yellow and you get what's called iron chlorosis. But moonas seem to do with that, deal with that really well. And they seem to deal with climate change really well too. And some of them are growing on on Churchill Island, some of them are growing in salt marsh, and they've been there since it wasn't saltmarsh, I think. There's no young ones coming up, but there's these really old ones in salt marsh. And it's like that's geological time.
SPEAKER_00It's amazing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's like, yeah, it was so different. And so they hang around and they seem to deal with the alkalinity, but everything else that you put up there, like if you plant a bankstream up there, it just goes yellow and turns up its toes, and quite often the she oaks do as well. But we're living in a modified landscape here because they put a line across from Wanggu from Arthur Seat across to Cape Shank in the late late 1800s, or maybe the second half of the 1800s, and um, and and every she oak from there was chopped down for lime kilns. So, and I'm sure they came back up, but you know, my family's unrelated to the MacArthur's, so the sheep probably ate most of them off because everything likes eating it. And um I mean she oaks produce hemoglobin to feed their bacteria, it's really quite amazing. Uh they're amazing trees. So we've lost them, we've lost the truffles that were on them, which impacts on things like bandicoots. So then you go from the Moonar woodland, it's on the s the the right on the hills as a community, and under Moonar it is so dry. Like if it's raining and you stand under a moonar, you don't get wet. And the soil underneath it's incredibly dry, and it sucks all the moisture into it. So everything that lives there tends to be a lot of them either annuals that come up when it's wintery, and you get this green algae that's like water crystals, and um, it's sort of the moss comes back and you get the orchids, the leafy greenhood, first leafy greenhoods out over there in the puck today. And the leafy greenhoods come up, and the orchids they they over summer they're gone back into tubers, so they don't mind. And um, and the annuals they just come up, set seed, and then the seeds in the soil, and then they come up next to you. So over summer it can look like there's not much there. And people go, Oh, there's nothing that grows under there much. There is actually, there's a huge diversity of annuals, fungi, mosses, um, orchids, and some of our most endangered plants, because it's an endangered plant community and it's restricted in its geology to those alkaline soils. So on the ridgelines it's quite a unique place, and you get well the other day we were watching the Golden Whistles and the Jackie Lizards in there with the rosebud eye students that I had the other day, and that was great to see. Yeah. And um, you know, they like those areas. And then um you come down to the flats, the swales between them because that alkaline dunes have blown from Bass Strait and they create like lunettes and quite steep on one side and and more gradual on the other. And when you get down to the flats, uh into that open park-like country, if you look from the rocks on the ocean beach, you'll see there's a band of red stuff. They call it Terra Rossa, which just means red dirt. But um the Terra Rossa band, um, Neville Rosengren thought it was made maybe from ash from the Western Plains from the recent volcanics where people are walking around amongst volcanoes on the Western Plains, and that that ash has blown over and made a band of red earth, so it's got available iron, and so that's why the vegetation's different. The um banks here can handle it because there's iron, and you get different vegetation growing on those red soils. And if I go and dig out the front here, out near the front gate, it's all it's sort of red. So my garden here is um pretty much, apart from the moon out that MIG planted, is pretty much what a calcerous whale would look like. Um and I mean the banks is going to take a long time to get to the huge well-spaced trees, but basically you've got the sedges and the and a diversity of grasses from spear grass and poars and blady grass and the kangaroo grass would have got eaten out fairly early on from agriculture. Um you've got flax lilies. There's actually three types of flax lilies in this garden. Um there's um the spear grasses, there's two spear grasses actually, and one of them I think might have been introduced when they because they they set fire to the back of rye and some of these places, three kilometre fronts on the hottest days in January and February, and burnt all the way to the ocean beach. Look, it's just next here. And um they've they burnt burnt it repeatedly from 1910 to 1920 to for the dairy industry, and then they planted it with what they call King Island Malliot as a fodder. To get it to burn, they couldn't get it to burn very easily. They had to chop a fifth of the tea tree, stack it up against the rest of it, let it dry, and then catch fire because they couldn't burn it. It wasn't, it's it's we live in a fairly fire-retarded area here. It's not really common the um the fire retardants. Like it's like I said, it's foggy here in summer, and you come down Boneo Road. It also gets really cold and you get frosts here, and people go, Oh, you don't get frosts you're near the coast, but we get frosts and um hit the Raven's birdbath over there, which is quite deep, that'll be frozen solid till 11 o'clock. Really? Um, it'll be the temperature gauge will say minus four, and um you come out and it's crunch, crunch, crunch. I used to love those days when I was a kid. I lived in Dalesford and I knew I'd get the the day off from school. Because you get to school and they'd be waiting there for the pipes to unfreeze, and you