⏱️ This edition of the West Vic Brolga newsletter is a five-minute read.
👋🏻 Hello Brolga readers, Zara here with Friday’s newsletter.
In today’s edition, we’ve got:
🥘 A profile of a beloved Ballarat family business;
🌳 Another 66 plane trees in Hamilton’s CBD facing the chop;
💧 And a Bacchus Marsh river rezoning causing controversy.
Let’s jump in.
In the Southwest 🗞️
Almost every plane tree in Hamilton’s CBD should be removed to stop further damage from roots and risks to pedestrians, an audit has found, but the chainsaws are likely five or six years away.
What happened: At Tuesday’s council meeting, Southern Grampians councillors unanimously accepted an audit and endorsed the removal process of the trees across all three stages of the Hamilton CBD Streetscape Revitalisation project.
Stage one: The decision follows council’s December 5-1 vote to remove 25 trees along Gray Street after they were all found to have caused significant damage to footpaths and shopfronts due to their large roots.
In April, councillors delayed adoption of new CBD design plans until a “happy medium” could be found regarding the trees.
A petition to save the trees attracted 538 signatures at the time, highlighting the CBD’s “rich canopy that has taken three decades to form” and its environmental and aesthetic benefits, including oxygen production, biodiversity support, flood alleviation, and tourism appeal.
In August, the Hamilton CBD Streetscape Project Advisory Group was formed, comprising local business owners and community members from both sides of the debate.
Not so plain: Plane trees are native to Europe and North America, with large leafy canopies. Their roots, however, have been known to grow to large sizes and cause damage to footpaths, drainage and pipes. The ones in Hamilton are more than 40 years old.
Next phases: The same method has now been applied to 38 trees in stage two and 28 in stage three, along Thompson Street, Brown Street and remaining parts of Gray Street not covered in stage one.
Director Rory Neeson told the meeting the results showed “a high majority of the trees having ratings that would recommend removal”.
When will they be removed? Stages two and three of the CBD upgrade are “five, six years away”, according to Neeson, with trees only being taken down “when works are happening in that section of the streets”.
Trees posing a danger would be removed much sooner.
“Council won’t be wearing the risk of having trees within the CBD that are causing a risk to pedestrians,” Neeson said.
Now what? Replacement species for the streetscape are yet to be selected.
Whether you’re launching a boat or casting a line off the rocks, spring and summer provide the perfect opportunity to get the gear out and head on a trip. Just make sure you have the appropriate license before you go.
Lake Purrumbete
Lake Purrumbete, a short drive from Camperdown, is a deep volcanic lake known for large brown and rainbow trout, tiger trout, Chinook salmon and redfin perch.
How to fish it: A boat ramp is available for boat fishing, while shore fishing is possible from accessible sections of the lake.
Lorne beach and pier
Lorne is a popular fishing spot year-round along the Great Ocean Road. Typical catches include Australian salmon, snapper, silver trevally, King George whiting, squid, garfish and flathead.
How to fish it: From the pier, or along the rocks between the pier and the main beach.
Lake Hamilton
A manmade lake established in 1977, Lake Hamilton is right in town and is stocked with trout and redfin perch.
How to fish it: Fishing from land is welcomed all the time while powered boats are only able to access the unrestricted area of the lake from 11am on Mondays, Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays.
Rocklands Reservoir
Surrounded by forest and filled with submerged timber, Rocklands Reservoir near Balmoral has numerous bays and arms to explore, and reel in redfin, Murray cod, golden perch and brown trout.
How to fish it: Boat ramps provide access to the reservoir, while shore fishing is possible from accessible banks.
In the Central Highlands 🗞️
A proposal to rezone land on the riverbanks of Bacchus Marsh will head to an independent panel for review, largely due to resident and activist concerns that future construction could create flood risk and harm local platypuses.
What happened? At its October meeting, Moorabool Shire Council voted unanimously to appointment an independent panel to field concerns over a proposed rezoning along the Werribee River. The appointment would go through Planning Minister Sonya Kilkenny.
Councillor Paul Tatchell commented that the town is “growing at a ridiculous pace”.
What’s proposed: The area in question sits at the intersection between Halletts Way and Adelong Way, and requires rezoning from agricultural land to residential. It also includes the subdivision of a 2.6 hectare property into five lots.
