5 Year Forward Planning at Cullulleraine

On Friday October 24th 2015, team leaders from the 2014 Farina works program, committee members and invited members began arriving at Cullulleraine in northern Victoria.

Membership numbers of the Farina Restoration Group have been steadily rising, and during the 2014 season, some difficulty was experienced by team leaders in managing the workforce with the current availability of tools and services.

In future, not only is work on site expected to be limited by availability of services etc., but also by available funding. Group management has realised that to make the optimum use of available funding, a long term plan needed to be assembled. It was decided to devise a rolling 5 year plan.

The images (below) are in no particular order, and certainly don’t cover all the 40 or so attendees at the conference, however they’ll give some idea of our meeting hall and conditions (the temperature was in the order of 35c most of the 3 days).

On Friday evening (7:30pm) Tom gave a short presentation, setting out the reason for the conference, and what our aims and methodology would be. No suggestion would be dismissed out of hand, and the final results were to be compiled into a 5 year plan.

On Saturday morning we were all put to filling out an initial form, stating …

1. What we believed were the most important things that we had achieved,
2. Where we are to date,
3. And where we should go in the future (with the Farina development).

We broke for morning tea, and then split into 3 separate discussion groups to arrive at a consensus on what to recommend for our allotted task.

The discussions lasted until after midday. Group leaders had by then delivered their verbal reports to the meeting on their group’s determination.

The rest of the afternoon involved a convoy of vehicles ferrying everyone to a fascinating local museum where relics from the Soldier-Settler days had been expertly gathered and installed in an appropriate bush setting at Meringur. We were hosted by Cheryl Benson.

Sunday morning was effectively a repeat of the Saturday morning arrangement, but a different set of tasks were allocated and reported on.

The Sunday afternoon activity was another convoy to Ned’s Corner Station. Ned’s Corner has been purchased by the Trust for Nature who’s task is to re-vegetate the property, repairing the damage done to the land caused by over-stocking. Again, this was a fascinating window into the trials of managing low rainfall properties. We were hosted by Colleen Barnes, the Administrator for Ned’s Corner.

The 6 images immediately below were recorded during our afternoon tours.

The pile of images at the bottom of this page were all made during the conference itself. They can be shuffled around to make them visible. Click on any one of them to enlarge it, and use the left and right arrows adjacent to an enlarged image to move backwards or forwards through the pile.

Click the blank page to stop sequencing through the image pile below.