Dear Tweed Shire Council,

I strongly support the proposed funding in Council’s budget for maintenance of Tweed’s Littoral Rainforest remnants, as has been proposed by Councillor Firth and is awaiting a vote of the 7 Councillors.

Regarding the Literal Rainforest remnants:

4 Council owned small pockets of land with trees and related ecologies.

Council is deciding soon that Council can’t afford weed control and basic vegetative management, so they won’t approve it in the budget, so it will continue to be uncared for.

The 4 small patches of rainforest are almost all that is left of what was once the best remaining rainforest on the mainland, The Rainforest of the Tweed Volcano Caldera.

As the continent moved north on the globe towards the equator, the rainforest which once occupied the entire Eastern coastline of Australia began to dry and be replaced by eucalypts. The rainforest of the eastern coastline disappeared. The Tweed Volcano Caldera Rainforest Survived.

The geological caldera, the erosion caldera of the Tweed Volcano, with its high rainfall topography, protected the original rainforest ecology through until quite recent times (someone imported a saw and it was all over).

In the Caldera today only small pockets of that original rainforest remain.

Which takes us to Tweed Shire Council’s role in its responsibility to manage weed control and basic vegetive maintenance of the remaining pockets of original rainforest ecologies. The key fact is that it is Council land, council has the legal responsibility to manage weed control and vegetative management on those lands, at the very very least.

Tweed Council strategies, plans and policy documents abound with ecological buzzwords, but the last of the original once wondrous Tweed Volcano Caldera Rainforest, the remnants of it, is treat appallingly by Council.

Tweed’s Littoral Rainforests are greatly valued by the community but sadly classified as ‘Critically Endangered’ due to historical poor management. 

Council has a critical responsibility to ensure the environmental integrity of these last few remaining coastal forests are maintained and improved.

End.