Ms O’CONNOR (Hobart) – Mr President, I thank the member for Murchison for reminding us all again of the importance of public education and the quality of the education that our young people get. My beautiful son, Connor Lees, studied medicine on the north-west coast and is now in general medicine at the Royal Hobart Hospital and received an outstanding education through UTAS.
Today, I rise to speak about the health of Hobart’s beautiful little rivulets. We have three rivulets: New Town, Hobart, and Sandy Bay, that come down from kunanyi, the mountain, to our beautiful city, nipaluna/Hobart. They are all incredibly important small waterways that run through this city that we too often take for granted.
The organisers of the platypus party at Cascade Gardens on the weekend of 22 February are not taking our rivulets for granted. It was a beautiful educational day on the Hobart Rivulet. John Gooderham, from the National Waterbug Blitz, was there, teaching children with pipettes and bowls full of rivulet water all about the rivulet’s ecology – the water bugs that live there, like the little jollytails, which are a kind of fish, and the kind of habitat that our local platypus needs to be healthy and to have a healthy rivulet. I want to thank Pete Walsh, who is well known locally as the platypus guardian. A very humble and hard-working citizen scientist, really, who has been enormously important in engaging the people of Hobart in our rivulets and the need for them to be healthy to sustain their ecologies and their platypus populations.
The event was organised by Gardening Australia presenter Hannah Moloney and supported by the Hobart City Council, which has done some very significant work on the health of our rivulets and contributed to a report on the environmental health of Hobart’s waterways that was authored by John Gooderham. I commend this book to all members, particularly, for example, to the Minister for Parks here and the minister for the Environment and climate in the other place, because it talks about some of the threats to our rivulets. As we know, they are habitat for a wide variety of animals, including platypus, rakali, which are water rats, several species of jollytail and a huge diversity of water bugs. That ecology changes as you get closer to the city. The diversity of water bugs, at particular points along the rivulets, provides information about the long‑term exposure that they experience from pollution and the impact that it has on water ecology. The state of the rivulets report demonstrates that all rivulets showed a decline in ecological health, particularly as they get closer to urban areas where we have pollution and weeds, like twitch grass and the infamous, notorious, and very difficult-to-control willow trees.
Something that we have seen in recent years that is enormously heartening, however, is an increase in community interest and involvement in the health of our waterways and in citizen science, which is what we saw at the platypus party on the weekend. In New Town there is fantastic work going on in a cooperative project between the Hobart and Glenorchy city councils. It is a $2 million project that will transform the degraded mouth of the New Town Rivulet into a natural estuarine environment. It is expected to take six months and will involve major earthworks and landscaping. The project, which involves the wider community, will also include the planting of 45,000 native trees, shrubs, water plants, and grasses. The current weir will remain and its structure will be improved to prevent bank erosion. Anyone who has been down to that rivulet will see the importance of that weir in preventing some of that rubbish from entering timtumili minanya, the River Derwent. This is just one example of how you can have cooperation between local government and communities to restore rivulet health.
All three of our beautiful rivulets deserve our attention and they need community engagement and the engagement of local and state governments to make sure that they are healthy and they are healthier as we get closer to the urban environment. It is such a precious thing to have platypus in our backyards. Let us look after their habitat.
I want to thank all the citizen scientists, John Gooderham from the National Waterbug Blitz, Pete Walsh for his extraordinary advocacy for the platypus, and the Hobart City Council for providing our community with that terrific opportunity on 22 February to celebrate our rivulets and all the life that they sustain.
