Thirty years – that’s a long time to be pulling out weeds and planting natives to help preserve the amazing and endangered littoral rainforest ‘pearls’ along our magnificent coastline. In 2025, Manning Coastcare Group members will be celebrating this significant volunteer achievement with a whole range of exciting activities.
The group hosted its 29th Annual General Meeting (AGM) on 16 November at the historic Rushby Casino building within the Ingenia Holidays Old Bar Beach caravan park. This venerable building, built in 1941 as a recreation hall on the Old Bar Reserve, is now available to the community again through Ingenia for small meetings and special events and proved perfect for a gathering of ‘outdoors’ people like Coastcare volunteers.
Once the formalities of the AGM and election were completed, and the lunch provided by local Blowfish Street Food had been enjoyed, members settled down in lounges to watch the short documentary film ‘Rescuing Wingham Brush’. This is a great story and well worth watching on YouTube. It is amazing that such a degraded sub-tropical lowland rainforest site could be regenerated at all – but particularly given the controversy at the time that became known as ‘The Battle of the Brush’!
Wingham Brush is, of course, a significant camp for world threatened grey-headed flying-foxes and the film was followed by an excellent presentation by Paul Hoskinson, a member of FAWNA who specialises in flying-foxes and microbats. Both mammals are plant pollinators that play an essential role in supporting native ecosystems including rainforests. The audience learned about flying-foxes dipping their chests mid-flight into the Manning River to get moisture to drink, their strong social fabric, and how they can forage up to 50 km carrying pollen and seeds with them. This makes them vital to the health and regeneration of our remaining native forest along the east coast, especially after bushfires.
If you are interested, you can check out the activities in the flying-fox camp through the National Parks ‘bat cam’ that live streams from dawn to dusk.
Coastcare volunteers work each week in littoral rainforest remnants along the Manning coast, from Crowdy Head to Hallidays Point. This coastal vegetation, typified by its canopy of Coast Banksia, Tuckeroo and Lilly Pilly trees as well as vines and underlying shrubs and plants, is under threat, not only from invasive weeds and development, but also from coastal erosion resulting in dune loss and exposure to wind and salt scalding.
Given predicted sea level rises and extremes of climate, the future does not look bright for this endangered seaside ecological community, particularly on the Wallabi Point to Old Bar coast. Coastcare is working with MidCoast Council and other experts to develop projects for our volunteers that will focus not only on littoral rainforest preservation, but also on planned retreat and resilience in the face of climate change and sea level rise.
New members are always welcome and are provided with tools and shirts. Training sessions and workshops help volunteers to identify plants and understand the techniques needed to eradicate weed species and care for native seedlings.
Visit www.midcoast2tops.org.au/manning-coastcare for further information or email Helen Kemp, the Coast Local Landcare Coordinator on coast@midcoast2tops.org.au
