⏱️ This edition of the West Vic Brolga newsletter is a five-minute read.
👋🏻 Hello Brolga readers, Zara here for a Monday edition of the newsletter after Friday’s public holiday.
Plenty happening in today’s edition, including:
🎓 Federation University’s response to recent immigration and visa policy announcements;
🌾 A look into Western Victoria’s canola season;
🩺 A look into whether West Vic urgent care clinics are keeping people out of hospital;
🐍 Colac’s snake catcher tells the Brolga about the busy season ahead;
🚜 And a chat with West Vic farmers on the benefits of regenerative farming.
Quick hits: Police were conducting warrantless searches at Stockland Wendouree Shopping Centre yesterday.
Trivia answer 📕
The old Ballarat Zoo was located in the North Gardens within the Ballarat Botanical Gardens, and was operational until 1959.
Across the patch 🗞️
Western Victoria’s two urgent care clinics had more than 30,000 consultations last financial year, giving breathing space to hospital emergency departments (EDs) and ambulances in Warrnambool and Ballarat.
In Ballarat 70 percent of patients said they would have otherwise attended an ED or called an ambulance. In Warrnambool it was 40 percent.
What are urgent care clinics? Urgent care clinics were introduced in Victoria in September 2022, with Ballarat’s clinic opening in November the same year and Warrnambool in July 2025.
The clinics’ longer opening hours allow doctors to provide treatment for non-life threatening medical issues like minor bone fractures, sprains, cuts, burns, sports injuries, gastroenteritis or minor infections and illnesses.
No appointment, GP referral or Medicare card is required to be seen and all treatments are bulk billed.
The service is delivered through local health networks like the Western Victoria Primary Health Network and largely funded by the federal government.
Werneth farmer Zac Carty has planted canola on his farm for 15 years. This season, he’s hoping the yellow carpets across his 430 hectares will result in a decent profit befitting the months of work he’s put into the crop.
Although fertiliser and keeping pests away are expensive, Carty told the Brolga, “if you do everything right and you take a lot of care, you can actually grow a decent crop and make a lot of money out of it”.
The market can be mercurial. “Years ago, we used to get $500 a tonne for canola, and then it got to $1,000, but it's gone back to $800,” Carty said. He describes $800 as “a pretty good price” but is hopeful of it climbing back to four figures.
Based on anecdotal evidence, Carty said “everyone’s up on their canola hectares, more than normal.”
Every time, there is a burst of adrenaline.
In his six years in the reptile relocation business, Colac snake catcher Benny McNamara has been called to retrieve the slithering, cold-blooded vertebrates when they’re basking on a walking path, nestled in a bathroom or eating a frog by the lake.
“It becomes quite dangerous to handle in some scenarios, especially if you're getting them in grasses, where you can't see where the head is, and you're just blindly grabbing, which I wouldn't recommend,” he told the Brolga.
In the Central Highlands 🗞️
Federation University is warning recent policy announcements limiting international student numbers will hurt local students that want to study in Ballarat and Horsham.
The university has thousands of students across multiple campuses, and a quarter of them are international students. Without the funding these students provide, a spokesperson told the Brolga the institution cannot subsidise local students.
What happened? A string of recent policy announcements have focussed on cutting international student numbers to reach a lower migration figure.
One Nation leader Pauline Hanson released a plan to reduce international student places from 590,000 to 350,000. The proposal also limits the ability of graduates to work in Australia after their studies are completed, from 270,000 to 40,000.
The Federal Labor government also announced visa changes that would make it harder for students to bring family members to Australia with them while they study.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said the ultimate goal of the changes is to bring net overseas migration down to 225,000 from 245,000.
A statement released last Thursday by Universities Australia, the peak body for the sector, said “international students have been blamed too often for problems they didn’t create”.
The numbers: Federation University has campuses across Victoria, through Ballarat, Horsham, Melbourne and Gippsland.
According to Top University data, the undergraduate student population of the university is 8,387 and 2,500 of these students are international.
The local perspective: A spokesperson for Federation University said the institution “supports a higher education system that puts Australian students and regional communities first”, but a drastic cut in international student numbers “fails to account for how universities are actually funded”.
A crime spike in Ballarat and a staffing shortage has rendered Victoria police under-manned, with opposing plans revealed by Labor and the Coalition.
What happened? There is a notable shortage in the Victorian police force, with approximately 1,500 vacant positions.
Some have attributed the shortage to mass burnout among the force and a lack of resources.
At the end of 2025, just under 500 officers departed the force. This was to cash in on a deal that expired on December 31 of the same year that allowed officers to cash in on 12 months of unused personal leave, on medical grounds, if they retired.
In July, hundreds of retired police officers volunteered to re-join the force to ease pressure. The retired officers are joining as “reservists”, performing administrative duties, handling evidence in preparation for court cases and staffing police stations.
The Ballarat Botanical Gardens are one of the oldest in the state, with many stories within the park boundaries.
Thanks for reading today’s newsletter folks!
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Cheers,
Zara