Professors Hill Reserve with David Cameron

This is our most botanical episode yet. Prepare to get a little plant nerdy.

Professor's Hill Reserve, in North Warrandyte within Nillumbik Shire, might only cover five hectares, but it contains one of Melbourne's richest and most significant patches of native bushland.

In this episode, I walk with botanist David Cameron, whose work has shaped the way Victoria understands and protects its native flora. Over five decades, David has surveyed vegetation across the state, helped develop the Victorian Biodiversity Atlas, assessed threatened plant species, and become one of Victoria's leading botanical minds.

As we wander through Professor's Hill, David reveals how botanists read a landscape. From rare orchids and mosses to towering eucalypts, every few steps uncover another clue about how this remarkable reserve functions.

We also hear the story of how David's knowledge helped save Professor's Hill from development, with Nillumbik Shire Council ultimately acquiring the land and protecting it as a public reserve. It's a fascinating reminder that careful science, community advocacy and local government can work together to conserve places that might otherwise have been lost.

Whether you're a seasoned plant enthusiast or simply curious about the hidden stories beneath your feet, this episode offers a rare opportunity to see the Australian bush through the eyes of one of Victoria's most respected botanists.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

I'd like to acknowledge the Wandru Warong people as the traditional owners of the land where this recording was made. Over the past few months, I've been walking through reserves around Melbourne, Vietnam, and recording conversations along the way. I've met with traditional owners of First Nations peoples, conservationists, ecologists, and others who've chosen a place that matters to them. We walk and talk about nature, what lives there, what's changed, and what needs protect the world. You'll hear our footsteps, the wind in the trees, the birds overhead, and the city not too far away. This is Finding Melbourne's nature. This is great. We're with David Cameron, a person who spent five decades working as a botanist in Victoria, and he joined the Forest Commission in 1978. Since that time, he's carried out vegetation to work right across the state. He's been the manager of the floor information system, and he later became botanical curator and taxon manager for the Victorian Biodiversity Atlas. He's led the assessment of many of Victoria's native plants and he's helped shape the threatened species list that continue to guide plant conservation across the state. David is also widely recognised for his work in rainforest ecology. He authored a field guide in Victoria's rainforests and developed a scientific method for identifying the boundaries of rainforests in the field. He's someone I personally looked up to through my career. I've learned a great deal from his work and is held in high regard by many people working in conservation across Victoria. It's a remarkable career, but today we're leaving the databases and field guides behind and walking around Professor's Hill. It's deep in Nilenbeckshire, and it's a place that David has known since childhood, and one that's played an important role in his journey into botany and conservation. Thanks for joining us. You're gonna love this one. We're in a site in Warrandyte here. North Warrandyte, is that the right suburb?

