GREEN CREDENTIALS

I begin this post about Peter Spencer by saying that my green credentials are obvious. When Eberhard and I bought our property in 1992 there was no garden surrounding the small timber house that was to grow to become Das Helwig Haus B&B. I set out to build the garden of my dreams and have achieved a remarkable result. We recently opened our garden for the Australian Open Garden Scheme. I’ve planted trees and shrubs in this organic garden to attract the birds, bees, butterflies and other living creatures.

White Buddleia - butterfly bush

Yesterday friends visited just as I assembled a new electric shredder. Although I compost leaf matter from the garden, I realized that most of my shrubs are now so large that when they are pruned back I needed a shredder to mulch their woody branches. Read the rest of this entry »

CHRISTMAS DAY 2009

Here on Christmas morning at Das Helwig Haus B&B we have the Christmas decorations in place and the aroma of fresh pine needles and a baking ham pervades the house. The Christmas cake, cookies and things to nibble wait beside fresh bowls of peaches, apricots, plums and cherries – the summer harvest fruits of this cool mountain climate, the Granite Belt of southern Queensland. I picked our fresh fruit from the trees of our garden

December cherries

It is a pleasantly cool day with an overcast sky and there is a weather front coming through which should bring soaking rain to the drought stricken western regions of New South Wales and Queensland. This would be a remarkable Christmas present. Read the rest of this entry »

ANOTHER OPINION

When I read this feature article on On Line Opinion I was grateful to Max Rheese for writing so succinctly on the problems we country landholders have encountered in recent years. I will illustrate his words with my photographs. Below is a photo of Das Helwig Haus B&B surrounded by ‘Remnant Forest‘. We are not allowed to clear any trees within this area.  The photo was taken from high on the hill on the other side of the valley, which does tend to condense the thickness of the forest surrounding our home and it fails to show that we had already cleared a firebreak around our buildings before the ban was introduced.

Rooftops of Das Helwig Haus B&B

It must be realized that because we are unable to clear any regrowth within this forest that it will grow more thickly until a bush fire destroys everything in its path. Read the rest of this entry »

MORE ABOUT TREES

Some of my readers are wondering what it was that Peter Spencer wanted to do on his property. I’ll quote the words of Kahn Spencer posted on Agmates.
The people on this forum and those all over the world that are supporting Peter in his stand deserve to know what his motives are. At this point money is obviously a major concern, the bottom line is Saarahnlee and many other properties are no longer a viable business due to this legislature. So yes money is part of it but it is not the sole reason or the main reason for his stand.
The irony is that not only does Peter not have plans to do any major clearing on the property, he has spent a great deal of time and money researching and designing a forestry sustainability plan for the property. He had a goal several years ago, I remember because he would talk about it all the time when we were children, that goal was to selectively harvest and replant a variety of, mostly native, trees. By doing this the farm would be able to sustain a very controlled form of forestry without ever causing a significant reduction in the total vegetation. It was in essence a vegetation management plan. This devastating legislature will not even allow him to do that.

For details about the legislation and how Peter Spencer has not been able to get a hearing in the courts of Australia, go to http://loveforlife.com.au

Those of you who have read my November posts related to Peter Andrew’s book Back from the Brink will know that water not only flows over land, but travels downhill beneath the soil to our gullies and rivers, unless it is all taken up by the thirsty Eucalyptus saplings now stealing two percent of Queensland grassland each year. They are nothing more than woody weeds but are protected under the State vegetation laws

Romeo Lane Corner 2006

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SMOKE FILLS OUR VALLEY

We are experiencing a period of hot, dry weather. This is what the farmers need to ripen their tomato crops before Christmas. Have you ever noticed how expensive tomatoes are at Christmas time? The crops in the northern districts like Bundaberg and Bowen are finished and the backpackers are moving south looking for work. Here in the cool mountain highlands of the border between Queensland and New South Wales our tomato plants can not be planted until the frosts are finished. This year the farmers on the Granite Belt had heavy rain in May to fill their farm dams and the weirs across the creeks and Severn River. They have water to irrigate their crops and now have been blessed with a heatwave to encourage the quick growth and early ripening of their vegetables.

But last night the weather forecast for today included a severe fire warning. And yes, I awoke this morning to the sight of our valley filled with smoke.

