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Letters to the Editor
Speak to 4W drivers

Fireworks or weed control

Regional Parks

Rangers

Save the trees

Earthfall

Editor :
Glyn Mather

Readers are welcome to respond by letter or e-mail to other letters or articles in the National Parks Journal, or to write in about whatever you like. Preference will be given to short, concise letters. Other letters may be edited or not included, depending on space limits. 
Please be aware of libel and defamation laws! All views expressed are those of the authors and are not necessarily shared or endorsed by NPA

Speak to 4W drivers 

This letter is a response to comments by F Winternitz, February NPJ, on 4WDs in national parks.

As with most things and people in life on earth, there is great variety. Not all 4W drivers are irresponsible bush bashers. Many are sensible, moderate people who wish to walk, and enjoy places inaccessible by 2WD. Many of our national parks can only be accessed by 4WD; for instance, Purnululu, Witjira, Lakefield and Finke Gorge.

Have you ever noticed that most NPWS staff use 4WDs? There must be some good reasons for this or money would not be spent on these more expensive vehicles.

We bought one after being thoroughly bogged in our old Corona wagon in Croajinalong NP, and needing to be towed out by the Ranger in a Nissan Patrol. I am sure NPWS staff have more important things to do than rescue motorists in distress. Most people prefer to be self-sufficient.

F Winternitz's "silence" treatment may backfire on its users – if, in the event of an accident or illness on a bushwalk, the assistance from a 4W driver so treated is needed to reach medical help, or when a road is too slippery for a 2WD to cope.

Encouraging responsible and appropriate behaviour of all national park users is probably a more effective way to go.

Jennifer l Reeve,
 Port Macquarie,
 11 April 2001

FIREWORKS OR WEED CONTROL 

The extract from Tim Low’s book Feral Future in April's issue of the Journal was very interesting. The issue of noxious weeds has been sadly neglected. The introduction of invasive overseas weeds with their attractive berries has replaced our native vegetation, much of which produced nectar for our honey eaters, fruit bats and small marsupials.

High hopes were raised when the Act was changed in NSW in 1993 in order to give local councils the responsibility for control. However, few councils took up the challenge. Maclean Council was the only council between Sydney and Queensland to declare bitou bush noxious. It was left to the State Government to declare bitou bush for the coastal councils. Councils have relied on Agriculture Department advice: "If you don’t intend to act to control a nominated plant, then it is no use declaring it".

Such widespread nasties as pink flowering lantana are in this category, resulting in bigger infestations as time goes by. The public have not been asked to assist or even told why they should take action. A 77 year old farmer friend near Tamworth has never had a noxious weeds inspector on his property, and a friend out of Gloucester regularly sprays his weeds, whilst a neighbour hasn’t spent a cent.

Our unique flora and fauna are rapidly disappearing whilst we spend millions on fireworks displays and a politicians' party in Melbourne. It’s time we got our priorities right.

Len Outram,
 Warners Bay,
20 April 2001

Regional parks 

What I like about the Journal is it always offers alternatives, when a development is environmentally unwise. A good example was Wingecarribee, where suitable materials were described rather than our precious peat. Cheap and abundant coconut fibre is in use by gardeners.

Geoff Mosley’s letter ("Parks for the Nation", April NPJ) interested me since he has done so much research on the history of national parks. I can add some facts to his file in connection with regional parks. Some years ago, I had just returned from the Lakes District where the concept was born, a few years after the first national park; Great Britain having nothing left of the wild had no choice but to encourage the birth of a new concept, the "regional park".

Full of this new idea, I told the NSW Director of National Parks I intended to give an address on the topic. He pleaded with me not to confuse the issue: some person was travelling the Australian countryside encouraging folk to fight against new national parks, to push for the novel British rather than the American concept.

Of course the American national park was quite different. The intent was to keep areas of great natural beauty for the delight and education of the present public and their future children. A noble and far-sighted idea.

I agreed to cancel my address for some ten years. A reasonable number of national parks having been declared in most States, I put the idea to my Society that since Australians were becoming

take this into account. We had a policy of following the Thoreau words, "in wildness is the preservation of the world". We must also save the wild where people live and work that was the basis of the "regional park".

