A huge environmental project in south-western Australia is under way whose vision is to restore vast swathes of lost territory to rich bush and lush forest, writes PADDY WOODWORTH
‘LET’S GET Charlie Darwin back into this landscape!” Keith Bradby has just pulled over to the edge of a red-dirt road to show me a remarkable plant that has characteristics of two species of grevillea, which is a widespread Australian botanical family with many members.
One species can be found a few dozen kilometres to the west of where we are standing, the other a few dozen to the east. But the one Bradby is holding does not quite fit either, and seems to be developing into something completely new and different.
“This is evolution in action,” he says enthusiastically, “but if the plant communities are no longer connected across the country, evolution can’t happen any more.” Bradby is the co-ordinator for the Gondwana Link, a massive environmental project that aims to re-connect and restore wet forests, mountain ranges, flat scrubland and arid woodlands across eight distinct ecosystems and 1,000km in south-west Australia.
The link gets its name from Gondwanaland, the ancient composite continent that included Australia, South American, southern Africa and India before it began to drift apart – about 120 million years ago.
The Link project, about as young as this century, is an attempt to prevent one of Gondwanaland’s richest biological legacies from fragmenting in a different sense, this time into impoverished islands of declining diversity.
The challenges to the Gondwana Link include vast areas cleared for farming, and a gung-ho mining industry sitting on some of the world’s richest mineral deposits.
I started the journey across the link at Margaret River, a flash surfing and holiday town at the centre of a new boutique wine industry, near the coast, at the continent’s south-western tip.
Driving the 400km south-east along Route 10 to Albany, the next substantial town, the landscape exudes a broad impression of robust ecological health. Much of the journey runs through unbroken karri eucalyptus forests. Karris are majestic trees, with old growth individuals reaching almost 90m. They thrive in the lush, wet climate of the extreme southwest, supporting a remarkable range of plants, rich in small marsupials, birds and reptiles.
The forests were threatened by logging, but are now extensively protected in national parks. Perhaps the most beautiful lies along the lazily meandering Warren river, where you can lose yourself in cathedral groves that rival California’s redwoods. Splendid fairy-wrens, tiny bundles of blindingly vivid purples and cobalts, perform courtship displays on the forest floor with the nonchalance of birds that are hardly ever disturbed. Until I reached the suburbs of Albany, I only encountered seven other cars in the whole day’s driving.
Here I hooked up with Keith Bradby, and we set off towards the other end of the Gondwana Link, the mining town of Kalgoorlie, deep in the Great Western Woodlands. Immediately we leave Albany, the climate becomes drier and the challenges facing the link become harshly apparent. First we pass monocultural plantations of blue gums, eucalypts farmed for wood chips or planted for carbon credits. Their tightly packed ranks admit no undergrowth; they are the very antithesis of biodiversity.
Then we approach the wheatbelt region, through vast paddocks (you don’t say “field” in Australian) cleared for crops and grazing. Often the green paddocks seem pock-marked with great grey stains, spotted with vegetation more typical of salt marsh than of meadows. Many of the farms, though cleared barely 50 years ago, are already dying from salinity.
The farmers who cleared them saw rich bush and forest vegetation, and assumed that this was good agricultural land. They forgot that this ancient part of the earth has not been refreshed and enriched by glaciation for roughly 250 million – yes, million – years. Only native plants can grow here, unless you pump industrial quantities of fertilizer into the little soil there is. Yet the new settlers treated their new fields as if they were the fat lands of Meath or Iowa. They did not know that thick layers of salt, deposited by rainfall from the ocean over many millennia, were only kept below the surface by the structure of native plant communities. Clear those plants, and the salt rises like an ecological avenger to poison the best attempts at growing wheat or raising cattle.
The Gondwana Link’s most intense efforts so far have been in the farming areas between the Stirlings and the Fitzgerald River. The link is more a vision than an organisation, and works through encouraging a broad coalition of other groups to achieve its goals. Swathes of local species – eucalyptus, acacia, grevillea, banksia, hakea, and dryandra – have been replanted on old wheatfields and pasture over the last five years in a great effort to restore an unbroken corridor of native vegetation from mountains to river.
A number of farmers have joined in, putting in belts of native plants on unproductive land. There are still more gaps than links on the map here, but the fragile dream of the link is taking definite shape.
An even more fragile restoration of the Noongar people is also forming tentatively on one of the purchased farms. Like many Australian environmental projects, the Gondwana Link is informed by an awareness of the destruction of the age-old aboriginal relationship with “country” by white settlement and dispossession.
At Nowanup farm, Eugene Eades, a charismatic Noongar elder — and former boxing champion — invites his community back to the country from which they were driven, not too long ago, to ‘reserves’ and urban squalor.
They find artifacts from their stone-age past almost everywhere they walk. A few hours further east, we encounter the famous Rabbit-Proof Fence, familiar to many cinema-goers from Philip Noyce’s eponymous 2002 film on the cruel fate of the “stolen generation” of Aboriginal children. The fence is still the boundary, visible from space, between agricultural land and the immense, little-known area which the Gondwana Link has called the Great Western Woodlands. Rather bigger than Switzerland, this is the largest area of (more or less) intact semi-arid woodland in the world.
A dazzling variety of eucalypts, some 350 species, ranging in colour from the carnal pinks of salmon gum bark to the argent foliage of silver gimlets, dominates the region. But there also grasslands, scrublands, salt lakes, and granite outcrops.
Gondwana Link is just beginning to operate here, mainly through the Australian Wilderness Society. The woodlands may appear intact on a quick drive-through, but in fact they form part of Australia’s legendary Goldfields region.
Many mining companies are operating here, and many more will in the future. Rather than trying to oppose them, the link is seeking advance agreement on an overall biodiversity plan which will ensure the protection of the most valuable areas, plus best practice during mining, including restoration afterwards.
It is probably presumptuous for any white person to imagine the Aboriginal Dreamtime. But it is tempting to imagine everything that lies beyond the woodlands to the west – the Fitzgerald river, the Stirling Range, the magnificent karri forests. And to imagine them once again organically connected, all the way to the Indian ocean. Maybe it’s a dream, maybe it’s a vision, but every seed planted along those 1,000km brings it closer to fruition.
Restoring the Future, Paddy Woodworth's book on ecological restoration projects worldwide, will be published by Chicago University Press next year.
