Woodlands’ anthem fails to sway DAL panelists

A PASSIONATE plea from Western Port Woodlands' activist, Tim O’Brien, including a moving rendition of his woodland’s protest anthem ‘On A Grantville Shore’ prompted gratitude from the Distinctive Areas and Landscapes (DAL) Standing Advisory Committee this week.

But that’s about all.

As the Lead Chair of the Bass Coast DAL panel, Kathy Mitchell AM, said to Mr O’Brien, following his address on the Wednesday before Easter, the committee’s hands are tied when it comes to impacting existing uses, including sand extraction.

“I just want to be clear in case there’s any expectation about this. We can’t revisit the sand mines, they are existing uses with existing permits,” said Ms Mitchell.

But speaking as a former tourist business operator and concerned local resident, Mr O’Brien left no one in any doubt about his position, that if a government process designed to protect “distinctive landscapes” failed to even mention the Western Port Woodlands, something was seriously wrong.

“There is a spectacular dishonesty in the pretence of professing to recognise the value of the environment of the Bass Coast region while simultaneously excluding the Western Port Woodlands from Significant Landscape Overlays (as if the last remaining stand of coastal forest, this significant wild habitat so important to the region and the health of the Bay, this rare and diminishing ecosystem of ecological vegetation classes that has been elsewhere stripped from the region, is not significant, not deserving of protection).

“To fail to include the Woodlands in the Proposed Landscape Planning Controls beggars belief for its calculated bone-headedness, for its failure to recognise the wishes of the Bass Coast community (and Council!) and for its deliberate anti-climate science environmental carelessness,” said Mr O’Brien.

“Why would the report be silent on this, the last remaining significant forest in the region, and Western Port’s last forest?

“Why? I can’t help but feel that this silence carries the stench of interference and loss of impartiality of the former Department, DELWP (now Energy, Environment and Climate Action) in the preparation of the Draft Statement… hell-bent in pursuit of “strategic extractive resources” (sand for city concrete) at any and all environmental cost.”

But Ms Mitchell did say, at the end, that the panel would be considering various submissions about biolinks, including from the Bass Coast Shire Council, about the potential for establishing biodiversity biolinks and wildlife corridors across the shire.

The DAL process makes reference to the Bass Coast Shire Council’s Biodiversity Biolinks Plan 2018 in Volume 1 of its Landscape Assessment for Bass Coast, without actually listing the potential for a corridor between The Gurdies and Grantville.

The council explained the reason for its biolinks plan back in 2018:

“The purpose of the Bass Coast Biodiversity Biolinks Plan is to provide connectivity in the landscape by linking remnant patches of indigenous vegetation using biolinks or wildlife corridors,” according to the shire’s plan of 2018.

“The aim is to restore ecological connectivity to encourage the movement of wildlife and allow for genetic diversity in breeding populations to ensure long term viability of isolated species such as the Southern Brown Bandicoot.”

Specifically, the council promises to maintain and improve existing connectivity along coastal areas, including “The Gurdies/Grantville vegetation blocks”.

Mr O’Brien said the panel should be prepared to go further and set out where protective overlays should be located to preserve the remnant bush between the Lang Lang Proving Ground and the Grantville Nature Conservation Reserve.

But the extent to which the DAL committee may be able to respond to public input about protecting the Western Port Woodlands looks to be predetermined, bringing into view again the impression within the community that it’s all a done deal; where protective settlement boundaries should go, whether the expansion of Cape Paterson should be rolled back, where ignoring the 'Woodlands' is concerned and maybe even where farm fences and farm outbuildings are needed… they're just going to do as they please!

Here is Mr O’Brien’s passionate address to the panel in full, including the words of his campaign song:

“

In my submission I propose to address in the broad The Draft Statement of Planning Policy and to provide comment based on my observations and experience as an owner and operator of a tourism destination in Phillip Island, and my observations on the critical importance of protecting and enhancing the rural and natural environment as an imperative to maintaining and growing the tourism economy – the natural environment and its distinctive character being the key tourism driver.