SPEAKER_00 2:24

Yes, yes, we're right in the heart of North Warrandyte here. How did you? We're on the um we've now been walking as we've been talking, talking and walking up the steepest slope within a little block of now public land. Originally it was private land, uh, called Professor's Hill. I've known this hill since I was uh a school kid. When I was in grade six, just across the road from the main road that we're parked on, down here, the Research Warrandite Road. On the other side, there used to be a my closest school friend in grade six was Greg McCainch. He used to play guitar, sing songs, write songs, and I didn't know till later that often when we were older teenagers and I'd go and visit him, and he'd be in his little tiny mudbrick shack that his father had built on the bush property across the road from here, uh from the hill, uh he'd be he'd be playing his latest song to me, and later on those songs turned out to be the songs that became iconic when he was the mastermind, the songwriter for Skyhooks, which became in the period of um our, you know, when once we're in our twenties, he and I and all our school friends, that cohort, um it became the most successful pop group in Australian history. And um, as I'll say, uh I didn't realise the significance of the songs that that Greg McCain was writing and playing to me on his guitar just across the road from here. But when we were both 12 years old, um, and I knew very well that this hill, which was then privately owned, but there was no suggestion of there were no fences, there was no nothing to indicate that anyone had ever had any uh direct use of this hill. It was just bush, a steep hill going up to a little little summit, which is where we're walking right now. And I just learned from Greg and his family that this was called Professor's Hill. We never knew why. There must have been some local identity who might have owned the land or lived nearby, who was a professor of something somewhere, but it was just known as Professor's Hill. And when we were 12, we decided, Greg and I, that we'd camp one night on the slopes of this hill in a little tent. But late that night, when we were huddled in our little tent, we'd have a little campfire, and Greg had shown me, he'd learned from his father, how you use the bark of the stringy barks, of which there's an increasing number the higher up with this hill we go. And uh he'd taught me how you pull the soft stringy bark off the stringy bark, the red stringy bark, Eucalyptus macrarynca, and you roll it around in your hand, and it becomes a bit like cotton wool, and then you can very easily set fire to it. And we made a little campfire and cooked our dinner. And then we're retired, but that night quite a storm blew up, and it was so frightening being tucked away in the middle of this bush deep into the night with a storm um raging overhead that we we we grabbed our sleeping bag and rushed back down the hill across the little old road. Now it's a major Betcherman connecting road, but it wasn't, it was just a very rocky dirt, dirt road at the time, and we took refuge in Greg's family house up the hill on the other side. So we chickened out of our very um prophetic connection with this hill because years and years later, when I came to live, um at the time that our first my wife and I, and our first son uh Marcel, who's now over 50 and runs an interesting Land Rover restoration business in West Heidelberg with a number of family members and others working for him. That's great. But he was born when we had just moved into a house we were starting to rent just across the creek and the and the road here. Um, and in the period that I was living here, from when he was born in 1974 up until the end of the decade, I used to spend a lot of time coming out and walking up and down this hill that I'd known since childhood, and which everybody locally called Professor's Hill. And I began to realize as I was a budding botanist at the time. By then I'd already done my honours year near Malacuta, and after that launched into five years work towards my PhD on rainforests, and I became aware of the remarkable diversity and richness and highly intact nature, as it was then, of the vegetation on this one hill. And because there are so few places left in Warundad where vegetation in a continuum from gully bottom to hilltop is undamaged by sulage coming downhill from roads or disturbance or from housing or anything else, I became aware that this hill was really quite a precious little gem. It's roughly five hectares in size, that's all it is. But it's unique in the whole Warandite district in that it has, it well certainly it had at the time, a strip along the gully at the bottom, parallel to the research Warrandite Road, of a swamp gum-dominated community, which almost uniquely throughout the region is so weed-invaded, um, damaged because everything, everything in, every all disturbances in the landscape drift and permeate down slopes. So all the sulage, all the siltation, all the rubbish, all of the extra nutrients that degrade native vegetation that depends on low nutrient sites, low nutrient soils to which our sclerophilus, that is the normal Australian bush vegetation, is so acutely adapted. All of those things gravitate to the gullies and they become so degraded, they become weed infested, they get used for roads, they get used for trunking of, you know, power lines and gas mains and and sewage, sewage mains, and everything happens in those gully lines. And eventually they become totally blackberry infested, horses are adjusted there, goats were put on the strip next to the road down here over many years, and eventually all such gullies become so degraded that it's now incredibly difficult to find uh the type of vegetation dominated by swamp gum along gully lines in anything remotely intact a condition. And in the years since I started surveying quite seriously and maintaining a list of everything I'd seen on this one hill in North Warandite, I did similar things all over the place in many parts of Victoria. I've I've done made lists of all of the plant species, but I did it so intensively on Professor's Hill because I just lived nearby. And I did it over many years, so I saw all the orchids throughout the flowering seasons for orchids. I saw all the grasses that come to full fruition closer to Christmas and into the early post-Christmas summer period. And by looking at it day in, day out throughout the year, I was eventually able to assemble a very impressive list of all the native plants and all the weed species for the entire hill. And eventually I realized there were more than 200 native species and more than 40 orchid species, and eventually it dawned on me that some of the orchids, some of which were being described by colleagues of mine at the time, were extremely rare, extremely significant. For a number of years, we thought that a newly described orchid called Caladenia Ina Kala, which means wine lip sparter orchid, that the population on the slopes of this one hill was the largest known population for a species of very restricted distribution named by my mentor and close colleague right through my academic life, Jeff Carr. From the day that I started my onise here, Jeff Carr was um starting his employment as the technical assistant uh for my supervisor, Bob Parsons at La Trobe. And the day that I started my onise here on the vegetation at a site southwest of Malacuta on the undisturbed biosphere quality um coastline, on that same day Jeff Carr was starting to work for Jeff. And so, being himself an experienced nursery person, having worked at the Geelong Botanic Gardens and then and having been a plant grower and a really green thumb individual, I learned so much from Jeff right from day one as his colleague and um and and fellow emerging botanist, that I've never looked back from that connection with Jeff. And he became very interested in orchids and he named quite a lot of species of orchid, particularly caladenias, the spider orchids, all kinds of other species in other genera he's named as well. But one of them, as I've just mentioned, the wine lip spider orchid, Caladenia enochila, Eno O-ENO is a, I think, a Greek word meaning wine. Um and so it describes the rich, deep purple colour of the labellum or the prominent lip in the middle of the very elegant spider orchid. And as I say, for a period of time we thought the largest population in the world for that threatened species, now listed under the Florence Warner Guarantee Act as highly threatened, occurred on this hill. We now have since learnt that there's one somewhat larger population at St Andrews, but this is still one of the only large populations to survive in still reasonably intact native vegetation for that one species.

