This audio documentary looks at the natural temperate grasslands once spread from Melbourne to the South Australian border, thriving on the fertile volcanic soils of Victoria’s Western plains. But they’ve been in decline from the moment settlers landed and are now critically endangered. The impact of livestock grazing, cropping and urban sprawl means that less than 1% are left.
This piece was made by Miyuki Jokiranta as part of ABC Radio National’s Earshot program and has been reproduced with permission from ABC Radio National Features Unit. It was sound engineered by Brendan O’Neill and features Ann McGregor, vice president of the Friends of Merri Creek and president of the Merri Creek Management Committee, John Delpratt, Honorary Fellow with the University of Melbourne, Alan Appelbe, cardiologist at University Hospital Geelong and owner of the property, Melaleuca, Reg Abrahams, Indigenous Protected Area project co-ordinator at Wurdi Youang and Peter Wlodarczyk.
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Now we’re going to do a little experiment – the majority of people that walk through this stretch of land - what do you think they see? At the moment they probably see long grass and worried about snakes, I’d imagine, which is valid, but unlikely. But otherwise they see a patch of dried grass.
And what do you see? I see kangaroo grass. And there’s a mixture of other grasses as well. Interesting invertebrates. Possibly some butterflies. Wonderful flowers – chocolate lilies, common everlasting, lemon beauty heads. And some nice basalt rocks which is the underlying geology and, of course, there are birds around which we can hear.
Dotted around Victoria are grassland remnants – in rail reserves, cemeteries, and rocky escarpments - small patches that offer a window onto history, a landscape relatively untouched by colonization. They’re little environmental hotspots not because we’ve cared for them – quite the opposite – because they’ve been overlooked.
I’m Miyuki Jokiranta and in this Earshot, I’m getting down in the grass, taking you through parklands, pristine patches and even experimental grasslands trying to recreate the precious remnant.
Natural temperate grasslands once spread from the Yarra River to the South Australian border, thriving on the fertile volcanic soils of the Western plains. But they’ve been in decline from the moment settlers landed and are now critically endangered. Grazing, cropping and urban sprawl has left only 1%.
So how can we expand the limits of our vision to see what the grassland lovers see?
By listening to the botanists and you really need to get down on your knees and look carefully at grasslands. It’s a small-scale ecosystem – a child’s eye level view is what you need.
So I’m going to do as Anne suggests – get down to the child’s eye level view and see what I can see… I need one of those knee pads. This is Wurundjeri land, I’m looking over knee high grass, which is virtually treeless. Iit’s not a dramatic landscape, but – like this – a little constellation of moths – the drama takes place at a smaller scale. Attention to the detail stands in for a microscope. But as to what all these grasses are…
In the 1980s the early days with the Merri Creek restoration, in the inner suburbs there was always indigenous vegetation to be replanted, so as we learnt more about what was indigenous to the area we learnt about the native grasslands and when the real stuff was being discovered further upstream that was quite exciting.
The Merri Creek was a dumping ground for Melbourne’s industries – a wasteland that’s taken a lot of campaigning and planting by Anne McGregor and the Friends of Merri Creek, to turn it into the beautiful inner city bush corridor that snakes up to the base of the Great Dividing Range, embracing waterways, woodlands, and the remaining scraps of grasslands.
That’s the sad thing, there’s only small patches left around in the suburbs, but it’s so important to keep them, protect them and manage them.
At a small scale, the majesty of grasslands is a bit lost. But small is better than nothing.
At a small scale, the majesty of grasslands is a bit lost, but small is better than nothing. VicRoads owned the land, part of, uh, a freeway reservation, obviously not building the freeway, um, there was a lot of community opposition to that. But this property was offered to Moreland City Council and, um, the community said very strongly to council, "Please buy it because it's an important piece of land for open space and for, um, ecological reasons, partly because of this grassland remnant.
For the moment, though, only the experts and enthusiasts can see their value.
It’s interesting looking here, the back fences are very solid. No sign that people come out onto the grasslands from their backyard, or even look into them but that the same applied along the Merri Creek further downstream, it wasn’t a place to go. But nowadays the back fences are being opened up and I hope the same can happen here are people learn about the grasslands.