go, nah, it's not gonna happen. They'd send you home, so it was great. It's like, yeah, yeah, we're gonna get home from school today. So here you get frosts and and down in in in Point Nepan at Munma, um the it gets so cold that not even the polygola grows in the bottom of some of those bowls. Because there's no cold air drainage line to drain it out, so it just gets colder and colder and colder. And I've been down there with my Parker on and my beanie, and I've come back to Rosebud and it's been 30 degrees. It's like wow. So uh the climate is really variable on the Mornington Peninsula, and what grows in in in different areas is quite different. So in those flats, you get the bandicoots dig around the shrubs and make their little herb field. There used to be bustards, and that's why I've got the sign out there, Turkey Flat, because this used to be called Turkey Flat through here.
SPEAKER_02Really?
SPEAKER_01Because there were bustards, but I guess they were good eating and easy to catch, and so um they got wiped out fairly early on, but I'd really like the bustards to come back.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And people think about grazing animals, and they always think about mammals, but they don't really think about big birds, but big birds do a lot of grazing. And so they would have kept a lot of these areas grazed, um and and and fairly open. And um so we've lost a lot of the fauna. There used to be heaps and heaps of roos, there used to be heaps of um well, there was more bandicoots, there was emus, there was um goanas, quals, all sorts of things that we've lost, and um, which is a a big shame.
SPEAKER_00There's big there's I've often heard people wondering if wombats were on the peninsula. Do you have a thought about that?
SPEAKER_01Oh, there were wombats on the peninsula, yeah. Okay, right. Um and you can see there there's there were some around here.
SPEAKER_00Really?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um there people used to leave water out for them 30 years ago up the road.
SPEAKER_00Wow.
SPEAKER_01And um and there there was a young one and there was a pear and it had babies, and then someone rescued a baby and took it away, which meant there was a pear. And um and and and there was a lot of emus because I know people who've got emu shells, they've probably got them out of middens in their garden. And you think, where did they get that from? Yeah. And I've heard from one of the hisscocks about running up the hill, and there was these piles of emu eggshells in the sand. So, and I think there were some down behind the shops in Sorrento in that campsite down there. So, yeah, there was emus, and there was lots of different birds around as well, including the bustards. So they would have had uh a biotic influence on the vegetation as well. In my yard here, I've got, and it's just a normal house block, we've got swamp rat runs. I've got to be careful at I have to put things in the ones where they go across the path, or I'm gonna lose myself down there one day. And they're amazing at their um how much they engineer the environment. It's really quite incredible. And um, and I've seen a white-footed dun art because I was watching the swamp rats, and then something different went across and I went, oh, that wasn't a swamp rat. They had a very pointy nose. I'm pretty sure that was a dun art. Um the issue around here is people put out rodenticides. When I first moved here, you'd hear boo book boo boo books, and I haven't heard one of them for a long time. Um but I've s people have shown me photos of dead ones, and um we need to get rodenticides right across Australia, sec the ones with secondary poisoning banned, but we keep putting them out. I had my swamp rats here dying, and and and they killed them all, and then um I had introduced rats come in which I hadn't had for ages. So there's a definite relationship there where if you have native rats, you don't have introduced rats. You can hear the thrush, so we have a quite a few different birds here. We have spiny cheeked honey eaters, singing honey eaters, straight thornbills, brown thornbills. We had a carawong the other day. Yes. I wondered where the cooker burrows came from, but a friend's got a nesting box up the road and they bred up, and I think the young ones have moved in down here because normally you wouldn't have them because you don't have the right sized hollows. Moonar doesn't make big hollows, so down here it's more raven country and little little things, jacky lizards. I've got um probably about six blotched blue tongues that live in this yard. I've got stripey and darkie, the two snakes at certain times, and white lip snakes. We've got microbats, um, we've got a huge diversity of insects, which I've been putting on eye naturalist because I don't know what they are. And we've got um what other birds? We've got blue wrens, um, scrub, white brown scrub wrens that come around under here. Um and it's an and echidnas comes through and wallabies. So it's surprising what you can have just in a a little garden, really. If people, you know, made space for indigenous um um life in their garden, but then which gardens for wildlife's been really fantastic, then we'd um go a long way to help him protect things because you can't just protect them in national parks. And there's quite a number of rare plants in this garden. We've got the Mornington Peninsula daisy bush over there. Um you don't see much Mysodus, but there's leafy greenhoods. The apaliclamus, you don't see that very often, but it comes up all over this garden at various times. Um the Bitterbush, which has died because the swamp rats chewed out the bottom of it, but I'm sure it'll come up again. And the Coast Warilda, which is a rare tree, which is just around the corner. Various coast daisy bushes.