Bushfire smoke

With visibility reduced by this pall of smoke I do not yet know where the fire is situated and if it is headed in our direction. What I do know is that thanks to our foresight in clearing trees in close proximity to our house and undertaking a controlled burn of our country at the end of winter, we will not need to evacuate our home. Read the rest of this entry »

REMNANT VEGETATION

At last it appears that the main stream media in Australia seems to consider there could be a story in the hunger strike of Peter Spencer. There are to be a number of radio interviews today. See Peter Spencer.

It is my intention to continue writing daily posts and illustrating them with my photographs to discuss some of the State laws which have been imposed on country people in recent years. As an illustration, consider a frog dropped into hot water. It will immediately respond by jumping out. However, if you place a frog in tepid water and slowly increase the heat the poor thing will stay there until it can no longer jump.

Such has been the encroachment on the lives of country Australians by various State governments in the past twenty years. Each issue was hardly worth a fight until now when we suddenly find ourselves powerless in the courts of Australia. This is another issue that I’ll elaborate on at another time, but the courts of Australia do not have the power to over-rule State court decisions. It has been a hypocritical act by our Australian Federal Government to encourage State governments to introduce laws that then allow our Federal Prime Minister to claim the credit for meeting greenhouse gas emission targets, without the affected people having any right to claim restitution via the courts of Australia.

As many of you know we have a beautiful river frontage and that we have a license (another tax) to draw water from this river for irrigation purposes. I have not utilized this license to grow commercial crops. We have only drawn water for the garden and to irrigate the Remembrance Field of red Flanders poppies each spring.

Severn River

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EUCALYPTUS FORESTS = HOT BUSH FIRES.

As always happens when people people join a FORUM to support a person or project they start to discuss other matters. Thus while I’m writing these posts in support of Peter Spencer I can not do much more that let people know why this courageous man has gone on a hunger strike. It must also be noted that every time I write the words Peter Spencer the powerful Google search engines will recognize his name and give it more prominence.

I posted my words yesterday on http://fayhelwig.com supporting the stand of Peter Spencer, who is on a hunger strike to draw attention to the lack of compensation for Australian country people who have had their rights to utilize their land, as they see fit, taken from them by Qld and NSW Government land grabs. I gained inspiration to write another post after reading comments on http://agmates.ning.com/group/peterspencerhungerstrike

Despite the fact that CO2 is a potent plant food, and that doubling the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere would only result in a rise of 1 degree Celsius, why are we tying up vegetation? Wouldn’t it sequester more CO2 if trees were grown, the timber utilized, and then more trees grown in their place? Instead we have the ridiculous situation where vegetation is grown until senescence, then it falls down, cant be harvested or collected and adds to situation such as the recent ‘Black Friday’ here in Victoria? Comment from Colin J. Ely

Saplings clean much more CO2 out of the air and produce more O2. A plantation of new trees will help, rather than leaving the existing trees. Perhaps a compromise could be reached, a part of the land could be used as a plantation which could be used for logging once it has reached maturity. Just a thought. Comment by Leith Carnie.

Bushfire at Glen Aplin

This was the view from our farm boundary fence in October 2002 of a bush fire, on the other side of our Glen Aplin valley, which took the life of a local woman. The little clearing on the hill in the centre of this photo above is the Felsberg Winery. Read the rest of this entry »

OUR GLEN APLIN HOME

Our 14 hectare (32 acre) farm is situated at 113 Mt. Stirling Road, Glen Aplin, Queensland, Australia. Glen is a Scottish word for a valley and the first Government surveyor who came through this region was a Scottish born man with the surname of Aplin, who named this pretty valley after himself. It became a valley of small land owners growing stone fruits or vegetables and grazing a few head of cattle. Within the past 20-30 years tourist enterprises like wineries, restaurants and guest accommodation have brought changes to the region.

Our home, Das Helwig Haus B&B, is situated in the forested area at the centre of this photograph, which was taken from the Felsberg Winery on the eastern ridge of the valley.

Valley view

To give you a greater appreciation of where we live, below is a view taken with a telescopic lens. Try to place that road, directly above the cluster of trees. The roofs of our buildings are barely visible behind the forest of eucalyptus trees.

Das Helwig Haus B&B

Over beside the road, you can just see the golden wildflowers above our entrance drive way.

Entrance wildflowers

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