In the great sickle-shaped hinterland of the Western Australian wheat belt, trees have been exterminated. A few lonely specimens mark the corners of paddocks but most of what you see is a land scraped utterly naked. Today, as I drive north from Perth toward the old pastoral lease at Mt Gibson Station, a wicked easterly howls in off the desert and the sky is pink with dirt. Less than a century ago this bit of country was a series of eucalypt woodlands, but they were bulldozed and burned at the urging of successive governments to make way for cultivation. The fragile soil exposed by all this tree grubbing was quickly depleted; then it was laced with billions of tonnes of superphosphate, which lured two generations of farmers into the delusion that their operations were sustainable. Emboldened by good seasons and high prices, grain farmers pushed right out into the drylands. At the time it must have seemed that nature itself was surrendering to human ingenuity and the vigour of a new settler culture.
I remember driving through wheat country on winter's nights as a boy to see mile upon mile of burning windrows, whose parallel lines were like the columns of an army on the march. When I was a kid, the sons of wheat farmers believed they would inherit something precious. This was before the creeping insurgency of salt and the arrival of an almost permanent drought. Farmers have been walking off the land here for more than a decade, and those who hang on to their scorched-earth inheritance are given incentives to plant the very trees their fathers were paid to grub up.
While it still enjoys a residual heroic romance in Western Australian culture, to me the northern wheat belt is the most sterile and desolate bit of country imaginable. Travelling through it today I see kilometres of empty, gentle undulation, taut wire fences, stubble. I see grain silos at lonely rail sidings, hamlets with few signs of life. It's all very orderly, but nothing moves except the flying soil. Heading north towards the goldfields and the red desert beyond, fences begin to dwindle and then disappear altogether. The earth turns a deeper pink and the bitumen two-lane of the Great Northern Highway unravels into the wavering distance where country becomes flatter, wider, drier and hotter by the minute. But then, oddly enough, you begin to see roadkill—emus, cockatoos, kangaroos—bloated and flyblown at the gravel edges.
It takes a while for it to sink in, but the closer you get to the desert, the more life there is in the land; once you're beyond the reach of modern cultivation there are trees again, and from their shadows come enough birds, reptiles and mammals to let you feel you are finally back in Australia. Each time I traverse the dead zone of the wheat belt and reach this bit of territory, my mood lifts. What kind of man cheers up at the sight of roadkill?
This far inland I'm way off my patch and I feel it keenly. I'm a coastal person. My home is the white-sand-and-limestone country of the central west. But past the last big wheat town of Dalwallinu, and before the gold diggings at Paynes Find, is a swathe of country that has taught me a lot about the mistakes of our common past and given me cautious hope for the future. Out here there's a different kind of littoral, where eucalypts and mulga scrub overlap in a wash of unlikely biodiversity. Along a stretch of road where, not long ago, you'd see country so beaten-down and degraded that you could cry, something is afoot. Here, in a state whose economy and mindset are bound up in an endless war on nature, private citizens have beheld the paralysis of government agencies and begun taking conservation into their own hands.
The chief player in the private fight against native mammal extinction is the Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC), a foundation that administers more than 2m hectares of land for conservation and restoration. The AWC runs Mt Gibson Sanctuary, about 350km northeast of Perth, in the Yalgoo district. This is where I first came into contact with private conservation and where, for the first time since I was a child, a mammal species seized my imagination and became as emblematic to me as any marine creature.
I've been coming to Mt Gibson since the AWC acquired it as their first big purchase, in 2001. A former sheep station of 130,500 hectares, it is a tract of transitional country bordering the vast dry salt pan of Lake Moore. The land within its boundaries still supports about 700 species of native plants in 13 vegetation associations, and with every passing year of recovery—since being de-stocked and rid of feral goats, foxes and cats—it gets closer to being a continental refuge for mammal species long extinct from the area.
***
In the late afternoon, when the bluish hummock of Mt Singleton shows in the far distance, I pull off on to the dirt drive that runs more than 40km east toward the old station homestead. I bounce past the junk piles of abandoned mine diggings. A mob of Major Mitchell's cockatoos spills, untidy as a closing-time crowd, from a cypress. Every few minutes the track changes colour—yellow, pink, black, purple, gold—as contours and vegetation types vary.
