Bass Coast Post
  • Home
    • Recent articles
  • News
    • Point of view
    • View from the chamber
  • Writers
    • Anne Davie
    • Anne Heath Mennell
    • Bob Middleton
    • Carolyn Landon
    • Catherine Watson
    • Christine Grayden
    • Dick Wettenhall
    • Ed Thexton
    • Etsuko Yasunaga
    • Frank Coldebella
    • Gayle Marien
    • Geoff Ellis
    • Gill Heal
    • Harry Freeman
    • Ian Burns
    • Joan Woods
    • John Coldebella
    • Jordan Crugnale
    • Julie Statkus
    • Kit Sleeman
    • Laura Brearley >
      • Coastal Connections
    • Lauren Burns
    • Liane Arno
    • Linda Cuttriss
    • Linda Gordon
    • Lisa Schonberg
    • Liz Low
    • Marian Quigley
    • Mark Robertson
    • Mary Whelan
    • Meryl Brown Tobin
    • Michael Whelan
    • Mikhaela Barlow
    • Miriam Strickland
    • Natasha Williams-Novak
    • Neil Daly
    • Patsy Hunt
    • Pauline Wilkinson
    • Phil Wright
    • Sally McNiece
    • Terri Allen
    • Tim Shannon
    • Zoe Geyer
  • Features
    • Features 2022
  • Arts
  • Local history
  • Environment
  • Bass Coast Prize
  • Community
    • Diary
    • Courses
    • Groups
  • Contact us

The magic forest

10/12/2019

13 Comments

 
PictureIn February Grantville’s grass trees were ablaze. Today they’re
putting on a spectacular show. Photos: Hartley Tobin
By Meryl Brown Tobin
 
Along a fence between the Grantville Nature Conservation Reserve and the adjoining sand mine, scores of tall white vertical posts have appeared. For a moment visitors might be unsure what they are looking at. Surely it can’t be some enormous building going up with the white posts being uprights to support the roof?

A closer look shows the white uprights are growing out of grass tree bases, some with new green “skirts”.

Like children stepping into an alien land at the top of Enid Blyton’s Magic Faraway Tree, visitors stare at the spectacle of a forest of grass tree spear-like spikes up to 4.5 metres tall, some as thick as an arm and covered in tiny white to yellow blooms.
​

About 100 kilometres south east of Melbourne, the 400 hectare reserve along the Bass Highway is a couple of kilometres south of Grantville’s shops and only 300 metres south west of a housing estate. On February 1-3 this year the forest was ablaze. With the fire threatening houses, it was a grim time for locals. Lucille, the orange air crane, was one of about 10 aircraft and numerous fire engines called in to battle it.

As their recently-blackened trunks show, Grantville’s grass trees were severely burned. Grass trees are slow growers with some of the taller species growing only 0.8cm to 6cm a year. Some species grow to six metres, not counting the spike and some live to 600 years. As some grass trees in the Grantville reserve are tall, they would have been there long before European occupation. An ancient tree, it has been called “a living fossil”, and it thrives in a sandy well-drained habitat. It also provides many species of mammals, birds and insects with a food source.

Indigenous Australians valued grass trees as a varied food source. They ate the white, tender sections of leaf bases, the growing points of stems and the roots, and they ground the seeds into a flour to make a type of damper which they cooked in hot ashes. They dug for grubs at the base of the trunk and extracted honey from carpenter bee nests bored into the pith of old dry flower stalks. They also used the plant’s leaf resin as an adhesive, for instance as a glue in spear-making and for waterproofing bark canoes and water containers, and as an item to trade. They used flower spikes for fishing spear shafts and firesticks, tough seed pods for cutting tools and nectar to make a sweet, slightly fermented drink.

Though fire might burn their leaves and trunks, grass trees can survive as their living growth-point is underground under tightly-packed leaf bases. The spring following a summer bushfire, large numbers of plants might send up flower spikes en masse, as they did in Grantville.

Currently, not only grass trees but an abundance of wildflowers greet visitors to the reserve: yellow hibbertias (guinea flowers), orchids, including lots of pink and purple fairy orchids, pink finger orchids, donkey orchids and flying duck orchids. Tree seedlings are also prolific and include wattles, eucalypts, melaleucas and sheoaks.

Visitors can park in the short road to the sandpit immediately south of the Grantville Tip. Weekends are best to avoid sand trucks. Park on the side of the road in front of the gate to the sandpit and walk south along the fenceline. As the terrain rises, the bigger grass trees start to become prolific, and eventually become a forest.

Sadly the bulk of the grass tree forest is not protected as it is on the land leased for sandmining. It is time authorities rectified this so even more of this iconic plant, found only in Australia, has a better chance of survival.
​
In the meantime visitors should take advantage of the chance to visit a natural botanical phenomenon not much more than an hour’s drive from Melbourne.  Even travellers who cannot stop to walk up to the big grass tree forest can see many hundreds of white spikes on low grass trees scores deep lining the fence of the reserve along the Bass Highway. A sight to see! 
13 Comments
Leticia
13/12/2019 11:21:44 am

So beautiful. Sad that this area isn’t protected.

