 It's not easy to do. It's not easy. It's hard to do. It's so hard to do. It's really hard. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's almost like I'm saying it. It's hard. It's really hard. It's really hard. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing. It's really hard. It's really hard. It's really hard. It's so much easier to do. I'm going to pass home one day to 1997, and I was a young post-doc just exiting out of one page. So I'm going to pass home one day to 1997, and I was a young post-doc just exiting out of one page. So I'm going to pass home one day to 1997, and I was a young post-doc just exiting out of one page. So I'm going to pass home one day to 1997, and I was a young post-doc just exiting out of one page. So I'm going to pass home one day to 1997, and I was a young post-doc just exiting out of one page. So I'm going to pass home one day to 1997, and I was a young post-doc just exiting out of one page. So I'm going to pass home one day to 1997, and I was a young post-doc just exiting out of one page. So I'm going to pass home one day to 1997, and I was a young post-doc just exiting out of one page. So I'm going to pass home one day to 1997, and I was a young post-doc just exiting out of And that's a really important message. I think we're going to hear more about that from her today, where she's been working really closely with industry right through her entire career, having great impact. One-fourth from 1997, when I became the head of, was the school of U.S. in the way of the Department of Environment and Ag, it was a great pleasure to actually see that Elaine was still involved with the R&D of that particular school at the time. And I ran into an ex-student today in my apartment. I said, I'm going to a seminar this afternoon, Elaine Davis. I'm going to hand over to Elaine who's going to start her presentation. And that's what we've already done. APPLAUSE Well, thank you very much, Mark. I'm not quite sure I remember it quite like that. Can you all hear me? Because I'm rather quietly spoken. If you can't hear me, I'll notice you going to sleep at the back. LAUGHTER I should start off by saying I've been wanting to give this seminar for quite a long time, but it's never really been quite the right time. And about 18 months ago, I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, so I thought I'd better get a move on. So, let's get started. OK. Now, Western Australia is the envy of all the other states in Australia because it's got a triple A credit rating. And one of the factors is not just the good financial management by politicians, it's also the quality of the state's infrastructure including roads. And what have roads got to do with plant pathology? Well, in the 1960s there were large patches of dying plants, understory and midstory plants in native vegetation in the southwest. And if I can make this work probably not, you can see in the top picture you've got oh, OK. Thanks, Fatima. You've got dying bankseers or dead bankseers along here in more or less a line. It was shown in 1965 that these dead understory and midstory plants were associated with soil infestation by an introduced pathogen, a soil-borne pathogen phytophthora synomomy which is now known as the dieback fungus. I know it's an OMI seat not a fungus, so please don't pick me up on that, but the name the dieback fungus is now in current usage in the general public locally. This was eventually called phytophthora dieback. The Forest Department, which was the lead agency at the time were very keen to map the distribution of phytophthora because many of these patches were many hectares in extent. They were using understory and midstory species to do this mapping. They found that it took at least 18 months between the time a site became infested with phytophthora until symptoms showed up in the understory and although the Forest Department had control over its workers in the forest, it didn't have control over many of the other users of the Jarrah Forest. And so the Forest Department carried out a very comprehensive education campaign to explain why they wanted to get far more control over access to different parts of the forest. And in 1975 the Forest Act was changed which allowed them to impose quarantine as you have down here and I'm sure many of you will have seen these sorts of signs in perhaps rather remote parts of the Jarrah Forest because they're really quite historic now and there is a barrier here preventing access and here is a gravel road. This allowed a period of quarantine to show the symptoms to show up on infested sites and phytophthora like all soar borne pathogens is spread by the movement of soil including gravel. So gravel is a basic raw material and it's widely used in roading in Western Australia and main roads Western Australia has a policy to only use dieback free gravel for road construction and repair and it uses in total through the whole state about five and a half million cubic meters of gravel per annum. There are other road other users of gravel as well shires, mining companies there are there's DBCA that makes a lot of gravel roads. Now in the past gravel was sourced from an area of native vegetation where there was no symptoms of phytophthora dieback and you could then say that the gravel was dieback free however and then the way in which