Last month the Victorian Conservation Regulator said Powercor’s vegetation management and maintenance activities in 2023 and 2024 had impacted habitat with high conservation values in south-west Victoria.
In a statement, the regulator said Powercor’s enforceable undertaking committed the company to improving its environmental performance and repairing previous damage.
Powercor will have to remediate 32 sites and report on its progress until the undertaking ends in 2028. The conservation regulator said Powercor had cooperated throughout the investigation.
Ben Zeeman at a remnant native grassland near Hamilton.Credit: Nicole Cleary
Powercor service delivery and vegetation management general manager James Walker said the company’s work to keep the electricity network safe meant its teams regularly needed to quickly access sites in parks, grasslands and other sensitive areas, including along roadways.
But Walker said Powercor had identified how it could better preserve the environment.
“We will be improving how we identify and protect flora and fauna, enhancing staff training and remediating impacted sites,” he said.
But there’s hope, despite the enormous damage inflicted on these sensitive habitats since European settlement.
Landcare groups, researchers and private landowners are rehabilitating grasslands, harvesting and germinating native seeds and replanting Indigenous grasses and wildflowers in places where they have disappeared.
Seeds from mixed native plants. Credit: Nicole Cleary
The roads at Woorndoo, between Warrnambool and Ararat in western Victoria, still have healthy tracts of kangaroo and wallaby grasses and other grass species. Native grasses also thrive in a four-hectare tract of public land called the Woorndoo Common, which erupts in colour with chocolate lilies, everlasting daisies, geraniums and sun orchids in spring.
Now, the grasses are a light tan colour with the stubby green shoots of native flowers between the tussocks. But Woorndoo Chatsworth Landcare Group chair Susan Bosch said the area would undergo its annual transformation after winter.
“If you come back at the end of October it will be a sea of colour,” she said.
The Glenelg Hopkins Catchment Management Authority is working with La Trobe University and Regional Roads Victoria to replant native grasses on roadsides in the Victorian volcanic plains region in south-west Victoria.
Ben Zeeman showing off some of the flowers that will bloom in the Woorndoo Common in spring. Credit: Benjamin Preiss
Stevenson said the project involved “scalping” weed-dominated roadsides after controlled burns and replanting the areas with native grasses.
She said the replanting project had already delivered results, with animals found at some sites, including the striped legless lizard, which is listed as endangered by the Victorian government.
The grasslands’ rehabilitation initiative also involves working with farmers who have remnant native grasses on their land.
Controlled burns conducted by the Country Fire Authority have also been crucial in preserving remnant grasslands and controlling weeds. Stevenson said 60 per cent of grasslands’ biomass – the total quantity of the living organisms – was below ground.
A murnong seed that will be replanted. Credit: Nicole Cleary
“A lot of species need that disturbance regime from fire. So they come back when we get the first rain,” Stevenson said. “Without CFA brigades doing burns we would definitely be losing these grasslands.”
Melbourne University honorary fellow John Delpratt said Indigenous people had managed the grassy plains for food and hunting before Europeans arrived.
Grasslands before and after European settlement in the Victorian volcanic plains region in western Victoria.
“Then the sheep and cattle came in and that very rapidly degraded that vegetation system because we now had large flocks of hard hoofed animals,” he said. “The vegetation had grown for a very long time with soft-footed animals.”
Delpratt said exotic species of grass and fertilisers resulted in the grass areas becoming highly modified.
Arthur Rylah Institute director James Todd said that due to historic land clearing the best examples of grasslands in Victoria’s south-west now occurred on narrow strips of public land along roadsides and train lines and pockets of private land.
The Woorndoo Common in full flower.
He said the state government was working to increase protection of native grasslands of the Victorian volcanic plains in the south-west from 2 per cent to 20 per cent of what remained of the critically endangered ecosystem.
Grassy Plains Network facilitator and grasslands expert Adrian Marshall said the diverse ecosystems had once provided habitat for many medium-sized creatures, including potoroos, bilbies and bandicoots.
“They would have been everywhere,” he said. “There would have been amazing sweeping plains, ephemeral wetlands and tree-lined creeks.”
Marshall said that across Victoria grasslands hosted about 650 species of plants, including orchids that flower in spring.
“There are roadsides out there that are like a field of orchids.”
Marshall said people were coming to understand the value of grasslands and the subtle beauty they offer.
“They’re still in decline. You can’t avoid knowing that and feeling the pain. But at the same time, people’s perceptions are changing.”
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