Dubbo Rivercare Group - Daryl Green (5th March, 2024)

The Dubbo River Care Group participated in Clean Up Australia Day by organizing a cleanup of the urban area along the river. They had 63 registered volunteers and collected a quarter of a tonne of waste. The group regularly conducts cleanups and other activities to care for the river environment. They are always looking for more volunteers and can be contacted through their Facebook page. The group is made up of volunteers and does not have any paid staff. Over the weekend, nationally, we had Clean Up Australia Day, the day with a simple idea of making a difference in your own local backyard by picking up rubbish. A local group who took this idea to heart and really got stuck into it were the Dubbo River Care Group. One of their long-standing members, Darryl Green, joins us on the phone. Good morning. Good morning, Keegan. How are you? I'm sure it's been a busy weekend. Yeah, we've been pretty busy, but yeah, it worked out really well. Thanks. Thanks very much. What did you do on Sunday, really, to mark the day? We organised to, through Clean Up Australia Day registration, to be a group that ran a section of the river, primarily the urban area between the Cerisea Bridge and the LH Ford Bridge on both sides of the river, cleaning that up with, yeah, we ended up with 63 registered volunteers that turned up, including probably about 15 of our river care group. Oh, wow. That's a decent turnout. Absolutely. We also brought a lot to the Leadership Academy here. They brought a lot of their students and parents and that down, so that was great. What did you end up finding down there in terms of rubbish and waste? Mostly just litter. We ended up with about three quarters of, sorry, a quarter of a tonne of waste and rubbish, 23 full big bags of rubbish, plus I think there was a tyre, a tube that had been dumped in the river somewhere and only one trolley, supermarket trolley, which was good. That's surprising. I'd expect you'd find more. Yeah, we usually do, which some of the new laws on leaving things around might be helping, I think. On that note, I'm guessing this, you don't just do this for Clean Up Australia Day. Do you regularly do these cleanups as a group? Yeah, our river care group, and I must say that Ozfish, Sean from Ozfish, was also there to help organize with the river repair bus, so that was good. But yeah, the river care group, every fortnight we have a working day along the river, picking up rubbish, controlling some of our environmental weeds, planting native species, replacing some of the weed species along the river environment. I've seen recently, since I've arrived in Dubbo, there's been a post about someone dumping furniture in Wylandra Creek. I mean, when you've gone out there for these cleanups to collect the waste and the litter and maybe plant some native species, overall, how bad is the amount or the type of waste you find? Is it quite common? Certainly, away from the urban environment here, like in Wylandra Creek or something like that, yes, you often find somebody's, I guess, cleaned out their shed or something and didn't want to go to the tip, so they've just dumped it at a convenient spot. There's some, I believe, one of our members, Rod, said there's a dump in Margaret Street down along the railway, there's somebody who's dumped some household furniture just recently. How can someone get involved if they'd like to help out at the next cleanup? We're always looking for more volunteers for the river care group. We've got about 35, 40 members at the moment. We hold, as I said, working days every fortnight. If somebody wants to get involved with us, we've got a Facebook site, just Google or search on Facebook for W River Care Group and there's an option there to open a membership application and they can just sign in there or they can come to one of our working days or talk to someone. They can ring me up. I'll give you my phone number if you like, 0427-952-033, if they wish to join, we'd welcome them. Just a quick question before I let you go. Another thing I've noticed since moving here is there is a lot of posts about people losing fishing rods when out by the river. Do you find a lot of fishing rods that have just been discarded or lost? I swear that's just a common occurrence for some reason. We did find, I think there were two fishing rods that had fallen into the river. I knew something like that had happened. Well, thank you for coming on this morning and spreading the awareness about your group and just some of the great work that you do. Yeah. Well, thank you, Keegan. Thanks for the opportunity. I'm guessing you're all volunteers. Yes. Yeah. We don't have any paid people at all. We're all volunteers. Yeah. That's just fantastic work. Thank you so much for coming on for a chat. Okay.