From taking to keeping

For seventeen chapters this book has mostly been an account of subtraction — rock worn down, forests cleared, rivers dammed, animals lost. This idea is the turn: somewhere in the last few decades, in a hundred scattered and uncoordinated ways, the people of the Adelaide region began trying to give some of their country back.

The most visible form is trees. Since 1981 volunteers have grown and handed out more than thirty million native seedlings for farmers to plant, while a sister program sends trained “bushcarers” into hundreds of surviving remnant patches — cemeteries, roadside strips, reserve fragments — to weed and nurse them back toward health. None of it undoes the clearing. It is the clearing run, however partially, in reverse, by people with trowels.

Bringing the animals back is harder, because it runs straight into the two predators that emptied the country in the first place. You cannot release a bettong into the Adelaide Hills, because the foxes and cats are still there and will eat it as efficiently as they ever did — a toll that has already driven more than one in ten of Australia’s native land mammals extinct continent-wide (Woinarski et al. 2015). So rewilding here has meant fences. At Warrawong, near Mylor, a predator-proof fence closed in 1982 and, behind it, brush-tailed bettongs and southern brown bandicoots resumed the small ordinary business of digging for fungi at dusk; the sanctuary later closed in 2013 and reopened only in 2019, which tells you how precarious even a defended island can be (InDaily 2019).

Water is coming back, in slower and patchier ways — drains blocked, wetlands nursed, the poisoned samphire coast coaxed back after brine damaged it, seagrass efforts inching along the metropolitan coast.

The deepest return is the oldest. In 2018 the Federal Court formally recognised Kaurna native title over the Adelaide region, the first such recognition over the ground of an Australian capital city (Agius v State of South Australia (No 6) [2018] FCA 358). In May 2021, in the Park Lands, Kaurna people lit a cultural fire — described by Green Adelaide as the first cultural burn in an Australian capital city, and the first on that ground in over 240 years (Green Adelaide / City of Adelaide 2021). This book’s cultural discipline holds here as everywhere: this is the public record, respectfully told, and no more.

None of this restores 1836. The mammals that are gone are gone, and the country will never again be what it was. But success was never going to mean restoration — only slowing the losses, holding what remains, and handing on a country a little fuller than the one we were given.