A Land of Sweeping Plains

Rainer Rehwinkel and Margaret Ning, Friends of Grasslands, 4 October, 2018

Monaro Grasslands are the quintessential Australian landscape that was so evocatively depicted by Dorothea MacKellar in her iconic My Country. The rolling Monaro plains that greeted the first Europeans must have seemed like the veritable Promised Land. Before them, the Ngarigo people were stewards of this country. They had traversed their country for countless generations before the Europeans arrived, harvesting its resources. Seeds of grasses like Hairy Panic, the oil-rich River Tussock and Snow Grass and the abundant Kangaroo Grass were ground into flour. The flowers of the Murrnong (Yam Daisies) burnished the grasslands from horizon to horizon, a rich yellow each spring. The flowering of the Murrnong signalled the time to harvest this important tuber. Judicious land-management, including burning of the grassland, attracted kangaroos. These, and wombats, wallabies, bettongs and many smaller mammals, reptiles and birds provided meat for the Aboriginals’ diet, skins and sinews for their clothing, bones for their tools. The distant blue misty ranges that we know now as the Snowy Mountains beckoned with the promise of a rich harvest of Bogong Moths.

Even today, nearly two hundred years after the first Europeans saw this amazing country, the rolling basalt plains have a certain allure, though not necessarily to those who are used to more richly treed landscapes. Many people feel uneasy in these treeless plains, mistakenly thinking that the landscape has been cleared. However, few, including many of its long-term residents, realise that the landscape has indeed undergone massive changes since the introduction of modern agriculture.

You really do need to work hard at trying to understand what we have lost from this landscape. A visit to some of the back-country cemeteries offers the best clues. Also, some roadside reserves provide a glimpse, as do some travelling stock reserves and other Crown reserves dotted across the landscape. Here, in these special patches that have escaped cropping, pasture improvement and the worst of the over-grazing and weed invasions, you will find what look like gardens; wildflowers of many colours, shapes and forms crowd each other, filling each space between lush tussocks of Kangaroo Grass and Snow Grass. These sights thrill the visiting botanist and native plant enthusiast. Some of the flora species are so rare that they are now found only at one or two sites. There is a plant called the Bredbo Gentian that is only found in one creekline east of Bredbo. Within the Monaro, the Tarengo Leek-orchid grows amongst Kangaroo Grass tussocks at only one travelling stock reserve. The Omeo Stork’s-bill is found on the edges of only four lakebeds in the grassy landscapes of this region.

Fortunately for many of these amazing wildflowers, which make up the vast diversity of the plants of the Monaro grasslands, there are some very large patches of grassland still to be found on some grazing properties. These farms have been managed by people who have long valued these special plant communities. They have valued them not just because of their beauty. These graziers have also recognised the native grasslands, and their hardy grasses and broad-leaved plants, for their pasture value. Many of these plants, which we generally refer to as wildflowers (or forbs in botanical parlance), also include native legumes. These broad-leaves have excellent value in production systems. The legumes provide high-nitrogen feed. The grasses are resilient, and many are naturally drought-hardy. The summer-growing Kangaroo Grass, Red Grass and Australian Sorghum respond to summer rains with lush growth. Research has shown that Weeping Grass or Microlaena has almost as great a feed value as the introduced Phalaris. The variety of grasses and forbs, all responding to different rainfall patterns, temperature regimes, soil-types and positions in the landscape, ensure that a wide variety of feed is available to stock, year-round and throughout each paddock. This variety fosters resilience.

The rarity of such species-rich communities is now recognised by the listing of some of the grasslands of the region as being a Critically Endangered Ecological Community under Commonwealth legislation. The listed community is known as the Natural Temperate Grassland of the South Eastern Highlands (or NTG SEH). In general, the grasslands have suffered from years of pressures, such as cropping and the establishment of exotic pastures ('pasture improvement'), historical over-grazing, significant invasion by a variety of weeds, invasion by rabbits, and to a lesser degree, establishment of pine plantations and the development of infrastructure, such as highways and roads, towns and villages, pipelines and dams.