I do not propose to pick through and provide comment on each of the substantive matters raised by the Draft Statement, other than one substantive matter: the astonishing omission of the Western Port Woodlands – under threat by sand mining – from the Draft Statement, and, by this omission, the absence of recognition in the DAL (as presented for discussion and comment) in the Draft Statement of Planning Policy.

I will argue that while placing the strongest protections on the Western Port Woodlands is not only an environmental imperative so necessary in an extinction crisis, but also that their preservation can solve one of the key problems with the current functioning of the visitor experience and which undermines the aspirations of the DAL and its professed “50-year vision” for the region.

And in what may be a first for such a panel, I will sing the last part of my presentation.

“

I provide my observations having operated what became a significant tourism destination for visitors to the region, an association with the island that began thirty years prior thanks to a family holiday home.

As it does for most residents here, the outcomes of the Draft Statement and the DAL connect with my wife and I, and our extended family, in a special way, but we would never pretend to have the connections to country of the Bunurong people whose lands we are discussing today.

My wife and I bought the Phillip Island Winery in late 2008, just in time for the GFC, which we operated for over 8 years from 2009, before handing over to the current owners as tenants in 2018, then settling on sale in 2020.

In 2009 when we re-opened the winery, we set about putting it firmly into the consciousness of day-visitors, as well as holidayers and locals.

Aside from a thriving weekend trade, for every day of the year except Christmas Day and Boxing Day we had at least one tourist bus, those helicopter day visitors, in our cellar door. Chinese in the main, but also Russians, Italians, Mexicans, Japanese, every nationality you can imagine. And so many travelling families from the Indian subcontinent – the parents up front, children in the middle row, and the grandparents in the back. Our approach was to always greet them warmly and to talk to them.

So, over any year, we were face-to-face in the casual environment of our winery with thousands of the visitors who make up the tourism economy of Phillip Island and Bass Coast.

And we learned things that report writers and researchers may not so readily glean. We were astonished by the numbers who asked, “we’ve been to the nature park, we’re going to the penguins, what else can you do here?” Equally astonished by the numbers who were ignorant of the Bunurong Coast, of Harmer’s Haven, of Cape Patterson, even of Inverloch and Venus Bay, and much less the region’s wild place, that lowland coastal forest that frames, protects and provides such character to the eastern flank of Western Port and its Ramsar wetlands.

The most enduring comment, when talking freely, was the comment of “how lucky we are to live in a place like this, so close to nature”. Those words from international visitors - “so close to nature” – cropped up time and time and time again. And spoke volumes for the appeal of this region as a destination, so close to the confines of Melbourne and its southern and south-eastern suburbs

I remember clearly one Indian visitor standing quietly gazing across the open farmlands towards Berry’s Beach asking me “do you own this place?”, I answered yes, he said “you are the richest person I know”.

“

So I place my observations drawn from those years in the winery as the backdrop to my commentary on the Draft Statement and the DAL.

Each year, the panel knows this, the Bass Coast region attracts 3.1 million visitors, with the tourism industry contributing $730 million to the local economy and more than 8300 jobs. (2018-2019 FY)

Tourism is, by a significant margin, the economic generator of the region, its most important industry, its largest employer, again by a significant margin, and among Australia’s most recognised destinations for both international and Australian tourists.

Preserving its character from the ravages of development and ensuring the maintenance of protected settlement boundaries, must be, surely, on the face of it, and on the evidence of the visitor experience, a key outcome of the DAL.

People don’t come here to gaze at endless strips of houses, ‘Burwood by the Sea’, nor to be greeted by an industrial wall of sand trucks at Grantville and the awful scars of great dusty pits on the ridgelines.

They come for a sublime experience, one, in a world with cities and regions sagging under the crush of humanity, that reaches deep into our human needs for contact, solace and expression with the natural environment.

“

So, let’s talk then about the Western Port Woodlands.