What was the rhyme - Sedges have edges, rushes are round, grasses are hollow down to the ground – so if I pull this leaf blade away, it should… yeah hollow in the middle – I’ve confirmed this is grass! So sheath, ligule, culm, awn, glume – Naming as a way of identifying or knowing is one way. But grasses also have routines, habits, preferences, like all living creatures.
The Friends of Merri Creek, our secretary, Ray Radford, asked the Wurundjeri Council to give names to the major grassland patches that are protected along the creek. Not this one yet. We’ll have to get a name for this one. Maran Babba is the umbrella title – body of the mother – is the spine along Merri Creek and others have thigh or arm…
Where would that put us that?
Well we might be on the other thigh…
Beautiful words, though. Sheath, ligule, sheath, ligule, awn, culm, glume.
I’m walking up to meet John Delpratt, one of the forefathers of grassland restoration in Victoria/Australia. Just north of Melbourne in Royal Park there’s a grassland experiment in progress.
So the idea was to transform the area into a complex native grassland. The fantastic thing about diversity in a grassland is the scale at which it occurs. In a sq meter you can have 20 or 30 species. That doesn’t happen often these days but we know we can construct quite complex vegetation communities from these native species but it still has to be demonstrated, people still want to call these experiments and this is genuinely an experiment.
There are as many approaches to creating and caring for a grassland as there are grass species. John and his students at the University of Melbourne have worked on techniques for scalping, mulching, direct sewing, weed suppression for rural, regional and now, just 3km north of the CBD, urban applications. But the point is these experiments/ these patches exist.
Wallaby grasses, common wheat grass, be some poa in here as well. We’ve also sewn my particular favourite kangaroo grass, themeda triandra.
Ok pause – If you only take away one grass species today - it should be kangaroo grass.
Themeda triandra. Kangaroo grass. It’s a tropical species, so it does best in warm hot moist conditions. Which doesn’t exactly describe Melbourne. It’s spread its way from central Asia down into Africa, so you often see it in wildlife movies waving at the nose of a lion. Then it spread down to Australia, a few million years ago. Then across right down into Tasmania. And it’s a keystone species we are trying to represent here.
So when you’re next in a grassland – what should you look for?
Colour. Kangaroo grass is strikingly colourful.
Bursts of red-brown spikes emerging from green stems, with this fine black tail – like you’ve just lifted a pencil line off a page. Usually knee to hip height. It’s unmissable once you’ve seen it. It becomes an easy beacon when navigating these complicated landscapes.
Then we sew a lot of forbes species. I guess that’s a characteristic of these South Eastern Australian grasslands. In their pre-1770 form they would have been very rich in wildflowers. Many of those wildflowers would have been utilised at the time for food, so they’re an important component of a remnant of these grasslands and our reconstructions of the plant communities which are based on the idea of those grasslands.
Reconstructions that acknowledge Indigenous Australians were instrumental in shaping the inviting landscape that John Batman saw when he first arrived. A landscape that felt familiar because it had been shaped by human hands.
There is now a strong belief that the grasses were cultivated, a number of the daisies were cultivated for food – particularly the yam daisies. But they were cultivated in the sense the Europeans understood and therefore failed to recognise in most cases. There’s a lot of talk these days about cultural burning, which is a term we need to understand better than we do at the moment. It was certainly a tool that was used extensively on the grasslands and also by replanting and possibly even deliberately increasing population. I mean they had tens of thousands of years to learn how to live off this land. They were going to be doing very sophisticated things to achieve that.
But fidelity to that pre-colonial point in history is impossible.
We don’t know what they look like look. Even the fine artists of the time, the Von Guerards, they didn’t seem to feature painting, they were commercial artists. They were painting homesteads and landscapes. If only he’d looked down and seen what was in front of him. But even then that was 30 and 40 years after settlement it was going to be modified. They talk about the daisies, which were so important to the Aboriginal people as a food source, they talk of them being eaten out within a decade of sheep entering the pastures.
Uh, if you look just across the other corner of the lake, we can see exactly what it looked like. So it looked like a, uh, golf course there
My name’s Alan Applebee. I’m the owner of Melaleuca, the property on the edge of Lake Connewarre.
