The first Remote day in 2003 from the Gecko Newsletter Spring 2003

Remote Area Bushcare – Long Angle Creek Springwood.
By Richard Lee BCO

The first Remote Area Bushcare workday was held on the 27^th July and was a great success.  Four intrepid volunteers arrived bright and early for a day combining a mixture of bushwalking, some stunning views and a hearty bout of good old primary work.  After a brief mix up at the beginning, we donned our packs and tools and headed off along the ridgeline and down a spur into the gully.

Long Angle Gully is a jewel of the lower mountains. Steeply dropping 130m from the ridge top down to the creek below.  In some sections sheer rock walls have been formed which is not often found in the in the Hawkesbury sandstone of the lower mountains.

About halfway down the length of the creek the narrow steep rainforest gully opens up into a wider flatter area of tall open forest. This was our target as this is where the weeds are. Sediment and weed seed flowing down the creek have nowhere to take hold in the rocky and steep topography of the rainforest, so it has all been deposited on the flat and hence a large plume of Privet, Camphor Laurel and other nasty tree and vine weeds has developed.

Directly below this plume lies a natural creek flat of deep alluvial soils; that once would have been home to some mighty Blue Gums until the loggers arrived. Growing there now is a mixture of native ferns, grasses and herbs but a suite of colonizing weeds was making its way in.

These colonizers were what we had come for. A large area of scattered Wild Tobacco (Solanum mauritianum) lay before us and it had come as a surprise. This area had been weed mapped before the Christmas fires of 2001 and back then this flat was covered in Crofton Weed (Ageratina adenophora) but the fires had done the job for us whilst succession had provided us with a new challenge. Undaunted the group got to work and swept up the flat, chiseling, cutting and painting and hand pulling all the weeds that lay before us.

By lunch the tobacco was no more and we had made our way up to a tributary that flowed in off Single’s Ridge Rd. Here we found a plume of our original target, a large patch of Crofton Weed, lay amongst the Ghanias and Callicomas. After a short break for lunch, the group again rose to the challenge. We had to remove all the Crofton. If any was left to flower and seed, it would make any follow up work all the more difficult and we knew that we could not make it back before flowering.

By 3:30 great piles of Crofton Weed lay in the forks of trees and the job was done. The packs we donned once more and we headed for the ridge top, tired and sore but knowing that we had prevented those weeds from taking hold in the wilder and remoter places that can be found just beyond the back door.