Ed Thexton

Adventures at VCAT

18/2/2023

A clash of world views on how Inverloch's Glade should be used is reduced to trivialities at VCAT. Photo: Ed Thexton

By Ed Thexton

THE legacy of COVID-19 lives on, or is this just a better way? We watched on Zoom for five days, from Monday 30 January until the conclusion on Friday 3 February. South Gippsland Conservation Society's vice-president John Cuttriss and I sat in the Bunurong Environment Centre to bear witness to the biggest-ever expenditure in the 47 years of the society.

Through the course of the week, we were joined online and in the flesh by Society members and others, including the press. Like all binge viewing sessions, the experience altered us.

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The Mighty Ayr

22/9/2022

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Ayr Creek, Inverloch. Photos: Ed Thexton

By Ed Thexton

I’M A country kid whose youth was spent on the Woori Yallock Creek at Yellingbo that is the last holdout of the helmeted honeyeater. Little did I know my local creek was a rare exception, its floral and faunal riches absent from most creeks of agricultural Victoria.

By chance I now find myself in Inverloch on the Ayr Creek. More a much-altered drainage line than creek really. But no matter how humble, it’s our creek. Thirty minutes ago I was in it, pulling out weeds and contemplating this writing. I’m 65 this birthday so the flower of youth is wilted, helped no doubt by the bee that thought fit to sacrifice its life for the benefit of my skull. I mused over what the hell I was doing with my holed gumboot in the effluent of Inverloch.

Really, I was gardening. Extracting one plant, in this case wandering trad (formerly known to many of us as wandering Jew), a native of Brazil, to create opportunity for others. I thought of the artificiality of our reductionist approach to education, of how forestry, agriculture and horticulture are siloed when in their true essence they are all just forms of applied interventionist ecology. Creek rehabilitation is interventionist ecology too.

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Lido Place and The Glade

30/6/2022

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View of Lido Place from A’Beckett Street – Source: Photo montage submitted with application

By Ed Thexton

INVERLOCH has a new resident and it’s coming to The Glade. It’s like having an elephant in your lounge room. Magnificent, it sits where it likes, and everybody must live around it for the extent of its long life.

Last week Bass Coast Shire councillors followed the recommendations of their planners and approved Lido Place, a three-storey development proposed for 2-4 The Esplanade, the old Inverloch Marine site. Lido Place has 42 apartments and two retail spaces. It will cover about a quarter of a hectare and share a wall with the Bunurong Environment Centre, home to the South Gippsland Conservation Centre.

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Time we kicked up our heels

16/12/2021

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The pinnacle of Ed’s footy career, receiving the award for the most improved player in the Woori Yallock Tigers Under 14s from Peter Daniel, a "real" footballer.

By Ed Thexton

WE’RE older, we’re grumpier, but we’re not quite ready to toss in the towel. Superannuated or should be, we have time on our hands. Once we had influence, more or less, and now we almost uniformly suffer from relevance deprivation.

What to do? Write, spill out two bob solutions to problems that we know from experience – or should do, after a working life – are way more complex and way slower to resolve than anybody would like. Every sling and every arrow you fling off the keyboard hits someone and it’s personal. What good does it do? Does it make anyone feel better? And still we rail at the moon! “They should do this … they should’ve done that.”

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The wonder of the woodlands

5/11/2021

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This remnant of a lost world has survived against the odds.

By Ed Thexton

I AM new to the Western Port woodlands after nearly 50 years of drive pasts. Recently I’ve walked with Dick Wettenhall to take in the orchids of The Gurdies and with David Nicholls to put bandicoot camera traps in the Adams Creek Conservation Reserve.

When I walk the woodlands it is with a sense of marvel. I can take the long view. The wide tree spacing, low ground cover and dispersed groupings of shrubs allow for that. The walking is easy. There is plenty of interest because the colour hasn’t been taken out of the country. There are the reds of the occasional running postman. Its low-nutrient soils hardly support a weed, which of itself is remarkable.

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Seven lunches from chaos

7/10/2021

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By Ed Thexton

THE crisis is upon us. Scream loud. Scream long. Scream until you’re heard.

Conclusive proof. Succinctly, elegantly demonstrated by the master communicator Rupert Murdoch.

In 4 x 6 cm at the bottom of page 25 of the Sunday Herald Sun newspaper, September 19, 2021.

Below lunch boxes and celebrity murders, the head of the United Nations announces the end of the world as we know it.

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Living with creeks

2/7/2021

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Rivers and waterways are serious, but creeks are another matter. Red Bluff Creek winds through farmland and bush towards Western Port. Photos: Geoff Ellis

By Ed Thexton

For most of my life, I’ve lived with creeks. They’re a big part of my life. It’s a funny sort of word. The eek in creek is something you don’t find in river or waterway – too solemn by far. It might be the eek in the creek that attracts kids. Kids and creeks go together.

As a kid, I was lucky. A country kid of the 70s with a country creek. How was I to know that my creek was special? Not that all creeks aren’t special. The union of earth, wind and fire, a boogey wonderland, the moon and the clouds. Creeks, kids and fun go together.

It’s fun to be alive and creeks are alive. Movement is fun. Water moves. Today’s creek is not tomorrow’s creek. A creek is infinitely responsive. If it rains, if it doesn’t rain, the wonders of gravity never cease; 24/7, water finds its way to the lowest point. And not just the visible – creeks are the visible embodiment of the subterranean. The water is always moving. From clouds, overland, through land and underland, a creek reflects it all. The mystery. What’s not to like?

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Thanks for the memories

13/5/2020

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Craig Sillitoe Photography / http://www.csillitoe.com

By Ed Thexton

I LIVE in the privileged space of Inverloch where circumstances have allowed me a surprisingly good lockdown. My working life involves short-term contracts and travelling, so it’s been a total wipeout as far as business goes, but with a boy doing home schooling and a big new trampoline it’s been anything but bad.

I never liked shopping and last November gave up the booze. I have just taken my sixth batch of sourdough loaves out of the oven, never having baked before this pandemic. (Fool-proof baking for the foolhardy perhaps.)

The time of limited distraction has emerged as less of an imposition and more of an opportunity. It’s not so much about what I’m missing but more about what I’m unexpectedly experiencing. Things that see the light of day now there is less noise.

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Straight back to business as usual

31/8/2019

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Cartoon by Natasha Williams-Novak

Half an hour after declaring a climate emergency, our councillors voted to proceed with a $2 million concrete path alongside a beach that’s receded 40 metres in six years.

By Ed Thexton

ON WEDNESDAY, August 21, I went to my first council meeting. Like most of those in the gallery, I was there for two matters: first, the declaring of a climate emergency for Bass Coast Shire; and second, the less globally connected issue of the Surf Parade Inverloch path.

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On catastrophe

28/8/2019

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PhotoL CSIRO

A FEW weeks ago, at the Inverloch library I picked up Black Saturday – Not the End of the Story by Peg Fraser, a cultural history of a small place, Strathewen, with an extraordinary story.

In this Museum Victoria publication about the afternoon of Saturday February 9, 2009, I could hear the voices of Barry, Barbara and Bronwyn as they spoke of a day, or more precisely a few hours of a day, that changed them. Like the expanding ripples from a pebble thrown into water, it also changed me.

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