For 30 years, Tamara de Silva has woken up to the sound of birds chirping in the trees across the road from her home in Melbourne’s south-east.
“Listening to the magpies and the lorikeets in the mornings, watching them playing around – it lifts your spirits,” she said.
In a few weeks’ time they will be gone, with hundreds of trees the birds frequent to be cut down to make way for a kilometre-long bike path.
The path, running along Queens Avenue in Caulfield East on the boundary of Caulfield Racecourse, was announced several years ago as part of the state government’s plans to remove a level crossing at Neerim Road and Glen Huntly, on the Frankston train line.
Under the plan, first reported by the Age, the avenue’s narrow bike lanes would be replaced with a shared bike and pedestrian path, connecting the new Glen Huntly station to Caulfield station and the Djerring Trail in the north, and Ormond, Bentleigh and McKinnon stations in the south.
But to create the new path, about 250 mature native and introduced trees will need to be removed, including several that are on Glen Eira council’s classified tree register. The government has said every tree removed will be replaced with two, across a 1.5km radius, though these are likely to be saplings.
De Silva said the plan was “absolute madness, insanity and bureaucracy going mad”.
“These are magnificent trees, 10 metres at least in height with a fantastic canopy in an urban area where tree cover is very limited,” she said. “They’ll be replaced with saplings that may not even survive.”
For several years, De Silva and other Queens Avenue residents have campaigned against the path they dub a “concrete wasteland”, plastering the trees with posters and submitting petitions to the council and MPs.
Now they are ramping up their efforts after hearing construction would begin in January.
“We’re thinking about camping out or having picnics out in the trees, visiting the minister’s office,” De Silva said. “We will fight until the bulldozers come.”
According to a new Level Crossing Removal Project (LXRP) fact sheet, the trees will be removed in early February and eventually replaced with more than 90 native trees as well as flowers and shrubs to “further enhance the biodiversity of the area”.
The council lost control of the land to the LXRP but has been involved in discussions on the design of the path.
Last year it agreed to the plan. But on Tuesday, the mayor, Anne-Marie Cade, changed her position in an open letter to the minister for transport infrastructure, Danny Pearson.
The letter said the council’s “alternative proposals for the project and community engagement have been consistently rejected by the LXRP”.
“Council understands that the LXRP wants to progress this project, but we cannot continue to support it while the LXRP continues to actively oppose viable enhancements that would protect tree canopy and has not appeared to be willing to plan collaboratively alongside council or the community,” Cade wrote.
“It is our view that with some compromises and investment it can remain a viable and successful project.”
The campaign to save the trees has also garnered the support of Caulfield MP and the deputy Victorian Liberals leader, David Southwick, who said the government “had form” cutting down significant trees over the holidays.
“After hearing about the current trees being targeted, I wrote to minister Danny Pearson asking him to save these trees,” Southwick said.
“There are ways to have a bike path and save the trees but it seems like the Allan Labor government is taking the cheap way out and again ignoring local residents.”
Pearson’s office was contacted for comment.
A LXRP spokesperson said it had worked with the council for two years on the path, including at monthly meetings.
“The shared use path in Glen Huntly is the missing link in this cycling corridor and will create safer journeys for cyclists and take more cars off the road,” they said.
“Several options were considered for the shared use path and other alignments would have required even more tree removal or did not have the space required for a shared use path.”