Reply
Kay Setches
13/12/2019 01:49:21 pm

Wow how wonderfully beautiful! Thank you for the information about the uses of this ancient grass trees. Magic in our neighbourhood!

Reply
Karen Sandon
14/12/2019 12:54:22 pm

Congratulations Merryl and Hartley on a beautiful and informative article so gracefully done. I am so hopeful that in sharing knowledge about these important places we help others understand how very special our local environment is. I have shared this article of The Post widely hopeful that that greater knowledge will lead to stronger protection and appreciation.

Reply
Kaye Courtney link
14/12/2019 01:39:13 pm

We are nearby yet know so little of this beauty. Thank you for awakening us.

Reply
Jan Fleming
14/12/2019 04:10:59 pm

Thank you Merryl, they are fabulous. We have one in our garden and didn't stop marvelling this year at the beauty displayed by the tree and its flowers.

Reply
Jen Rutherford
16/12/2019 04:51:53 am

We need to do something to save this living museum in our neighborhood for tge sake of the planet and future generations

Reply
Felicia Di Stefano
17/12/2019 09:39:38 am

Thank you, Meryl, for letting us know about the beauty of local environment that we are often too 'busy' to notice.
Thank you as well, for describing our first nation's people use of the plants. Perhaps Australia's indigenous people managed to take such good care of the land as they found a creative way to use every bit of plants, not to waste one property of the plants. We have much to learn from our first nation people. I shall make an effort to find time to go and take a look.

Reply
Meryl Tobin
17/12/2019 02:31:01 pm

Thank you for your kind comments about our article and photos, Leticia, Kay, Karen, Kaye, Jan, Jen and Felicia and thanks to those who clicked Like. If anyone plans to visit ‘The Magic Forest’, please note a fence blocking access to the reserve was recently erected by the Sand company . According to a Parks Vic ranger, visitors can still access the park via a gap in the fence on the corner of the Bass Highway and the road to the sand pit. However, due to hazards, such as those from fire-affected trees, he said visits were not encouraged.

Reply
Faith
19/12/2019 03:38:51 pm

Tried to go there today but couldn't find way in - any chance you could guide a small group there sometime?! Just dying to see them and see them protected!!

Reply
Meryl Tobin
20/12/2019 12:03:12 pm

Sorry you couldn't get in, Faith. The way we went in has been fenced off and the new signage put up along it suggests that entrance is on land covered by a Works Permit. Until I can get down to the reserve again and see if the mining company left part of the entrance area unfenced near where the road to the sandmine joins the Bass Highway, as the Parks Vic ranger based in Wonthaggi believed it had, I don't know what the situation is.

Reply
Linda Nicholls
30/12/2019 01:30:37 pm

Wow. Thankyou for sharing the features of the flora close by.
Starting a group to advocate for this region and other remnant nature sites is of interest to me.

Reply
Meryl Tobin
31/12/2019 03:09:47 pm

As has happened in the past, Linda, it would be great to see those who love our natural attractions come together to protect them. For instance, in the 1990s the Bass Valley & District Branch of the South Gippsland Conservation Society and the Grantville Action Group did much to stop the massive opening up of sand mines in the Grantville area such as one in Stanley Rd. Subsequently Friends of the Bass Valley Bush did a lot to protect native wildflowers and bush. In 1996 the SGCS group and the Coronet Bay Ratepayers and Residents Association even got up a petition to lobby for all local reserves and foreshores between Lang Lang east and Bass Landing to be developed to form the nucleus of a new national park, the Westernport National Park. Though the petition with 1139 signatures was presented to Alan Brown, the then Member for Gippsland West, who presented it to Parliament, it was not acted upon.
Maybe you could do some research and decide if you want to work with an established group such as the SGCS and maybe resurrect the BV&D Branch whose members came from the Waterline area, including The Gurdies, Grantville, Glen Forbes, Tenby Point, Corinella and San Remo. The local group only went into recess when it became unviable due to the loss of key members, for instance from them moving away.

Reply
Meryl Tobin
12/4/2020 03:44:21 pm

Regular readers of Bass Coast Post will be aware environmental issues are important to readers. Since this article appeared, Editor Catherine Watson has published a series of articles related to the future of the GMH Proving Ground at Lang Lang:'Not So Fast, GM’ on https://www.basscoastpost.com/mikhaela-barlow/not-so-fast-gm, 5.3.20, 'Holden's Last Hurrah' on https://www.basscoastpost.com/point-of-view/holdens-last-hurrah,18.3.20 and 'It's time for our own national park' on https://www.basscoastpost.com/meryl-brown-tobin/its-time-for-our-own-national-park, 2.4.20. I urge all persons interested in protecting our local natural environment and not already part of the group working to preserve the woodlands of the Holden Proving Ground to email editor@basscoastpost.com to join in the correspondence on this.

Reply

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.