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Ian McKinlay is the city’s keeper of the Golden Trowel, honoured in December 2024 at Wollongong Council’s Environment Volunteers Awards. His prize tool saw action soon after, finding a rare species of flowering ground-cover on its first outing at Woodlands Creek.

“Since then it’s stayed at home,” says Ian, mindful of a previous winner’s warning that the trowel’s golden shine lasts about 10 digs.

Ian is a retired history teacher who runs a Bushcare group with 18 volunteers at Hewitts and Flanagans creeks.

“We have grown to be the biggest working group that there is in Wollongong Council area. I think we’re probably the most active,” Ian says.

“I’m just surprised a lot more people don’t do it – because it’s the outdoors, it’s good company, it’s socially rewarding, and it’s doing something useful. The number of people I see exercising for their own personal [enjoyment] … they could just do this.”

The man with the golden trowel

Born in 1954, Ian grew up in “the bush end of Corrimal”, in an age when children were free to roam from the beach to escarpment (even the bit belonging to South Bulli Coal Mine, where he remembers people keeping cattle and the odd horse). “We wandered where we wished,” he says. “I just like being in nature and always have.”

Ian attended Corrimal primary and Woonona high. “History was always my best subject,”he says.

After studying at the University of Wollongong, Ian taught for four decades, with all but one year spent at Lake Illawarra High School. “It’s an outer suburban working class high school – and it was never boring,” he says. “The morale and the collegiality in that place was just exceptional.”

Ian remains a strong advocate for public schools but his retirement plans come from a childhood hobby, which dates from growing up on a block of land stretching down to a creek and a big fig tree.

“I was getting the coal out of the coal heap as a 10-year-old and thinking, what are those birds?”

He’s since become a fully fledged member of the Illawarra Bird Observers Club, with a three-decade record of local birds that he began after moving to Thirroul in 1996.

“I’ve got a lifelong bird-watching addiction,” Ian confesses. “I could never figure out why bird watchers weren’t prepared to do a bit of environmental work. And so I thought that’s what I’d like to do [in retirement].

“I had foolish dreams of working up on the escarpment. But you can actually go up there and when you know something about weeds, you just have to come back down here, because it’s just too big, too much up there.”

His first Bushcare experience was at Hewitts Creek, in the area behind McCauleys Beach, helping Marcel Van Wijk one Sunday a month. Before retiring, Ian did a TAFE course at Yallah in environmental management. All the while, he was receiving valuable practical education thanks to other volunteers, like Bellami Dunecare’s Carol Nance and Lynne Kavanagh, “who actually knew everything”, he says. “Particularly Lynne, and she still works there today.

“When I finished the TAFE course, Marcel said, ‘Look, this site is yours’.”

And so, in 2013, Ian found himself leading a new group looking after the Hewitts Creek area.

“We haven’t conquered it yet, but we’ve made a fairly big impression,” he says.

The birds have certainly benefitted.

“I’ve got records that run to about 90 native species down at Hewitts Creek,” Ian says. “Last couple of weeks, we had the first sacred kingfisher I’ve seen down there for four years. We get some brown quail occasionally. Most recent we had a Buff-banded rail.”

Water dragons, blue-tongue lizards and ringtail possums have also been spotted in their patch.

Fresh challenge in Thirroul

Late last year Council added to the group’s activities with a new area between Flanagans Creek and the surf club car park in Thirroul.

“It’s a very challenging bit of land, it’s been neglected – in Bushcare terms – forever,” Ian says. “It’s a favourite hangout of some of the local kids and they left some of their disused material there. It hasn’t got a wide range of weeds, but it’s got an awful lot of three or four main weeds, like asparagus fern and lantana and morning glory.”

Fortunately in the dozen years that Ian’s been leading the group, it has grown almost five-fold.

“We started with four and it’s just grown organically,” he says. “To see the difference you’re making is pretty good.”

Who cares for the bush

Most volunteers, other than the occasional student in environmental management, are recent retirees, including former teachers, IT workers, a metallurgist, an industrial chemist, an agricultural scientist and a retired farmer.

Bushcare is chiefly about weeding and maintenance, but Ian’s group has also helped re-establish native species, working according to council’s Bushcare vegetation plan.

They’ve planted shrubs and small trees, with seedlings from council’s nursery. One significant addition is a number of young sandpaper figs.

“Sandpaper fig apparently is very good at holding the banks of creeks together – and, of course, Thirroul’s creeks are not holding together that well in recent times,” Ian says.

“That April flood last year, it went through part of our site that I’ve never seen water on before – it clearly went over there at least a foot, maybe 30 centimetres deep, by the look of all the rubbish and logs and things that were strewn over it.”

Due to climate change, future floods are likely to be intense. “We just hope they’re far enough apart that the sandpaper figs and other things we plant are well established by the time they hit.”

Cleaning Up Australia

On the day the Flame visits, volunteers are doing a Bushcare shift, then a Clean Up Australia Day shift. They also take part in council’s Rise and Shine clean-up program and over the years have seen all sorts wash in, from wheelbarrows to weeds like madeira vine. After one flood, Ian found a beach dog-walking sign 40 metres upstream.

“We do a fair bit of clean-up,” he says.

Though there’s some tree vandalism, the worst vandals are the deer, which trample and graze on plantings, ringbark and knock down trees in their rutting season from July to August. Rabbits are also pests; foxes and cats are the big wildlife killers.

Ian recommends a slow removal of lantana for the sake of ground-feeding birds, like yellow robins and superb fairywrens. “Lantana is actually quite good, it’s giving them protection and a leaf litter to work through.”

Weed removal is mainly by hand, rarely they use Roundup and only for cutting and painting weeds too big to pull out. “We certainly don’t spray anything.”

At the end of a Monday morning stint of Bushcare, it’s clear the activity is good for both people and planet. “Look at this group – look at how wonderfully fit and trim they all are,” Ian says.

“Certainly the physical side of it is something that keeps you relatively nimble and makes sure you get a bit of peripheral vision still happening.”

Our conversation pauses as students, possibly late for school, whizz by on e-bikes.

In the quiet that descends after 9am, we take a final photo of the Golden Trowel and learn that it is actually not the group’s first award. Council recognised Hewitts Creek Bushcare in its founding year. “Our prize was a native fig, which we planted back in 2014,” Ian says. “It’s now 10 years old … it’s about four or five metres tall.”

Watch this space – a decade from today, where will the current seedlings be?

In 2023/24, the WCC Natural Areas Volunteer program had 50 groups with a total of 370 people who put in 11,793 volunteer hours. To join a group, head to council’s Bushcare webpage or call (02) 4227 7111.