We recently spoke with Doreen von Linde of The Barossa Council about her role as Barossa Bushgardens Natural Resource Centre Coordinator.

What’s your role and how long have you worked in local government?

I am the Natural Resource Centre Coordinator at the Barossa Bushgardens and have started in this role in February 2020, a few weeks before the first Covid lockdowns, making it a very interesting first few months.

My role is to manage and maintain the 7ha native display gardens as well as
environmental education. My position is funded by The Barossa Council and Green Adelaide. I deliver workshops, addressing environmental and sustainability topics and work with a variety of stakeholders, including schools, landholders, other
environmental organisations, Aboriginal nations, businesses, across councils and Landscape Boards.

What does a typical day look like for you in this role?

Tuesday and Thursday are our volunteer days. Our Nursery Coordinator and I
currently manage 40 volunteers that help us with site maintenance as well as nursery production. In the mornings we catch up with everyone to assign the tasks. If we get a chance, we support the teams doing the work. From Autumn until now, the site team has been able to focus on adding around 1500 native plants to the gardens as the dry weather has kept weeds from growing. That has changed over the last few weeks and we now work on weeding, pruning, irrigation and path maintenance. Often, we have visiting groups taking garden tours or Traditional Uses Trail tours, learning about
edible plants and their medicinal uses and I am glad I have some fantastic tour guides.

Wednesday and Friday are the days where we have team and management meetings or workshops. These can cover a wide range of topics, including (but not limited to) frogs, native bees, habitat gardening, bird ID, edible weeds, mushrooms, wicking beds, composting and worm farming. Most workshops are held on site and I love to make them hands-on to support learning and information retention. I understand that it can be challenging for some schools to organise transport and at times we visit schools as far away as Clare and Gawler to run workshops with Aboriginal students and children with different abilities.

What important lessons have you learnt over the years?

Having a great team around you and being supported by the other departments within council makes my job amazing. Here at the BBG we are a great team with our direct line manager being super supportive. Going further up, management is challenging our thinking in a good way, broadening our horizon and pushing us to learn and adapt.

Our volunteers are the most important people and without them the Bushgardens simply would not exist. I find it very important to listen to their ideas and make sure they are involved in any new developments and changes. Our teams are very passionate and having them involved ensures they are dedicated and take
ownership. 

What is your proudest career moment?

There is not only one, but probably about five! I will only go into two of them though. The first is the development of our Food for the Soul Community Garden. We organise activities for people with different disabilities as well as dementia and during the lockdowns in 2020, these were suspended. As a result, and to do something about this in case it ever happens again, I invited five local disability and mental health support groups to help develop an inclusive and accessible
community garden. We now have 8 wicking beds of which four are wheelchair
accessible and four large enough for people to plant or harvest standing up.
The garden has a shelter and wheelchair-friendly table setting and is used by the community regularly.

The second thing I am proud of is the organising of our first ever Barossa
Bushgardens Bush School sessions during the last school holidays. We invited up to 10 kids from 8 to 12 years of age to learn about fire and food, including fire safety, fire
starting methods and native food plants in the first session, and birds, traditional
shelters and tools in the second session. On both days we had the children for 4 - 5 hours gaining knowledge and skills in different survival techniques, including
orienteering and having a better understanding about how Aboriginal people managed to thrive in the Australian environment.

What do you like to do outside of work?  

After work I’ll usually have a play with my children and finish the night with a book. Weekends are three days long for me and our family either spends it hiking, at the beach, with friends or in our own garden, which has grown into a beautiful little
paradise since we started planting ten years ago. My husband and I home school and we use all the above mentioned activities and other opportunities to instil a deep love of the environment and learning into our children. My six-year-old is not great in math but knows a few scientific names of plants and can name most native animals without hesitation!