The works of humans can be beautiful. A farm, a forest plantation, can have charm. So can a village similar to the one in which I live in my retirement. For me, it is a mini-paradise worth protecting by a regional park declaration. Sadly we have no Regional Park Act of the British kind in this State. Most politicians and the public do not understand its purpose. I described it in my book Saving Australia.

In such a regional park, there is no change in land ownership, so one area for argument disappears. The declaration is made by a request from a majority of the residents who, finding their region beautiful, wish to conserve that beauty. Such a regional park encloses where people live and work, on farms or factories, and also areas of wild bush.

How can you advance the claims for your suburb to become a regional park? Make sure there is adequate tree planting and present growth is protected. If you have dunes or natural areas, see these are conserved and used. Gosford, for instance, has a number of day walks to natural centres that the council advertises. If you have no botanic garden or arboretum you may be able to create these. Those are a few ideas.

It may be in the future. Yet the whole of Australia may one day become a regional park! Utopia perhaps, but one can dream.

Vincent Serventy,
 President,
 Wild Life Preservation Society of Australia,
 4 April 2001

Rangers 

Could anyone please tell me what our NPWS rangers actually do?

Apparently a job as ranger is eagerly sought, and it helps if the applicant has a University degree. The salaries are $40,000 pa and up (with all the perks of fee uniforms, vehicles, subsidised housing etc).

Might we not therefore expect to see a few of them actually patrolling parks, helping visitors or even enforcing laws (especially that dogs will incur a $1,100 fine, so the one and only notice I have seen says), or even – horror of horrors – trying to keep some of our trails clear? Or repairing signs?

In 35 years of walking in Australia, I have met (outside Tasmania) only one ranger, once, actually patrolling a trail. This was a woman ranger in the Royal NP who had been told to "get out and do something" with three others. (Perhaps the office was getting overcrowded). She was picking up litter.

I think we all should expect a little return for the millions of tax-payers’ dollars keeping them all in their cushy jobs.

I eagerly await a reply.

John Morrison, Burwood,
9 April 2001

Save the trees 

Trees represent the largest and longest-living life forms on Earth. Many are identical to those browsed upon by the strange animals that millions of years ago roamed the land presently covered by our creations of glass, concrete and steel. Trees have survived dramatic changes in the environment only to fall prey to the logger’s chainsaw and the bulldozers of "cultivated" humans.

As our cities expand, we dominate more and more of the ecology of this Planet and find ourselves increasingly alienated in our own artificially created "environment". But, whether we like it or not, we remain just a small part of an interdependent and finely balanced ecological system, and at the very heart of that system are the trees: a basic biological unit about which terrestrial life on this Planet revolves.

Our record since European settlement in Australia demonstrates a callous disregard for this web of life. We have carried out a ruthless policy of destruction, reducing our Great Forests to marginal farmland, sacrificing millions of years of evolutionary advances on the altar of economic gain. The diversity of the many hundreds of tree species is being reduced to those few considered to be of economic or ornamental use.

The time left to us to conserve the balance of nature has almost run out. Those who claim that the continuing destruction of our Forests will have no serious impact on our environment are wilfully ignorant. Those who believe that the balance can be restored by replanting selected chemically driven species are sadly mistaken. The very nature of life depends upon diversity. Where we might plant one species, nature would establish one thousand. It is foolish arrogance to believe that we can take "control" of the environment and maintain a viable ecological system. We have proved to be experts in destruction, not in creation, and not even in conservation.

The Federal Minister for Conservation and Forestry recently emphatically declared on TV to be aiming to step up the logging of native old growth forests and extend it into the national parks! Such a man is not fit to be "responsible" for the conservation of our soil-building, climate regulating, water-generating and purifying Forests.

Frank Miller,
for Friends of the Earth,
Southern Tablelands NSW, 27 April 2001

Earthfall

(if our world could speak)

 

Tell the worlds,

In silent voices,

 

That no-one knew me,

They knew a shell,

 

I felt alone,

In crowded places,

 

I touched so many,

To be seen by few.

 

I live the life of the millions,

to die the death of one soul.

CW



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