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Richard Gray
Bushland Regenerator
When I met Richard at his Coburg home I had a strong flashback to the early 1990s at the Prince Patrick Hotel in Collingwood, with him singing a rendition of Night and Day a song by Cole Porter. He was working with a four-piece comedy cabaret group called The Cabbage Brothers. The group sang songs from the 1920 and 30s, with a knockabout but musically faithful style. It was a time before television gobbled up the comedians from the live circuit, and people went out to pubs and clubs to see comedy on a regular basis. It was before the once-a-year event of the Comedy Festival. Richard has always looked, and still does look despite the years, a little like Prince Charming. A tall dimpled man with a dashing tone to him. In fact he had a stint in Queensland with a touring Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs show.
In 1994, out of work, and looking for direction, he volunteered at an indigenous nursery at the St Kilda Adventure Playground. Living in a flat at the time, he realised he didn't have enough contact with the soil.
His earliest memory is of waiting for his sister to come home from school with his nose down in the grass, watching the ants, knowing where all the creatures lived and 'exploring the wilderness of the suburban backyard'.
He volunteered at the indigenous nursery five days a week and he realised: 'I had a passion again, learning plant names, propagating little plants. We then formed the nursery and the co-op, and then we could supply (plants) to local councils and get paid for it.' The nursery propagated between 100,000 and 150,000 plants a year for over ten years.
As part of the business, they developed a bush crew for weeding and revegetating. 'We would get permission or otherwise to revitalise waste tracts, along railway lines. We went to Councils with the ideas for the spot (to revegetate) or local transport authorities. (We would say) for this amount of money we could make this weedy rubbish-strewn strip a much more attractive place.' The light rail between the Melbourne city and St Kilda is one of these areas they changed forever. These days, this type of site identification is part of the City Council's job. Indigenous plants have proven over time to be better at surviving harsh, waterless environments.
For Richard the planting is about more than just trees. He says it's about 'habitats, something for the animals to eat, somewhere to hide, homes to live in.' When he runs a Friends group tree planting event, he says, 'people come along thinking they are going to plant trees. Whereas we try to plant whole communities of plants, ten per cent are trees, and the others are a mix of shrubs and grasses. It is a mixture of creating habitats and biodiversity and making a human aesthetic to make it appealing; you are trying to make it human friendly.'
No matter how friendly this work aspires to be, it is still not to everyone's taste, as Richard tells, for instance , about a man who berated workers for protecting vegetation at a beachfront, because isn't a beach just sand? And the woman who thought planting trees in the city was stupid - when Richard talked about homes and food for the native birds, she said, 'oh, we've got enough birds.' And the residents in Elwood who didn't want a wetland constructed near their homes because they were concerned the frogs would keep them awake at night.
But the drought in Victoria has created a huge interest in indigenous plants for the average garden. Water-hungry European plants and lawns are making way for our hardy home-grown species, and perceptions are changing. The interest in native plants is not only about drought tolerance, Richard says: 'There's something more (to it) than that; I think its something also about identity.'
At 7am, five days a week, Richard arrives at the depot to load the truck. As team leader he scrutinises the worksheet for the day, discusses with the other team members what tools, chemicals and processes the day's job demands. They load up, maybe get a coffee if the location permits, and head to a creek bank somewhere around the fringes of Melbourne. Richard now works with Indig-we-do Bushland Restoration TM, in revegetation, rehabilitation and consultation. He says, 'I still get a buzz taking a chainsaw to a boxthorn along a riverbank. You go there (to the site) and there is an unapproachable piece of land streamside, because of the stupid boxthorn. You get in there gingerly and effectively to remove this weed problem into a pile to be burned, which frees the land to be planted. You have eliminated the habitat for pest birds and rabbits and foxes.' It's a job satisfaction we don't all have, though it is not for the faint hearted. Hazards include extreme weather, snakes, trip hazards from half buried rubbish, chemicals used for killing weeds and, particularly in St Kilda, syringes.
For leisure, Richard bushwalks in weed-free National Parks and continues his passion of looking for the random, but not random, patterns of an unhindered native vegetation. He is constantly looking at and learning from the untouched wilderness.
Back in Coburg we walk along Edgar's Creek, his local, and he tells me how being connected to his local Friends group is a great opportunity to meet his neighbours and watch others enjoy the fruits of their labours. Seeing their planting survive two summer floods and endless amounts of rubbish is his payoff and inspiration. I notice his six-year-old son grab with both hands a mustard seed plant, a pretty weed, and yank it clear out of the ground. Richard tells me his paternal Great Grandfather was the curator of the Kyneton Botanical Gardens, and his maternal Grandfather planted pine trees around Mount Gambia to halt erosion. 'They planted pines, I'm planting gums,' he says. I wonder what his son will plant.
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