That the Draft Statement is silent on one of the most obvious of Bass Coast's distinctive environmental landscapes, the Western Port Woodlands, is an appalling oversight. While the Woodlands – please walk into them – provide gob-smacking vistas, their framing of the eastern shores of Western Port gives the whole of the bay its special character and its most magical beauty.

There is a spectacular dishonesty in the pretence of professing to recognise the value of the environment of the Bass Coast region while simultaneously excluding the Western Port Woodlands from Significant Landscape Overlays (as if the last remaining stand of coastal forest, this significant wild habitat so important to the region and the health of the Bay, this rare and diminishing ecosystem of ecological vegetation classes that has been elsewhere stripped from the region, is not significant, NOT deserving of protection).

It also fails to recognise the distinctive habitat it provides - being, in the main, rare lowland forest – and fails to recognise its importance to the identified vulnerable and disappearing flora and fauna found there.

The humbug in The Statement’s identification of the de-vegetated, denuded Bass Hills as being of special character while ignoring the forest corridor that defines the visitor experience in the approach to the region – and to NOT include the Woodlands in the Proposed Landscape Planning Controls – beggars belief for its calculated bone-headedness, for its failure to recognise the wishes of the Bass Coast community (and Council!) and for its deliberate anti-climate science environmental carelessness.

You would have to wonder if the authors of the draft report are unaware of the extinction crisis in this country, unaware of the importance of maintenance of habitat for healthy populations of native fauna and flora, unaware of the contribution of loss of forests to global warming and the climate emergency facing us – facing our children! – and unaware of the importance of forest and of uncontaminated subterranean flows in maintaining the health of coastal wetland ecologies – Western Port being an internationally recognised and protected RAMSAR treaty wetland.  

Why would the report be silent on this, the last remaining significant forest in the region, and Western Port’s last forest?

Why? I can’t help but feel that this silence carries the stench of interference and loss of impartiality of the former Department – DELWP (now Energy, Environment and Climate Action) – in the preparation of the Draft Statement given the bloody-mindedness and negligence of this Victorian Government and the environmental vandals in ERR in the hell-bent pursuit of “strategic extractive resources”… well, sand… at any and all environmental cost.

Self-evident truths

In this, in not including the Woodlands top-to-bottom as a Distinctive Area and Landscape and not deserving of the strongest protections under the Draft Statement, we do not need the evidence of expert witnesses to confirm what are self-evident truths.

That the maintenance of habitat is critical to maintaining healthy populations of our ‘wild things’, is something that everybody knows, every school child, everyone. It is a self-evident truth.

Yet, the Western Port Woodlands – this region’s last forest – is being removed, degraded, dismembered, scoop by scoop, hectare by hectare by sand mining.

* It beggars belief that two of those mines operate in Conservation Areas.

* It beggars belief that at the northern end of the Woodlands on the Adams Creek Reserve stands a sign informing visitors that they are entering the habitat of the endangered Southern Brown Bandicoot. Yet, walk fifty metres from that sign and there are two bloody great sandpits ripping out forest on both northern and southern flanks of the Reserve. 

Top-to-bottom, these miners are determined to continue, hang the environmental cost. And being supported by Government despite ample resources of equivalent sand elsewhere, not in forest.

So let us not wave the finger of disapproval at Brazil for its removal of the Amazon forests, hectare by hectare, or of the vanishing forests in Borneo, being removed hectare by hectare.

Forest loss there, forest loss here, hectare by hectare, show me where lies the ethical and moral difference in this time of climate crisis, of extinction crisis?

You need only consult Google Maps to see the damage being done here in the pursuit of sand at the expense of the environment and of such danger to this region’s visitor economy. That the loss of forest, here, in Brazil, in Borneo, in Papua New Guinea, is endangering our planet is now an accepted truth, and the dangers it poses humanity is self-evident.