It’s not only the landscape and the community that are considered endangered. Many of the individual plant species are also listed as threatened. No fewer than eleven of the Monaro grassland’s flora species are listed as threatened. They are Bredbo Gentian, Mauve Burr-daisy, Tarengo Leek-orchid, Summer Leek-orchid, Austral Toad-flax, Trailing Hopbush, Hoary Sunray, Silky Swainson-pea, Monaro Golden Daisy, Button Wrinklewort and Omeo Stork’s-bill. Additionally, Natural Temperate Grassland provides habitat for threatened animal species, including the Grassland Earless Dragon, Striped Legless Lizard, Little Whip-snake and Pink-tailed Worm-lizard. And that list doesn’t include those fauna species that are now extinct from the Monaro Plains, including the Australian Bustard and the Eastern Bettong. The Emu only just manages to hang on in the fringes of the plains. It wasn’t too many years ago that you could see Wedge-tailed Eagles hung up on the front fences of grazing properties in the region, and as late as 1997, I recall seeing several Dingos strung from a tree on the western edge of the plains.

Over the last thirty years or so, a great deal of effort has been expended to conserve these vitally important grasslands. Over that time, many projects have been dedicated to these systems. Project officers from various government and non-government agencies have sought to understand the ecology of the systems. I was privileged to be part of that effort. We surveyed sites and mapped the landscapes, to ensure that we know where these special grasslands can be found. We found new species and new populations of rarely known species. We educated and engaged with communities throughout the region. We wrote field guides, management guidelines, popular articles and research papers. We encouraged managers of special sites, including cemeteries, stock reserves, private lands, Crown reserves and council reserves, to value what they have, and assisted them, often with funding, with management and the other pressures that our grasslands face, including several tenacious weeds. We established conservation management networks that engaged with grassland managers, the scientific community and other stakeholders to encourage more effective conservation management of grasslands. We set up reserves, including NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service nature reserves, and reserves managed by private or quasi-government conservation agencies, such as Bush Heritage Australia and the NSW Nature Conservation Trust were also established. Even at the time of writing, the new Biodiversity Conservation Trust is introducing a program with significant funding to provide for long-term stewardship of grassland areas on private lands throughout the Monaro.

A special case in grassland conservation has been the collaboration between Snowy Monaro Regional Council (formerly Cooma-Monaro Shire Council) and a dedicated team of volunteers from the community group Friends of Grasslands (FOG). The grassland at Radio Hill, just above Cooma, also known as Old Comma Common Grassland Reserve, is one of those very special sites that has escaped the grazing and cropping pressures that have befallen many areas of grassland across the Monaro. I discovered a population of the threatened Monaro Golden Daisy at the site in 1995. This plant was almost unknown on the Monaro Plains at that time, although there had been several early records. This site was identified as being worthy of special protection.

For almost 20 years people from FOG and others, with the blessing of Council, have been visiting Old Cooma Common Grassland Reserve in order to restore the best areas of its grassland, including its population of Monaro Golden Daisy. Until a few years ago, this work consisted of two working bees each year. Nevertheless, this saw the defeat of the English Hawthorn and Sweet Briar plants on the site. Those programs also included extensive fencing, erection of signage and a great deal of community engagement.

Two of the most threatening herbaceous weeds at the site, and throughout the Monaro, are African Lovegrass and St John’s Wort. In late 2015, FOG obtained a South East Local Land Services grant, funded by the National Landcare Program that enabled the engagement of a contract sprayer to begin serious control of the African Lovegrass and St John’s Wort in the best quality grassland areas. The Management of habitat for Monaro Golden Daisy and Natural Temperate Grasslands, Cooma project also included spraying at the Cooma Rifle Range, which also has a fine example of Natural Temperate Grassland with a population of Monaro Golden Daisy.

Old Cooma Common Grassland Reserve, being so close to Cooma, is now a showcase for the Natural Temperate Grasslands of the region. It is a key site for the protection of the Monaro Golden Daisy. The reserve complements the nearby Kuma Nature Reserve that is managed by NSW NPWS for the protection of three of the four threatened reptiles of the region.

Much work is still required. Recent research has shown that, of the vast areas covered by Natural Temperate Grassland before the arrival of the European settlers, estimated to have totalled some 500,000 ha, only some 0.1% is now formally protected in the reserve system. This includes the grassland at Old Cooma Common Grassland Reserve. How much more grassland is informally protected on private lands is unknown, though such protection can only be considered temporary unless there is an in-perpetuity conservation covenant over the site. The Natural Temperate Grassland community faces extinction in the wild should continuing conservation efforts fail. Only with considerable government, landholder and voluntary community effort will this remarkable plant community remain for future generations to enjoy.

For more information on Natural Temperate Grassland, see the following websites:

https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/threatenedSpeciesApp/profile.aspx?id=20260

http://www.environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/sprat/public/publicshowcommunity.pl?id=152.