Thank You to Our Amazing Community! A heartfelt thank you to all our wonderful members and supporters who joined us for the B4C End of Year Morning Tea. For those who couldn’t make it, you can now read a transcript of President Mik Petter’s inspiring speech. Reflecting on B4C’s 27+ year journey, Mik spoke about the resilience of our catchment, the intergenerational nature of our work, and the importance of building strong, connected communities and natural environments in the face of climate change.
Listen to the recording here or read the transcript below.
So it’s always worth asking the annual question: Are we there yet? You know, twenty-seven years from when Wayne. . . well, it’s probably twenty-nine years from when Wayne first rang me and said, “How can I protect area thirteen of Whites Hill / Pine Mountain and the albino kookaburra I’ve got in my back tree?” And I said, “Oh, it’s easy, mate. Just set up some bushcare groups, and when you’ve got five bushcare groups, set up a catchment group. It’ll be fun” I said.
“How’s it going, Wayne?” Twenty-seven years later, he’s still working twenty-four-seven on that. So are we there yet? NO.
Will we get there? Not any time soon. Are we closer? YES, WE ARE.
So basically, I want to talk about resilience – and particularly I want to talk about climate resilience.
Every year I talk about climate change, and every year things get worse. I’m not going to talk about what we should have done, because, well, we could have avoided it. We could have reduced it, but instead we’ve chosen suffering. So now we’ve just got to suck it up, basically.
So, this builds on some work I did in 2016, way back when – almost ten years ago now – when various state government insurers, Suncorp and the state government, and others convened a meeting between Energex, the insurers, the banks, Red Cross, and shopping centre owners to talk about disaster preparedness. We talked about how useful shopping centres were during cyclones. We also talked about heatwaves. How do we deal with an ageing community when we know we’re already locked into so many degrees of heat stress? Did we have a plan for what to do with our population during heatwaves? What we decided was that shopping centres are the largest public air-conditioned spaces we’ve got.
So, as a result of that meeting, rather than getting rid of chairs – which they were doing at that stage – they added more seating. If you notice, there’s more seating in shopping centres now. There are also paramedics on site. There are also cardio kits. That was all designed as part of that meeting in 2016 to make shopping centres air-conditioned public spaces for people to seek refuge in times of natural disaster.
They’ve also put solar panels on the roof as an independent power supply. So that’s us sorted – provided you can get to the shopping centre – and there are contingency plans about busing people from aged-care homes to the shopping centres and things like that. It’s amazing that a lot of people think government doesn’t do anything, but it does. It’s just behind the scenes, often without a lot of fanfare, and involves a lot of nitty-gritty, hard work. So hats off to all the various worker bees who do that sort of work.
But where does nature go? Where are the climate shelters for nature? I was thinking about the koalas the other day when it was hailing down like blazes. I thought, Where do they go?
We already know we only get certain species of mangroves in our system here in Brisbane because of hail – because certain trees can cope with it and certain trees can’t. That’s why we only have a limited number of mangrove species here in our area. So how do we make climate shelters for nature? How do we climate-proof the animals and plants that can’t just let themselves into the shopping centre?
I’m sure if the wallabies all went en masse to Westfield, they’d welcome them with open arms. Well, no, I don’t think so. So we’ve got to make those spaces. We’ve got to provide bioavailable water.
Animals are very bad at using taps, so you’ve got to provide permanent drinkable water somewhere they can access it. That’s why we did all that work at Tingalpa Wetlands—because it’s a groundwater spread system. It never dries up, even during drought. That’s why we spent all that time cleaning the weeds out of it—because it’s bioavailable water. And we went from sixty-five bird species to one hundred and ten bird species. So that’s what you’ve got to do: put little holes, little riffles, chains of ponds in all your creeks, get rid of the concrete, which gets it away really quick.
If you look at what they did in Norman Creek – which I think I first proposed in 1982 – they dechannelised it, put water holes in it, and made bioavailable water.
The other thing is all the life-support systems we plug in. All you nursery volunteers who propagate those plants are effectively installing natural cooling units. Every large tree is the equivalent of one to two air-conditioning units, if there’s enough water, from evaporative cooling—not even counting the shade—so it functions just like an evaporative air conditioner. In other words, each large tree delivers the cooling capacity of one to two air conditioners. So, across a whole hectare of forest, you can get around thirty-five thousand kilowatts of cooling power.