SPEAKER_02 12:08

That's incredible. And as I look around, because we're standing in the reserve now, my eyes are starting to tune in, and you start to see like there's a pterostylus there. There's this is a really diverse site, isn't it? At first I was walking up and I couldn't see it, but as we start looking around, you realise how much is on the ground.

SPEAKER_00 12:24

Yes, by the way, as we're walking, I just want to draw attention to the fact that I did mention right at the beginning of the slope that we had a ground cover of mosses. Mosses and other bryophytes are the mosses and the leverts, they're the bottom, the bottom plank of the plant kingdom. So at the bottom of the plant kingdom, we have a great diversity of mosses and liverworts and hornworts. These are called the bryophytes, and across much of Australia's vegetation, both in the arid zone, in the alpine region, and everything in between, and particularly when we have bogs and swamps that are occupied by sphagnum and similar-looking bryophytes, sphagnum being a moss, we have traditionally had this soil-protecting layer of cryptogamic crust or or um moss mats. And right here where we're standing, right from the beginning of our walk, uh 90 to 100% of the actual ground surface is covered by an absolutely unbroken continuous sward of a number of moss species. I could name everyone that's here. I'm mostly right now looking at Hypnum cupresiformi variety laccinosum, which I call the great or common plat moss, because it looks like it's platted. And further back, I was mentioning that there was another couple of species, one of them Trichotrella papillata, we saw, and we also can see here one that I also mentioned further down through idiopsis, weft mosses. Um the um the tricotrella I mentioned is a twine moss. There's also a beautiful species further down that I saw patches of, and I mentioned to you is um called Brutilia with beautiful soft brown hairy stems. And every one of these mosses I'm mentioning is a ground-covering robust species which has a greater cover over the site than any other species, such as a eucalypt, the cassinias, the tea trees, the bergens, any other species whatsoever. None of them come close to having the ecological footprint that is the cover and abundance of these bryophytes, in this case, just a handful of mosses alone, are what are holding the fragile soils on this steep erodible slope together in the absence of any aggressive forces, such as horses, hard-hoofed animals, deer, which are also pretty hard-hoofed and which are introduced to Australia. And most of the places that you walk around Warrandite these days, whether you're in the National State Park or any other reserve, you will not see intact moss mats like this. This is a very rare thing to observe, like I'm looking at right across the um all the moister parts of Professor's Hill. Small as it is, this hill encapsulates a huge variety of flora. As I mentioned earlier, I think more than 200 native species, more than 40 orchids, quite a lot of those orchids, highly threatened species, a number of other highly threatened species also on this hill. And part of that is because you not only have the uh once quite intact swamp gum zone along the gully, but when you come up from that, and I call that the O zone, O for ovata, we come into RMR, I think. Um it's a zone which is dominated by eucalyptus radiata, which is a pepmint, variously called black pepmint, common pepmint, or narrow leaf pepmint, various different common names for that species. So that's R. Then there's also another R for rubida, which is the candle bark, which is scattered through the mid-zones on the slopes of this hill. Um, and there's also uh the very important eucalypt meliadora, which is famous the world over, uh, eucalyptus meliadora as the yellow box, as one of the eucalypts that produces some of the finest honey the world knows, alongside the significance of um Manuka from New Zealand and leatherwood honey from Tasmania. On the Australian mainland, some of the finest honeys are based largely on the uh flowering activity of Eucalyptus Meliadorus, so that's the M in the middle of um RMR. But when you get upslope even further, and we're at the interface here between that very rich zone and the one that's the last one going up the hill, which I call PMG because, well, firstly, it was a postmaster general's department, so easy to remember that way. But the P is for polyanthemos. Eucalyptus polyanthemos is the toughest and most rugged um eucalypt species of the of these landscapes in this district. And red box has the toughest timber, very, very hard to cut. It'll blunt a chainsaw quickly, it's