Merewether is a coastal suburb of Newcastle, Australia. A coal mining centre for much of its life, today Merewether is a popular surf beach and desirable residential area.
Merewether Landcare is a community organisation established in 2001. All its members are volunteers.
Merewether Landcare does two types of work:
1. Hands-on Landcare, including
· The Merewether Beach Revegetation Project. This is our most substantial activity and is the main subject of this website
· A monthly working morning in Glenrock State Recreation Area. Because Glenrock has abundant and diverse native flora, this work mainly involves weed clearing and control
· Other Landcare work, including plant propagation and bush regeneration at other local sites
2. Education and information, including
· Signage and pamphlets
· Journalism and scholarship on Landcare and related issues
· Talks to schools, community groups and other organizations
· This website
Click for a complete list of Merewether Landcare publications
To open any document on this page, click on its title. The document will then be downloaded to your desktop as a Word file with a title such as "page1_1-3.doc". You can then rename the file as you wish.
Click on photos to enlarge them and read captions.
1. The Merewether Beach Project
At the beginning of 2004 the Merewether Beach sand dunes were covered with Bitou Bush, a South African saltbush first brought to Australia in ships’ bilges in the 19th century, and later used extensively to revegetate dunes after sand mining. Bitou Bush did its work all too well. By the end of the 20th century it had colonised 80 per cent of the east coast of Australia and there were national, state and regional control strategies. (For the NSW strategy, see here. For a comprehensive regional strategy, see here)
In late 2003 Merewether Landcare won a $25,000 grant from the federal government’s Envirofund. We used the money to buy native plants, tools and a toolshed (which you can see behind Merewether Surf Club). In 2004—2005 we removed (by hand) Bitou Bush from the dunes between Merewether Surf Club and Dixon Park carpark. We replaced the Biotu Bush with local native plants, the sort of plants that were here before white settlement. Other groups are now doing similar work along Dixon Park Beach and Bar Beach.
Since early 2006 we have been removing Bitou Bush from Merewether headland and surrounding areas and again planting local native plants.
Our project is an example of constructive, practical conservation. There is a long history of this sort of work in Newcastle. Most of the parks and reserves you see around Newcastle are there because of the efforts of residents who worked cooperatively with local and state governments.
All Merewether Landcare members are locals, most of us retirees in our 50’s and 60’s. We also have a few students, and a doctor who comes and works when he’s on holidays. We work every Tuesday morning from March to November. We’ve developed a good relationship with Newcastle City Council staff and with people who use the beach.
We do this work because we like doing it. The physical work and social contact is enjoyable, and there's the satisfaction of seeing plants grow and the beach looking more attractive.
Initially some locals were skeptical about what were doing, telling us that we were wasting our time because the sea would wash the dunes away, as it had in a huge storm in 1974. Now people come up to us and tell us they are glad the Bitou Bush is gone, and that they think the native plants look good on the beach. They also appreciate the return of local native fauna such as monitor lizards, white-faced herons and Nankeen kestrels.
Our aim in this project is to show the community and Council that the beach and its surrounds look better if they are looked after. There’s a lot more that needs to be done to achieve this along the coast between Merewether and Bar Beach. The three parks on this stretch of coast—Jefferson Park in front of the Beaches Hotel, Dixon Park and Empire Park—are currently rather barren. They would look a lot better and be used more if they were landscaped and planted, in consultation with residents and other beach users. Then there’s the question of Merewether Old Surf House: Is it to be renovated or demolished? If the latter, should it be replaced with a new building or a park?
So far (from January 2004 to September 2007) we have achieved the following:
· Planted 15,000 local native plants, with a 70 per cent survival rate
· Contributed 7,000 hours of voluntary labour worth $210,000
· Developed an effective and harmonious Landcare group
· Begun to educate the community about the project and associated issues
We have also learnt a lot. The essence of our learning is that successful Landcare work has many dimensions. Landcare workers need botanical and environmental knowledge and gardening and landscaping skills. They need to understand how their work relates to local history and culture. They need to be able to relate easily to people, think critically and plan strategically. Our group is a particularly productive and contented one: we get a lot done, and we work happily together. In our project we have also been fortunate in having as our coordinator Lori Hungerford, who puts in many additional hours each week planning our work.