the gravel was sourced was that the native vegetation was removed hygienically without trying to in a way that would minimize the infestation of the site the gravel was extracted but that's not now considered an appropriate method of obtaining dieback free gravel because native vegetation has a value in its own right and the cost of offsets and such like has made it exceedingly expensive you could go and look for gravel on other sites where there is no native vegetation but if you're dependent on symptoms of phytophthora dieback being shown up by the death of native plants how do you know whether the gravel from a paddock for example is infested or not particularly as phytophthora has a very wide host range that's been shown in glass house experiments or in field sampling and consequently you don't know whether wheat plants for example are infested or not they may not die but they can still be infected but being infected is not of course the same thing as the ability to kill a plant so one of the examples of how gravel is used here we have an area on the Albany Highway this is in Grenigal Forest the edges of this road have been repaired to make them a bit stronger and because it's a native vegetation and this is being done on the main roads then they would be trying to use dieback free gravel along this road for the repair of the road so dieback free gravel one that you know is free of phytophthora is in short supply and I wondered about 20 years ago whether infested gravel can be treated to kill phytophthora this is where the link with mark comes in the chemical in question was that I thought might be suitable is methamsodium it's used in horticulture so it's registered for use in Australia it's time injected into soil using a rig like this it's classed as a fumigant but it's actually methamsodium as a liquid it can be injected into soil to the depth of about 15 centimetres which would be the routing depth of carrots and potatoes and strawberries and so on and in soil it breaks down to a gas methylisothiocyanate mitc and it's a mitc which is the bioactive agent it has a half life of about three days and being a gas it's going to diffuse through the soil mainly up and to some extent laterally so in order to try and extend its life in the soil the soil has to be kept in some way to prevent the mitc escaping and this can be done by using polythene sheeting in the case of the horticultural industry locally the soil is rolled to compact it and then it's irrigated heavily to make a water seal mitc breaks down into oxides of carbon, nitrogen and sulfur so it leaves no residues can methamsodium be used to treat gravel if it is it would have to be used very differently and ideally you would use it here at the top of a stacker which is making these big gravel stockpiles but methamsodium isn't registered for use in gravel use of chemicals in Australia is regulated by the Australian pesticides and veterinary medicines authority the APVMA you'll hear a bit more about them and so in order to make this treatment legal you would need the change in the label of the usage of methamsodium but before you get to that you really need to answer a few questions firstly does it work because if it doesn't work there's no point in pursuing this and can it be used safely which is one of the great concerns of the APVMA and finally if it does work and it can be used safely and there is a label change is it going to be cost effective because if it's not there's no point in using it so we started off with some money and the early work on efficacy was done in the lab now I'm not going to go in a blow by blow account of all the things we did but I just wanted to give you some idea of the sort of experiments that we're doing we did a number of small experiments all experiments looking at the effects of methamsodium of MITC on phytophthora over time and at different rates so the sort of experiments that were done were using a small amount of gravel in a flask here we had millet seed infested colonized by phytophthora which was separated and then after the methamsodium was added to the gravel not to the millet seed then we would take the millet seed out and plate it onto agar which is selective for phytophthora and so here we've got different concentrations of methamsodium the label rate up here half, quarter, zero after one hour after 24 hours and you can see firstly that it's very easy to plate out millet seed very nice and easy easy to count and the treatment after 24 hours even a quarter of the rate of methamsodium shows that it kills phytophthora so it looks like it's effective but there's no point in taking this you really have to start working in the field so this is the field experiments that we did a large number of them the first thing we found out was that millet seed if you put it into gravel every saprophite in gravel loves millet seed and so it just dives in and outcompetes phytophthora so we had to use inoculum we used pine plugs which are shown here colonized by phytophthora for probably about six months before they were used we had to put them into the gravel and be able to take them out again so whilst we were discussing this with colleagues somebody suggested using burly cages they were obviously a keen fisherman and weighted burly cages we bought several hundred of these I think we exhausted the