Alan is a cardiologist at the University hospital Geelong and when not taking care of his patient’s heart health, he’s out weeding on a windy headland.
So we’re about 15km out of Geelong and we’re on the Bellarine Peninsula, only about 5km from Bass Strait which explains the extremely strong consistent winds we have here.
Wind is not great for recording, but it is fabulous in a grassland! Weeping grass flops from one side to another, the feathery white heads of wallaby grass appear - for a moment - to move in unison, and wind ripples across tufts of spear grass like an ocean.
Really when we bought the property, I was blind to the grasses, completely blind. I suppose it’s like a logger walking into a forest and all they see is logs. I couldn’t see the beauty of the native grasses. I can bring friends here who don’t know anything about grasses and one patch of weedy grasses looks like just the beautiful kangaroo grass, and stipa and wallaby grass. We see grasslands as something to put our sheep and cattle and herbivores on to get something back from the land. I suppose the next-door neighbour who used to graze this probably thinks this is pretty silly having locked up this grass for 30 years and burnt it for 30 years. He probably thinks I’m a little bit mad.
Alan, accompanied by his two Jack Russells Rocky and Bullwinkle, works as much as one person can. The property is a mosaic of native and introduced patches, burnt and weedy.
You can never really recreate nature. I’ve been to the Kimberley’s and seen intact grasslands, where the Kangaroo Grass is above your head and you have to walk around it. You can’t walk through it. And seen patches of grass where there’s 30 or 40 or 50 different species in a sq meter. We can’t recreate that. We can’t bring back nature to that degree of perfection. We don’t know how to do that.
There is something joyous just tromping through long grass, isn't there? There is something joyous as long as you're not phobic of snakes. Well, you're going in front of me, so I figure you're scaring them away. Uh-uh. They're very, they're very timid. The, uh, copperheads, they're like the Labrador of snakes, so- They really, they really just want to get out of your way.
If you open and part the grass you can see, there’s little tunnels. There’s a whole city here below the grass we don’t appreciate. And I imagine on these piles of dead weeds I’ve got stacked up. The little owls we see and the barn owls, the tawny frog mouths, I’m sure they stand on these piles of weeds in the middle of the night and pick up the mice and little animals that are running around in the dark after dark.
The other thing about the native grasses is that they are much safer in terms of fire than some of the grasses we had here before. When you’ve got 4 ft high Phalaris or cocksfoot, it’ll have flames 6 or 8ft high, whereas the Microlena that weeping grass, which we have a lot of, that is very low. It has low fuel loads and it only has a tiny flame really.
You’ve self-trained how to burn? Is that right?
Well some of it is by accident, because we had this fire almost 28 years ago which got out of control and then there was a huge flowering of Kangaroo Grass in that area. That’s what alerted me that there was a lot of seed in the soil just waiting for the chance to come up.
This is an area where there must be a residual seed back because new plants are springing out of the ground – 5 different native flowers have come up – and that’s what gives me a really deep joy. When we burn an area and something that I’ve never planted comes up by itself. The seed was there in the soil for… I don’t know how long its been there maybe 20 or 30 years and it’s decided to grow. Because the conditions are right, and it’s had that stimulation of the fire and it’s come back and it’s going to gradually spread.
We talk a lot about… you just keep scaring me! We’ve run out of food Rocky. You thought it was a snake, didn’t you? I wasn’t sure…You said they were the Labradors of the snake world, but I didn't think they were that friendly. No.
It’s very special to look at a tree you planted 30 years ago and you can’t reach around the tree and you can see there’s birds nesting in it and feeding amongst the grasses. There’s that deep connection of time. I can’t imagine what indigenous people would have felt but I can get some glimmering of that because I know every tree and where I’ve burnt and when I’ve burnt it. The grasses I’ve planted and the trees I’ve planted. I know which friends have planted which trees. At night if I can’t sleep, I can walk through the property in my mind and I’m asleep in 5 minutes.
Crisp blonde heads nod to the wind. Rye beauty and dry angles leaning on each other for companionship, support. In the 70s environmental philosophers coined the term species loneliness – the gnawing feeling that we’re disconnected from the rest of creation. But we’re still struggling with the idea that we could form a kinship with all the living things around us. Our relationships based on reciprocity. We can’t really remove ourselves anymore - this landscape is now reliant on us to thrive. Well, at least to maintain the form we desire of it. But I guess that’s a plant’s life in human presence.
