Welcome to Term 3 everyone!
2026 mid-year achievements report: We are very pleased to release this report sharing great outcomes, engagement and stories from across the state. This is a document full of eye-catching stats, lovely photos and easy to read stories. Open it up and take a look – you might just find a photo, story or quote from your school in there!
It’s also a great document to share with your school council, local Landcare group, potential funding bodies/sponsors about the wonderful program you are part of so feel free to distribute widely! For a summary better suited to your students and school community we will be putting together a short celebration video. We’ll circulate it soon.
Important reminder about your EC test: If you are using the pink and white LAQUA twin EC meter for your salinity testing there is something important you need to keep in mind. If a decimal number such as 3.50 is shown this is NOT a low reading. The meter has converted a very high reading to something that can be displayed on the screen. You must multiply decimal numbers by 1000 to calculate your result. Eg 3500
Good news – platypus sighted after 30 years: We thought you’d like to hear this great news from the Australian Platypus Conservancy May newsletter. It’s a good lesson for students (and us) that hope is never lost!
In 2002 the Australian Platypus Conservancy conducted a platypus live-trapping study along the Curdies River, a small coastal water course located in south-western Victoria. The Corangamite Catchment Management Authority (CCMA) commissioned the work to find out if a platypus population was still found in this self-contained system, despite a history of habitat degradation and reduced flow, compounded by drought.
The results were not encouraging. No animals were recorded in two nights of fieldwork sampling 11 sites distributed across 32 kilometres of the Curdies River and its tributaries. A concurrent effort to elicit local sighting reports concluded that platypus had not been regularly observed anywhere in the system since the 1950s, with none seen at all since the mid-1990s. Accordingly, there seemed to be a strong likelihood that platypus numbers had dwindled over time to the point that the population was now extinct or effectively so.
It was therefore extremely exciting to learn in November 2025 that a local resident, Catherine McPherson, had not only spotted but managed to record on video a platypus swimming in the Curdies River near the Timboon Trestle Bridge (one of the sites where survey nets had been set in 2002)
If you’d like to read more head here. The APC newsletter is a great one to subscribe to if you are interested in keeping in touch with platypus (and rakali) news.
