The $25m bid to protect a vast swath of Australia’s tropical wilderness

The chainsaws were coming for Liffey Valley, a haven of Gondwana-era myrtle and sassafras sheltering Tasmanian devils, spotted quolls and bandicoots. It was 1990, and two San Franciscan philanthropists had just awarded Bob Brown, then a state MP, the $49,000 Goldman Environmental Prize for his defence of the Franklin River.

Brown seized the windfall and used it as a down-payment on the land, and began fundraising to pay off the rest and secure the Tasmanian valley from logging. The campaign gave rise to Bush Heritage Australia, a not-for-profit that has since secured 44 properties and 1.5 million hectares across the country for conservation, from a pocket of Illawarra rainforest to a swath of samphire shrubland spilling into Western Australia’s Hamelin Pools.

Now the organisation says it is making its most ambitious ploy.

The opportunity has arisen to purchase a property called Wooroora, a 20,000-hectare cattle station on the edge of Far North Queensland’s World Heritage-listed wet tropics. The land is wedged between Yourka, an existing conservation reserve managed by Bush Heritage, and the Koombooloomba and Tully Falls national parks.

Securing the property would anchor a 429,000-hectare conservation corridor and safeguard the largest unprotected section of wet sclerophyll forest in the region, as well as headwaters that gush onto the Great Barrier Reef and habitat that vaults from rainforest gullies to 1000-metre bluffs, spanning more than 50 ecosystem types.

“You have this convergence of different ecosystems creating this thing called an ecotone,” says Dr Jo Axford, head of Bush Heritage’s northern properties, looking over a map of the area at Yourka’s headquarters.

“You get cassowaries here,” she says, running her finger along Wooroora’s eastern edge abutting the rainforest of Tully Falls. “And emus here,” she says, pointing to the western side further inland. “You also have koalas and tree kangaroos. These things don’t normally coexist.”

The bill for Wooroora is $24.7 million, including the first five years of intensive management required to transform a cattle property back into pristine wilderness. It’s currently a prospective acquisition as Bush Heritage guns to raise $5.3 million to secure the property and support its broader work.

Despite its agricultural history, only small patches of Wooroora have been cleared and about 98 per cent of its bushland is intact. “It’s very unusual to find a pastoral property like that now, but the property hasn’t been cared for,” Axford says. “So when we look at it, we can see all these things that we can do through fire management, weed management, removing cattle and feral animal control. We’ve got this huge potential to have a big impact.”

Two decades of this kind of management at the Yourka property has paid dividends. Blue-faced honeyeaters and rainbow bee-eaters dice the air of the property’s savannah, studded by Queensland blue gums and orange termite mounds curled over like golems. In 2020, koalas returned; paler, smaller and shorter-haired than their southern cousins to cope with the tropical heat. A platypus was spotted in the river for the first time in 2022. And a new species of fungi, Austroboletus yourkae, which emits a fishy tang, emerged from Yourka’s leaf litter and into the scientific literature in 2023.

Yourka manager Leanne Hales shows us a camera trap set up to document the antics of a resident great bowerbird last year. The resulting 70,000 images captured both the bird’s amassing of its favourite decor – bleached snail shells, red caps from gas cylinders, the plug to the station’s kitchen sink, the stolen pom-pom of a beanie – and a procession of creatures thriving in the area, including possums, bush rats, a lumbering goanna, squatter pigeons, dragon-like pheasant cuckoos and a bettong.

The Bush Heritage team are hoping to foster the same abundance on Wooroora, where a rare northern stronghold of magnificent brood frogs – delicate orange-striped amphibians the size of thumbs – have been discovered. Under agreement with the current owner, Bush Heritage has early access to the property, and Jirrbal Indigenous rangers are preparing to help run eco-surveys to find what else may live there.

“There’s rocky crevices, fungi, all sorts of amazing things we just don’t know about,” Axford says of the property, which would transfer to Bush Heritage’s control next year. “It’s full of secrets.”

Crossing into Wooroora in a trio of mud-splattered ATVs, savannah transforms into cooler, higher, grassy forest roved by Brahman cattle. We stop at a place where a sheet of green plummets from the sky, as blunt and dramatic as a circus tent pitched in a paddock.

Slip through the curtain of glossy boat-shaped leaves and the world transforms. The light dims and temperature drops so suddenly your skin shivers with goosebumps. A cathedral of kauri pine, native ginger and vines closes overhead.

It seems extraordinary this pocket of rainforest, nestled in the shade of a tiny, heart-shaped gully, persists in the middle of a cattle farm. “It’s just this little microclimate that enables this type of rainforest vegetation to grow in what’s otherwise very open woodland,” says Emily Rush, an ecologist brought on by Bush Heritage to work on Yourka and Wooroora.

She kneels and unclips a camera trap from a trunk; it has captured a passing Lumholtz’s tree kangaroo, a creature resembling a chimeric blend between a rock wallaby and a lemur with the mystical quality to match.

While these rainforest pockets provide critical refuge for rainforest-dwellers including the tree kangaroos, it’s actually the grassy, open woodland surrounding the dark gully that represents the most precious part of Wooroora.

