Grasslands value lost on greenies

Last year the Victorian government spent an extraordinary $400,000 to save a large gum tree in Albert Park in the middle of Melbourne.

The eucalyptus was in the way of the new swimming pool being built for the Commonwealth Games, so the Government had the whole venue redesigned, rather than suffer protests like those that erupted when three old elms were cleared from Albert Park a year earlier.

This overwhelming desire to save large trees, and old trees, perhaps reflects a general fear that we have already cut down too many trees.

There is this idea that most of the rainforest in Brazil has been destroyed, but interestingly despite the publicity given to clearing activity in South America, 83 percent of the Amazon remains intact.

I lived in Africa during the late 1990s and watched open savannah country replaced with acacia forest in areas where elephants were excluded.

In Australia several million hectares of the vast Mitchell grasslands, which extend from the Northern Territory through western Queensland into northern NSW, have also become infested with Africa's prickly acacia which have colonised these areas.

Poet Doretha MacKellar may have been writing about the Mitchell grasslands when she penned "My Country" in 1904 with the verse:

"I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains".

The MacKellar family had properties in the North West near Gunnedah.

Gunnedah is a few hours drive east of Gilgandra, Warren and Nyngan, where police assisted NSW Department of Natural Resources staff carrying out land clearing compliance checks a few weeks ago.

This highlighted the fact that across Australia many landholders and Landcare projects focused on restoring grassland areas are now constrained by tree clearing laws and regulations that perhaps over value trees and totally ignore the ecological value of grasslands.

Interestingly, the last comprehensive environmental report by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, "Measuring Australia's Progress 2002", only reported on the area of tree clearing.

It did not report on the net change in tree cover, as though trees do not re-grow and grassland can not be lost to invasive scrub and rainforest -- which is the situation in many parts of rural and regional Australia.

In Albert Park in Melbourne most of the trees are located along roadsides or between fairways in the golf courses.

The trees are generally either in avenues or clusters and any re-growth is carefully restricted or managed.

Imagine if The Wilderness Society decided Albert Park had too few trees?

Imagine also if the environmentalists insisted that that the mowing of grass stop altogether?

There would probably be good Eucalyptus re-growth within a year and an outcry from the same local residences who insisted the single gum tree be saved from the redevelopment for the recent Commonwealth Games.

You would think these city folk would be demanding space to kick a ball and fly a kite, in much the same way as farmers at Nyngan or Coonamble want to be able to manage invasive scrub on their farms so they can run a few cows.

ADVERTISEMENT