That the Western Port Woodlands provides habitat for a number of endangered and vulnerable species is also an accepted truth. So too, we do not need the testimony of experts to attest that the activities of these miners and the incremental loss of habitat and of habitat connectivity between populations, endangers these populations and adds to the pressure of regional extinctions.

The humbug of offsets, as though protection of habitat can be a zero-sum-game – “oh we’re ripping this out but look at what we’ve planted over here”… or as bad… “we’re ripping this out but look, we’ll protect this bit down here” – may allow some to sleep better when closing their eyes to the damage they are doing, or approving, but it is environmental humbug. Remove the habitat, and the wildlife dies. That is a self-evident truth.

So, what disappearing wildlife is at increased risk, what is this DAL Draft Bass Coast Statement failing to protect?

You don’t need me to list them, this panel will have heard them enumerated by a number of expert witnesses. But if we’re talking Distinctive Area and Landscapes and talking of a “50 Year Vision that identifies and values the attributes to be conserved and enhanced for the long term” then surely the vulnerable Southern Brown Bandicoot, the endangered Swift Parrot, the Strzelecki Koala, the Powerful Owl, the Strzelecki Gum, the Prom Sheoak, the Finger Fungus and so many orchids fall under “values and attributes to be conserved and enhanced for the long term”.

But in failing to provide the strongest protections to this disappearing Riparian lowland forest, the Draft Statement fails its own words by this gravest of omissions: (it says) “We highly value our abundant native flora and fauna and safeguard and manage habitat, particularly the habitat of endangered, threatened and vulnerable species.”

Fail. Fail. Fail. Failing its own words, failing a key aspiration.  

Missing an opportunity

In preparing a 50-year vision, I would have thought that the Draft Statement may have projected a little more creatively in framing this vision and seen the unrecognised opportunities in the Woodlands. 

Everyone, everyone who walks the Woodlands to the ridgelines, and gazes back across Westernport, is struck by the sheer breathtaking beauty of this special place.

* Did the authors of the DAL Draft Statement walk this forest?

* Did they enter a towering grove of grass trees, spears in flower?

* Did they walk a wild watercourse from a ridgeline down the long damp dark gullies?

* Did they walk with a Bunurong heritage expert and note the evidence of thousands of years of occupation in the markers on the trees?

Did they sit under any tree anywhere in that forest, and just listen and look? 

Surely, in defining ‘the way forward’ for protecting and enhancing the distinctive areas and landscapes of a region recognised for its natural values, a forest, wild, unique, one with breathtaking views over Western Port – this still pristine bay – surely speaks more to the imagination and of future eco-tourism opportunities than cattle grazing de-forested hills.

In fact, as various reports attest, the ‘farm experience’ in the region is a relatively small slice of the Bass Region’s visitor economy.

“

Lose the forest, break it apart with great dusty pits, fill the Bass Highway with thousands of trucks, and we endanger the visitor experience, and we lose forever the opportunities it affords, not to mention the awful environmental cost of its vandalisation and loss.

So, to return to where we started.

There is a key opportunity, not recognised in the Draft Statement, that potentially sits at the core of the marketing, functioning and future of this region as “a natural attraction, a natural wonderland”.

As noted in the Bass Coast Unlocking Rural Tourism Strategy 2023, the “noticeable characteristics for the visitor economy include the skewed spatial distribution of visitors…(…)… Phillip Island attracts more than twice the number of visitors (2.1 million visitors per annum) than the mainland (1.0 million).

These data, and commentary, accord with our visitor experience when operating the Phillip Island Winery. Visitors pour into the Phillip Island cul-de-sac as a first or only stop, and the length of the Bass Hwy, this one arterial, provides no opportunity to arrest this flow, to disperse these trippers across all that Bass Coast has to offer.

The vision of Bass Coast Shire to “be regarded as a leading rural tourism destination acclaimed for its excellence in ecotourism, agritourism and coastline tourism” recognises that “improve(d) geographic and seasonal dispersal of visitors” is an imperative.

