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Protecting road reserves near Albury
Olives may be good news for much of rural Australia, but in some places older plants can produce unhappy side effects - feral olive trees.
High conservation road reserves in the Goombargana area, 40 kilometres northwest of Albury, New South Wales, recently faced an outbreak of thousands of olive seedlings.
"Goombargana Hill is quite significant," former West Hume Landcare Coordinator David Costello said. "It is the beating ecological heart of the area and the roadsides are the arteries leading to it.
"But the arteries were becoming blocked, with olives choking out native plants and providing shelter for foxes and rabbits.
"Birds were feeding on the olives of one or more trees from old neighbouring homesteads and then seeds were ending up sprouting by the roadsides.
"In only around four kilometres of roadside, there were literally tens of thousands of olive stems ranging from quite mature trees to tiny little ones."
Funding
West Hume Landcare Group realised the olive seedlings were causing a problem for the region and managed to remove about half of them in 2003. Funding of more than $3,000 from the Australian Government and support from the Hume Shire enabled the programme to be completed.
"Goombargana Hill has about 1,000 hectares of Box-gum Woodland which helps maintain the genetic diversity of the area," David said. "It supports threatened species like Carpet Pythons, Squirrel Gliders and Grey Crowned Babblers.
"The roadsides leading up to it still had a good variety of native trees, shrubs and ground covers, but these were fast being overtaken by the feral olives.
Activities
"It was critical we stopped the spread of these trees before they reached Goombargana Hill and they became a logistical nightmare to control.
"We used a very specific approach applying a small quantity of a basal bark chemical (effective on stems up to a diameter of 200 mm at ground level) on the base of the trunk of each stem. It sounds time-consuming, but using contractors we wiped out about 70 per cent of the remaining feral olives in two days."
Ongoing follow-up will be needed, but David said with the removal of most of the trees, this should be manageable with the support of the shire and the community.
"We put in a lot of work early on, including mail drops and community working bees, to make sure that the community and the adjacent landholders understood what was happening and why," he said. "As a result we gained a fair amount of community support for the project."
More information
- David Costello, former West Hume Landcare Coordinator: (02) 6051 2205 or david.costello@cma.nsw.gov.au
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