30/05/2025
Bring it back...
Email sent to 3aw Breakfast. They have been talking pretty continuously this week about the drought & how rural Victoria is suffering. Imagine what a huge boost to the local economy the Mallee Rally would be especially this year. We keep trying in the hope that one day somebody will listen
Hi team, my name is Daryl.
I have listened to Ross on the "wireless" since his early days at RRR. He will be thrilled to know he's my comfy old pair od slippers. Don't know him, never met him but he has been part of my life for forty years. I know he hates politics but I have noticed a bit of a change lately. My sporting passion is off road racing. I have been competing since I was seventeen, I'm now 61. It has been a long relationship. I'm no good at it but that's not important & that's what I love about it. There's a whole lot of us that just compete because we love being part of it.
The first "big' race I went to as a seventeen year old was the Sea Lake Mallee Rally. I was literally the kid in the toy shop. My first experience at seeing my hero's of the sport in person as opposed to reading about them in magazines. Most people have been through Sea Lake, it's one of those "blink & you'll miss it" towns on the way from Melbourne to Mildura. I know Ross knows the story about the pub being bought by a local consortium because I have heard him talk about it. What he may not know is the Supermarket & the hardware store are also locally owned under a similar arrangement.
The Sea Lake Mallee Rally was Australia's longest running off road race (47 years) until in 2019 it was refused a Parks Victoria permit. The PV permit had been a "rubber stamp" arrangement until then.
A bit of background. It's easy to just look at the event as a "car race". To a rural community it's much more than that. It's an event that means a lot of people come together for a fair period of time leading up to it. That gets people off their farms & out of their houses. I call it the bush psychology. You know, the bush version of the office water cooler. Although they are there to plan for their particular part of the event, it's a catch up that they would otherwise not have. A chance to maybe sense someone is not travelling as well as they say they are. The roles of those that help with the event are many. The Sea Lake Off Road Club takes care of the race itself. The Schools, Kinder, Footy & netball club & the Lions club all do catering. All except the Lions are at scrutineering in town on the Friday night providing catering. At the track which is out of town they are all there Saturday & Sunday. The Rally was all of these group's major fundraiser of the year. As the school principal once explained to me getting money in from outside the town is really important, it means they aren't constantly having to put their hands out to the same townsfolk all the time. The mental health benefits an event like this brings to a rural community cannot be measured. It all culminates with the event that proudly showcases their town. You would not find a long term Sea Lake local that hasn't contributed to the event in some way.
There were even signs when you entered the town saying "Sea Lake, home of the Mallee Rally". The event was their very identity.
The track for the race is at Lake Tyrrell which is just out of town. The race usually consisted of four laps of the 85-90km track. A couple of times they had the event as five laps. The format is two in the morning, an hour service break & then two in the afternoon. In 2016 a Chinese tourist took a pic of themselves at Lake Tyrrell appearing to be walking on water. This is achieved because Lake Tyrrell is a salt lake. Cheetham Salt have a large saltworks there. It has a hard crust with a small amount of water covering it giving the appearance of walking on water. The pic went viral on the Chinese social media & large numbers of Chinese tourists started flocking to Lake Tyrrell. The problem was there was no single designated area for the tourists to go. They were using GPS to get to the lake which would lead them sometimes to farmers tracks. They were opening farm gates & not closing them resulting in stock getting out. They were leaving rubbish on farmland & they were even sometimes trying to drive on the lake which resulted in them getting bogged & needing to be pulled out.
A plan was formulated by locals to get a government grant to build a visitor centre so as everyone went to one area. Several town meetings came up with the design & plan. Part of the logic for the visitor centre was that the growing numbers of tourists could affect the race because their aimless wandering & driving could see them on the race track during race weekend. Obviously farmers locked gates on race weekend but you never know. A centralised visitor centre seemed the perfect solution for everyone. A three million dollar grant was given by the Andrews state government to the Buloke shire for them to commission the visitor centre. It was soon after the government grant was announced that an indigenous activist & convicted drug trafficker came forward to protest about the event. He claimed there was significant aboriginal cultural heritage around Lake Tyrrell & that meant the event should cease & never happen again. In 2018 the Andrews government rewrote the indigenous cultural heritage legislation. The 2018 Mallee Rally was ran under a "permit to possibly cause harm". When the off road club applied for the 2019 permit from Parks Victoria they had a meeting. At that meeting there were people from Parks, Buloke shire, DELWP & Aboriginal Victoria. The Sea Lake Off Road club (SLORC) weren't invited. That meeting concluded that a permit for the 2019 event would not be issued unless a cultural study of the entire track was carried out. Most of the track is private farmland & some of the track is crown land. They wanted the study to include both the private & public land.
The cost of such a study would be in the many millions of dollars & probably would take years. At the end of that process the likely outcome would be the indigenous groups would refuse to sign off on the race continuing. The club is a small rural club. It didn't have anything like the money needed & Parks Victoria said they didn't have that sort of money either. So of course the 2019 event didn't take place. In fact 2018 was the last Mallee Rally. Some serious lobbying took place by local politicians that knew the value of the event to the community. The Andrews government agreed to a grant of three hundred grand late 2019 for a "conservation study". We were told this would pave the way for the event to return. The study commenced then covid hit. Study concluded after covid. A draft report was released & it was a total fit up. Short version is the report concluded that the event should never be allowed to happen again. The indigenous groups wanted the government to buy all the farms surrounding the lake & hand them over to them. They wanted the government to buy the saltworks & give it to them. They wanted the government to fund & build an observatory & hand it to them. They also wanted all non indigenous based tourism at the lake to cease. There were even claims made that irrigation by the farmers surrounding the lake were damaging the ecosystem of the lake. Fun fact, it's a salt lake. There is no irrigation, if anyone tried to water anything with water from the lake it would instantly die. The draft report contained many things were inaccurate & some things that were outright lies.
after the draft report was released there was a period of time where people could send counter submissions that challenged the draft report. These counter submissions would be used to come up with the final report. The final report was due to be released before the last state election. Despite local politician Jade Benham asking for it's release several times in parliament & even submitting an FOI request for it's release, it remains hidden by the government. We suspect the counter arguments were more compelling that the arguments to permanently cancel the event. This doesn't suit the government's agenda so they keep it hidden. This is the same cultural heritage legislation that has led to the rock climbing bans at The Grampians & at Mt Arapiles.
The people of Sea Lake have never been consulted about their event. It was just banned from Melbourne & that's that. They don't get a say at all.
There is a fair bit about the "Sea Lake Mallee Rally" on YouTube if you want to have a look. There was a good Age article written. If you google "Bombing the Vatican Sea Lake" you will find it. Local area politician Jade Benham is pretty full bottle on what's occurring & would be a good person to talk to if you were interested. The event always took place on Queens Birthday long weekend. They even planned the grand reopening of the pub for the 2019 long weekend because it was always their best weekend of the year. Of course the race got cancelled. I also have a social media page called FTR Motorsport which has become a "bringbackthemalleerally page. My involvement is that of a supporter of the race, nothing more.
Events like this are so important to rural communities. You can imagine how beneficial it would be this year with hundreds of thousands of tourism dollars coming into the region. Also as previously mentioned, the mental health benefits it would bring. The government has stonewalled every attempt to get this event back. We have always believed a compromise position could be reached if there was negotiation. The indigenous groups aren't interested & neither is the government. We are reaching a critical time. This is year seven without it. Government & indigenous groups will argue that "you have managed without it for seven years so you don't really need it". Any help with putting the story out there would be much appreciated.
Thank You
Daryl Pearce.
