Once again you can wish people a 'Merri Christmas' with these stunning cards featuring the Flame Robin, the Sacred Kingfisher and the Spotted Pardalote. Only $5 each, 10 cards for $20, or 20 cards for $30.

You can also buy seed packets for three Merri Creek plants: Chocolate Lily, Clustered Everlasting, or Clustered Wallaby Grass, for $2 each.

Plus, we now have a beautiful, eco-friendly, certified organic fair trade Tea Towel by local artist Glennys Romanes, which highlights how the bushland along Merri Creek is valued by our community, for $25 each.

Money raised from the sale of these gifts goes to projects run by Merri Creek Management Committee. Complete this Order Form to purchase cards, seeds and tea towels. 
(These gifts may also be available at Joe's Market Garden on Saturdays, and the cards are available at the CERES Nursery in Brunswick East.)

Local photographer, Adi Tudor, has created another wonderful Birds of Merri Creek calendar and is again generously donating half the profits to the Merri Creek Environment Fund. As well as fabulous bird photos, all taken locally on Merri Creek, the calendar features a full page write-up about Friends of Merri Creek and the dates of next year's Merri BirdWatch Surveys.

This is an ideal Christmas present for $27.50 or $35.50 including postage and packaging. 

Complete this Order Form and email to friendsofmerricreek@gmail.com

A two page article about MCMC's involvement with Moreland Primary School's recent Creekulum program featured in the Autumn 2021 edition of the Australasian Parks and Leisure journal. The article highlights public parks as rich places for school children’s outdoor learning, using Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) - innovatively grounded in Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung cultural perspectives - and leaving no footprint. You can see the article, entitled Parking the school: Learning about Country from the ground up, here. The project evaluation report for Creekulum is here.

We welcome Chris Cobern, the first ever Upper Merri Landcare Facilitator.  Funding for the position is from a Victorian Govt Landcare Facilitators grant for a one day per week postion, until June 2024. Chris brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the position. He will be focused on increasing community natural resource management activities in the Upper Merri (and the upper Plenty) community.

Chris is pursuing the formation of a Landcare group in the area and is keen to hear from interested people. He'll also be encouraging the formation of Friends groups in more suburban parts of the upper catchment, as well as supporting existing groups.

Chris can be contacted on Wednesdays at chriscobern@mcmc.org.au.

Merri Creek Management Committee (MCMC) recently cemented stronger ties with the Port Phillip and Westernport Catchment Management Authority (PPWCMA). Our success in gaining funding to employ a Landcare Facilitator for the Upper Merri led to the development of a formal partnership agreement with the PPWCMA. 

MCMC also joined over 70 other organisations listed as partner organisations to the CMA's Regional Catchment Strategy (RCS). It means we formally support the pursuit of the visions and targets for relevant parts of the RCS and have agreed to help achieve optimum results, within our available resources.

As a partner organisation, MCMC submitted two projects for the Prospectus section of the RCS: the Merri Creek Biolink project and the Merri Creek Community Engagement project. The Prospectus is akin to a ‘stakeholder billboard’ on which organisations summarise their most important, desirable, practical and/or innovative project proposals. Although it doesn't guarantee funding, it advertises the fact that we are looking for help to achieve the projects.

Photo: Merri Creek in its upper reaches in Merriang

MCMC is looking forward to finding out more about the current state of fauna in the grasslands around Melbourne, as our skilled Ecological Restoration staff carry out contract work for the following species and clients:  

- Surveys of Growling Grass Frog, Striped Legless Lizard and Golden Sun Moth at Beveridge Recreation Reserve, for Mitchell Shire Council.

- Monitoring of Golden Sun Moth at a grassland offset site in Craigieburn for Hume City Council.  

- Monitoring of reptiles at new conservation reserves in the Merri Creek catchment and in the west of Melbourne, for the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning.  

Photo: Bougainville’s Skink Lerista bougainvillii, found under a survey tile

MCMC supports many litter clean-ups undertaken by community volunteers. We give our thanks to Zara Hakam who organised a litter clean-up in East Brunswick for a university assignment and wrote about her experience, explaining how it relates to broader ecological issues. 

Of the 13kg of litter Zara and her six friends collected in one hour along Merri Creek in May 2021, over 97% was plastic. Most were single use items such as disposable face masks (9), plastic bottles (18) and plastic straws (35). Zara calculated that if these levels of litter were found along the entire 60-kilometre length of the creek, the Merri would hold approximately 2.5 million individual pieces of plastic!

MCMC supported Zara's clean-up efforts with advice and equipment.

Photo: Zara, 2nd from left, and friends sorting Merri Creek litter

To read Zara's report, follow the read more prompt.

Merri Creek communities will benefit from two new grants gained from the Victorian Government’s Community Volunteer Action Program to be rolled out from late 2021 through to September 2022, and both project proposals were developed by MCMC.

Merri Creek Management Committee received $55,000 for Combating Key Threats to Curly Sedge. This project will tackle severe weed infestations threatening Melbourne's core population of endangered Curly Sedge Carex tasmanica, around the Merri tributary, Curly Sedge Creek at Galgi Ngarrk (Craigieburn Grasslands) in Wollert.

The Friends of Merri Creek (FoMC) received $32,641 for the Queermates of Bababi Djinanang project. This will support FoMC’s new sub-group, the LGBTQI Friends of Bababi Djinanang, with workshops and working bees in and around the precious Bababi Djinanang native grassland in Fawkner, next to Merri Creek.

Photo: Slender Speedwell & endangered Brackish Plains Buttercup amongst weeds in Curly Sedge Swamp, Wollert

We congratulate our Special Engagement Programs Coordinator, Angela Foley, who graduated in September 2021 with a Doctor of Philosophy in Education. Her doctoral thesis, titled The art of place-making on Wurundjeri Country today, is an intercultural study that reflects on how the things we make, and the stories we tell and share, reveal how we are connected to Country in contemporary ways, including in urban places.