🟠 What is the root of all things?

WHAT’S ON THIS WEEK 🎟️

• THURSDAY 19/03/26, 7.30-9.30PM | Kew Court House Live: Ashes

• FRIDAY 20/03/26, 7.30-9.30PM | Kew Court House Live: Bella Ciao

• FRIDAY 20/03/26 TO SUNDAY 22/03/26 | The Basin Music Festival

• SATURDAY 21/03/26 TO SUNDAY 19/03/26, 10AM-5PM | Tesselaar KaBloom Festival

• SUNDAY 22/03/26, 10AM-4PM | Repower Festival

• SUNDAY 22/03/26, 10AM-1PM | Dogs Day Out

• WEDNESDAY 25/03/26, 7-8.30pm | The Tudor Choristers

📰 THIS WEEK’S HEADLINES

“Nothing we can do”: Why Melbourne's east is heading into a longer, drier fire season

Parts of eastern Melbourne are set to face unusually low rainfall until June, according to the Bureau of Meteorology’s latest seasonal outlook.

It will mean Melbourne’s east stays drier for longer than usual during autumn, increasing the risk of fire in greener areas and the chances of a longer fire season.

As conditions get hotter and vegetation gets drier, how are authorities preparing for worsening fire conditions?

Parts of southeastern, eastern and northern Australia are facing an increased chance of unusually low rainfall from March to May. If estimates are correct, these regions would be within the driest 20 percent of Bureau records between 1981 and 2018.

Griffith University Climate Action Beacon director, Professor Brendan Mackey, said most of southern Australia had seen a long-term decline in autumn and winter rainfall since the 1970s, which was largely driven by human influence on the climate from greenhouse gases.

“Due to global warming, low-pressure systems are getting pushed further south, so they are increasingly not dropping their rain over southern Australia,” Mackey told the Eastern Melburnian.

Country Fire Authority (CFA) research and development manager, Dr Sarah Harris, said Victoria’s fire seasons were getting longer due to changing weather conditions and climate change – now starting one to three months earlier and ending two to six weeks later than usual.

“For most of the state, we will see a doubling of those very high fire danger days and in some parts further east, we'll even see a tripling [by 2100],” Harris told the Eastern Melburnian.

Belgrave Heights and South CFA brigade captain Sean Grondman said growing complacency in a growing population was another factor increasing the risk of fire damage.

“We're still in a very high drought factor in the sub-surface soil, so it's going to take a lot of moisture to bring that back to a safe level for us,” Grondman told the Eastern Melburnian. “There's nothing we can do. All that we can do is continue with our planned burn program.”

Harris said as CFA not only responds to fires, but other natural disasters such as floods and storms, the whiplash effect of unpredictable climate and weather meant CFA needed to be more adaptable to these rapid changes.

“We’ve got to be agile and optimise where we can because we're dealing with this changing environment,” said Harris.

Read the full story here.

East Side Stories: How 15,000 trees turned into a life-long endeavour for Hawthorn’s bonsai master

Walking through the doors of Hawthorn’s Bonsai Farm, you can feel the hustle and bustle of trams and cars racing just outside fading away.

The face of Melbourne’s oldest bonsai nursery – 78-year-old Lindsay Farr – spoke to the Eastern Melburnian about his life-long devotion to the art of bonsai, a Chinese practice dating back more than 2,000 years ago.

Dating back to about 200 BC in China and later introduced and refined by the Japanese, bonsai is the art of growing and shaping miniature trees in containers.

According to Farr, his love for horticulture comes from family: His grandfather owned a nursery in Canterbury East and his father a nursery on Croydon’s Main Street. Alongside this – and perhaps surprisingly – he credits the film The Wizard of Oz.

“There was a scene where a tree came to life animated and reached out and grabbed the Tin Man,” Farr told the Eastern Melburnian. “I found that terrifying as a five year old, and I fled from the theatre in terror. But that very week, the ladies who formed the Victorian Bonsai Society came into my dad's nursery in Croydon and I looked at the pictures in their books and I said ‘This is for me’.”

However, Farr didn’t enter the leafy world of his father and grandfather straight away, instead spending 15 years of his life as a musician. Farr played the saxophone and flute for bands like Daddy Cool in Melbourne and Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes in Boston.

Farr said he turned back to his roots after he began a family and started thinking about his children’s future.

Alongside his wife Marietta, Farr planted about 15,000 trees in a property at Kalorama to start the farm.

“Everyone thought I was crazy,” said Farr. “Of those 15,000, there's less than 50 left here now.”

Farr began sharing what he had learnt from bonsai to others during the 1990s before being approached to film what is still the first and only TV series about bonsai – The Way of Bonsai – in 1999. He also developed a web series – Lindsay Farr’s World of Bonsai – in 2005.

One of the hardest things was keeping all of the trees healthy during increasingly harsh summers, according to Farr.

“For 50 years, they haven't missed out on a drink on a hot day,” said Farr. “Rather than a love, I’d say bonsai is a commitment.”

Read the full story here.

DID YOU SEE? 👀

🐝 🌸 Are we looking at our seasons all wrong?

The National Account reporter Archie Milligan recently spoke to ecologist and environmental educator Clancy Lester about how Indigenous seasons may provide a more accurate way of working out the weather.

The self-described “bee nerd” also encouraged Australians to ditch their lawns and nature strips for native flowers and grasses.

Check out the full interview below.