SPEAKER_00And I just saw a swamp rat poke its head out.
SPEAKER_01Oh yeah, the swamp rats, they're rampant. They're running around everywhere at the moment. They're so cute. My son said, What's these little guinea pigs with tails? When we're out working, I don't know. Haven't you seen a swamp rat before? And he hadn't, so that was surprising. But yeah, my granddaughter loves them. She tries to pat them.
SPEAKER_00That's a great description of guinea pig, because they kind of are more guinea pig than ratty, aren't they?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, they're very cute. You can see their runs, their runs are everywhere. And then the um blue-tongue lizards and the s the um scrub wrens use their runs and their holes too. They'll disappear through there and then come out over there. And um I've been keeping, like I keep a diary of what comes up and what's flowering, and at some point I'll paint that and put that, you know, to some sort of image. Because I find it hard to I'd I'd prefer to paint things to try and make sense of them. That really helps me get my brain into gear.
SPEAKER_00So nature plays a huge role in your art?
SPEAKER_01But yes, it does. So I often do cross-sectional things, or because I work with aerials and aerial photography a lot, I often do an aerial view of things and um, you know, look, because it's about patterns and about observation, really. I spend a lot of time walking. Mind you, my walking, it's pretty slow. I go a long way, but it's pretty slow because there's so many things to see. And I mean you lose your sight when you turn 42, so it's great having young people around who can see, because they and I learn so much from kids, and I say to them, Oh, you're you're a better scientist than me, because you can actually see and hear, and well, some of you aren't closer to the ground than me, but um I to the little ones I say you're closer to the ground, and and then and and then some will say, Oh, and we're more intuitive, and I go, Yeah, and you've got quicker reactions. And you don't have such a fixed view because adults have a fixed view. They'll go, oh no, that's an ant, and the little kid will go, no, it's not, it's a caterpillar, and you go, Oh my god, it is too. I didn't think they could move so fast.
SPEAKER_00So when did you decide you might want to start working in nature?
SPEAKER_01Well, I would I I was always really good at biology. I like biology. I liked we had the Gold League thing, you know, you could draw birds and stuff, I like drawing birds. Um and so I had the choice when I got to year twelve, I was accepted as a studentship to do art, art and craft, and you meant to go and do teaching, you're in an indentured situation, or I'd been pre-um selected to go to ANU and do science. And um and my mother said to me, Well, in this day and age a woman needs an independent income and don't turn something you enjoy into a drudge where you feel like you have to do it. So, well see, in her day and age, if you got married suddenly you couldn't work. And she was during the war, she was drawing machinery and blow-ups of motors for tractors and machinery, and as soon as the men got back, she didn't have a job anymore. So um she said women need an independent income, and so I decided to do biological sciences at La Trobe. And so I started doing that, and after a year I I was all just a bit much, I think. I needed a year off. Yeah, fair. So I took a year off and I worked at CSI Rowing Long in the mossproofing department, um, with spectrophotometers and chromatographs and stuff. Sort of heavy duty machinery. Yeah, yeah. And um and then I went decided to go back to uni and finish off doing what I was doing, and and I was in a cohort with some pretty amazing people, like Jeff Carr, Robin Adair, Darcy Duggan, all these people that have gone on to be quite influential in their ways.
