The importance of bush in an urban environment

Importance of the bush in Mosman

I’m a bush regenerator, and I’m on the committee of the Mosman Parks and Bushland Association. Bush provides the corridors for the animals and the bird life to move from place to place. Otherwise they become isolated pockets and that's not good for their health. And most of the time, [over time] they'll die out.

So there are fights for bushland. There are fights for bushland within Mosman, not just for the Mosman locals. The fights for the bushland, the headland foreshore trust that everyone is entitled to, not just Mosman. And one of the things that people say [to developments that will damage the bush] is “yes, you don't want it, because it's your backyard”.  

COVID really brought out how much we do need this sort of environment to survive, and for our sanity. I love the peace of the bush, the sound of the birds, just seeing the natural environment. 

Conserving the bush a long-term project - middle head and Mosman

There are boxes and boxes of papers dating back to the [19]’60s on the history of the Mosman Parks & Bushland associations’ efforts to conserve the bush in Mosman. The very first publication that Eileen and Joan Bradley had done and which was really one of the instigators of the group, was a book on the behaviour and plumage of blue wrens. This is just a lovely little history of observations made in Ashton Park on her walks there. 

There was a period in the late 70s and 80s, where a whole lot of the eucalypts were dying along the foreshore [around Mosman]. The studies have been recorded of when they're trying to find why the trees were disappearing and dying. It's quite fascinating. And then there are records of [the history] of bush regeneration techniques, and the tools you need, and the weeds, all how they've evolved, [along with more recent] battles for the foreshore. And then we've had the middle head oval, with some Mosman locals wanting plastic turf, and [that argument being won] so that now we have natural turf there. 

Then the ongoing information that we can manage to get together, [about all of these efforts] has been able to [be built] on for other people.

Bush crucial for people and Nature

But since the bushland has been [most recently regenerating] across the road, I've been getting more Native [birds back again] so it's hopeful, but not easy. Then there's the importance of our need for the forest - forest bathing - our version of walking through a park or walking through native bushland that we can keep, I think it's keeping our sanity. It keeps my sanity, put it that way. And I'm sure it does for a lot of other people.