whole of the state supply at one stage and we had them powder coated because they're galvanized and they've got a lead weight at the bottom and both zinc and lead are inhibitory to phytophthora so we got that done we attached them to stout fishing line we could have them powder coated any color we wanted we could use two species of phytophthora without getting them muddled up we hoped then we used them throwing them into these five cubic meters of gravel during the construction of the gravel stockpiles we were trying to emulate the way that this would work commercially but we were totally successful at that so the metham sodium was added using a knapsack sprayer and when we were constructing these stockpiles for example we would have a bobcat layer of gravel we would spray that with metham sodium you'd have another bobcat layer of gravel we'd throw in a pine plug in oculum and you probably can't see it but around the edge of each of these cones there is the fishing line with flagging tape on it so that we knew which species of phytophthora we were going to be removing and so on we did this to make a five cubic meter stockpile of gravel the pine plugs were removed at different times after the stockpiles had been constructed and then we would take out the pine plugs clean them up, plate them out onto selective agar and here for example we have a control so zero metham sodium and here we would have be treated with metham sodium after one hour these two plates would be of phytophthora synomomy so in this case at this particular rate phytophthora was killed within one hour within the pine plugs this one is a different species of phytophthora phytophthora multivora and it's still surviving after one hour in pine plugs but we left them all a bit longer than that at the same time these stockpiles were sampled for MITC to see how long that hung around in the stockpiles because you don't want to open up the stockpiles and find that your operators would be affected by fumes of MITC so this is the general sort of method that we used we also wanted to approach the capping of the stockpiles now the way this is used commercially is that the metham sodium is applied the soil is compacted and then it's irrigated but gravel crusts it has about 5% fines and it has perhaps about 5% water and it crusts quite quickly so it gets very hard on the surface and we thought that the crusting would be sufficient to seal the stockpiles but we needed to check and so we had colleagues from the chem centre who set up monitoring devices sampling devices on either side, upwind and downwind of the stockpile and the MITC from the treated gravel was measured and it was only detected 5 meters downwind of the stockpiles of treatment so we thought that crusting was actually effective so this took quite a number of years and an application was made to the APVMA in 2012 for a label change we set on a rate of 80 mls per cubic meter which is about half the label rate for horticulture we had a withholding period of 28 days because by that time MITC could no longer be detected in the gravel the gravel stockpiles needed were unsealed because gravel crusts and an exclusion zone of at least 5 meters and this work was done by colleagues Sasha, Kazami and Nigel West from the chem centre and Ben Wharton from the water quality centre chem centre in Keratin Scott Payton from Newfarm and Francis Tay who's in the audience here who's worked with me for many years and we had funding and support for this from B&J Catalano's Main Roads, Merua it's so long ago that's actually changed its name Newfarm, Duffer which has also changed its name and DEC label change came through in 2017 well that's quite a long time to wait and they accepted all of the things we had suggested apart from the exclusion zone which they suggested they said should be 200 metres but it doesn't really matter because it meant that scaling up was now possible so we can go into the second phase of this work which I haven't had much to do with it's been really done by Main Roads and funded by Main Roads and the first of these was a large inoculation experiment using 1500 cubic metres of gravel which makes our 5 cubic metre stockpiles look a bit silly it was done by Arba Carbon and it was conducted at Colford Quarry which is in North Bannister Metham sodium was applied at a nominal rate of 80 mils per cubic metre we used a pine plug inoculum and instead of just putting it into burly cages and throwing them into these stockpiles here they were placed in these plastic tubes which were slotted at the end that goes into the stockpile to allow MITC to get in there and then they were sealed on the outer part of the tube and the tubes were positioned at different heights and different depths into the stockpile the stockpiles were unsealed there was a withholding period of four weeks and there was an exclusion zone of 200 metres as specified by the APVMA and MITC was monitored to 100 metres downwind on 2, 3, 4, 5 and 8 days after treatment now after 28 days all the tubes were taken out and the pine plugs were retrieved and they were they were all plated out at the SCA and some of the people involved in that are here in the audience so they can have sympathies with all of us who plated out these things and the plating out showed that there was less than 6% survival of phytophthora in the