At the state barrier fence, known as the vermin proof fence, I stop the Land Cruiser and get out to swing back the gate. A desiccated emu carcass stands ensnared in the wire as a reminder of the fence's function. In dry seasons, emus head west in search of water, often moving in huge numbers. The fence, which is more than 1,800km long, was built to keep them at bay, and periodically you still see news footage of the emu "plague," hundreds of enormous, thirst-crazed birds stampeding south or battering themselves to death against the wire, cordoned off as though they were vermin.
From the vermin fence I bash the rest of the way east along the track to the sanctuary's homestead, a modest old place with sagging verandahs. There are stockyards nearby, a shearing shed and the usual array of once-loved vehicles that mark the property's former life as a sheep station.
***
Back in the spring of 2001, on my first visit to the sanctuary, the same compound was abuzz with scientists, the old shearers' cottage encircled by trailers piled with the equipment of zoologists, paleo-ecologists, entomologists and hardy bird-folks. I'd just finished a seven-year writing project and was enmeshed in a wearying public campaign for a coral reef in my spare time, so I arrived depleted, under-briefed and sceptical about this new philanthropic venture at the edge of the arid zone.
At that time the AWC was an unknown quantity. One of Western Australia's most senior scientists, a man I knew and admired, had suggested that I come and take a look while he was up there, but he made the mistake of telling me that the whole show was the brainchild of a rich man, so naturally I expected the AWC to be a cashed-up corporation anxious to redeem itself, or yet another "green" outfit confusing conservation with commerce. Perhaps only an Australian can be this leery of wealthy do-gooders. We don't exactly have a strong tradition of philanthropy. We tend to blame those convict beginnings and the hard-bitten settler mindset, and perhaps there's something to that. Compared with the settlement of America, for instance, which was savage enough on any terms, colonial Australia does seem to have been specially marked by dismay, hunger and disenchantment: place names like Useless Loop, Point Torment and Lake Disappointment are common. Here there was no promised land for the interlopers, little milk and even less honey. When wealth was finally generated, its beneficiaries rarely troubled themselves with old-world noblesse oblige or the gestures that religious Americans were susceptible to. Having at last wrested something from the waterless frontier, the luckless colonists of the Australian west grasped hard and long at whatever they got. Along with their war on nature they maintained a stalwart resistance to charity; there was no room for softness.
Whether we like it or not, conservation traditionally involves the broke hounding the captive in the employ of the feebleminded. I never held out much hope that the Australian rich might one day enter the fray on the side of nature, especially not our western breed of moguls. Dreamers we may have been, but few local conservationists were utopian enough in 2001 to imagine something like the AWC in our midst, a flush, science-based entity without a political agenda. It sounded too good to be true. So when I arrived at Mt Gibson that spring in the siege mode of the campaigner, I was entranced by the landscape, though wary and privately cynical about the AWC. But within an hour of meeting its founder and benefactor, Martin Copley, I was disarmed.
With an odd mixture of authority and modesty, the quietly spoken Englishman outlined his plan to secure a network of wild refuges for native mammals. Around us, consulting specialists were already establishing which species were extant on the property and how many had been lost since the arrival of grazing and introduced predators. We visited trapping surveys and spread vegetation maps across the red-stained bonnets of vehicles. There was a sense of excitement.
Taking me on a hike across the homestead ridge, Copley pointed out raptors' nests, ancient sandalwoods and the great dry pink expanse of Lake Moore. A former insurance magnate, he offered an unsentimental view of philanthropy. He said he'd learnt about native mammal extinction and now had the resources to do something about it—end of story. From the start he struck me as logical, purposeful, even steely. Scrupulously polite, he was impatient with symbolism; his instincts seemed strategic and empirical. He wasn't a guilty rich man, nor was he anybody's fool. In his own terms he simply saw a vacuum between state agencies and green advocacy groups and decided to fill it. While advocacy groups could only prod and shame government into enlarging its efforts, Copley's purchase at Mt Gibson dramatically increased Western Australia's reserve of critically important habitats at the stroke of a pen. Today his organisation is the biggest private conservation landholder on the continent. Having brought a new respectability to philanthropy and conservation, the AWC has helped spawn something that may become the new environmental mainstream in this country.
