Vale Alison Doley AM
Sad news in the catchment as Alison Doley, a long time supporter of the Moore Catchment Council, passed away on 20th February 2019. Alison farmed at “Koobabbie”, Coorow and was a long term champion of landcare and native ecology especially with her love of Carnaby’s Black Cockatoos. A timeline of conservation events at Koobabbie is attached.
Alison was honoured in 2017 with a AM in the Australia Day Honours for significant service to conservation and the environment in Western Australia through revegetation and catchment recovery initiatives. Around 165ha of the property was revegetated with local provenance native species between 2007 and 2011. Much of the bush is protected under covenants. She was also a member, founding member and president to several conservation and recovery committees, trusts and panels.
Last year, Alison was an integral part of The Last Stand organising committee which helped raise awareness of native biodiversity in the Midwest wheatbelt. We’d meet every month for 6 months plotting how we were going to make the event work.
Alison was particularly passionate about the demise of roadside native vegetation especially the Buntine-Marchagee road which she has been monitoring for years and kept notes of native species that had disappeared and weeds which had taken over (attached). In fact, in an effort to keep weeds at bay on the roadside, Alison and good friend Fiona Falconer would go out hand weeding ‘pesky’ Love grass and also present to the Coorow Shire Council in an effort to raise awareness of poor environmental practices decimating the ecology of the area. Thank you Alison for your contributions to environmental conservation in this region. You will be missed. RIP