very hard to split because the um the timber is uh sort of interwoven, sinew-like, a bit like mussels, uh, very hard to chop. Uh, it's not like a smooth barked eucalypt with easy to split wood, like the swamp gun down at the bottom of the hill. Um, so that's the P. The M is Macrorynca, which I did mention earlier when I was talking about my childhood association with a hill and learning how to make a start a fire with the stringy bark. And um, so we're here at the interface of where it becomes dominant. That's Eucalyptus Macorinca, red stringy bark. A lot of these um eucalypt names are not for anything other than for the colour of the timber. So if you look at look at the timber of red stringy bark, it's quite reddish. And if you look at the timber of other eucalypts that are similar, like yellow stringy bark, it's got yellowish timber. And white stringy bark is quite pale and whitish, that's a timber colour. When we talk about um uh red gum, we're not saying anything about the tree is red necessarily. It's because the timber is uniquely deep, rich, reddish colour and extremely durable, extremely tough, and so often these names, even the name box, the box name doesn't come from any obvious feature except that someone in the early days of settlement decided that some of the eucalypts that are of a box type, no box type bark, which is finely tessellated, um a persistent bark type, they decided that some of these eucalypts had leaves that reminded them of a little shrub or small tree grown for hedging in Europe, particularly in England, called boxus. And boxus, the box for hedging, has no relationship whatsoever to any eucalypt, but that's how we got the name box attached to a class of eucalypts which are very rugged, very tough. And the one that's here is the red box. Um, also mentioned yellow box, but that's not a true box eucalypt, that's actually related to the iron barks. But that's a bit of botanical deception because it's adopted the bark type that makes it look like the true boxes. And the third one at the top of the hill, P for polyanthanos, M for Macarinka, G is for a eucalypt, guniocalyx, which technically can go right from riverbanks and gully flats all the way to the hilltops, but it becomes a very important member of this community, the PMG zone at the upper slopes. And G for Gunniocalyx has several interesting common names. Um, it has long strap-shaped leaves, which actually illustrates its relationship. Its closest sibling species, its most closely related species is the mountain grey gum of mountain forests and river valleys and much wetter habitats. And that's eucalyptus, well, one should say kippolo carpa, but if I say that most people won't recognise it. So Cypella carpa if you prefer. Its closest relative here is actually this eucalyptus gonia calyx, which is either called Bundy, or it's also known as long-leaf box. It's not a true box. It too has adopted a persistent bark type to adapt it to high fire frequency, intense fire risk, and so it's protecting what all its relatives would have as a smooth um shedding bark, where you know, gum, which is chino or resin, can exude from through um points of damage, often nothing more than a few insects making some holes, and then the sap or the chino comes weeping down the stem, and because it's a persistent bark for the ones we call gum barked or gums, um, you can see these beautiful patchy colours, often red or purple or yellow or brown, pouring down the stem from the points where the sap comes out through some wounding. So that's what we call a gum, and so the um the Bundy or longleaf box is actually a gum species which has adapted to fire-prone environments and poorer conditions by adopting a persistent bark that looks like a box, but it's not a true box.

SPEAKER_01 21:34

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00 21:35

So that's the G in PMG, the zone that we're entering. So let's keep walking upslope and um we'll see how quickly it transitions from the RMR to the PMG zone, as I called it, in my descriptive um analysis of the fascinating vegetation of this one small hill. Once very representative of the entire district, but now uniquely well preserved. Because there's no upslope development on the hill, largely as a consequence of a conservation battle that was required during the 1980s to maintain in the end this area, this hill as a council reserve. And I'll explain that once we get to the top of the hill. Because I want to open up a map and show you and describe to you the significance of this hill in the context of the district and Melbourne, the metropolitan area as a whole.

SPEAKER_02 22:29

Absolutely. Sounds great.

