20/20 Summit

There was 'something in the air' this morning. Thunderclap Newman's hit record of the seventies would have been an appropriate anthem for the weekend talkfest. Let's hope something comes of it. I've heard nothing impressive so far, and nothing about rescuing the environment and teaching average Australians about their surrounding flora and fauna and living in harmony with it. If the mud splattered four wheel drive vehicle convoys and trailbikes around Gembrook at the weekend are an indication, there's a long way to go.
The air was cold and misty and perfectly still. To this walker, recovering from three days of gastric flu, it was like an injection of life straight into the vein. Smoke from the DSE/CFA controlled burns mingled with the freshness, bringing a little of the bush. I was breathing fine particles of incinerated understory and the charred bodies of thousands of lizards, echidnas, possums and birds and insects, sacrificed to improve the bush and make it firesafe.
I was so thankful that I felt well again. I worked through the acute stage of my flu on Friday, pumped full of painkillers. We had a busy day, due to Jewish passover I think. I had an order for 50 bunches of pin oak foliage as well as other extras above normal. I climbed a tree at the farm which showed good autumn colour and took off the entire top half to get the fifty bunches. Such exertion when you're crook knocks you about, I was in bed dosed up at 7.30pm without any dinner.
Saturday I'd set to work through the bees to prepare them for winter, the weather forecast being for a fine warm day. I took off five boxes sort of half full of honey and pollen and pinched the head of the failing queen of the poorest hive and united it with the hive which was the swarm I caught in the cemetery in December, leaving me four doubles of reasonable strength going in to winter. By days end I'd extracted the honey, about 40/45 kg.
Lib worked yesterday, so after she left at 6.30am I worked on the vegies for our roast chicken dinner and chopped up swede, carrot, onion, celery, parsnip, garlic and herbs for a spag sauce. I walked for an hour, then browned one kg of mince, sealed the vegies with a minute or two in a hot frypan, and put it all in the crockpot with tomatoe paste, a tin of tomatoes and three chopped home grown to cook on low for 10 hours. I make a helluva good spag sauce.
The boys and I left in Gord's car for the footy before midday to catch the start of the Melb/Carlton match at 1.10pm (oddly). It was a spirited contest when Melbourne hit the front early in the second term. At that point I had to find a toilet and when I returned ten minutes later Carlton was six goals in front. We left at three quarter time, eight goals down.
The smoke seems to have cleared a bit now now, as I look out the window at the currawongs having their annual feast in the fig tree. A few months ago I talked to one of the full time CFA blokes who does much of the burning about here in the autumn. I asked him what was the status of sweet pittosporum in terms of fire hazard, when I was researching a response to the council's war on this tree. He wasn't sure which it was at first but when I described it and explained its commonality he said "Oh yeah, that's really hard to burn, its full of moisture and very little grows under it to provide heat in a burn to get it going."
"Why burn it then. Why not cut it out with a chainsaw and paint the stump with roundup."
"No, that'd be too hard in the bush, easier to get a really hot fire going and get rid of it."
He continued to explain the merit of regularly burning the under growth to generate vigourous new green growth of indigenous flora, to the benefit of wildlife species in the surrounding areas which have new unoccupied habitat to move into. I could see his point, but asked him doesn't the fire also cause the sweet pittopurum to vigourously regenerate, it being a native although not indigenous to this area.
"Yes it does, but we send DSE teams in to spray the regrowth with weedicide so we select what comes back."
I'm not convinced that the management pracices in all this are ideal. It's too hard to root out sweet pittosporums manually in the 21st century with the aid off chainsaws, power winches and weedicide but our predecessors cleared vast areas of native forest with axes, crosscut saws and bullocks in a short space of time. The only sure thing at the moment is that every autumn there's a pall of smoke hanging for up to weeks on end, and a lot preserved DSE/CFA salaries paid on this dog chasing it's tail management. Maybe we should be looking to fire resistant species like sweet pittosporum to grow as protective belts for towns and houses and farm buildings.
I can only hope that something comes of the 20/20 summit.