Joing Merri Creek Management Committee and the City of Yarra this National Tree Day!

When: 10am - 12pm, Sunday 26th July

Where: Burnley Park, Richmond. Here's the google maps pin: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ANPaPiA6DoXdhcrr9

MCMC congratulates one of our key partners, Metro, for their recent award for Excellence in Governance Outcomes – Sustainable Leadership at the Infrastructure Sustainability Council awards in Brisbane earlier this month.

The award recognised the exceptional sustainability and biodiversity outcomes achieved by Metro since the commencement of its role working on the Biosite Management Program in 2017. MCMC manages the majority of these ecological biosites, particularly the most sensitive or complex grassland reserves and many that were neglected or poorly documented.

Metro Trains site, photo supplied by Ben Roberts.

Caring for a creek that stretches over 60 kilometres requires more than just on-ground conservation work. Because Merri Creek weaves through shifting landscapes and diverse communities, protecting it also depends on the relationships between the people and organisations looking after the many different ‘patches’ connected to the creek system.

Attendees at Wollert Community Farm's one-year anniversary celebration. All photos by Maria Herrera, Whittlesea Community Connections. 

If you’re lucky enough to get a window seat on a Melbourne-bound train from Wallan Station, you’ll look out over a landscape shaped by decades of agricultural drainage and modern development.

“Wallan is growing so rapidly,” says Claudia James, President of Wallan Environment Group. “Every month or two I notice a high-density housing development that has gone up.”

It’s hard to imagine that this was once the heart of Herne Swamp – a vast, 600-hectare wetland that teemed with thousands of brolgas, magpie geese and black swans. Today, less than ten percent of the region’s original freshwater marshland remains.

Herne Swamp, viewed here from Green Hill, was once a vast, 600-hectare wetland. Photo by Max Roux.

Marnie Goding, creek lover and Cofounder of sustainable clothing brand ELK

Marnie and her team at ELK spend two days each year supporting environmental organisations, including MCMC, through their paid volunteering program. ELK regularly join MCMC clean-up days, usually working to collect litter along the creek and surrounding parklands.

ELK Cofounder Marnie Goding. Photos courtesy of ELK.

The Latham’s Snipe is a globetrotter that prefers to stay entirely out of the spotlight.

Quiet, cryptic and remarkably well camouflaged, these migratory shorebirds spend much of their time hidden among dense wetland grasses and reeds. For most of the year, they breed in northern Japan and eastern Siberia before making the extraordinary journey south along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway, arriving in Australia between August and April to rest and feed before returning north once again.

Latham's Snipe. Photos by Beverley Van Praagh.

Between the fast-growing towns of Beveridge and Wallan lies a narrow ribbon of land that time – and development – nearly forgot.

While much of the surrounding landscape was drained, dynamited and cleared for agriculture over a century ago, the Melbourne–Sydney rail corridor remained fenced off from livestock and protected from the plough.

Over many decades, this thin strip of land has become a biological time capsule. It is one of the last remaining strongholds of the Seasonal Herbaceous Wetland: an ecological community so rare it is protected under national law.

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The wallan wallan Regional Parkland Alliance was officially launched on the weekend! Our Alliance partners - MCMC, FoMC, WEG, and BEAM - met at the top of Green Hill looking out over Herne's Swamp all the way to Mt Fraser, and across the area that would make up the wallan wallan Regional Parkland.

The Hon. Ros Spence, Member for Kalkallo joined us, and spoke about the importance of natural spaces for the communities that will make up the far northern suburbs, and the importance of our Alliance to helping to bring the vision to life.