Friends of Mount Painter and Mount Painter Nature Reserve
by Sarah Hnatiuk, Co-convenor of Friends of Mount Painter
friends.of.mount.painter@gmail.com
A case study describing the history of the site and the bush restoration carried out since 1989.
Canberra, the Bush Capital and Mount Painter
In designing Canberra in 1911-1912, Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahoney Griffin were influenced by the Garden City and City Beautiful movements of that era. They produced a plan in which built structures fit, in Walter’s words, into the ‘irregular amphitheatre’ of the landscape.
The result is a ‘Bush Capital’ where the higher hills and ridges are topped by bushland. These bushland areas are managed by the ACT Parks and Conservation Service (PCS) as reserves that together form Canberra Nature Park (CNP). Mount Painter Nature Reserve (NR) is one of CNP’s reserves and Friends of Mount Painter (FOMP) one of 32 Parkcare groups that support PCS in managing the CNP reserves across the ACT.
Mount Painter NR is part of a chain of reserves in the west of Canberra that extends some 15 kilometres from Black Mountain near the city centre to the Murrumbidgee River corridor. Mount Painter NR backs on to the suburb of Cook and comprises 82 hectares on Mount Painter itself (the hill) and a lower area of 11 hectares in the Wildflower Triangle (WFT). These two sections of the reserve are largely separated from each other by horse paddocks.
The hill is the remnant of an old volcano; it is steep, rocky, very substantially cleared, eroded because of overgrazing in the past, and weedy. It is not an area that would have been chosen for conservation had it not been for its position in the landscape. By contrast, much more of the original vegetation has been retained in the gently sloping WFT. It includes a patch of dry sclerophyll forest at the top and one dominated by Candlebark lower down. Where trees were cleared in the past, there is grassland dominated by Kangaroo Grass and with a variety of forbs and small shrubs.
The Deakin Fault runs across the WFT with the volcanic rock of the hill to the south-west and sedimentary rock to the north-east. The influence of the different soils derived from these two formations is evident in the flora they support. For example, the dry sclerophyll forest is restricted to sedimentary soil, as are the orchids and most of the shrub species that occur in the WFT; few of these occur on the volcanic soils.
Friends of Mount Painter
Mount Painter NR started life as a small area round the water tanks and its access roads when the suburb of Cook was being established in the 1960s. The WFT was part of the neighbouring reserve, Aranda Bushland, from which it was separated by the construction of a road in 1979. FOMP had its genesis some years later when three residents, whose homes backed on to the reserve, became concerned about the reserve’s weedy condition.
In 1989 when the ACT was granted self-government, CNP was established and Parkcare formed to organise and support volunteers working on reserves. We count our establishment from then and have continued without interruption ever since. During the 1990s, FOMP lobbied hard, and ultimately successfully, for the entire hill to be included in the reserve. The last of the domestic stock were removed in 1998, and a grant enabled FOMP to engage a consultant to produce a vegetation plan in 2000 that would guide restoration of the much cleared, newly added section of the reserve.
Management and Restoration activity
The variety in the condition of the reserve across its extent provides a range of management challenges. The most extreme of these was noted in 2011 by the Commissioner for Sustainability and Environment when she reported on the management of the CNP. She concluded that Mount Painter NR was in a critical condition, the worst of the 35 reserves in the CNP. Kangaroo, rabbit and erosion control were needed on the hill. FOMP assisted PCS in sweep counts of kangaroos, which found more than twice as many than the carrying capacity of the reserve; mapped rabbit burrows, which established that there were three and a half burrows or warrens per hectare; and laid wood and coir logs in eroded areas. Continuing rabbit and kangaroo control by PCS, helped by the breaking of the Millennial Drought, has resulted in more extensive ground cover, less erosion, natural revegetation of eroded areas, and better survival of plantings.
The planting of trees and shrubs on the hill started in the late 1990s and has continued ever since with large plantings by PCS and smaller ones by FOMP. The early plantings were on the lower slopes and have created a corridor of shrubs and trees round the bottom of the hill. On bird walks in this area, we now see many bird species: 37 last autumn. They ranged from a Wedge-tailed Eagle to Weebills and included some of the species migrating from the mountains to warmer places.
Later plantings have crept higher upslope, and we are now filling in the gaps. Through 2019-2022, we planted trees on the challenging, uppermost slopes. They benefitted greatly from La Nina rainfall. We could not have contemplated those plantings in normal years as steep slopes and terrain inaccessible to vehicles mean watering them over their first summer would have been impossible. Our most recent planting added shrubs and a few trees to an existing but sparse part of the boundary corridor.