pine plugs now depends on which way you look at this oh we killed 94% of it oh oh we killed everything which is what we were expecting there was almost 6% that survived but any experiment that doesn't work particularly well or quite as you think is always very instructive so there were lots of lessons learned from this original this large inoculation trial phytophthora survived in the areas here shown in red the outer face and bottom edge of the stockpile and if you look at the stockpile here you can see that the gravel is much coarser here than further up the stockpile so there's segregation of the gravel in the areas of poor crust formation there will be loss of MITC so it won't be sealing as well the air quality monitoring also showed that MITC was detected 100 meters from the stockpile on one occasion so I think the APVMA were right to be very cautious but it meant you had to go back and look at every stage of the operation to see whether you could improve the sealing of the stockpiles to a better stockpile construction to minimize segregation and this is a well known problem in the gravel industry and there are ways to resolve this there we're looking at better ways of sealing the stockpiles and the the application of MITC of methane sodium was not as good as it should have been and so a better application method was needed so that was the outcome of the other carbon work very brief summary of it and so the process was redesigned and this was done by the people at Colford the Colford quarry and so we don't have a number of cones here we have concentric a number of ribs and there is I will show you in a minute a stack producing these this is a 30,000 cubic meter stockpile and it's also sprouted a bundle around the bottom to contain it this is the truck that has been redesigned with the redesigned application method for methane sodium there's a drum of methane sodium on the back here here's a hose coming off there there's a truck way off in the distance which would be this truck this is the other end of the operation here is the conveyor there's gravel coming up here the methane sodium is applied under this cowl here and it's falling onto one of these uh uh ribs of the stockpile so this is the methane sodium hose and the method of application is now much more controlled than it was in the large inoculation experiment they also using a water cannon to water the stockpile at the end of each day and they're applying 10 millimeters of water um again from this truck so they're definitely sealing the stockpile um so this is a number of improvements which have just gone from looking at the original process in the experiment done by Arbor Carvin to improve the efficacy and the ability of methane sodium to be delivered more easily and more reliably and also to minimize the sorting of gravel and to improve the sealing of the stockpiles and it's been accepted by main roads as being perfectly acceptable modifications but there's one thing that needs to be done as well which is verification because how can you tell that the gravel has been treated because after all treated and untreated gravel look exactly the same you can use the paperwork but I'm a great cynic and I can realize that this could be manipulated if you wanted to sample gravel for phytophthora but it would be logistically difficult how do you sample a 30,000 cubic meter stockpile and feel that you're doing this in a feeling confident with the results and it would also be exceedingly expensive because of the cost of all those samples you could look for residues of methane sodium but there aren't any residues so they've all disappeared and so we thought it might be possible to use an indirect method because methane sodium doesn't just kill phytophthora it affects all the microorganisms in gravel so are there changes to the microbial diversity of the gravel that could be used to indicate that the gravel has actually been treated so it was very much easy to get and see exercise because main roads didn't have any money to actually put into devising a test that could be used but the company Bioscience which is a small West Australian company has a method for looking at the microbial diversity of soil, horticultural soil or agricultural soil it's an automated ribosomal genetic space for analysis or a RISA assay and it uses primary pairs to look at the diversity of nine groups of microorganisms and using some bags of untreated gravel and treated gravel which hadn't really been kept in any particular way they were just lying around we happen to have them as the way you do but in the untreated gravel there's one group of microorganisms which Bioscience called Bacteria 1 and that's about as far as microbiology goes and there are more of those more OTUs of those in the untreated gravel than in the treated gravel you can see here otherwise there's really no difference with the other groups of microorganisms but if you use a principal components ordination it shows that Bacteria 1 in treated and untreated gravel cluster very differently so the green ones are the treated gravel the brown ones are the untreated gravel and so you could use both the number of OTUs that you get from this analysis and also their clustering to show that there is a difference between the treated and untreated gravel doesn't mean to say that's a result of the treatment