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DTEND:20210717T140000
UID:6a61775980d4c
DTSTAMP:20260723T120721
LOCATION:Dandenong Creek Ricdanic Drive Bayswater 3153 VIC
DESCRIPTION:
A HUNDRED YEARS\, A HUNDRED TREES
A Rotary Bayswater story marking a century of service in Australia
There is a bend in Dandenong Creek\, just past the Ricdanic Drive entrance to the trail\, where the water slows and the tea-tree leans in close enough to touch the surface. On the morning this story begins\, that quiet bend will fill with people. There will be smoke curling up through the canopy\, the low murmur of a welcome spoken in language older than the creek itself\, and a hundred bare-rooted saplings waiting in their trays for the ground.
It has taken a hundred years to arrive at this single morning.
In 1921\, the first Rotary club in Australia opened its doors\, carrying with it a simple\, stubborn idea: that ordinary people\, working together\, could quietly reshape the places they lived in. A century on\, the Rotary Club of Bayswater wanted to mark that milestone with something more lasting than a plaque or a dinner. Not a celebration of the past\, but an investment in the future &mdash\; something that would still be standing\, and growing\, long after everyone at the planting had gone home. The idea that took hold was disarmingly simple: for every year Rotary has served Australia\, plant one tree.
A hundred years. A hundred trees. One creek.
The site chose itself. The Dandenong Creek Trail already threads through Bayswater as a corridor of habitat and quiet recreation\, but the stretch near Ricdanic Drive needed care &mdash\; more shade\, more understorey\, more roots to hold the bank against the next flood. It was also\, fittingly\, land that had been cared for by others long before Rotary arrived. So the Club didn't plan this alone. First Friends of Dandenong Creek\, who know this waterway root and branch\, helped choose the species and the ground. And the day itself will begin the way it should &mdash\; with a smoking ceremony\, acknowledging that this creek carried stories for tens of thousands of years before a single Rotarian ever picked up a shovel.
None of it happens without the willingness of others to back an idea with more than good wishes. A community grant from Bendigo Bank will help buy the trees\, the guards\, the stakes and the mulch that turn a good intention into a hundred trees in the ground. Knox City Council's support means the right approvals\, the right advice\, and a trail that will still be walkable while the roots take hold. Rotary's part is the glue: the volunteers\, the organising\, the follow-up watering roster\, the two hundred hands that will do the actual digging.
And when the planting is done &mdash\; when the last sapling is staked and the last boot is muddy &mdash\; the smell of a Rotary barbecue will drift across the same bend in the creek. Free\, for every volunteer who came. Not a reward so much as a full stop at the end of the morning's sentence: a shared meal\, the oldest form of thanks there is.
It is easy to walk past a young tree and see very little &mdash\; a stick\, a guard\, a strip of mulch. But return to that bend in ten years\, and the picture will be different. There will be shade over the trail where there wasn't any before. There will be birds that weren't visiting a decade earlier\, and a creek bank a little less inclined to wash away in a storm. There will be a hundred trees that don't know they were planted to mark a centenary\, quietly doing the work anyway.
That's the part of the story Rotary is comfortable not being remembered for. The trees will still be standing long after most people have forgotten exactly why they're there. Which is\, in the end\, rather the point &mdash\; of Rotary's first century in Australia\, and of this one morning beside Dandenong Creek.
URL;VALUE=URI:http://bayswaterrotary.org.au/event/45135
SUMMARY:100 Tree Planting Project
DTSTART:20210717T100000
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