By Ed Thexton

FOR twelve years the South Gippsland Conservation Society has thrown every manner of dinosaur enthusiast at Mike Cleeland and his thirst for ancient fossils is unquenched.
 
How do you find obscure traces of dinosaur presence from 125 million years ago? The answer - persistence and consistency, the hallmarks of Mike’s endeavours.  Days, months, years and decades are needed to succeed at the fossil game.  Mike has acknowledged that when he started he was just like the rest of us and barely able to see the fossil for the rock.  He is going out of the conservation society at the peak of his game. 

Luckily for Mike, he grew up at Cape Woolamai so climate is a mere triviality.  As an inheritor of Bass Strait’s frigid south-westerly gales, belting horizontal rain and crashing waves, he was born for the life on a rock platform.  Professor Pat Rich recounted that years ago Mike took one look at their underground digging for fossils at the Otways Dinosaur Cove and took off for the rock platforms, never to return. ​

​By Ed Thexton

IN THE 1980s I’d come down to visit Mum in Inverloch and marvel at the contrast between the diverse subtle beauty of the Inverloch beach and the blighted creeks of the northern suburbs.  I knew rather too much of those urban wastelands as coordinator of the Northern Waterways Project working on the Darebin and Merri Creeks and the Plenty River. Walking was a hazard, and natural remnants reduced to glimpses.  Millions of dollars and decades of work have brought them from places of post-industrial communal blight to precious communal assets. 

By Ed Thexton

10am on a beautiful Friday in the centre of the Inverloch oval.  Five hundred-plus children from across the educational institutions of Inverloch.  Aunty Sonia Weston welcomes us and conducts a smoking ceremony to kick off a day of Rs: restoring biodiversity through resilience, regeneration, reintroduction, and reconnecting to country. 

A fitting start to a day of planting by the gun planters of the Inverloch Childcare Kindergarten, Inverloch Kindergarten, and the Inverloch Primary School Environment Team.
First up, seven of Inverloch Childcare Kindergarten’s best descend on the Beacon Court Reserve in Inverloch.  This was recently dominated by Sweet Pittosporum. In an hour, 300-plus plants of a dozen or so species are planted into the pre-dug holes. ​

By Ed Thexton

TWO bits of news have caught my attention: First up the council approved the extension of the Surf Parade path to Goroke Street. While I would have preferred a gravel rather than concrete path, ​I’m pleased they’re not removing any more foreshore vegetation to construct it. We’ve lost over 40 metres of dune vegetation in the past decade and we can’t afford to lose any more.

The most exciting news is the discovery of an Eastern Ground Parrot in Inverloch, near the coastal foreshore. And these two items are linked, if you’ll allow me to explain. ​

By Ed Thexton

IN 1983, I quit work and took a year to learn more about ecology at Roseworthy Agricultural College in South Australia, then celebrating its centenary year.  Natural resources management rather than agricultural production was my preferred study, and my thesis was about trees on farms.

Remember 1983?  The defining moment of the drought was the dust storm that blacked out Melbourne, followed on February 16 by the Ash Wednesday bushfires that swept from Adelaide through Victoria. 

​On February 17 I drove to South Australia.  It was still hot, and I cooked the motor of my tiny Mazda 1000 ute at Talem Bend and hitch hiked through the ravaged Adelaide hills to begin my studies. 

​For a farm boy from the high rainfall Yarra Valley, the flat windswept wheat and sheep farms, in the driest, most cleared state in the world’s driest continent, were a shock.​

By Ed Thexton

THE great thing about travel is that it gives you air to reflect on your life at home, experience the unexpected and, if in Japan, to experience the first world done differently (no crime, no grime).  One such place on our way to the venerable Mt Fuji back in April was the Hakone Open Air Museum in the small tourist town of Gora where we came across the Picasso Exhibition Hall, two storeys of paintings, sculptures and ceramic works in addition to photos of the artist at various points during his life.  The other was a cat shop. Visualise an armada of waving paws, devoted to all thing cat.  The Japanese clearly love their cats.

It was here that my brain, free from the trivialities of home life, was let out to roam.  Triggered by the surprise juxtaposition of Picasso’s high art and cat crap, I reflected on the Jekyll and Hyde duality of Felis catus, the domestic moggy.