with methamsodium but there is a difference and that's really probably as much as you could expect this effect we now know is apparent within six weeks of treatment and it persists for more than 15 weeks so let's just summarize all of this and dieback free gravel we've shown that methamsodium treatment can be used to produce large volumes of dieback free gravel the treatment is applied at the end of the extraction operation and this is really important because it means that there's less chance that the treated gravel being subsequently contaminated the cost is $20 per cubic meter at the quarry gate but when you think about gravel a large proportion of the cost delivered on site is transport costs and this means that you could actually go and treat an infested area an infested gravel pit close to where the gravel is needed and therefore reduce the transport costs the equipment which is being used to doing all of this is mobile and so it can be moved to where it's needed we have the verification process we've got the paper trail which is being produced and we also have now we know the Orissa assay shows differences at the Colford quarry I don't know whether it would show differences for another gravel pit so I don't know whether that difference is a portable one whilst all this was happening Colford quarry has obtained ISO accreditation for the whole process and because the APVMA change is Australia wide this is available for the whole of Australia so lastly thanks to main roads for pushing all of this and providing funding to Arbor Carbon for doing that scaled up inoculation trial which was so instructive to Colford quarry for allowing the work to be done on their site and thinking through the whole process and redesigning the whole process to Bioscience who happened to have an Orissa assay that just seemed to fit the bill for what we needed and to BDCA who have supported this all the way through and I'd like to say it's been a great pleasure to work with all of these people because they've been so enthusiastic about the whole process thank you very much thank you very much for the talk I'm just curious you thought this method of using this chemical to treat ground hasn't been adapted to other applications as well such as, let's say for example if there is a polycultural field that's infected by a bitopter we can't replant anything there we are dying to follow the response you've got that Lee, well yes, metham sodium would be used to treat soil borne pests and pathogens in a horticultural situation and of course it's already registered for that so I think that's really about the starting point where we came in so there's no reason to think that it's any different from the current usage metham sodium yes well you knew the rate at which you had a nominal rate that you wanted to apply it at Kim is from Oh hello Kim and he knows exactly what's going on under that cow at the end of the stacker and it's not important that you have a fine spray or anything like that you could just dribble the metham sodium onto the gravel because it's the MITC which does the work and that's going to diffuse through the gravel stop pile so you really want to have the coarsest drops possible so that the nozzles don't get clogged up with the fines from the gravel thanks, thanks Kim help me well well I'm not sure about what is already done by the nursery industry if they're trying to sterilize or treat large piles large volumes of potting soil whether they already use metham sodium in this context in this way because I think there are options using a solid form which his name I don't remember and this will treat that volume of soil so I think that's perhaps already been explored but this is really treating very large volumes rather than just very small volumes yes Tommy I think that MITC is going to be effective against all of those organisms I don't think you're looking at something which is selective it's a I'd like to call it broad acre um biocide yes because after all it's used to control not just soil borne pathogens but also pests and also weeds it's got a very wide range of target organisms yes yes of course yes I understand well metham sodium yes it will certainly be affecting both beneficial saprophytes in the gravel but firstly the this is a one-off treatment for gravel that's the first thing to say so you don't have to worry about any enhanced microbial breakdown of the metham sodium by other microorganisms in soil as you have in soil which is regularly treated with metham sodium and that is a major problem for horticulturalists because they may find that if they're using metham sodium or other agricultural chemicals which get onto the soil then microorganisms in the soil can use those as food source and start to break them down so you have a problem where these those chemicals are no longer effective and you don't have to worry about that with gravel it's a one-off so I've forgotten all about that um but that doesn't mean to say you shouldn't be wary about these things if you're trying to use this as a way of treating other soil type products and I think you need to look at each of those and weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of using this type of treatment yes I'm sorry Roger this is this is this is sorry this is this is this is it sorry is there any work plan to identify