Our projects

The DPA started the community plant nursery in 2006. Since then we have grown thousands of trees, shrubs, native grasses and groundcovers for the parklands and schools, farms and community revegetation projects right along the creek catchment. Members come to a park care day and help to sow native seeds into tubes. They can then take a box of tubes home to care for the seedlings until they grow large enough to be planted.

The DPA is working with the Darebin Creek Management Committee to secure funding and support to develop a concept plan for a new catchment environment and education centre in the parklands. The new centre was a priority recommendation of the Banyule and Darebin Council funded parklands master plan. We staged a highly successful workshop with all of the councils from the catchment, Melbourne Water and Northcote MP Fiona Richardson in 2010. Now, we are working to secure in principle support from catchment councils for a funding bid to the State Government's Community Support Fund.

The DPA has commissioned author and historian Dr Sarah Mirams to write a history of the parklands and the DPA, telling the story of how community action transformed a former quarry tip and horse paddock into one of Melbourne's best urban bushland reserves. Darebin Parklands: Escaping the Claws of the Machine will be launched on 13 November 2011.

The DPA's objective is to create more native habitat so that more animals, including platypus, can live in the parklands. Helping to improve the water quality of the creek is a big part of this. We undertake a range of projects including running Junior Ranger Club activities like Catch a Carp Day and Junior Ranger water pollution action day (run in conjunction with North East Melbourne WaterWatch), which includes painting anti-pollution platypus stencils on drain covers around the parklands.

We have also had Julia Vanderoord, WaterWatch officer with North East Melbourne WaterWatch as a guest speaker at an information evening and in 2011 we conducted two sucessful creek cleanup days after the January floods.

In 2010 the DPA finished a major revegetation project along the darebin Creek, on the Ivanhoe Floodplain. The $11,000 three year project, funded by Melbourne Water with support from Banyule Council, saw creek bank stabilisation works and planting of 10,000 native grasses, groundcovers, shrubs and trees. Community groups including Global Club, local schools and Darebin DOG's assisted with the work.

In 2011 we started work on our new project site, around the Clifton Bridge in the parklands.

We work with the parklands' rangers and plant appropriate indigenous species as part of our goal of creating more native habitat in the parklands.