This type of ecosystem is wet sclerophyll forest, one of Australia’s most precious and unprotected ecosystems. These forests are dominated by gigantic rose gums – among Australia’s tallest flowering plants – alongside blackbutt and turpentine, and nourish a sparse understorey of native grass and shrubs. It’s essential habitat for yellow-belly gliders, which need old-growth rose gums for their hollows, and the northern bettong, one of the top 20 mammals at most risk of extinction.

Since traditional owners were removed from these ecosystems, nixing centuries of cultural burning, wet sclerophyll forest has shrunk, taken over by cattle or overrun by rainforest.

“Up here in the wet tropics, we have about a million hectares of continuous rainforest,” Rush says. “But we only have about 54,000 hectares of wet sclerophyll forest up here, in really fragmented patches. The widest strip of wet sclerophyll forest is four kilometres. The narrowest is 100 metres.”

Without regular, low-intensity fire, rainforest plants lay down layers of rotting leaf litter, smothering native grasses and encroaching on forest. Aggressive invasive grasses such as gamba and grader grass out-turf native species, growing up to two metres tall. These invaders drive flames 10 times hotter than fires fuelled by native grass, turning bushfire into a force that razes, rather than regenerates, forest.

It’s the job of Rhys Swain to bring nourishing fire back to the landscape. The fire program manager presides over a mosaic of maps showing the last time each patch of Bush Heritage’s properties burned. Focused on protecting biodiversity rather than buildings, he weighs up a raft of factors: how often do certain species prefer to burn, when are nesting animals in areas slated for hazard reduction, have fuel loads built up to the degree a fire would burn too hot and cook mature trees?

“We’ve got to understand exactly what the bush needs,” he says. “We take the life cycle of the most threatened plants that are in there to determine the fire regime, the area, the frequency, the severity and the interval.”

The goal is to avoid the late-season infernos that annihilate ecosystems and leave monocultures of gamba grass in their wake, a fate befalling many of the savannah woodlands of the Northern Territory. Fires often roar across the border from Wooroora into Yourka. Swain hopes bringing active fire management to both areas will make for less destructive fire seasons once the fence between them comes down.

Back at Yourka after sunset, a greater glider’s eyes are bright with torchlight in a grove of eucalypts, its bushy tail dropping from a pale branch like a feather boa from the crook of a starlet’s elbow.

This creature with farcically fuzzy ears is part of the reason Wooroora is up for protection. The property was slated to become a wind farm with 98 turbines, each 200 metres tall, and would have required the clearing of 509 hectares of forest.

Backlash to the proposal produced one of those politically awkward situations where some conservationists found themselves allied with anti-renewable activists. Ark Energy scaled down the plans to 42 turbines, but in April 2024 then Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek signalled she would reject the development, citing the project’s risk to habitat for the northern greater glider, among other species, as one of her motivations.

That’s when Bush Heritage stepped in and asked to buy the property instead. “It’s a tricky space to be in,” Axford says of the organisation, which she describes as not anti-industry or mining – and certainly not against renewable energy – but pragmatic advocates for carving out some ecologically rich spaces to be left free of any kind of infrastructure, farming and logging.

“We’re active managers, and it’s really important that our neighbours see that we’re active,” Axford says. “It makes a really big difference to how we’re accepted in communities.”

A small army of fire-trained staff is just one of the management assets Bush Heritage brings to the table, scaled up from 12 crew before Black Summer to 76. There are the thousands of marauding feral pigs to trap and kill; we spy their black bodies charging through the grass trees. Thickets of fast-spreading lantana must be torn out and controlled. Maintaining access roads with heavy machinery comes at enormous cost. Acquiring land is just the start of the story.

Bush Heritage runs mostly off donations, but receives a small amount of support from the federal government to help achieve a commitment under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework to conserve 30 per cent of Australia’s land and waters by 2030, in the face of catastrophic ecological decline. Official numbers claim we’re 25 per cent there, with another 34.3 million hectares required to meet the goal. The government has acknowledged private land acquisitions for conservation are part of the solution.

Yourka already has a nature refuge covenant over it; a type of agreement that means any successive owners must protect its conservation values, forever. Bush Heritage is aiming for an extra level of protection for both Yourka and Wooroora called a special wildlife reserve covenant.

“It’s a really phenomenal amount of protection because a nature refuge doesn’t actually, believe it or not, protect from mining, and it doesn’t protect from forestry interests,” Axford says.

“We’ve got an application in for Yourka, and when we purchase Wooroora, that will be our aim, too. It gives the same level of protection as a national park,” Axford says.

From above, you can’t see the fences that split Yourka from Wooroora; just nature’s borders between the olive green of wet sclerophyll trees and the emerald of rainforest, the rock of dramatic gorges and the almost pearlescent waters that flow into the ocean and onto the reef.

“There are very few wild places left in the world, and here we have an opportunity to save and protect one, and that’s what I feel right here,” Axford says. “I actually feel hope.”

Angus Dalton and Audrey Richardson travelled to Far North Queensland courtesy of Bush Heritage Australia.

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