As you know, it rained last weekend – which for us was both a good thing and a bad thing. Good, because the rainwater tanks were down to the bottom rung and the Bureau of Meteorology wasn’t predicting any tank-fillers for months. Bad, because in our area, every time it rains it leads to nocturnal people wanting to test their four-wheel-driving prowess in the bush next door.
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Sometimes, often about 2-3am, we’ll hear this distressed roaring and raging in the bush, probably similar to the sounds of mating dinosaurs. It can go on for hours, as people bog their vehicles in the mud wallows they have created.
Occasionally, we have taken the dogs out for a bushwalk the next day only to find vehicles bogged so badly you can’t even see the wheels.
One was found lying on its side in the mud like a felled white wildebeest. On another occasion, a once nice, high-spec Commodore was found in the middle of a mucky wallow – its front and back bumpers ripped off and the entire cabin half filled with watery clay.
I should have said this is in a designated bushland reserve, about 5km from the centre of Bendigo. It’s not on some remote, outback bit of scrub.
We’ve had some talks with Parks Victoria about this.
And even though the local staff are nice people who care passionately about the natural environment, it seems money to either stop the midnight rumblers, or to repair the damage they’ve done, never seems to be available.
There was talk last year of filling in the growing lakes and canyons with gravel and digging some drains, but that didn’t happen.
One piece of advice from the Parks folk was to get the neighbourhood motivated, and we’ve touched base with a few of them.
They say they’re just as annoyed as we are and don’t know what to do about it either.
Parks Victoria also advised us not to actively discourage the activity, but to report it to the cops.
Done that a few times, along with calls about unregistered monkeybikes with unlicensed kids ripping along public roads to get into the bush to tear it up a bit more.
Signs went up. They’ve been about as effective as standing outside the White House with a sign saying: “Errr, be nice to Australia, Mr Trump”.
One morning this week, out in the New Bayou, a thought occurred: a bloke should not whinge so much. There’s always an upside. In this case, it’s the contagious, unmitigated glee of the two corgis, who seem to think these marvellous mud-baths are created seasonally just for their doggy pleasure. They leap into the knee-deep ruts and hollows like furry dolphins, sometimes with just their eyeballs and ears above water and charge their way back to dry land shaking themselves like kitchen mops and looking like nothing so much as four-legged lamingtons. So that’s something.
Also this week, we came across a new variation on the mud-pluggers. It looked as though someone had rammed a four-wheel-drive through thick scrub, flattening it for about 30m. At the end of this instant new track, they’d left their mark.
An old mattress, a busted microwave, a snapped off timber bollard, a worn-out chair, piles of old papers and assorted other sacrificial domestic offerings to the gods of the bushland reserve.
Mrs Whacked surveyed the damage and remarked it probably would have been easier and cheaper if they’d taken it to the tip.
WAYNE GREGSON