SPEAKER_00 22:36

For me, as I'm aging, approaching my 75th birthday next year, I have to take uh a steep slope like this fairly slowly, but it's also what I call botanical pace to slow down and look at things. Right here we've got a little a little uh colony of um nodding greenhoods in perfect condition. There it is, the nodding greenhood, terrestalis newtans, one of the more than 40 orchid species on this hill. And all the way up this slope, this deep slope, we're intersecting these different zones of vegetation. And all the way we're passing through zones where different plant species are characteristic. If I can catch my breath, we've just walked under the canopy of a quite old golden mottle. Now, if you know golden mottle, it's got an odd name, but technically it's called Acacia pignantha. Picnantha means small flower, but it's anything but small flowers, because the flower clusters, they're actually each one the cluster of dozens and dozens of tiny, tiny flowers, and they're quite large. It's one of the larger flower clusters. For most Australian, most Victorian wattles, the flowers are in little balls, and these balls are relatively large. There's nothing small about them. But this species was proclaimed the official floral emblem of Australia by Bob Hawke during his reign as Australian Prime Minister. So this became the official floral emblem of the entire continent. And it's very widely distributed, but here we've just entered the zone where it becomes a common species and we've got them flowering all around us. Another thing that I point out to people whenever I take walks on this hill is the story of the native grasses. There's quite a rich diversity of native grasses here, and uh that's really important because I see native grasses and native orchids as two really important indicator families, talking entirely about native species here, because there are numerous weeds in the grass family and equally numerous weeds in various other families of plants. In the orchids we only have one exotic South African species, but in other families like the daisy family, what we used to call the compositae or composites, now called the asteraceae, we have numerous exotic species. We've passed many of them coming up here, and we have a very large diversity of native species, including the Cassinias that are now so dominant here because of the long period without fire. But when I focus on orchids and I focus on native grasses, I'm focusing on two key, very important elements of the landscape for all kinds of reasons. In the flora of these districts, the presence of a rich assemblage of these two families is a key indicator of the quality of the vegetation. And I developed a whole system for classifying quality of vegetation and mapping it in classes like one, two, three, four, and five, and using that mapping as a way of communicating to others, particularly to planning authorities and so on, where the most important areas of vegetation are because of these qualities of firstly the integrity of the native composition, secondly, the abundance and development of exotic weeds, thirdly, the quality I mentioned, this subtle quality of ecological balance, particularly between different native species, because sometimes you get far too many members of a particular species of acacia that's overabundant in one area or another. In other cases, it can be an overabundance, in this case of a Cassinia species, or in this case three different species here, or presence and that, or absence of things like the highly specialized hemiparasitic thing called Cassitha, of which we have we can have two or three species in this district alone. Um, and these things in great abundance can tell you either that you're too long without a fire or you're too long without some other necessary disturbance type. The word disturbance is controversial because most people think of disturbance as a bad thing. But in native vegetation, various types of disturbance are crucial to the maintenance of the health of that vegetation. Right here I'm looking down at a patch of one of the several different species of, having just mentioned the hemiparasite, meaning it's photosynthetic, but they're also parasitic on other plants, and that's the cositha that I just mentioned, which are called dobber laurels. But here I'm looking down here at another semiparasitic family. Um, it's the carnivorous sundews, and this one species here, now called Drossera aberans, um, has beautiful, extremely sweet, large white, fragrant flowers. They're not flowering right now, but that's that species there. And there's there are several other species on the hill as well. And they actually catch insects and other small creatures and digest them with external juices and little globules of rather sweet, sticky substance at the end of specialized hairs, and by externally digesting the insects that get caught in those sticky hairs, it then absorbs the nutrients and supplements its diet because it's living in a relatively nutrient-poor environment. So we're seeing whole carpets of that species, like there with the reddish leaves, and just here. And amongst it, we're seeing another orchid, another Caladinia, but not a spider orchid. This is um Pink Fairies, Caladenia carnia. All right, well, you can see it's quite an interesting. In ecological terms, we call something like this. Some people would call it a transect. If it was a transect, then we'd be doing some form of sampling along the line. But of course, we're not doing that. I'm just talking my way up and up this steep hill. But what we're doing is what really is called a gradsect. That means it's like a transect or a line along which sampling of some sort is done along an environmental gradient, therefore, gradsect. Now I'm just noticing here a tall, tall greenhood, that's pterostylus. These dates called melagramma, that particular species. So that's a quite short one. And again, as I mentioned for other woods we saw earlier, under ideal conditions in a really good season, and particularly in the years immediately after a fire, they'd be much more robust, much taller with many more flowers. Interesting. So it's very much an indicator of the season as to whether an individual plant which is there with its tuber underground will actually produce a flowering stem and then how tall it grows and how many um flowers it has if it's got more than one. Now I just want to point out, I don't know whether fiorai, you can see that's a different-looking moss again. It's got it's in full fruit. Well, they're not fruits, but people call them fruiting bodies. They're actually spore bodies, but that that that is yet another entirely different genus of um mosses. You can see they look different. This is the genus Dicranoloma. They have quite large species. Nearly all of the different species in Victoria, I know most of them very well, are in rainforest or very wet forest. But this is one of several species found in a very wide range of communities. And here, like all the mosses I've pointed out to you so far, it's actually clothing the ground and protecting that soil, and in so doing, providing a microhabitat for innumerable small creatures, small animals, and also very important sites for the germination of plants that need the protective buildup of soil, the humus, that is when the leaf litter progressively degrades and turns into soil, which is a very, very important process in these nutrient-poor habitats, like in the auriferous country round the northeast of Melbourne, the goldfield specifically, and all of these parts of Melbourne are overlying, what we call Silurian, that is a geological period, Silurian sediments. And the Silurian sediments, although they're sedimentary and have a fair, potentially a fair number of nutrients in them, they're not particularly nutritious soils. Hence the aboriginal word for what they call basically fitty soil was the word Nilumbik. So now we've reached the top of the hill, and you can see that there's a fence and there's a sign and there's a road.

