As part of this year’s 21st annual 4WD QLD K’gari (Fraser Island) clean-up event in May, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service (QPWS) managed to pry a few clubs away from the beach to assist in clearing weeds from several beach camping areas.

The beach camping areas were chosen as a focus of this year’s effort to highlight the cause and effects of vehicle and human movement through the landscape. A large proportion of the island’s weed problem is centred around visitor use sites, camping areas and roads where weeds are spread by people, vehicles, camping equipment etc.

Clubs, assisted by QPWS, worked in camping areas between Eurong and Dundubara to manually remove weeds such as lantana, Mossman river grass, crowsfoot grass and prickly pear.

The volunteers worked hard for four hours and removed over 3,600 individual plants. This was a great effort by the volunteers who greatly impacted the weed issue in these camping areas.

Not to be outdone, the remaining clubs spent several hours removing rubbish from the beaches between Hook Point and Sandy Cape and collected over 8.2 tonnes of rubbish – a fantastic effort by all involved.

Article contributed by Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service