Documents
To open a document, click on its title.
Sowing seeds of coastal regeneration- June 2005 Daily Telegraph article about the Merewether Beach project.
Working Paper No 5—Making Things Happen—for more on bitou bush
Title of steel hardly rings true anymore and
Working Paper No 4—Botanising Awakabal—for more on Newcastle’s tradition of constructive conservation
2. Coastal Processes
The Australian coastline is naturally unstable. Human activity compounds this instability. These issues are discussed in Working Papers 1 & 2. These papers include focus questions for school groups.Documents
To open a document, double-click on the title.
Working Paper No 1- The local bugbear, the sand drift
Working Paper No 2-The Unstable Coast
3. Ecology and botany
Every area, be it large or small, rural or urban, has its distinctive ecology and botany. This is particularly notable in Australia, where there can be major changes in plant species and growing conditions within a few kilometres or even a few hundred metres.Our group started with little knowledge of native plants or coastal ecology. Experts we consulted gave us a little help. Mostly we learned through experience. We cleared and planted; we had some successes and some failures. We thought, talked, read and wrote about what we’d done. And as we learned we kept on working.
Some of our botanical learning is discussed in
Working Paper No 3—What was here? What is here? That paper tells of how we’ve come to know and love our local native plants. It also expresses our admiration for one of the early English collectors of these plants, George Caley.
Working Paper No 4—Botanising Awakabal celebrates the work of the local people who in the 1960’s did the botanical work that persuaded the NSW government to create a national park at Redhead, just south of Merewether.
4. Urban planning and design
As we have worked on our project we have recognised that the natural beauty of Merewether Beach would be further enhanced by proper urban planning and design.This issue is discussed in two newspaper articles:
Our gem by the sea could shine much brighter
Voters need to know where the city needs to go
5. Decision making
Our project began when two of our members asked Newcastle City Council to plant a few shade trees around the picnic tables at Merewether Baths. We were told that the Council could not help, as it had not allocated funds for this purpose in its current work plan. We then learned about state and federal government grants for local environmental projects. In mid-2003 we applied to the federal government’s Envirofund. In December 2003 we won a $25,000 grant.Getting this grant was the making of the project. It made us independent of the Council and other environmental groups and gave us the freedom to get on with the work. As the project unfolded we came to realise how important this independence was. The Council’s decision-making processes were bureaucratic and slow; the work style of our initial partner in the project (another local environmental group) was laissez-faire and our partnership terminated after six months.
Four documents discuss aspects our learning about decision-making:
A brief guide to running a successful Landcare group sums up our learning about leadership and decision-making in Landcare. We wrote it to help people embarking on Landcare or other community-led projects.
Working Paper No 7—Learning in Landcare uses case study and other research to develop an argument about Landcare as complex and contested work and learning.
For council harmony, move beyond blame attempts to explain why Newcastle City Council finds it difficult to function as effectively as it might.
Working Paper No 6—Helpful Learning: Improving practice, improving organisations argues that developing a picture of what people are actually doing and learning in their daily work is central to improving both professional practice and organisational effectiveness.
Merewether Landcare Members
Core Group
These members have worked on the beach project in a regular and continuing way since it began in January 2004.
- Gardner Browne
- Otto Fischer
- Griff Foley
- Rita Graham
- Andrea Hackney
- Barbara Harvey
- Ken Hullick
- Lori Hungerford
- Doug Schofield
- Barbel Stuhr
- Mandy Tomlinson
Other contributors
The following people have made important contributions to Merewether Landcare through one or more of: the beach project, our monthly Glenrock work group, or our Wednesday plant propagation group.
- Louise Battersby
- Faith Brown
- Rinaldo De Vitis
- Sylvie Evans
- Josie Fraser
- Katherine Gauci
- Tim Hackney
- Jiao Li
- Chris Marley
- Gareth Marley
- Andrew Pulsford
- Brian Smith
- Kathryn Ticehurst
- Laura Ticehurst
- Elizabeth Schofield
- Michael Schofield
- Juanita Schofield
- Bob van Oostrum
- Britt van Oostrum
- Marjan van Oostrum
- Jane Watt
- Alison Woolard
- Tom Woolard