Installing guards for newly trees and shrubs planted May 2025. Further uphill are plantings from the late 1990s, 2010, 2011 and, still in pale pink guards, 2022. Image by Sarah Hnatiuk
Although there has been some debate among the experts about how many trees there should be on the hill, with some saying more are needed and others that there are already too many, we feel that there are now enough. The 2000 Mount Painter Vegetation Plan aimed to establish an open woodland. FOMP’s 2021 update of that plan identified the need for a few more trees (now planted), more clumps of tall shrubs and enhancing the small shrub and ground cover layer. The latter is where we are increasingly turning our attention. With more than 25 years of experience of planting trees and shrubs among our current volunteers, we feel we have a good handle on how to ensure reasonably good success. With grasses and forbs, it is a different story.
To identify which ground cover species and locations now have self sustaining populations, we looked back recently at our records of species planted on the reserve since 2011. These are the lessons we have learnt :
- Killing weedy ground cover before planting removes the competition the seedlings otherwise encounter.
- More robust species, such as Poas, Clustered Everlastings, Lomandras and Tall Sedge, do better than more delicate species. We have had no success with lilies.
- Patience is needed before reaching conclusions about what works. For example, it was not until the La Nina years (2020-22) 10 years after they were planted that the Clustered Everlastings regenerated for the first time. It took five years and a wetter than usual summer for Hardenbergia to grow beyond just a few stems and leaves and set seed.
- A member of the public when passing one of PCS’ plantings remarked, ‘I don’t know why you keep planting here, nothing ever survives’. He was largely correct, which underlines the need for recording what has been done to ensure that later generations do not reinvent the wheel.
- The temptation to plant into bare patches of ground should be resisted. We have had little success in establishing regenerating populations in such positions and have concluded that, if not even weeds will grow there, nor will natives.
We continue to experiment, including with direct seeding of grass and forb seeds which has so far proved a complete failure.
The most extreme of the challenges the reserve faces now is invasive weeds. When FOMP first started working on the cleared part of the hill in 1998, Saffron Thistle was seen as the major problem, but there is no mention in the records of Paterson’s Curse or St John’s Wort. These two weeds are now very common and, along with Cobbler’s Pegs, the focus of much of our weeding. We first noticed Cobbler’s Pegs in 2019, but unfortunately too late to halt its rapid spread by kangaroos. African Lovegrass has also been brought on to the reserve but fortunately almost exclusively only along paths and tracks, and we are more or less able to keep on top of it.
Our weeding strategy is limited by the number of volunteers who attend our work sessions. We can control small woody weeds, particularly blackberries, all over the reserve, thanks to one of our most able-bodied members who scales the steep slopes with his spray pack. Beyond that we concentrate on hand weeding the more biodiverse areas which are in the WFT and in rockier areas on the hill. From 2011-21, we rated the weediness of different sections of the hill once each year and saw an encouraging reduction in overall weediness in the parts of the reserve we targeted compared with those we did not. Weed species differed in the ease with which they could be controlled with large thistle species proving much easier to get rid of than others like St John’s Wort, Mustard Weed and Horehound.
Into the Future
The future for FOMP looks like more of the same with weed control occupying most of our time but interspersed with a little planting. We will also continue to assist PCS however we can, run bird and plant walks and be available to help local schools and university classes when asked, as we have in the past.
We can achieve much, especially with the help provided by PCS’ Volunteer Support Ranger and the roving volunteers of PCS’ Ranger Assist program. Corporate groups help us as well. There are, however, some things we cannot do. As I write, the ground layer on the reserve has been grazed very low by the kangaroo population which has not been culled for several years; we hope Mount Painter NR will qualify for a cull next winter. Similarly, we must wait for PCS’ overstrained resources to put a cool burn through the WFT where, after seven years, the orchids are overwhelmed by accumulated biomass.
Meanwhile we continue to enjoy the reserve and its ever-changing face, guarded as the Ngunawal have been for thousands of years, by the pair of Wedge-tailed Eagles that so often circle the hill and bring their eaglet here to learn to hunt.
Fine out more:
Mt Painter map and place names
https://www.parks.act.gov.au/find-a-park/canberra-nature-park/mount-painter-nature-reserve
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