Residents shared 82 submissions during the community engagement portion of the process, many citing their concerns for environmental impact.
Groups like the Bacchus Marsh Platypus Alliance and Moorabool Environment Group argued that one particular part of the area, a 4,465 square metre block dubbed “lot D”, should remain a protected, public space.
The concerns: Natasha Evans, Vice President of the Bacchus Marsh Platypus Alliance, told the Brolga the initial biodiversity assessment of the area made several errors, mislabelling a threatened plant as non-indigenous and making no mention of the area's local platypus population.
“It’s been farming land forever and a day, but because it’s a really beautiful open paddock, right next to the river, many people consider it part of the reserve and a lot of animals use it - kangaroos, wallabies, birds of prey, lots of lizards and snakes,” Evans said.
Second go: The firm responsible for the assessment recently returned to the site and delivered a second report.
“Melbourne Water also put in a few suggestions, about the drainage aspect,” Evans told the Brolga. “It’s basically underneath a 100-year flood zone, so they said it’s off the cards”.
The platypuses: Evans said the issue with developing the area above the river is the sediment, and it could harm the area’s platypuses.
“When they break ground, use earthmoving machinery, all that soil goes into the river,” she said. “So platypuses struggle to find enough food, there’s a lot of turbidity. It basically washes the macro invertebrates the platypus feeds on down the river”.
What next? The planning panel is set for February 2027, with no final decision likely until mid-2027.
“We haven’t been able to stop all of it,” Evans said. “But the land below it is going to be revegetated with ecologically-correct plants and handed back to council in two years,”
“So it’s not all bad things.”
David Tan operates Nasi Rice with his family on Howitt Street in Wendouree, about 5 kilometres outside of central Ballarat.
Three generations of the family have been chefs, and David and his siblings have each grown up around rich, homemade food.
“I actually grew up believing everybody can cook,” David told the Brolga. “It’s kind of funny, it was only in my 20s I realised that wasn’t true.”
The space: The Nasi Rice space was initially acquired by the family to function as a central kitchen and storage space in 2023, and it became operational this year.
When David returned to the family business in 2024, after spending several years working with Imperial College in London, he began shifting the space around to be a retail store.
Now, he and his mother, Bee, produce up to 650 dumplings and dim sims in the space per week for wholesale with their own family recipe.
Story so far: Don, David’s father, first moved to Australia from Malaysia in the late 1990s, followed soon by Bee. David moved in 2007, and his sister, Angeline, left a software job to join the family business as well.
“Everyone has had a different journey,” he said, adding that the family all moved at different times, and got involved in the business at different times.
He added that, last year, the family realised the areas they have lived and worked in coincidentally followed the same pathway as Victoria’s first Chinese immigrants during the gold rush, starting in Robe - where many ships dropped off passengers to avoid the £10 poll Victorian tax on Chinese immigrants - followed by Bendigo and Ballarat.
The food: David told the Brolga a few of the family’s signature dishes are Hainanese chicken rice and his father’s rendang recipe, which they have previously incorporated into pies.
David said his preferred cooking method is actually baking - he likes the scientific methodology behind it, and used this thinking to create the curry-ayam pie in Ballarat's Best Pie Competition earlier this year.
The pie was entirely gluten-free, with a crust constructed exclusively from potato.
Rock Lobster: Don’s first restaurant was in Robe, South Australia. David said Don introduced a new way of cooking lobster to the locals - as a noodle dish, rather than steamed, salt boiled or fried.
“We had a few instances where people kept bringing in lobsters to the shop and went, hey can you whip this up for me?” he said with a laugh.
Looking ahead: For the past 7 years, David’s father has operated Don’s Kitchen out of Midlands Bowls Club in Invermay Park. He said his dad is “always the head chef”. Soon after the contract for Don’s Kitchen finishes this Sunday, the business will be joining Nasi Rice with plans to create a hybrid restaurant-cafe space.
“I have left a lot of furniture on wheels,” David said with a laugh. “To make sure we can always move things around.”
On Your Feed 📱
We visited a pub in central Ballarat with a lot of local history and memories, dating back to 1866:
That’s all I’ve got for you today, thanks for reading folks.
As always, please get in touch with any thoughts, comments, feedback or news tips you have for us. Just reply to this email.
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Cheers,
Zara