***
Meanwhile, literally back at the ranch, I leave a note tucked into the flyscreen door of the homestead and decide to press further into the sanctuary so I can reach Lake Moore before dark. It's slow going. I have to ease the vehicle up the steep, guttered track of the homestead ridge. Halfway up I see a telltale mound and pull up with a flutter of anticipation. Getting out as quietly as I can, I ease down the scree slope to the hummock of black and red and green stones that forms the nest of a mallee fowl. In a moment I see there's no bird here, and hasn't been for some time.
Resembling a big speckled chicken, the mallee fowl stands up to 60cm tall. It's a discreet and elusive bird. The male constructs the nest by kicking dirt and stones into a circular mound with a central crater, in which he dumps vegetable matter upon which the hen will lay her eggs. Heat generated by the rotting detritus incubates the eggs, and hatchlings must fight their way unaided to the surface and then fend for themselves.
Back in the truck, I crest the ridge and go crunching down into a new landscape. But before I head down into the valley of trees I make a detour. I'm anxious about the light, but determined to make this ritual visit whenever I'm here.
I stop the vehicle in a clearing that was once unremarkable to my unschooled gaze. When I first came here with the station's former owner, Peter Underwood, and the bird expert John Dell, I had no idea what we were looking at or for. Across the hard-packed red dirt there's a plate of exposed rock where I once knelt with the two older men to survey a few burrows that opened around its perimeter.
"Rabbits?" I murmured.
Underwood shook his head.
"Boodies," he said. "Boodies!"
"Boodies," I murmured doubtfully, looking to the birdman for some moral support, sensing a joke at my expense. Boodies? Yeah, right.
"Like a woylie," said Dell, "Closely related."
Ah. Of course. Even I'd heard of the woylie. But like most of my countrymen, I couldn't have described one.
The woylie belongs to the great treasury of marsupials that we revere and know nothing about. As I learned that day, the boodie (see picture) and the woylie are different species of bettong. A bettong is like a kangaroo but no bigger than a modest teddy bear. Its face is more rounded than a kangaroo's, with the protuberant eyes of a possum. While the woylie (Bettongia penicillata) nests in the undergrowth of dry sclerophyll forest, the boodie (Bettongia lesueur) is the only macropod to shelter in burrows. It digs elaborate warrens, favouring rock lintels that give its redoubts security and unusual longevity. Like most marsupials it is omnivorous and nocturnal. It has a particular appetite for underground fungi.
"Look at that warren," said Underwood admiringly. "You'd think they only just built it."
By this stage I was properly enthralled by the prospect of a boodie encounter. Wondering if we'd have to wait long, I began to calculate the approach of dusk, but before I could embarrass myself further the others broke the news that, although once widely distributed across the arid inland, the boodie has been extinct on mainland Australia since the early 1960s.
The story of this extinction is familiar. The arrival of agriculture and pastoralism wrought catastrophic habitat loss. In their native state, small mammals did not have to contend with predatory carnivores like foxes and cats, for which they were easy meat. Under these new conditions the boodie population collapsed quite suddenly.
Still hunkered by the old warren, Underwood confessed a conviction that somehow, one day, the boodie would return to Mt Gibson. His tone was wistful but also defiant. I thought again of the potent space that an absence becomes. Each time I come to Mt Gibson I think of Peter Underwood and his dream of boodies finding their way back to these burrows, like exiles returning to their former homes. With the passing of every year that notion has become a little less fanciful. In fact, it might soon be possible, because a partnership of public and private concerns has already seen the boodie begin its long easterly trek homeward.
The last natural strongholds of the boodie are two remote islands, Bernier and Dorre at Shark Bay. A little closer to shore squats the smaller Faure Island, another AWC sanctuary. In 2004 I travelled there with Martin Copley, Tim Flannery and the basketball star Luc Longley to help to release boodies and other rare marsupials back into the wild.
