Andrew Stocker - transcript
My name’s Andrew stocker, I’m the Education Information Coordinator of the Melbourne Wildlife Sanctuary at La Trobe University in Bundoora. I run all the education experiences; high school, secondary and tertiary students come through the Wildlife Sanctuary. So, whenever anyone wants to utilise the Wildlife Sanctuary as an education resource then I coordinate that.
The Melbourne Wildlife Sanctuary was established in about 1967-1968. After the first intake of university students, a few students got together and said, “Let’s set aside a small patch of land and turn it back into what the Melbourne region used to look like.” I guess getting university students and primary school students and secondary students in here learning about ecology is what our mission is.
Some of the important work that has been done at the Wildlife Sanctuary is for starters, the revegetation work. The whole area was farm land; the whole place has been pretty much de-weeded, a lot of the pest species of plants have been removed. We also manage three areas of crown land, that’s Gresswell forest, Gresswell hill and Gresswell habitat link, and that provides a corridor for arboreal animals to sort of move from one end of Melbourne right through to the other.
There’s millions of animals at the Wildlife Sanctuary, depending on what sort of level of animal we are talking about, with the school kids we actually focus on what we call mini beasts. We have students coming out into the Sanctuary, rolling over logs and rocks, knee deep in our wetlands, looking for all the tiny bugs that exist out here so that they get an understanding that the ecosystem or ecology starts at that lower level, without that lower level you get none of the higher up level.
We’ve got things like kangaroos, echidnas, loads and loads of bird life. So out on our wetlands over here we’ve got white faced herons, rufus herons, lots and lots of wood ducks, purple swamp hens…
The nesting boxes I guess are the substitute habitat, we call them the commission style housing rather than the five star. Obviously the five star is the hollow that would exist in the tree that takes around about a hundred years to develop. So these houses are for animals like sugar gliders, ring tail possums, brush tail possums, ducks, kookaburras, basically any animal that requires that hollow habitat up in a nice big red gum.
The Wildlife Sanctuary’s main mission at this stage is to replace a 40 year old fence. When we actually get that predator proof fence we will be putting in all the different sorts of animals that we call locally extinct. Things like bandicoots and quails and even wallabies and wombats that aren’t so rare but they’re not sort of in these regions.
In general I guess the main focus of the Wildlife Sanctuary is to engage the community in what we do. So staff members can get involved by volunteering at the Wildlife Sanctuary, through either CVA or through the Friends of the Wildlife Reserves group. Staff can also comes on one of our night tours or day tours, what we call twilight tours or our day tours, they can come on and we wonder around and give people a really good insight into the way in which these sorts of places function, and hopefully spot animals sort of sticking their heads out and feeding for the night. It is open from ten till three, Monday to Friday and also on Sundays. You are more than welcome to basically just come in for a wonder. There is the Iron Barks Hut which is available for barbeques, social functions, and even as an alternative teaching facility.
From a university perspective we have quite a number of subjects that are actually run through here. An interesting thing is that it’s not just subjects like zoology and botany that use the Wildlife Sanctuary, we have Education students that come up here using the Wildlife Sanctuary, we have Archaeology students and we’ve even had Physiotherapy students that come up here and use the place. And in terms of other users we’ve got PhD students, research projects that are actually using the place as well.
The main message that the Wildlife Sanctuary is trying to put out there is this message of conservation. It is essential to the understanding and continuation of even humanity to be able to have environments like this; as a place for relaxation or as a place for the health of our ecosystem. So, this concept of conservation is something that La Trobe University has obviously shown a huge commitment to over the last 40 years and it is something that we all hold incredibly dear to our hearts.