“

The emerging opportunity

The Holden proving Ground is again for sale, this time by VinFast. It provides an unparalleled opportunity as a coastal ‘gateway’ to South Gippsland, the Western Port Woodlands, the spectacular Bunurong Coast and the pristine farmland and forest beauty of the Strzeleckis.

Offering 877 hectares of mostly preserved coastal bushland in a threatened bio-link corridor, it is zoned farming and without environmental covenants.

The site is predominately native vegetation, with 6 Ecological vegetation Classes (EVCs) in good condition supporting numbers of identified at-risk flora and fauna.

Imagine then, this site, with its permanent buildings, infrastructure and wide-span interior spaces, as a magnificent natural 'gateway' – a centre for tourism opening up the whole of South Gippsland and its wonderful natural assets.

Its return to the market presents a ‘second-chance’ opportunity to protect the site and the endangered species it supports in perpetuity, to secure it for the community of Victoria and the national estate, to provide a tourism gateway to Bass Coast and the South Gippsland region, and to provide visitors a unique immersive coastal forest experience, all within easy access of Melbourne.

A ‘gateway’ tourism centre there will re-profile the visitor experience to the Bass Coast region and supercharge the growth of tourism across the whole of the region, bringing potentially hundreds of millions of tourism dollars to the lesser-recognised assets, experiences, coastlines, ranges, centres and opportunities the region offers.

Critical to this opportunity, however, as a genuine 50-year vision, is the protection of The Western Port Woodlands. 

We ask that this forest be protected in perpetuity. That top to bottom, it be included in the DAL.

* That the mines and miners be removed.

* That this corridor be excised from the declared Extractive Industry Interest Area, and the Strategic Extractive Resources Areas.

There is no justification for this destructive activity, no room for the removal of disappearing forest of such importance to the region and its endangered wildlife, and no reasonable nor believable claim that such activity is “sustainable”.

The ravages of sand mining is a blight on the Bay and Bass Coast and the near silence on the depredations of this activity a desperate oversight by the authors of the Draft Statement.

This panel, with its recommendations, with covenants and protections and the recognition of the Western Port Woodlands available to it under the DAL, has the opportunity to change this future, and to genuinely frame a 50-year vision for the Region.

So, make recommendations for the best future for the Bass Coast Region. Make a decision for the environment, make a decision for the forest, make a decision for the vulnerable and endangered wildlife it supports, make a decision that recognises the climate emergency, and make a decision for your children, and their children.

And, in so doing, create new opportunities that can make a vital contribution to the visitor economy of the region, to grow employment in new experiences and ventures, and to give Western Port Bay and its RAMSAR wetlands the strongest protections by ensuring the protection of the coastal and riparian ecosystems along its flanks.

On a Grantville Shore

(Tim O’Brien)

The sun settles low on a Grantville shore

And wave tops shine, over Western Port

Grass trees sigh, hushed forest call

In this magic hour on a Grantville shore

Behind the ridge lines over Grantville shores

Woodlands crying, to a diesel roar

Teeth of steel, old timbers falling,

Where the sand mines claw, over Grantville shores

For this Melbourne build, there’s a plan in store

“Sand for concrete and carparks, we must ensure,

Let these forests fall, we just need more!”

And so our wild things die along a Grantville shore

There’s a gentle breeze now on the Grantville shore

Sunset glowin’, over Western Port

The grass trees sigh, the forest stirring

Oh keep me here on a Grantville shore

Feel the gentle breeze on this Grantville shore

Colours glowin’, over Western Port

The grass trees sigh, hear the forest calling

In this magic hour on a Grantville shore

This magic hour on a Grantville shore.

Coming up

At 10.15am on Wednesday, April 12, at the Cape Paterson Surf Lifesaving Club, the DAL panel will hear from the Save Western Port Woodlands, South Gippsland Conservation Society and Victorian National Parks Association on this very subject.

LISTEN TO THE SONG: https://www.facebook.com/tim.obrien.129357/videos/441933721452188