After the Floods: A Walk in the State Forest

A kangaroo bolts into the greenery of the Nyah State Forest

The December floods in the Mallee district were of historic proportions. Old-timers have to reach back more than 50 years to think of a rain event in this dry area of the state that compares with it. Many farmers received their average annual rainfall in two days of torrential rain, seeing salt pans fill up, paddocks turn into billabongs and previously dry lakes and creeks fill to overflowing.

With the passage of time, the waters are receding. Some farmers look back on a a fraught harvest and a ruined crop. Others, lucky to get in early, managed to turn two crops out of the one growing season as the flood waters germinated seeds left in the ground after harvest. With indefatigable optimism, Mallee farmers look forward to the next season, relishing the harvest that will come from ground that has been adequately watered for the first time in decades.

The Nyah State Forest, on the banks of the Murray River, is a great place to observe the aftermath of the floods. In recent years it has been as dry as a tack, criss-crossed by dusty dirt tracks where walkers and campers could move among a large variety of woodland birds and animals. Other than by the Murray itself, it was rare to spot any kind of waterfowl; it would be more than five years since I spotted a solitary sacred ibis by a waterhole in the park.

Christmas in the park was a revelation. Hard on the heels of the rains, large swathes of it were still under water. Roads were closed to traffic, and not much better for walking. On one walk I went no more then five minutes along one of my favourite trails, only to be confronted with a billabong where once had been a dirt track and a succession of dry-looking mallee trees and eucalypts.

Nyah State Forest, Christmas 2010

The same area of the forest, Easter 2010

A few months later, and the park has changed in character once again. Some of the water has receded, and more of the tracks are open. Campers are able to set up on the banks of the river. Some tracks are still closed, and many others are severely rutted and scarred by the receding waters.

On entering the park I set along my favourite path, which had disappeared under water in December. While open, the track was almost indecipherable under a carpet of green. The dry creek bed at the start was now a stream where ducks swam. The waterhole where I had once spotted an ibis was now a slow-moving creek, covered with a layer of green algae. A family of Eurasian coots which swam by its banks turned tail and bolted into dense foliage as I approached.

A creek flows where once had been a dry ditch

Once again I did not get as far as the river bank, as a new billabong blocked the way. Butcherbirds, magpies and kookaburras gave voice to a cacophony of birdsong. In the rare pauses, ravens and choughs uttered monotonal calls that sounded for all the world like grumpy neighbours asking the noisemakers to shut up.

Time was up, so I had to head back. I wonder what will the place look like when I next walk there?

Greg

Are Compulsory Helmet Laws Effective?

Last year I read a book by Tom Vanderbilt called Traffic which indicated that cyclists wearing helmets made them less safe, not more. Vanderbilt's thesis was that car drivers tended to travel closer to helmet-wearing cyclists, while giving a wider berth to the unprotected. Implicitly, this put helmet wearers at greater risk.

I had not previously questioned Australia's mandatary helmet laws. Instinctively, it just seemed the right thing to do to put on a helmet. On reading that book, I started to wonder whether the compulsory helmet legislation was automatically a good thing. Around the same time, there appeared to be a groundswell of opinion challenging them, notably in the case of Melbourne's new bike rental scheme, which was failing miserably due to these laws.

This year I fell off my bike and landed on my head. Let's just say that my anecdotal evidence came to outweigh Vanderbilt's empirical evidence.

Now new research published in the Age indicates that modern helmets are nowhere near as effective as the helmets that were around when the legislation was brought in. Again, this casts doubt on whether the legislation actually achieves what it sets out to do - protect cyclists from harm.

Very few countries have such laws in any form. The rest of the world seems to get along just fine without them, and do not seem inclined to follow our lead. Indeed some of the safest countries in the world for cyclists, such as Denmark and the Netherlands, do not have helmet laws and cyclists rarely wear them. The key factor in their safety appears not to be helmets, but the fact that there are large numbers of cyclists in those countries, so car drivers are more accepting of them. There is safety in numbers.

Unlike the case for, say, seat belts, it appears that the science supporting the helmet laws is far from clear. It's a good question whether the State should be mandating that we do things for our own good when the evidence that they work is highly contestable.

I think my view would now be that compulsory helmet legislation is not a good idea, because people ought to be allowed to decide for themselves when the evidence is so unclear. And, personally, my decision would be to never, ever ride without a helmet.