Length
03:04
Summary
A member describes his club’s participation in the Mallacoota Gun Club Nature-led Community Recovery Grant program, focused on community-driven fire recovery efforts to plant trees and support wildlife post-fire devastation.
Transcript
David Whittle, Treasurer Mallacoota Gun Club: Mallacoota Gun Club, we’re a small club, far East Gippsland obviously, we shoot clay targets and we shoot competitions on a monthly basis. We lost probably more than 90% of our facilities in the fire, yeah, it was pretty devastating for everybody. So, we decided, I decided I’d start applying for grants and we ended up with quite a number of grants and we were extremely lucky to get those and build the facility that you can see today. One of the grants we applied for was the Nature-led Recovery Grant, that was a $5000 grant through Zoos Victoria and the State Government and we used that to purchase about 1250 plants. This is our new front boundary. After the fires, we wanted to have a slightly bigger safety margin. Our old front fence used to have quite a few bird-attracting plants along it that just occurred naturally and we lost those during the fires. We’ve planted all local, endemic, indigenous plants. Some of the plants we’ve got along here are the casuarinas to assist the glossy black cockatoos and we’ve also planted some manna gums up this end which are koala-attracting and some small ground covers and some bigger trees amongst them as well. Our lay out is a bit like a horseshoe and having the planting across here closes up the end of the horseshoe creating a corridor that the wildlife can go along. We, you know, we’ve seen goannas and we know there’s wombats and dingoes and the roos are quite interesting. Quite often they’ll sit out here on the grounds while we’re shooting; they don’t seem to worry about it too much. Guns clubs do suffer a little bit with reputation and it’s not really an earnt reputation but we’ve got a little bit of pushback at times and the Nature-led Recovery Grant has really helped um make people realise that we’re not all about destruction, we are about the environment and we do want a good sustainable environment, we shoot clay targets here and they’re biodegradable. We do have an environmental management plan here, and so a lot of that, and the planting that we’ve done along the way has really changed the minds of some of the naysayers around and they realise that we’re about more than just shooting stuff. Yeah, we love the place, the wilderness and the community as well. We have a very interesting diverse community but it’s a fairly tight community especially when, you know, disaster hits, as was proven by the fires.
[Emergency Recovery Victoria logo]
[End transcript]
Updated