SPEAKER_02 31:30

On top of the hill, I wanted to ask David, other than the biodiversity values, why is this place important?

SPEAKER_00 31:37

It's also just public open space in an increasingly urbanised district, which, while we look everywhere and we can see uh what looks like continuous vegetation, it's actually highly fragmented, quite densely developed with in many cases old subdivisions that are quite small. And so to put the uh whole case into some kind of perspective, I want to also introduce uh two other two other props of mine. One is a map of the entire Melbourne region showing the um location of floristic quadrates. I mentioned earlier about my cutting my teeth in vegetation survey using quadrates in um foreign fauna surveys of all kinds, particularly as a botanist in pre-logging survey teams later in survey teams for the gold fields, for the Melbourne area. It happens that in the late 80s and the beginning of the 90s, I was one of the several botanists that were uh conducting quadrant-based surveys of um remnant patches of native vegetation, pretty much all on public land. We didn't really have the opportunity to do it on private land. And here for the whole of the metropolitan area, which has this boundary there that you can see. Yes. That's the boundary of the Melbourne metropolitan area, as defined at the time. There's course growth corridors that are filled out the suburbs out beyond the highly urbanized area there. So this shows you the distribution of sample sites. It says here plant quadrates are the sample sites at which the floristic composition of the vegetation was recorded. Each quadrant contains a list of all vascular plant species. That is, we didn't look at the bryophytes, we're only we're content just to look at vascular flora, that is everything higher than the bryophytes. Each quadrant contains a list of all vascular plant species together with a visually assessed cover abundance value for each species. Other information for each quadrant site includes sampling date, notes on features of biological interest. The quadrate data collected in this survey are permanently stored in the computed data bank of the Flora Survey Group, Ecological Policy and Resource Assessment Branch, Department of Conservation, Forests and Lands. All of those things have changed, names endlessly changed, but the concept has stayed secure, and today the Victorian Biodiversity Atlas, of which I'm the botanical curator, still houses every one of these quadrants and every other quadrant that's been uh sampled and databased since the 1970s.

SPEAKER_02 34:17

So when I'm looking at this, it's a huge map of Greater Melbourne with all these, but there's so many quadrates all through, even urban areas and greater urban areas.

SPEAKER_00 34:29

Little tiny bits and pieces anywhere in the urban. I mean more than I ever could have imagined. But every bit of native vegetation that was mappable is shown colour-coded by the vegetation type. And you can see that in to the west of Melbourne, half of those are now gone.