I remember walking out at Faure into the low mulga just as stars took over the sky. From a carry-cage tagged and supported like a case of impossibly rare jewels came a tiny creature snuggled within a hessian bag. I held it a minute or two while its heartbeat capered against my chest; it wouldn't have weighed a kilo. I was struck by the fineness of its limbs and I wanted to linger a while, but there were protocols to observe so I knelt in the red dirt, laid the bag down and peeled it open so that the creature might emerge unassisted, and when it did I got my first glimpse of a boodie. When it got to its feet it twitched a moment as if to gauge the feel of its radio-tracking collar, glanced about with huge, dark eyes and bolted, zigzagging into the bush, and witnessing it I found it difficult to maintain an empirical calm. One after the other, boodies and then several rare hare-wallabies shot out into the wild.
Despite their vulnerability to native owls and raptors, the original 17 boodies released on Faure Island have grown to a wild population of more than 100. Mt Gibson's old warrens are hundreds of miles southeast of Faure, and there are logistical problems to be solved before the first translocations can be undertaken, but at least with the new population thriving on the island, where the mainland is in plain view, the boodie is within striking distance of home.
During the original AWC survey, Alexander Baynes produced an invaluable picture of mammal species present at Mt Gibson before the arrival of pests like the fox and the cat. The list he produced is a rollcall of troubled species that includes not just the boodie and the woylie, but the elusive wambenger, the chuditch, the short-beaked echidna, and several species of dunnarts, bandicoots, bats, wallabies and mice.
Creatures with names like these would be at home in a satire by Jonathan Swift, so it should be no surprise to discover that the Dean's co-ordinates put Gulliver hereabouts. At the time Swift was writing there was indeed an austral island teeming with creatures more strange and marvellous than even he could imagine. But the sad fact is that the citizen on the street in Sydney will have as little idea about what a dunnart is as his counterpart in London or Chicago. For the record, it is a mouse-sized marsupial with huge ears. There are about 20 species of them.
***
Finally, with the sun gone beyond the western ridges, I come out upon the great and terrible expanse of Lake Moore, at whose dry shore I'll make camp for the night. I've driven all day away from the coast in order to roll my swag out on the edge of yet another body of water, and a ghostly one at that. There are better campsites back in the salmon gums but the eerie blankness of the salt pan fascinates me. I want to be present at dusk and dawn to see what comes in from the shimmering distance.
Back at the vehicle, I tip my bed-roll on to the stony ground and cook a meal on the little propane stove. I sit in the gathering dark as bats flit overhead. The creepy, egg-like moon squeezes up out of the interior. A stiff easterly breeze begins to blast across the gritty surface of the lake and somewhere behind me a tree creaks. I climb into my swag to get out of the wind. I can see just as well from there.
I wake at midnight, surprised to have slept for almost four hours, startled by the passage of some emus. Later other creatures will move by unseen, thudding south. I snuggle back down but sleep eludes me. The moon overhead is almost oppressive and I hadn't anticipated the luminous expanse of lake would be quite so intimidating. The wash of the Milky Way begins to look like a reflection of the salt pan below and after a few hours I have the discomforting sense of being pressed between two fierce fields of light.
I twist down into my canvas cocoon and think of the three small girls who trekked alone through this country back in 1931. Theirs is a legendary journey, made famous by Philip Noyce's film Rabbit-Proof Fence. Molly Craig, Gracie Fields and Daisy Kadibil spent nights hiding in hollow logs and walked all day for nine weeks at the mercy of forces crueller and more implacable than landscape. And here I am, a big pink grown-up with a Land Cruiser, beginning to feel—well, a little uneasy in the moonlight.
Just before dawn cockatoos begin to shriek up in the trees on the ridge, and as light comes up I roll out of my swag to make coffee while pigeons clatter past.
As I set off along the shore the first pinprick of sun is at the horizon. I veer out from the rocky breakaways that separate lake and land to walk amid the hundreds of animal tracks impressed into the soft crust of the salt pan. Lying north to south, Lake Moore is well over 100km long. Here, at one of its narrower points, it's still several kilometres wide. It's bigger than a city, yet except for me the only thing moving on it this morning is the easterly wind.
I walk south until a dark mass appears in the distance. A newcomer could be forgiven for mistaking this smudge for a group of people, or a mob of kangaroos. It takes a few more minutes for this gathering to reveal itself as a long, winding alignment of upright stones. They vary in height from about 15 to 60cm and have been embedded in the salt pan in a serpentine pattern that tightens at its western end into concentric coils like a fish trap. Yet there seem never to have been fish in hypersaline Lake Moore.
