1992_07_july_mullfeat

Several years ago you could drive around Vernon Circle and southwards on to Commonwealth Avenue Bridge.

As you rounded the corner the Brindabellas formed the horizon like a blue ribbon. In winter, the ribbon was spotted with snow.

Now, alas, that hideous white block of residential units shatters the harmony of the Brindabella horizon. One has to drive past the building to get the full line of the Brindabellas. It is not quite the same; the joy of the vista needs to be experienced on the turn of the corner.

We are blessed with only a few despoilations of that magnitude in Canberra. Burley Griffin’s idea of leaving the hills in their natural state has largely been adhered to.

The valleys have been filled with lakes or houses with small patches of reserve.

Indeed, for miles around, the general pattern has been to graze, crop or build in the valleys and leave the hills alone. Often this has been because hills are too expensive to build or clear of too hard to crop or graze.

The result has been very little natural lowland. But a pocket remains in Gungahlin, called Mulligan’s Flat.

It is not wilderness, but it has had little human interference compared with nearly all the rest of the flat land around Canberra.

Ironically, it was urban development which saved it. Because urban development was always threatened for the area, authorities were reluctant to allow clearing or pasture development because they would have to pay compensation once the land was resumed for urban use.

Without the extensive grazing and pasture improvement the area has become habitat for a great variety of native plants and wildlife.

A submission to the Chief Minister, Rosemary Follett by seven conservation groups has listed the known ones. The submission was made by the Conservation Council of the South-East Region and Canberra, the Society for Growing Australian Plants, the Canberra Ornithologists Group, the National Parks Association of the ACT, the Canberra Archaeological Society, the ACT Herpetological Association and the Field Naturalists Association of the ACT.

However, the submission doesn’t tell us how the flat was named, and I can’t find out from the ACT authorities I contacted. Does anyone in readerland know? There’s a Mulligan’s abattoir knackery at Oaks Estate, but I’m sure it has nothing to do with the beauteous flat.

The submission says it is one of the few extensive lowland grassland and woodland that has not been extensively degraded through clearing, grazing or urban development.

In original Gungahlin plans (which were current until quite recently) the area was to be subdivided for housing.

Now the area of some six square kilometres is to be preserved as a nature reserve. The Minister for Environment, Land and Planning, Bill Wood, said this week ÿ(jul26-aug1)@ that he hoped to fix the boundaries in the next few weeks. He would take a generous view of those boundaries.

He acknowledged there would be considerable cost to revenue, but that was balanced by the significance of the site.

There is another side to revenue-development argument. With a beautiful nature reserve close by, the amenity of the whole area goes us. Thus property values and rates revenue go up. Estate agents will embrace the amenity in their advertising: a wallaby’s hop from Mulligan’s Flat.

The most extreme example of that theory is New York where people millions extra to get a glimpse of Central Park.

Heaven forbid that Canberra should become like New York.

The president of the conservation council, Jacqueline Rees, said of Mulligan’s Flat, “”Here you will find an oasis of relatively undisturbed native forest, woodland and grassland, of the type that existed before European settlement and has now in most places gone forever. Gone with that bushland have been the birds, the animals, the creatures that lived in it.”

The conservation proposal says the site has long been regarded as one of the best bird-watching sites in the ACT. It mentioned six species found there that are rarely if ever found in urban areas: regent honey-eater, painted button-quail, hooded robin, diamond firetail, brown tree-keeper and the speckled warbler. Presumably, once the quarter-acre blocks go in, the birds die or fly out.

Frogs and toads, other than the accursed cane toad, seem to be dying out throughout the world. Some scientists hypothesise that it is to do with extra ultra-violet light. The proposal blames improved pasture (superphosphate?) for the non-appearance of a least one species which is found at the unimproved Mulligan’s Flat: the spotted burrowing frog.

It is home also to the orange-groined toadlets and the whistling tree frog.

The Ctenotus uber, (subs leave cap in first name of species please) a skink without and English name, also lives there, as does the rare black shingleback üTrachydosaurus rugosus.

The mammals include the brush-tailed possum, which unlike the ring-tail does not like urban development, the red-necked and swamp wallabies and a couple of species of marsupial mouse, and at least five species of bat.

Feral goats, cats and foxes present a difficulty. One idea floated has been to fence and eradicate, but it seems that fencing will do more harm to native as exotic species.

The site also includes a massive outcrop of reef quartz.

At the edge of the area is an old school site and the remnant of the 19th century Murrumbateman to Bungendore road, both built when NSW was a colony, perhaps before one of its colonial Premiers, Sir Henry Parkes, had delivered his famous Tenterfield address which led to Federation and the establishment of the national capital which, until this week ÿ(jul26-aug1), threatened once again to impose human settlement upon the area.

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