The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. Thank god we started doing that. We can tick that box. And every tree we plug in is a little life-support unit.
The other thing is to make sure we keep the soil water up to it. What’s the water that sustains trees when it’s not raining? It’s the water in the soil.
There’s forty times the amount of water in soil than there is in all the rivers and creeks. So anything we do to slow the flow – to put litter down, to put rock mulch, to make understory grass cover – maximises the amount of water that’s infiltrated and put into that underground tank where it can’t evaporate, where the trees can then access it and act as our natural air conditioners.
We need to do other things as well.
When I was in the Northern Territory working with the field naturalists up there around 40 years ago, there was a legend—now passed on—called Strider. He used to go around and find fallen trees, then plant native jasmine vines next to the fallen trees and water them with buckets. He created wallaby bowers from fallen logs by planting Pandorea jasminoides—I think that’s the variety they used up there—beside the logs. He was literally walking the landscape, putting this into practice, following the old adage that the best fertiliser is the farmer’s footsteps.
His adage was that the best land-care is the naturalist walking around doing things in the landscape. It’s an old story, but a good one. He would literally go around making wallaby bowers.
We need to know how our animals are using the landscape and what we can do to support that. Do we make little clefts and overhangs for ground-dwelling fauna to seek refuge, shade and shelter? Is there anything we can do for arboreal animals by using rock piles? Can we provide shelter for reptiles, amphibians and birds by planting riparian vegetation?
We’ve got to trick the space up—enrich the habitat, make more shelter and shade, and grow our web of green, spread its arms, and enrich on the work we’re doing.
A lot of our work was clear in the beginning. Clear the weeds – plant the trees. Now we’re getting mature forests growing, and we need to come in and manage them because the job’s not done.
When Europeans first arrived here, they confronted a very rich landscape full of tree hollows. That didn’t happen by accident. Every part of that landscape was managed by people – including how many, and how, hollows were made. It was someone’s job to make hollows.
So there’s an active and ongoing role for humans in this landscape. Once we’ve replanted it and managed it, it’s not a job that’s going to be over. It’s an active role. It’s a job you can pass on to your kids, and they can pass on to their kids.
That’s what we’ve got to think about. We’re an inter-generational organisation. We’ve got to think about multiple generations of effort. Getting the weeds cleared and the trees planted is just the start of the job.
If you look at the Oxbow, we’ve been there twenty years, and we’ve got at least another twenty or thirty years to do there. So, how do we do it? That’s why we make partnerships. Civil partnerships with groups like the Brisbane City Council, because the Local Government Act talks about good governance, and our view is that good governance involves community participation, community involvement, and managing our joint assets.
It’s not just up to council staff. Don’t sit back and think the government’s going to do it all for you. Good governance is about people getting motivated and active, but also about kicking the government when they get off track. We don’t mind doing that – we’re a partner, not a pet.
So yes, we do bite occasionally, and that’s necessary. But you’ve also got to acknowledge when the job is done and involve all those other civic partnerships – non-government organisations, corporate organisations, quangos, and the like. We’re partners in projects and in progress, not just a subcontractor.
Over the past twenty years, we’ve seen catchment groups evolve – from a BCC Conservation Environment Advisory Subcommittee, to a BCC Catchment Advisory Committee, to now a strong and independent Brisbane Catchments Network.
When I first started doing this job, there were no catchment groups. Now we have catchment groups covering the whole city. So from bushcare to catchment care, we need long-term partners because we’re repeat offenders. We need to keep going back again and again to the same areas.
It’s not “set and forget.” Nature repair is not “set and forget.” So, in conclusion, our job is to bring community, effort, resources, all three levels of government, and all the corporate investment we can get to work on strategic national priorities to protect and sustain the natural world – both for our benefit and nature’s intrinsic right to exist. So B4C has a vital role in nurturing this catchment now and in the future, and I want to congratulate and say thanks to all our members and supporters who help us do that task.
So thank you very much for listening!