SPEAKER_00Like yourself.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, no, it was a really good cohort, and and at the end of it, like ecology was only a small bit of it. And so for that sort of stuff I I'd do really well, and for the chemo taxonomy, I didn't do very well at that. And it was but it was good that it was biological sciences because it was mainly structured around biology. Um, and the ecology, zoological ecology unit was like working with light brown apple moths and how to kill them. It was like well that wasn't what I was really interested in. And it was maths and statistics, which you know, I would I'd actually done three maths at school, but I'd given up when they got to complex numbers because it didn't seem to have any practical um application. It's just all the high following stuff. So um it was and I had a really broad high school education. I went to Dalesford Tech High, um Campbell High and PLC.
SPEAKER_00Oh, that's quite a mix.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well at Dalesford Tech High, I would have liked to have done technical drawing and things like that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But girls weren't allowed to do that in those days, and we did domestic science, and the day I came home and my mother said to me, So what did you learn today, darling? And I said, Something about dusting before you vacuum, and she went, Oh, you're joking. No, my bright daughter's doing that. And so I think I was a bit neurodivergent. Um I think I'm a bit neurodivergent, and so I wasn't really up if I wasn't up for something, I wasn't up for it. So I did an honest project with um Bob Parsons and Peter Rawlinson, um, a biologic on E mus and seed dispersal, which for an honest project it wasn't a good idea because you only get nine months, not a year. And for an ecological thing, you need at least a year. And Peter was off at um Krakatoa and measuring things coming back to Krakatoa, and but Bob was amazing to work under, but they don't like you having two different things doing across two different departments. Yep. And um, but I got to go to South Australia and the Alps and and all different places and collect EMU poo and look at emus, so that was pretty good and worked with the E mus at Healesville. Um but I still continued painting. Yeah, and and it was always there and I still enjoyed it. And um and you know, at one point my kids are going, Oh, you should do your PhD, but at that stage it was like I don't really need it.
SPEAKER_00No, that's right.
SPEAKER_01What what's what to achieve, you Yeah, I mean I've written journal articles, I've done research, you know. If there was something that I needed to study and so then I decided I wanted to do more writing and I thought I'd like to write a book and I thought, oh how will I fund someone to help me so that I could got the money for my bills. I gave up on money a long time ago. I just put the bills on the fridge and then someone offers me a job, or if I see a job that needs doing like the weed in the darter seed after the fire, then I just start doing the job and enlisting help from some of the volunteers or something, and then someone will say, Oh look, we'll pay you to to sort it out and coordinate it. So I've I've found that usually the universe helps you if you just start doing something, and if it's for the benefit of the planet, your needs get met. You don't have to go looking for stuff, really. Yeah, I gave up on money a long time ago, and that's a real relief actually doing that. I mean, sometimes I get a bit stressed and go, oh, how am I gonna do that? But then someone will come and buy one of my paintings, and that all sort of comes together, often to the scent.
SPEAKER_00Wow.
SPEAKER_01To the same scent.
