Myalup Coastwest Planting Program

Over two weeks 15,000 seedlings will be planted in the Myalup Dunes to rehabilitate the coastline.

This week 4,000 seedlings were planted by schoolchildren from Perth who had an interest in rehabilitating the South West coastline. Next week, Our Lady of Mercy College Australind students will continue the program followed by another school from Perth.

The program was the brainchild of three school children at Ardross Primary in Perth who wanted to help rehabilitate the environment after the 2016 Yarloop Waroona bushfires.

Shire of Harvey Environmental Officer Samantha Pickering said there was a lot of interest from school children in Perth to help out after the fires and since 2016 the program has evolved from planting around Yarloop to now rehabilitating the Myalup coastline.

“This program has allowed city kids to appreciate and enjoy what Myalup has to offer and it’s been a great success,” Ms Pickering said.

“This program attracts a cohort of young people who appreciate the process on the dunes and how that’s going to affect us all in the future and how we can help to make it better.

“This program has also shown what the Shire of Harvey has to offer to people in Perth and these kids often come down after the planting to show their families. It has opened up tourism in a sense of getting people down here to appreciate the area.”

Program coordinator Bruce Ivers said the kids loved taking part in the project “it is a really special place, what a classroom, right next to the ocean.”

“The teachers love it as well, they call it a real activity, it’s not something they are doing in their heads, they are out using their hands to produce a real revegetation outcome.

“The thing they can connect with is that they can do something about climate change, that’s a very important issue to them.

“What we tell them here is we can’t stop sea-level rise by what we do here but we can slow down some of the bad effects by planting seedlings on the dunes and also stopping the wind erosion.

“What we really want to do is give the kids some hope that they can make a difference and give them the confidence to have a go and showing them that they can plant a lot of seedlings in a short amount of time.”

The program is funded by a Coastwest grant and the Shire of Harvey.