how significant the wishes of that were made in six percent well the suggestion has been made a number of times that the large inoculation trial that was done by harbour carbon should be repeated to just to confirm that you can have a hundred percent kill of phytothra and I think this has some merit but you need a very large checkbook and so far nobody has come up with a very large checkbook if you think you know you've got a few spare millions I think to do this then yes I'm sure it could be done but um so far no I think that the way in which the risks have been considered and have been managed is probably considered to be adequate the other thing to mention is that large pieces of pine stem that like this colonised by phytothra if any gravel supplier had those in their gravel that they were supplying they would probably be out of business very quickly because you would remove any large bits of organic matter as part and parcel of the gravel process have I said the right things Kim thank you Elaine the what I might call an industrial scale and could you tell us about any sort of work that you did preceding that industrial scale um um I'll tell you later Pete thank you thank you I thought if if people go to the for example the Alcoa mine sites they always love to see the big machinery and that I thought might be of interest to people who usually work in the laboratory you know with fine forceps and fiddling around with very small things so I think having a water cannon as part of your equipment for sealing gravel stockpiles is something I would love to have a go at I think that's that's a really fantastic story this afternoon and I can't help but reflect on the values that I've been knowing on the current it's fantastically inspiring the driven focus and I see the acknowledgments at the end of the presentation I'd like to be half of those people reflect back the acknowledgement of everything that Elaine has contributed right throughout that project it's now 10 to 30 years so it's absolutely kiosk to the crew it's a fantastic focus on dedication so on behalf of the APPS we actually have a happy new year that we'd like to present to you all but I think maybe I'll put it a bit later just in five days we'll be making a presentation on this to you all but this incredible it's an incredible bunch of plans and this is really a suggestion from the APPS for you to be like so here you're also going to be Arm's Day today that's absolutely love thank you it's very much luck for that kind those kind words and thanks to the APPS for and also to the audience here I might have an audience of one or two but I was absolutely burned away when I saw so many people and next time we'll take the Albert Haug I'm going to hand those to Paul a great pleasure to be able to stand up here today and reflect on well DBCA involved with the D-Lane on this project I first became involved with the whole process at the meeting and so did the gravel story but I was manager of the Public Schools Policy and Practices Granting Department and we were responsible at that time of reviewing a lot of the management documents which guided various uses in the forest so we have standards for clearing and reestablishing and rehabilitating gravel pits and standards for water management and I went to a dive act conference a deep conference out at Murdoch in 2009 or 2010 I think before you she was still struggling to get some of that work done with Catalanos and the process through the ACME and when I first heard the the idea that Elaine had it struck me as being one of the most valuable conservation tools that we have available we needed it because continuing to clear uninfested jar of forest or uninfested forest to produce no actually gravel was really problematic and part of the reason why Elaine quite rightly said it's in short supply because as mechanisation of the forest has improved or has expanded as people continue to use motor bikes and use all the roads out in the bush the likelihood of spreading by top growth through inadvertent means as well as through industrial timber harvesting mining whatever else you want it's really put the pressure on those remaining areas of uninfested forest so the idea that we could move away from clearing those areas to produce the basic raw material with the idea that we could move to the basic raw material which were currently unavailable to us so we couldn't really hand on heart say that if you go to a farmer's paddock even though there was no signs of PC you couldn't really say it was divac free whereas and similarly with the old old remnant gravel pits that had been mined many years before we wanted to be able to have a mechanism which would enable us to do a couple of things first we wanted to be able to cover the residual gravel that was left around there because you could put those days it was bulldozers in front of ladies and stuff so you had to have perfect gravel in situ if you like so once you got to floating rocks and those sort of things then the ability to use the gravel mixed up with that became more and more difficult till they got to a stage where they say nah there's still a lot of gravel here but it's too rocky or it's too hard to get to so there was a large number of these old pits so if we could introduce industrial gravel recovery so crushes and screwings and all that