Burrandies Aboriginal Corporation works crews tackle wild pines

OneFortyOne have recently sponsored a project with Nature Glenelg Trust and Burrandies Aboriginal Corporation to help tackle the issue of wild pines that have spread into bushland in the Green Triangle cross-border region of SA and Victoria. This three year trial project hopes to cover hundreds of hectares of bushland containing pine wildlings. Burrandies Aboriginal Corporation crews will control the wild pines by hand, with support and supervision from NGT and the Limestone Coast Landscape Board.

This year, the project has been coordinated by NGT staff, with land managers ForestrySA offering maps of wild pine areas. The project has commenced woody weed control in important remnants adjacent to plantation areas – slowing the impacts to the bush by this common invader.

The teams have come from Kingston and Mt Gambier and we have visited places like Caroline Forest reserves, Nangwarry Forest areas like Topperwein (refer to map above), Island Swamp, Muddy Flat, Nangwarry and Round Waterhole. Bray has been visited twice with many medium sized pines to deal with in rocky and dense mallee. One visit to the Trig Point gave amazing views over the broader landscape, where you could see the coastal lakes to the south-west and Lake Hawdon to the north.

Several significant trees have been found during these field trips including this one (below) photographed near Nangwarry. Habitation trees are of great importance to our Indigenous community and we hope to register some of these trees in the future so they are part of the public record and can be managed by the local First Nations when they wish to do so.

We pay our respects to Robyn Campbell (ex CEO) of Burrandies Aboriginal Corporation who passed away recently. Robyn was a great advocate for indigenous and non-indigenous groups joining forces on land management and will be sadly missed. We also acknowledge ForestrySA for granting access and maps of the sites.