When American archaeologists visited this site in 1966, they measured the startling stone configuration at more than 80 metres in length, and counted 437 upright slabs and 91 that had fallen over where they stood. They noted the remains of a footpad across the lakebed, a track that still leads directly to this site. The visitors were in no doubt that this was an Aboriginal ceremonial place and, in the spirit of the era, they set off in search of "informants" who might explain it to them. Forty-two years on, it's impossible to know how good their information was. By the time the Americans arrived local people were a sad diaspora, hundreds of kilometres apart in settlements without traditional association. This site is difficult to get to, and little has been written about it since 1966, but it's generally agreed that it was an important meeting point for Noongar people from the south, Wongai from the desert and Yamatji from the coast. Across the lake there is an ancient dance-ground, a women's place related to this one, part of a series linked to ceremony and dreaming and trade.
Although the site on the lake is protected under federal legislation, its traditional custodian is a frail old man who lives nearly 200km away and upon his passing there is small prospect of the place having a new guardian with the full authority of traditional law.
There are human sites in this country that thrum with power, places whose ancient presences intimidate and confront, but this is not one of them. This feels like a monument to lost songs, languages, connections and clans, for a place like this, without its people, is bereft. Many of the 250-plus Aboriginal languages have been lost since the colonial era and too many folkways have disappeared in our own time. The reality is that since 1967 the well-meaning policies of every state and federal government have bequeathed the physical and cultural destruction that the earlier racist dispensation could not. Despite political successes, there are probably now more Aboriginal Australians in ill health, without education or employment than in the years of my childhood, more adults without agency in either tradition or modernity, more young people illiterate in every sense.
After previous visits to this ancient site I have walked away consumed by sadness and anger. I formed the conviction that it was a lost place, another bit of silent country, but this was presumptuous of me. In recent years Aboriginal people have begun to visit Mt Gibson and Lake Moore more frequently, either seeing these sites for the first time or revisiting them in an effort to revive the old and educate the young. Separated by great distances, some Aboriginal people are looking to the internet as a tool for the propagation of secret and sacred lore. Even seven or eight years ago, when the surrounding country bore all the disheartening marks of degradation, it was harder to sense much human promise hereabouts, but this year, in a landscape brimming with new growth, hope for the cultural and the environmental future of the region is just that little bit easier to cling to.
***
Even a decade ago the old war on nature was the prevailing mindset in this part of Australia. Its code lived in every bullet-riddled sign, every bleached paddock, every redneck bumper sticker and depressing roadhouse conversation, but something has definitely shifted. There is a new attitude to country, a sense of responsibility and respect evident in the language and actions of land users and custodians in the region. The neighbouring sheep station, White Wells, was recently de-stocked and is now Charles Darwin Reserve thanks to a bequest from Darwin's great-great-grandson Chris. On the northern boundary of Mt Gibson, within sight of where I stand, Ninghan Station has become an Indigenous Protected Area. Its stewards, the Bell family, are of Badimia descent. The Badimia are the Yamatji clan with closest traditional links to Lake Moore and the Bells have the responsibility of conserving indigenous sites and restoring natural heritage on their lease.
These projects are all private concerns, the labour of mere citizens. The native flora and fauna under their protection belongs to the state, but their operations are leaner, nimbler, and can be more immediately responsive than most state environmental agencies, which are politicised and bureaucratically inert. Faithful public servants have to endure vacillations of policy, infuriating budgetary constraints and the cold reality that almost every other arm of government is hostile to conservation. The advent of this new movement will hardly make the work of government agencies redundant. Nor does the emergence of private philanthropy mean that strident advocacy has become unnecessary—far from it—for most gains in conservation must still be won in the brutal and sapping rhetorical arenas of the courts, the parliament and the media. But the arrival of a quiet and respectable third way is a critical part of the cultural change needed in Australia if we are to restore our scorched earth.
Up on the ridge, above the barely perceptible tracks of the ancients, I look out on the expanse of the lakebed. Around me in the trees, in the buzzing air and crackling leaf litter, the recovering world feels close and familiar, upstanding and new. You can sense the country gaining strength again, fighting back, and on a fresh morning like this you really can imagine boodies bunkering down in their old warrens, like forward scouts dug in ahead of a wider repatriation.
