John Linton
Annette and I took a day off on Friday to travel to Benalla in Victoria to visit one of the fauna protection/regeneration programs that Exetel supports. Not wanting to face the eight - nine hour drive from Sydney (two ways in three days) we flew to Melbourne and rented a car which cut the drive to something less than two or so hours. Since I first arrived in Australia I have always loved 'country Australia' more than I have ever been able to develop a fondness for the two Australian cities I have lived in and even a 'quick as a flash' trip like this reminded me of why that has always been the case. Friendly people, everyone you talk to treats you like a friend you have lost touch with, and a care and regard for other people that is simply missing in city dwellers.
It was raining cats and dogs for most of the trip up the Hume Freeway from the airport so my views of the 'country side' were basically the back spray from the rear tires of the semis and other vehicles we overtook but it eventually cleared up as we approached Benalla - a town I haven't been to for over 30 years (since I sold a computer to the local credit union - which is still there! the credit union not the computer). Everything about the town had changed, of course, but we went to the pub I vaguely remembered next to the railway station and Carton Draught from the tap still tastes good.
We had booked in to a b and b close to the town centre and had dinner in a recommended local restaurant (a far cry from the 'cafe' I remember) and had an excellent meal with a local wine (Stanton and Killeen Durif) I had only tasted once in my life before - much better year and one third of the price I last paid. The barman made me a Martini to my instructions and when it wasn't quite right, without prompting he tried again and got it just right and we had a running conversation throughout the meal about drinks he had made in different places at different times and qualities, failings and triumphs of the local and fast growing wine industry (now becoming more well known for wine other than the Morris and Stanton and Killeen reserve Muscats and Tokays. The meal was exceptional and it is a delight to eat sophisticated food the ingredients of which were grown a few kilometers from your dining table though the quantities, as in every country town I've ever eaten in, remain of truly challenging proportions. We had no trouble sleeping that night.
On Saturday we drove out to the 'meeting place' where some 80 - 100 volunteers (many from Melbourne, particularly the universities, but also people from Ballarat and Bendigo and other places in the immediate district) were assembling to be given their instructions and directions for the inspection of around 270 (out of 410) 'nesting boxes' provided in an attempt to increase the rapidly diminishing populations of squirrel gliders, sugar gliders and brush tailed phascogales. The briefing by the project leader (Ray Thomas and his 2 i/c) was thorough, informative and devoid of 'padding' and after each designated leader had loaded their 10 meter ladder off we went under lowering skys and rain showers for a day in the surrounding bush tracking down the nesting boxes and checking the contents and other key data on the provided analysis sheets.
We spent from 9.30 am to 4.30 pm (with a 20 minute break for a sandwich) checking our eighteen boxes and got fairly wet on occasions but there were one or more (once 4) gliders of both types in more than half the boxes but no phascogales. We only had one difficult moment when our rental car failed to make it up a not too steep incline crossing a rain soaked paddock and begian to slip sideways - however we gently reversed down the slope and walked to the next nesting box. We had a really great day chatting with the truly nice, as well as deeply knowledgeable, Ray Thomas and his niece and her husband and their four year old daughter and it was great to be back in the bush again and doing something useful - though my legs were certainly stiff at the end of the day from the ladder climbing and bush walking up and down the various gullies and creeks.
One sad aspect of the day was to see, first hand and at close range, what dreadful things have been done to the Australian bush by inept and ignorant farming and 'wood harvesting' over the last 200 years by Europeans and for the last n,000 previous years by the "original inhabitants" 'firestick farming' so beloved of some very misguided people. What was once densely wooded, with multiple varieties of large, medium, small trees and hugely diverse shrubs and plants is now a wasteland of scrubby eucalypts that are so densely overgrown none of them survive beyond 10 or 12 years. Of course, ignoring the effects of the 1952 bush fires, the major culprit is/was the 'logging industry' whose 5 major mills instigated the clear felling of every single tree over a huge area followed by farming practices that were ignorant of contour protection although the various divisions of the department of agriculture and pasture protection boards have made dozens of attempts since Federation to educate land users in effective methods of regenerating the soil. This is a situation pretty much repeated throughout this continent by greedy and ignorant people.
At the end of day Ray guided us back to town and we said goodbye to another great Australian. He started the project 14 years ago and has given his time since then to planting many hundreds of thousands of a mixture of Ironbarks and another 40 different trees and shrubs to, eventually provide habitat to allow the Regent Honey Eater to arrest its decline and, hopefully, move away from the critically endangered zone. While waiting the 20 or so years it will take for the habitat to grow to a maturity that will allow that to happen it has become dense enough for 142 species of rare and seldom previously seen birds to return to the area.
Ray also fills in the 'off season' by making and placing the nesting boxes (we inspected) to assist the endangered squirrel glider both survive and move its isolated population towards the other populations in the Great Dividing Range where there is different genetic material so that the species can become stronger. The boxes are also used by squirrel gliders and, a major bonus, by the occasional brush tailed phascogale that hasn't been seen (alive) in the area for decades.
If only there were more Australians like Ray Thomas and the volunteers who help make this, one day, a reality.
PS: We used our notebook with HSPA throughout the trip and obtained excellent speeds in Benalla and Seymour with over 3 mbps in both places. On the Hiume Freeway we got over 4 mbps.