Letter From Down Under 2

As the nights lengthen and temperatures drop, it's good to be reminded that our loss is someone else's gain - things are hotting up in the Southern Hemisphere.  With that fierce antipodean sun beating down, where better to seek shade than beneath a gum tree.  If only life were that simple. 

One and a half hours drive up the bumpy Bonang Highway gave us a real taste of the scale of Australia.   "Highway" suggested to us a dual carriage way or at least a tarmac surface. Here, surrounded by the vast forests of East Gippsland, it meant road, the only one going anywhere.  

As we crammed ourselves into her "ute" (pickup truck) and meandered through the forest, Jill Redwood, forest campaigner and backwoods woman, helped alleviate the motion sickness I had begun to feel by pointing out the many different species of tree growing by the roadside. There are over 300 species of eucalypt alone in Australia. We also saw signs of clear felling - huge coupes or cuts where all the trees had been cleared and any unwanted timber burnt. An occasional lorry passed us carrying one or two gigantic eucalyptus trees. We were in timber country up beyond the self-styled "timber town" of Orbost on the south east coast of Victoria. Jill's farm "Witchwood" is as at Goongerah, deep in the heart of forests. She has 25 acres of river flats which are home to her goats, horses, geese and chickens.  Saddened and angered by the destruction of the old growth forests all around her, Jill has spoken out against the logging industry and its wanton disregard of environmental concerns. This has won her few friends locally. A courageous and forthright individual, Jill has received death threats, had her horse shot and has been harassed by local "rednecks". Her mail one morning consisted of two severed goats heads, courtesy of a passing trucker. 

During our stay we helped out on the farm and did a variety of tasks including gardening, pressing apples for juice, collecting firewood, maintaining fences and scaring cockatoos off the walnut tree. Jill is a particularly resourceful individual, adept at a wide range of rural skills such as basketry, cheese making, working with draught horses and house building.   These hard won skills have enabled her to build her own house using horse extracted timber as well as a spacious bark hut, an Australian pioneer speciality built of large sections of thick eucalyptus bark attached to a wooden frame.

Jill sometimes runs rural skills courses at her farm and takes wwoofers, but now devotes most of her energy towards the preservation of the forests. This keeps her busy at her desk editing the "Potoroo Review", campaigning and running the local anti-logging group CROEG (Concerned Residents of East Gippsland).  Her efforts have not gone unrecognised - in 1995 she won the Australian Conservation Foundation's award for "environment campaigner of the year".

If the forest appeared endless to our European eyes, Jill quickly put us straight. The depressing reality is that in a little over two hundred years, white settlers have cleared over half of Australia's forests and that destruction is accelerating  The most tragic thing, she told us, is that these huge old growth trees, currently cleared at the rate of 17 football fields a day in East Gippsland, mostly end up as wood chips in Japanese paper mills.  

The forests of East Gippsland are particularly diverse, reflecting the varied topography of the region, ranging from coastal dunes to rainforest and stunted alpine woodlands.   Eucalyptus forests predominate, but also found in the region are callitris pine woodlands and podocarp rainforests.   As a whole, these support over 300 endangered species, such as the Tiger Quoll (the largest predatory mammal in mainland Australia), the powerful owl, the long footed potoroo (a diminutive relative of the kangaroo) as well as plants and invertebrates.   Many of these animals require tree hollows for shelter or to nest in, or they feed on others that do.   Eucalyptus trees do not produce usable hollows until they are 100 years old or more - commercial logging runs on 60 to 80 year harvesting cycles, effectively preventing recolonisation from adjacent old growth areas.   Other animals need sediment free water or moist mossy undergrowth; clear felling removes all these.   The result is a devastated ecosystem, with a radically disrupted species composition allowing introduced foxes and cats to consume or out compete the native animals.  From an aesthetic point of view clear felling is also repellent - the sight of huge tree ferns lying smouldering in the ashes of the once majestic forest is heart-rending.   To learn from Jill that the majority of trees end up as wood chips was particularly upsetting.   It is very clear that the Australian government is more interested in selling off its unique natural heritage than in preserving the forests of East Gippsland, which have been described as "the most diverse temperate forest ecosystem on earth".

