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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2010-06-23 Daily Xml
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Grievance Debate

GEMTREE VINEYARDS

Mr BIGNELL (Mawson) (16:01): On Sunday, it was my great pleasure to attend Gemtree Vineyards in the great electorate of Mawson at McLaren Vale to celebrate Arbor Day by planting trees with other volunteers, locals and people who had actually come from a fair way away to plant trees for the day.

We planted about five and a half thousand plants which included totem-poles, sticky hop bush, kangaroo thorn and mixed grasses such as wallaby grass, spear grass, windmill grass and tall wheatgrass. Drooping she-oaks and native daisies were also planted in the grassland areas although I did not plant any native daisies: I was in charge of the acacias.

It was a wonderful day and probably, I think, the fourth Arbor Day that I have celebrated in the Gemtree Vineyards over the past five years. Michael and Melissa Brown and Andrew and Helen Buttery run the Gemtree Vineyards and do a magnificent job. They are all about sustainability and biodiversity and I think that is the way of the future for the Australian wine industry.

These people set a fantastic example. Not only are they producing wine that is biodynamic, they are also making sure that the area that they own has a lot of native shrubs in it which then in turn makes a fantastic habitat for our native animals including, obviously, the birds but also the frogs. They have built six interconnecting dams on their property to bring back to the area the frogs that are under enormous threat through pesticides and other man-made forces.

Greening Australia is their major partner in this exercise and I also want to pay tribute to the Greening Australia chief executive here in South Australia, Mark Anderson, and Sam Catford, who is the communications manager. They did a fantastic job to get about 150 people out there on Sunday. It was a beautiful day to be in the Vale, very sunny. It was the day after some nice rain that softened up the ground so that it made it fairly easy to use our picks to dig our little holes to put the seedlings in.

Arbor Day actually started here in South Australia. The very first Arbor Day was held in Adelaide back in, I think, 1889. The Gemtree Vineyards decided about 1998 that they wanted to do something to make a statement about sustainability for our area and for the vineyards. They contacted Greening Australia and I think they have been very happy with the partnership that has been formed.

When you drive along through McLaren Flat to Kangarilla you will just see all these fantastic native trees on the left-hand side of the road as you head towards Kangarilla. It really does stand out and it is something that I think our whole—

Mr Pengilly: Is Kangarilla in your electorate?

Mr BIGNELL: No; Kangarilla is not in the electorate. I will tell you later. It really does stand out particularly when you compare it to the camel farm, which is just a few hundred metres back down the road, and the barren land there. What a difference it can make if someone has the initiative to go out and plant all these native species and return some of the land to what it used to be.

The Brown and Buttery families also cleaned out a lot of the native creeks. People would know—as I do having come from a farm myself—that on farms old quarries and creeks have often been used as dumping grounds for old fences and things like that over the years. They went through and pulled out a heap of scrap metal a few years ago and really started that rehabilitation work on their property.

I really want to congratulate them for that because they are setting a fine example for the rest of McLaren Vale—a wine region that is already proud of its environmental credentials and an area that is working hard to make sure that we have generational farming for decades and decades to come. They are really starting to set the benchmarks, and we are already leading the way in the use of recycled water and other environmental benefits. I think the more we look at not just the domestic wine market but also overseas markets, people will look at markets that do things well environmentally not just in terms of producing the grapes but also in making the wines. So, I would like to congratulate them for the fine example they have set.

It was interesting talking to Mark Anderson, because as we look towards preserving the Willunga Basin, I think Greening Australia will provide a good template for us to make sure that we not only maintain the area and protect ecotourism and aquaculture but also protect it for biodiversity as well, and make sure that we have all those native trees and the animals that come with it.

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