SPEAKER_00And your art is incredible. It's so vivid, it replicates like that coastal environment so well, and it's so detailed, like, because you start looking and then you go, oh, that's that species. Like there's all these hidden sort of detail in there of of the complexity of the um ecosystem that you can sort of glaze over, but the more you focus, the more you realise how complete it is.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, my friend Jill calls it informed naivety. Which I think is quite good. I quite like that. I quite like that. Yeah. So I thought of oh it'd be good to write a book and and then the biosphere needed a wanted a book on salt marsh, and I think and it's um it's a joint project with the Bunnerong Land Council. It's a biosphere that said, oh, you know, you know a lot about salt marsh and da-da-da. Because I was part of the state salt marsh study, and one of my first jobs was in Swan Bay trying to work out what the flowers were on a glass ward. Oh, it's those little bits sticking out. Right. So um that took, you know, that did my head in. I'd I'd come home and all my friends were what having a good time at home, and I'd have piles of press plants trying to with the microscope trying to work out what things were, and I was by myself, and you know, one day I thought I took it, take a shortcut. I was in Swan Bay, I was mapping the Swan Bay for the department for their management plan, and I thought I'd take a shortcut. I had this huge south thistle that I thought this is going to be a hydrophilis, because at the time it was how big the microns, the pollen grains or something were like not a really good feel characteristic. So I had this huge tree of a thistle, and I thought I'd take the shortcut because I had to get back on the ferry, and I started walking and ended up like up to nearly my waist in the snapping shrimp holes and had to get out and go all the way around. And I got really good though at knowing which bits of salt mass you'd sink into and which bits you wouldn't. So I got quite I carried it all the way out to the herb area and again and went in and go, no, it's just a prickly south this all. Can you do some characteristics that aren't based on the side and how many microns of pollen grains or whatever it was? Um it was just one of those things, but yeah, it was a bit of a I did so many more hours than what I got paid for. But you learn a lot. I was dedicated, well, probably stubborn is the word, and and bloody minded. I'm gonna do this, I'm a girl, I'm gonna do this. You all you fellas that go, there's no women botanists in Victoria. Um, apart from a few notable exceptions, like David Cameron. I never ever felt that from him or David Albrick. They were always incredibly supportive of my work.
SPEAKER_00Well that's good to hear, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Doing those I so and anyway, getting back to the salt marsh, so I thought, oh yeah, I yeah, I do know a bit about salt marsh. Yeah, I probably could do that. And I I don't know, they might have just wanted a a little book with pictures and what but I looked around, there's quite a few of those sorts of books, and I thought, oh, I don't think we need another one of those. High at season just a photo or whatever. So I've and when we did the state salt marsh, you know, coastal salt marsh aggregate is just one EVC, and the um the state salt marsh study recommended being to buy it up to about ten. So they've all got this interim A in the front. Yes. And um, and so I've based it on those. So I can show you that. Yeah, yeah. I've got it upstairs. That's interesting. And I've just done the scans and the um bun and wrong are getting all their language together, which is fantastic. And so they've got um, so I worked with the linguists, so it's got all the bunerong words in it. And um so it's quite pictorial, and I got photos and just scribbled stuff over them and put where the carbon goes in and the biofilms and the butterflies, because I was out there with Carl Euston, you know, and so put the all the different things in, draw the bitten in.
SPEAKER_00It's so good because like I'm like many people who've worked in conservation over the years, me and so many people have been influenced by these plans that you've written over time where you'll pick it up and you'll just start reading through, and whether it's you know, Tookarook Swamp, Seaford Wetlands, all these places that you've had this huge influence where you've looked at it in such a detail, and we all sort of quote your knowledge when we're moving forward with stuff. Your level of detail is incredible. How do you think that's something that's always been important to you or?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I do. Um well I'm I think it's curiosity. I think I'm just really curious, and and also I think my my sort of level of neurodivergence allows me to fix and go do into things. And I see that quite a lot in the botanical world. There's a lot of neurodivergence in the botanical world. I think you have to be a bit obsessive and um and and and try to be accurate, but it's also about not getting too fixed in it because you learn a new thing and it just changes the whole picture again, and you go, oh, okay, well I'll change that now.
SPEAKER_00Something I wanted to ask you about is I've been visiting all these conservation reserves around Melbourne, big and small, and you've had a footprint in so many of them with management plans and work that you've done in the past or volunteering. Um how important from your perspective is it to protect what we have left?
