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www.mdavid.com.au |
What's with this 'Nature Stuff' then?When I was a kid I was lucky. I lived on the edge of Sydney Harbour in an area surprisingly unaffected by housing and other types of development. Wild orchids, native to that area, and other types of wildflowers bloomed between the gum trees. |
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A spray of wild orchids |
With all those flowers and the nectar they produced, the place was full of native birds too. And there were plenty of echidnas and goannas. And fish. I'd catch meal-sized fish from the harbour, using fresh Sydney rock oysters prized from the rocks as bait. I saw sharks and dolphins and giant fish and enormous mud crabs and a lot more amazing stuff than I could list here. Then over the next twenty years a wave swept through. Not a wave made of water. It was a wave of change. The larger trees are still there (except for the ones poisoned by neighbours wanting to improve their water views) but the shorter vegetation is very different now. |
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Native birds like this New Holland Honeyeater were common in the area. It's been good to see them come back since locals starting planting flowering Australian trees in their gardens |
The first to disappear were the orchids. You see, there was a lady in our street who liked orchids. She liked them so much that she'd go looking for them. When she found some she'd pull them out and take them back to plant in her own garden. They always died but that didn’t stop her going back for more. My sister and I once caught her doing that and said, ‘What are you doing?’ She jumped quite a bit and looked mighty guilty, stopped digging and started shoving butchered orchid remnants back into the soil. ‘I’m just planting some flowers.’ Yeah right. We were only little kids but we weren't stupid. Of course the next day those orchids were gone and over the following years she managed to wipe out the lot. Then the Lantana arrived. |
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Lantana spread quickly after the council dumped it in the area |
My mum went outside one day to see a bunch of council dump trucks in our street. The council had been clearing Lantana from one of its parks. In Australia, Lantana is an aggressive introduced weed and because that type of Lantana is an artificial hybrid it's madly difficult to find a biological control for it. So the council had several truckloads of the stuff which they'd ripped out of their parks, and wondered what to do with it. For some reason, they decided the best thing was to dump it over the cliff near where I lived - an act for which their own rangers would issue a fine if anyone else did it. Within a very short time the cuttings took root and spread for several acres, blocking out all the small plants and growing so thickly that none of the kids in the street could play in the bush any more. Then came the antifouling. I've forgotten exactly when that happened, but for a while all the boats moored nearby used a special kind of antifouling paint. Antifouling is something that stops barnacles and coral growing on the hull. Around that time, antifouling paint had some sort of nasty chemical thing in it which was super-poisonous. The year that paint was introduced all the oysters died in that area. And not just the oysters. Everything else on the rocks died as a result of the chemicals leeching out of those antifouling paints. So the fish disappeared too. After all the shellfish died, a slimy brown algae gunk started growing over everything. It was slippery and it stank when the sun dried it out. After a while that type of antifouling paint was banned and the nature of the place started repairing itself. It all came back different of course, a different species of oyster and different fish and so on, but at least some stuff did start growing back. Last time I went back I was left pretty sad by how much things have changed. For example, when I was a kid there were thousands of little frogs called red-crowned toadlets living in the area. Pretty much any spot in the bush where rainwater trickled down the rocks and accumulated in shallow pools, you'd find red-crowned toadlets or their tadpoles. Well, those red-crowned toadlets became locally extinct in that area and in fact the frogs are now listed as a vulnerable species. |
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It's green isn't it? So what's wrong with it? This Mile-a-minute vine is another species of introduced plant to take over the bush where I grew up. You can see from this photo how dense this vine gets, growing right over the top of every other plant trying to survive on the forest floor |
The crazy thing is, most people in that street wouldn't think anything has changed. They sit happily on their porches and see green stuff (Lantana and mile-a-minute vine) and blue stuff (water views) and think this is how it's been forever. But it hasn't even been like that for 20 years. It's changed drastically in a very short time. Everywhere I've been on this planet I've heard stories like this. Great waves of change sweeping across the environment, leaving natural places permanently changed. Aggressive introduced plants and feral animals, spreading over the landscape from one coast to the other, displacing indigenous species with their bland uniformity. I've always been amazed that more people aren't bothered by this. But then when you talk to people you quickly realise that it's pretty hard for someone to care about a red-crowned-toadlet if they've never heard of one. And then there are the people who are so unfamiliar with the Australian bush, that they think we never even had spectacular wild orchids growing all through the Sydney region in the first place. They don't realise what they're missing. I'd be kidding myself if I thought I could change everything with a website like this one. For starters, I don't know enough. But hundreds of people come to this web site every day. If some of the stuff here sparks some interest, then I'd be very happy with that. |
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