SPEAKER_02 34:46

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 34:46

So back when we published this in 1989. Yes. 1989, at the end of our very intensive analysis of all this quadratar, you can see that there was still a network of remnant patches of, if you look at the pink colour, it's called Thematagrassland. There were four different subcommunities, and then there were grassy wetlands, one and two, with these yellow bits. You can see they're usually little uh wet areas, and half of those are now gone. But we sample, John and I went and sampled a lot of this vegetation, and when you go up the Yarrow Valley on the east side, there's a pattern of remnants that is concentrated around Warrandite. Yes. So Warrandite is still within the metropolitan zone, and um beyond that it's the upper Yarrow Valley, and you're outside the metropolitan boundary. So we had lots of quadrates. In fact, the other map had a box here that was enlarged to just focus on the much greater number of quadrates that were able to be taken in this greater Warrandite area. So you can see that when you go out from Melbourne post-Studley Park, there's very little native vegetation beyond Studley Park till you get up towards Warrandite, sort of Templestow area. And then we get this network of patches. Quite a lot of them are interconnected or almost connected. If you look here in the middle of all of this, you see that biggest block in the whole Warrandite area starts with Professor's Hill here and includes the chase up there. Ah. So you have played a huge role. You've this preserved. Well, this only this only exists because I sent a letter to the Shire President. Then that galvanized the Warrandite Environment League, of which I was a very active member, to contest that development. We won handsomely. We had a sympathetic person in charge, as it happened. And because of that, the subdivision density was halved. The council was then able to, because of the information we'd presented and I presented to council and to the Planning Appeals Board, the Council then decided it would do its best to acquire this hill. So then it became a sanctuary. And I became for many years chairman of the committee of management, which I already technically was on paper because of a tiny little corner down there.

SPEAKER_02 36:59

So we're standing in your legacy, Dave, and I absolutely am indebted to you as many people are, because this is incredible to know something so significant. So seeing this, and you you understand the intricate balances and details so much. For the average person, and they're looking at a bush reserve around Melbourne and things, do you think there's hope? There's hope to hold on to these blocks. We can look after them, we can make sure they're protected.

SPEAKER_00 37:24

There's now so many friends groups and botanists and consultants and university academics and urban ecologists that the basic elements of what I'm describing is just to a lot of plant ecologists, not that there's many of us, but there's enough. This is all basically second nature. I just tried to encapsulate it for one for one appeal hearing.

SPEAKER_02 37:50

So, in case you missed it, David's knowledge of Greater Melbourne's flora allowed him to create an argument to the council that made sure Professor's Hill was protected as a reserve. His surveys had helped indicate that all the biodiversity here was essential to protect. All of the species he's shown us are the reasons why this place is so important. And it has a huge role in landscape context, not just locally, but across the state. He explains his methods for collecting data next.

SPEAKER_00 38:22

But I developed a method where I wrote this down and I explained that actually these things that I just listed they tend to go down together in parallel. So you either start off with primary physical disturbance being nil, and weed intrusion being nil to negligible, ecological balance being excellent, diversity of indigenous flora maximal, maximum attainable in vegetation types. Now, some vegetation types are naturally rather species poor, and others, like wetlands, there'll be a relatively small number of species, with several really dominant, and sedge lands and other things may have just a few species. Or on the sand dune, there might only be two or three species there. But when you get into really species-rich vegetation, the norm might be 50 to 100, or as on this hill altogether, 200 species or more at the time of settlement. So you've got to go by what is attainable in the vegetation time. Don't expect it to be, you can't give a single figure, it's what it is for that community. That's why the quadratic data analyzed for qualities representatives is so important. Because from that you learn what is the average composition of good quality quadrants at a quadrate scale. They're always standardized for those surveys to 30-meter diameter circles or 30-meter side squares. So they're either 30 by 30 gives you 900 square meters, or a circle of 30-meter diameter, which gives you 714 squared. 714 square meters, not much different. So when you do a standardized quadrant in a whole lot of vegetation, and you use the quadrat method where every species that you see has to be named, or you try your darndest to name it accurately and put it into a data set, and then you analyze that data. Then you can say, well, for this type of vegetation, this is what a quality sample should be like.

SPEAKER_02 40:18

David now explains how he used this data to define the different quality zones.