We have a section that’s 9 ha. We’ve put Kangaroo grass seed into the ground. It’s all establishing now. That was always done by hand dispersal. No machinery to do the stuff or things like that. Even though fortunes have been spent on that all over Australia. But by hand is the best way.
I’m Reg Abrahams – I’m a Gundijtmara man from South West Victoria.
This is Wurdi Youang, nestled at the foot of The You Yangs, Mount Macedon to the North, Corio Bay to the South and Melbourne about an hour East.
The property was bought by the Indigenous Land Council in 2001 and divested to the Wathaurong Aboriginal Co-operative in 2006. For the past 10 years I’ve been working as an Indigenous Protected Area project co-ordinator and trying to get ranger teams and people invested in caring for country and getting Aboriginal people out here learning about grassland and fire management. Fire is really important at the moment.
We’re in 60 ha here – 40 of it was Victorian Volcanic plains, grasslands degraded. We’ve regenerated that and re-seeded that. What we’re going through now is old cropping land. As we come up here – that was all cropped, so we’ve stopped the cropping, done some burns and put about 100 bags of Kangaroo grass down. How much to do you reckon Pete?
Yeah probably about that amount
At the moment we’ve got striped legless lizards here, critically endangered. We’ve got critically golden sun moths. Spiny rice flower – spiny spinescens. We call them Blue Bells. I do the Australian names; Pete knows the French…
Restoring a large grassland is prohibitively expensive. So Reg and his colleague Pete are trialling new ways to draw funding into the landscape.
Basically, we’re going into the food part of it.
We decided to try and look at this native grassland from a different angle. The Aboriginal people, their grasslands over the whole of Australia, were an economy. It wasn’t a conservation effort. It was a practical economy.
You can know about your Aboriginality, you can know about story, you can know how to dance. But this stuff is important because it’s all about food. A lot of people, they just don’t know. They just walk past it and yeah.
So we’re trying to learn and get some the burnings to get desirable species to self-seed or promote themselves.
This is the Kangaroo Grass which they reckon is the bees knees. They got more protein than wheat barley and oats, they are drought tolerant plants and gluten free. That little black part there, that tail that’s the awn. When it rains, that awn actually spins around and drills the seed into the ground. It comes alive. It’s amazing. After years of sitting in a shed or something. But we have other varieties here as well, we have panicum… I’ll show you one in a minute… but where have they all gone? Where’s all the Wally grass Pete?
Progress is slow. Interest in native grasses and grains are coalescing into an industry, but not fast enough for Pete and Reg.
It’s too frustrating because they don’t throw the right money or the dollars to do it. Even with the Western grassland reserve I don’t know why they haven’t handed it back over to us.
In 2010, the Victorian Government put a public acquisition overlay over a 15,000 hectare patch of land to protect grasslands into the future. The Western Grassland Reserve is currently mired in purchasing problems. A recent report found that only 10% of the properties had been acquired. Wurdi Youang fell under the overlay, and the Wathaurong Aboriginal Cooperative asked to manage their own property for it to be released.
Because then we can pursue more funding opportunities to have more workers out here managing the place and try and get this grass seed business up and running.
Their request is still pending.
Ah, there’s a rope around this grassland, but apparently, John tells me, that’s to stop cars and bikes, not humans so let’s go in…
One of my great supports now and early in my grassland journey was my dear wife Lyn. She had 2 rules, well 3 rules. She looked up because she was a birder, but then once she’d finished with the birds, she looked down. There are two reasons to look in the grasslands, and I’ll only mention the plants. And her other rule was that she always walked in the opposite direction to what I was walking. Because that’s how you find things out. If you just walk side by side then it’s fun to share knowledge and experience. But so often she would find something, she didn’t know what it was but she knew she hadn’t seen it before. We had something to take home. Sometimes it’d be a weed, sometimes a native, but always fun.
We’ve been overlooking the grasslands. But maybe you’ll look at one differently next time… The sound engineer for this program was Brendan O’Neill.
I’m Miyuki Jokiranta, thanks for listening.