SPEAKER_01That's where you need to start. There's no point planting trees while the old remnants are dying. So I usually start from the old remnant trees or a remnant patch and water. Water and remnants is where I put my focus. And it it becomes highlighted to me over and over again and reinforced. So after the fires at Bunyuk and and I was taken up there to look at the impacts, there was people that put in so much energy and putting in wind planting windbreaks and all this sort of stuff, and it had pasture grass underneath, and all the the pasture grass had burnt and ring bark, so all of those trees had died that they'd put in. And that was so disheartening for them. But the patch of bush next door that burnt, it came back fine. So um trying to protect the remnants, and often people will go in and take out the obvious weeds rather than seeing what's actually there and what they're protecting, but also understanding that weeds have habitat and maybe what's growing there is growing there irrespective of the weeds. So in some places I've gone and taken weeds out around, say rare beer bush, and the rabbits have eaten them. So I think the fur the next first step, once you've worked out where the remnants are, is to look at the threatening processes, and there's no point going in. I've had to hold a few friends groups back because I just want to get rid of the polygon. If you do that, you'll get the seed bank coming back up, and you'll the rabbits will eat it all and you will have lost it. So working slowly and systematically out and removing the threatening processes is really important to otherwise you just lose it. And also the realisation that it's often not the age of an ecosystem is often not the overstory trees, but it's some of the stuff underneath, like the tree ferns, the must daisy bush, the hetekarias, the ages of those might be extremely old. So when they wanted me to map the significant species on on Wangu on Arthur Seat for their plan, I said, well, I'm also going to map any aged old understory because that's to me significant as well. Or anything that's pre-European. And um, and sometimes we may not know that until we actually look at it and go, oh, that radiata, that eucalyptus radiata, is actually one tree, it's just got five trunks.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And it's actually really old. Or wow, look at that must daisy bush, or wow, look at that king fern. And so I mapped those as well. Do you do you have hope? Do you do you think it's I'm a hyperoptimist. Yeah. You know, the Berlin War came down overnight. Nelson Mandala got out of prison. You know, like things can happen overnight. You know, the guy is gonna kick back.
SPEAKER_00Something I would love to touch on is that there might be people listening to this who might have a garden and not realise how much you can do in a garden to help nature, like what you've done here. This isn't a a massive block, but you've turned it into a No, this is just a normal house block.
SPEAKER_01Um I mean I do have a borrowed landscape because my neighbour doesn't have a house next door, he's got a driveway, but he does have what's a um monbresha and all these weeds that I have to keep at. Um you can do a lot. So the main thing I think in terms of biodiversity, because a lot of it starts with insects and things like that that you can't see, is to find out what local plants are in. Well, I have a thing where I go either grow what belongs or I grow food. And both of them are valid. Having food in your garden really adds to your resilience if the safe way stops working, at least you've got food.
SPEAKER_00Yep.
SPEAKER_01So having food and also the miles and the the other thing to try and do is to get off the grid. Because then if the power goes down and everything goes down, it doesn't matter because you've still got stuff. So we've got water tanks. If the water goes off, well we're not even on the mains, even though it goes past. And even though I'm on the South East Water Consulting Committee, I don't even use their water. Because if their pipe, the fault line collapses, because their pipe's on top of the fault line, if all of that collapses, there'll be no water. So working out self-sufficiency is a really good thing. So then I plant either what belongs or food, and I make sure that the food plants that I put in aren't chronic weeds. And then you go for as many different things of local stuff that you can put in as possible because each of them, even though we might not know what it is, has a function for some insect or flum fungus. And I mean, I'm learning that the little native oxalis, at a certain time of the year, that's the only thing that's flowering, and the native bees totally rely on it. And it's a tiny little bee that's about that big, and you're looking at it's like got a black dot in it, and you look at it close and go, oh, that's a bee. Having water around for wildlife because we're going to have extreme climatic things happening. So having water around for different levels for a pie for birds, as much structure as possible. I use mulch on my paths and I try to not bring in anything. And creating um leaving logs for habitat, and you'll find that things just start coming in. Um, having friendly fences that things can go under or not, or select it so I the rabbits don't get through, but other things can. And I've watched blue tongues go up over a wire fence. And trying to get your neighbours to and get that connectivity happening is a really good thing. And I think then you get insects coming in, then you get birds coming in, then you get the whole web starting to reconnect.
SPEAKER_00I think we all understand that web a lot better. Thanks to Gidger. If you want to hear or see more of Gidger, check out the Dreamweavers documentary online that was recently released. The Bruin Watch. The book you mentioned with French Dwellers of Worm are in, which you can check the Western Court biosphere website for. And if you get a chance, please, please go along to any of the walk and talks that Gidger does. If you want to hear more episodes of Finding Melbourne's Nature, please check out Finding Melvin's Nature.com or check us out on your favorite streaming platform. Thanks so much for listening, and please feel free to censor any of your feedback or thoughts via the website.