copyright   1997

Letter From Down Under 1

Here's my first article on year-long travels in Australia and New Zealand. I had just left my job working in the Heritage Seed Library (HSL) at Ryton Gardens. Written in March 1997, we arrived in mid February during a hot spell and recuperated at a friend's house in the attractive suburb of Albert Park. It was the first time I'd ever taken a shower with my clothes on. Hiding my light under a bushel once again, I notice that for some reason I failed to mention that I gave a talk myself - on the work of the HDRA's Heritage Seed Library (HSL) and the impact of European seed regulations on the availability of heritage vegetables.   The Seed Saver's Network is an Australian organisation dedicated to the preservation and dissemination of seeds and crop plants and is based in Byron Bay, NSW.  It was published in a slightly abridged form in HDRA News (as was); this is the unexpurgated version transcribed from the original biro and paper creation.

LETTER FROM DOWN UNDER 1

from your Owen Correspondent

We arrived in Melbourne during some of the hottest weather of the year.    The combination of daytime temperatures of over 40C and jetlag made the first two weeks a period of slow adjustment to life Down Under.   

I was keen to meet with the staff of the Diggers Club, a leading Australian seed company who have been trialing and selling an excellent range of heirloom vegetables in their catalogue.  Owned by Clive and Penny Blazey, the company’s head quarters is at Heronswood, a beautiful house and landscaped gardens overlooking Port Philip Bay.  On the day we visited, the gardens were open to the public and we sat in the recently constructed rammed earth and thatched tea rooms and talked about heritage vegetables.

Clive is convinced that many of the old fashioned vegetables give tastier produce, with higher and more sustained yields than F1 Hybrids.    He told me that some of his customers fly out from Britain to get their supplies of heirloom vegetable seeds, such is their desperation.    Diggers have recently obtained Crimson Flowered Broad Bean, which they will be growing and offering in future years.    It was good to hear that an old stalwart from the HSL is set to win friends on the other side of the world.  By a lucky coincidence, Diggers were holding a seed campout at Heritage Farm near Seymour that very weekend and we were invited to attend.

Heritage Farm is set in particularly beautiful countryside - impressive granite hills with rocky outcrops scattered through the eucalyptus, tea tree and wattle forests, with the Goulburn River flowing in the valley.    An equally impressive range of wildlife is to be found there too - koalas, possums, wombats, kangaroos and echidnas were among those that we saw during our stay.

Over two hundred people gathered at the campout to swap seeds, information and to listen to the guest speakers.   Food was provided by the local CFA (Community Fire Association)  a volunteer force who tackled bush fires and seemed to have a major role in rural life both as a bush fire hit squad and a cohesive force within the community.

Speakers included Dr Judyth McLeod of Western Sydney University, author of Heritage Gardening, a book on heirloom plants, Jude Fanton of the Seed Savers Network, who visited Ryton in 1995 and David Cavagnaro, former head gardener for Seed Savers Exchange in the USA and photographer extraordinaire.   Judyth spoke of the threats to world agriculture from increasing population, loss of biodiversity and climate change.   She suggested that individuals could help mitigate some of the worst aspects of this doomsday scenario by growing a wide selection of locally adapted heritage varieties.

David described the years he and his family spent living self-sufficiently, the lessons he’d learnt and his conviction that human as well as horticultural biodiversity was crucial for our survival.   He mentioned that recent immigration into Australia had led to a much wider and more interesting cuisine than had existed during the mainly Anglo-Saxon phase of settlement.   The race issue remains contentious with some politicians advocating strict limits to immigration from Southeast Asia.   David’s talk was illustrated with many of his exquisite photographs.  

Jude Fanton, who visited Ryton in 1996, talked about the Seed Savers’ Network’s work with Solomon Islanders and in Cuba. 

Neil Barraclough, the recently appointed manager, outlined his plan for the farm and his desire to eliminate the need for artificial pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers.   Growing commercial quantities of seed organically is particularly challenging due to the wide range of pests which flourish in this climate.   The aerial assaults of cockatoos, rosellas and other birds are also particularly intense.

Neil is also responsible for founding a heritage fruit group and is extremely knowledgeable on the subject.   He kindly provided me with a floppy disk containing some fascinating information which he asked me to copy and distribute to interested parties in Australia (and beyond!)

In order to learn more about Heritage Farm, we decided to stay for 10 days and thus became the farm’s first WWOOFers.

Copyright 1997