Funding

Because of the way I am able to approach bringing the forests of Sassafras back the costs are fairly low, just quite labour and time intensive. It is my passion, others would call it a hobby, if that's the case then it is a cheap hobby! For all of the past decade we paid for my passion out of our money.

For many years I had looked at various forms of funding and long term protection for all the time and effort put in. I looked at a few programs, two of them had too many strings attached for my liking. Eventually we settled on the first one we looked at, making Sassafras a Wildlife Refuge under the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Act, 1974. It is not iron clad permanent protection, that is it can be revoked by the property owner, or the Minister of the day. However it does give Sassafras the same protections from outside actions that a National Park has, a good start.

Early in 2012 because Sassafras is Wildlife Refuge, as part of the occaisional mailings from the Conservation Partners program we got an applicaition form for funding from the Foundation for National Parks and Wildlife. We applied and were succesful for a June 2012 start.

All of the costs we used to incur to fix Sassafras are now covered for the next 3 years. After a decade I had a pretty fair idea of what I spend and what wears out when. All I have to do is record what I spent the money on, create a record of what I have done, and work to the plan I created as part of the submission. Not too onerous especially as now my passion is paid for.

So far so good after 3 months. The one thing I have learnt is not to make the new areas being started too big, so you can tick them off fairly quickly, hopefully the same month you start them. I think that looks better rather than taking months to finish doing a larger area, also you don't get tied down doing one location. Another point is when it rains travelling by quad bike is not good for tracks on a daily basis, it is good to have the option to travel to other areas on foot. The ground here can stay damp for many months.