SPEAKER_00 40:23

So what I did, and it's not presented here, it's part of a supplementary folder of maps that went with all of this. I had mapped this block of five hectares and carefully drawn these lines. You know, if you sent four or five people having understood this and they drew those lines, they'd all pretty much match. Any person with an ecological familiarity and insight would come up with the same, this is quality one. That just tells me everything. This is quality two, this is quality three, and there's four.

SPEAKER_02 40:55

That is fascinating. And what I love about your um your methodology for surveying and transex, you don't have to be the best botanist in Victoria to be able to do a quality transect, do you? You can just be someone who's noticing things over time.

SPEAKER_00 41:13

Really, what I'm saying is if you're a slightly switched-on botanist or an ecologist or an environmentally trained person, you can apply that method to get a pretty good indication of that quality and use that in any planning system. You can use that to say, here's this big subdivision. Let's plot the quality. We don't have to do a million quadrants or ten quadrats or a hundred quadrats if we don't have the time or it's the wrong time of year. We can at least map the quality and say, this is the bit that you should reserve. Gotcha. This is the bit that if we look after it, we put a fence around it, keep the cats out, keep the dogs out, limit people to walking tracks, clean up rubbish, do some weed work, judiciously use something that's effectively cultural burning if we can get away with it.

SPEAKER_01 41:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:00

If we can get people to sign off on it. But if we can achieve that, we might keep the quality of some of these bushland remnants for longer. Basically, what Jeff Car and I was saying. If you're going to spend any money on helping acquire a piece of bushland that really will do a lot to help protect the indigenous flora, the native flora, representative of its part of the region, this is a goa.

SPEAKER_01 42:27

That's great. I love it. That's a great story. I thank you. That's fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 42:34

Now I can just explain that half a generation later, my son, who was born virtually the day we moved in across the road down here in 1974, when he turned 16 on his 16th birthday, August 1990, he, with a friend of his from school who lived across the road from the hill, almost a neighbour of Greg McCainch, the two of them used to do a lot of walking and exploring the chase. And his friend Anouk, she was particularly interested in recording and documenting the birds, and they became really aware of how important the bird guild of birds up at the chase was. But then they became aware that the person who happened to own the chase, a much bigger area further north that continuous with this, that it was up for subdivision.

SPEAKER_02 43:30

So he wrote a letter to the exact same counselor that David wrote a letter to to protect Professor's Hill.

SPEAKER_00 43:37

Imploring him to do what he could to help protect the chase because Marcel and his friend Anouk were aware that there were wedgetailed eagles successfully rearing young in what's called a nest tree in a gully within the chase property, which was up for subdivision. And by a bit of consultation with bird experts, particularly a Tasmanian expert on eagles, which we communicated with, we became aware that it was the last place within the whole outline of the Melbourne metropolitan area where wedge tailed eagles were successfully rearing young. And so he was able to, at 16, alert the same shire president to the plight of a similar case to this one. Could he do something to help protect the chase from subdivision? And that started a whole campaign which involved all the school kids that from his class and his school and other schools, and it became quite a media spectacle. And the Warandite Environment League came into force again. I mean, it continued to have cases and issues, but it supported that case, and in the end the council managed to put up, make an agreement with the owner to purchase a significant proportion of the Chase bush land to become what became the Chase Reserve, way bigger than Professor's Hill. So my son was much more successful than I was in getting a much bigger reserve that was now it's now managed by the council, same council. Okay, and there's a whole valley up here. I mean, it looks bushy, but there's houses scattered through all of this, and it's all private except the Chase Reserve, which with a narrow strip along Stonia Creek kind of connects up with Professors Hill. So there, it's the biggest part of that blob that I said, well, that's the biggest parcel of land that's still intact in the whole Warrandite district, which is the greatest concentration of remnant bush land up the Yarrow Valley in the whole of metropolitan Melbourne. That's where the greatest concentration of remnant quality bush is. Everywhere else it's highly fragmented. That's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 45:44

You must be so proud of him.

SPEAKER_02 45:47

Well, that's David Cameron at Professors Hill Reserve. Please go check out Professors Hill Reserve. And please, if you ever see David doing a walk and talk, go along. You won't regret it. If you're feeling like some more episodes, check out finding Melbourne's nature.com or check us out on your favourite streaming services. Thanks for listening and look forward to catching up with you at the next reserve very soon.