Transcript
[On-screen logos: CFA, Safer Together, Victoria State Government]
[On-screen text: We acknowledge the Dja Dja Wurrung people as the Traditional Owners of the land on which this video was created. We honour Elders past and present whose knowledge and wisdom have ensured the continuation of culture and practices]
[On-screen text: Community Based Bushfire Management: Stories of change]
[On-screen text: Cornish Hill Collaboration]
[Speaker 1] So the Cornish Hill project has really been about people working together to get stuff done.
[Speaker 2] Cornish Hill is a great example of community coming together with various stakeholders.
[Speaker 3 Male] Look, everyone's motivated to so mitigate the problem.
[Speaker 4] It's just been a great example of what you can get done and what you can achieve.
[Speaker 5] The fact that change has occurred is such a positive thing for me and a demonstrator of success.
[Speaker 6] It's all feeling really good.
[Speaker 7] Yeah, feeling really good.
[Bridget Clarke] So Daylesford is in central Victoria.
It's in the middle of a large multi owned park that is about 70,000 hectares and Cornish Hill is 38 hectares plunked in the middle of town.
[Sam Basham] Like all areas around Daylesford and other mining areas, there's a large amount of gores and BlackBerry that was used to cover up these mining sites, which is a really fine fuel and in conditions where fire will get into them.
In hot and warm windy days that will create really intense fire and it's very hard to stop.
So it needs continuous treatment to remove and keep those fuels down.
[Glen Webster] Now this little track here was completely unusable until 12 months ago.
That's how the whole area was.
Basically all 38 hectares was pretty much like this.
We said we will sit at the edge and protect houses but there'll be no active firefighting in the reserve because of the lack of access and the potential for you to be stuck.
We couldn't even find out exactly who was the lead fire agency for in here.
I was asking around and everyone said it was someone else.
[Kay Richardson] Just from looking on mapping, it was quite obvious that there was quite a high fire risk in terms of its proximity to Daylesford, so we knew that something had to be done.
[Jeff Doyle] It's a lovely area, but there's always been in the back of our minds a concern of fire risk with the ghouls et cetera.
So we've been sort of working with all the other neighbors and formed a fabulous volunteer group to try and get onto it and fix it up.
[Katherine Anderson] Bridget came towards us with a lot of support actually.
She's got an incredible knowledge of across the agencies and how we can apply for funding for the projects that we as a Bush regeneration group want to work.
But she also helped us to get more in touch with the CFA and DEECA.
And then she brought to us backing onto Bush.
[Bridget] We got some speakers to come and talk about not just what a fire could look like in their town, but also how to manage that risk.
Obviously, all of those messages were delivered with a really local example to people who lived right beside the park.
So that was a huge shift in the, I guess, energy of that little group.
[Jeff] The volunteer numbers increased and everyone just got a little bit excited about it and a little bit relieved because the fire issue was really number one for everyone.
[Glenn] So there was no need to convince people that it needed to be done.
It was just really a matter of communicating and getting all the right people together and getting them around the table at the same time.
[Bridget] Once we tapped into the right people and we were able to have all of those conversations together, to understand the perspectives together and just bringing the ones who needed to be in the conversation into it and including them meaningfully so that they were then able to see what had already been achieved.
So that my role sat in that space of like, we haven't spoken to land and built environment yet.
Let's find out who that is.
Let's phone them up and keep them up to speed.
Obviously, CFA weren't happy to be involved.
Local government were happy to be involved, community were happy to be involved.
So it's sort of opened an oxygen space to a conversation that just hadn't been had.
[Map on screen: caption (from top left ‘FFMV – Mechanical grooming; FFMV – track widening and firebreak maintenance; FOCH – woody weeds groomed and sprayed; CFA – weed, spraying and track widening, planned burn on the books for the future’}
Their trust had evolved and relationships have formed, so you've got a good platform for work to get done.
[Glenn] Everyone's motivated to the outcome.
Not everyone was in agreement of how to get there.
It was a matter of sitting around the table and talking.
CBBM role is absolutely key to it.
It keeps the motivation of the stakeholders up because they know that something is going to happen.
It's not just a talk fest and nothing happens.
So that that CBBM role is absolutely pivotal to the outcome as it was before the works began to clean up and give us access.
This was a huge safety liability to the town of Daylesford.
So slowly we're turning it from a liability into an asset.
[Jeff] It's basically just connecting and you have to e-mail, walk in, have chats, meet people on the ground.
And I think with the collaboration with the CFA, etcetera, the council, if you can join together, you actually get an awful lot done.
[Sam] It's not only a great result in terms of reducing risk, but the local community that then get involved, the relationships that are built out of that and the understanding of what we actually do and how we can actually help.
Without that common goal, we tend to stick in our lane and focus on our own things.
[Kay] We all want the same outcomes.
We want to see the Bush fire risk reduced, we want to see the amenity improved.
We want to see some of the natural biodiversity values come back.
So when someone's facilitating those discussions and bringing everyone together, you get things done.
[Katherine] What Bridget helped me to understand is that I'm not on my own trying to just chip away at a huge problem.
If I talk to enough people, we can all work together.
[Text on screen: The Safer Together Community First team would like to thank the following for their help in the making of this video:
Bridget Clarke
Sam Basham
Zac Van Kuyk
Glenn Webster
Kay Richardson
Jeff Doyle
Katherine Anderson
Friends of Cornish Hill
Cornish Hill Committee of Management
FFMVic
Daylesford CFA Brigade
Hebpurn Shire Council
Land & Built Environment
CFA – D15 Community Safety Team]
[On-screen logos: CFA, Safer Together, Victoria State Government]
END
Page last updated: 16/09/25