things then we could actually bring along those rocks all that other material that we didn't know its disease status and start to recover those and then that gave us the chance to then rehabilitate those sites that are probably free, equal as on one hand the contractor would take raw material or base raw material they would then have to rehabilitate the site so we could then re-vegetate so the other point that Elaine made a very solid point was it also meant that you could save a lot of money from the industry because of the capacity to use the gravel within a stone throw of any of these jobs which was in a farmer's paddock or in degraded forests that was badly PC effective we could go in there use what we know was an infected gravel put it through that process and out the other end came a product which we were happy to use so forest policy practices branch in that sense was to try and think about how we could incorporate some of these new practices and emerging processes into it so we looked at things like you know, ISO accreditation and sort of stuff that Halford did and we would be very happy to say that once someone was accredited in that and they had their ISO accreditation then we could work with them to do subsequent monitoring or whatever to make sure that the process was had been followed through and what was being laid out along the road which was in fact, you know, dive out for a gravel and the sorts of things I thought about at the time and I'll go down to it now for seven or eight, ten years or something at the time was things like just you know, recording where the gravel from a particular source went, what road section it was on and then you could go back later on and if you saw a great big string of die-back infestation then you'd say what you took out there wasn't die-back free gravel so you know, there was some simple ways that you could just do a review of the success of your life in a practical and an industrial sense so Elaine was over the you know, 2012 got the APV and made label chains that seemed like, there must have been a lot to it earlier than that that I got involved with but it seemed like forever to go through the machinations of just trying to get the label chain so you could go and do the trials and then there was the process with Catalano and then Dr. Coleman and you know, one of the most pleasing things in my career is to see Elaine follow that through, you know, 20 odd years and to come up with a process which is now industrially recognised and saleable across Australia and I think it's an absolute credit to Elaine and one of the most valuable things for nature conservation in this in this state because of its capacity to make safe clearing of forest and to make broad tours available for previously worked so Elaine from the departmental perspective we really enjoyed working with you and you know, we're glad to be involved and I'm really glad that it's come to fruition for you so on behalf of, well not DBCA now but on behalf of DBCA we really would thank you for that, for your work so thanks very much Thank you very much Paul We had a little video out to show to show that while we did very serious work we had a bit of fun as well Oh, really? Ready There's Nathan's voice That's going on Thank you Oh Yeah, just put it on Go over to Elaine There you go So we had a bit of a journey and Elaine intercepted my journey I was at the time the reform materials and as Elaine said in the presentation the government had a drive to try and mitigate depreciation of assets so main roads put forward some funding for strategic projects for each of their regions and I knew from my previous days back in Murdoch, uni and through my experience the main roads that the issue of dieback and gravel was a huge problem and we needed to answer it and answer it convincingly going forward So I put up an application for funding not knowing what I was going to do with it at the time and I got granted after a meal to start the research into the eradication of dieback for the week after construction So where do we start so we can involve ourselves numerous people showing us environmental officers which I loved and made lots of inquiries and we managed to get on to CPSM Murdoch University which I was hard to have a theory that we could potentially eliminate the pathogen out of a recognised disease portion of Jarrah Forest by clearing everything and maintaining a fellow status box in the forest in determined disease areas we fenced them off and we cleared all the beds I didn't break out all the roots I left them in there because that's what I wanted to check whether the system is down in depth within the root map because I remember Mark Gray saying your project won't work because it's going to sit there and it'll still be there in the school so we monitored over the years carbon being our scientific advisers who managed to sample and would sample the CLA 300 and then down to 3 metres in depth so after a number of years if Giles is correct the pathogen does get forward and dies out once in a few years we haven't finished the project but unfortunately I left the main roads but hopefully one day someone will throw some money and we're going to answer that question even though he has been on part and crime for almost eight years that we're doing these projects now there was three projects