Thread: 600 klm of Fire breaks in Vic High Country

Thats a few wood heaters worth of smoke

The cattle men up around the great alpine national park are screeming to get back in there and let the cattle keep the under growth down but the government seem to think it is better to pollute the enviroment and spend milloins and millions of our tax dollars having telecomfrences and burning what the cattlemen will pay them to let the cattle eat.

I dont understand how anyone can think that running cattle in the bush is a bad thing, it stopped the bush arond Mt Buller from going up for 88 years except for a few smallish remote lighting strike fires that were able to be left to burn them selves out.

Let's just burn the bush and make it ugly like a city, all 1 colour then ban every one from using it (if anyone would want to go there with nothing to see anyway) other than walkers.

I dont understand how this can be responsible management of our natural resorses, it's just really covering up the fact that they made a mistake and kicked out the natural land clearers and now they have to make the lazy buggers in the DSE do some work and waste what the cattle eat.

I could go on forever about this but I wont, Im not calling all people in DSE lazy, Im sure 1 or 2 of you do work.

I agree,
Its not the work they do, but will it ever have an end?
They could have one enormous Fire break with just 1,000 hectares in the middle for us to all visit.
Then it would still probably all go up in smoke

The fire break does nothing if you dont know where the fire is going to be, the cattle thin out the whole bush, keep black burys down and if enough of them are up there they can prevent fires from spreading by keeping the undergrowth right down.

All a controled burn does is allows people to see that some sort of effort is happening up there, as before they didnt see anything happening other than a few cattle running around eating grass.

Whos to say that by the time the next bush fire hots this 40 km wide area of cleared under growth, the fire isnt going to be raging in the tree tops like in several areas the last fire, and then it doesnt care if there is anything on the ground.

I cant understand how the so called most intelligent people whom work in this area can make such bad calls, the simple solution is to creat new grazing rights that are trasferable from area to area to keep the cattle moving through the bush, this would clear much more area and make it less likely that cattle would become a nuisence as they would be in the more inaccessable parts of the bush, add some tree clearing (through logging) and controled burns in sensitive areas where cattle may damage the ecology such as natural springs and water holes and where some types of plants grow that may be damaged by the cattle and then allow everybody to use it as for what it has been saved for and thats enjoyment.

Clubs (of all types), graziers and the parks authorities can work together in maintaining the parks as well as vollenteers to cut the maintenence costs with a bourd made up of members of these groups made up to manage it all.

It would be cheaper and easier than what we have now but there is no sense in making sense.

I thinks thats enough of a rant for now.

The fire breaks are going around the Thompson Dam and some other water catchments