Pathway · about 15 minutes · 4 steps
Mending ground
Read recovery in progress — the turn from taking to keeping, and what a mended patch of country looks like.
Two centuries of taking, and then, somewhere in living memory, a turn. Start with the shape of that turn — fences, replanted gullies, water let back onto drained ground, Kaurna custodianship returning — so you know what “mending” looks like here, and how modest it still is. Then find it holding rather than starting: the Fleurieu’s peat swamps, wet enough that a fragile emu-wren never had to leave. From a refuge that survived to one rebuilt behind wire: the bettong, gone from the open ranges, digging again only where a predator-proof fence keeps the foxes out. Finish at the hardest case: native grassland, down to scraps of one per cent, the limit of mending once almost everything is gone.
Take it with you. Next time you pass a fenced sanctuary or a verge of tussock grass, you’ll know which kind of mended ground it is, and how far it still has to go. Close the page and go outside.
- Caring for Country today — After two centuries of taking, the Adelaide region has begun, in a hundred scattered and uncoordinated ways, trying to give some of its country back — modest, real, and nowhere near a full repair.
- The Fleurieu peat swamps — Spring-fed peat swamps in the wettest folds of the southern ranges — an acid sponge built by centuries of waterlogging, and the last stronghold of the Mount Lofty southern emu-wren.
- Brush-tailed bettong (woylie) — A rabbit-sized digging kangaroo that once tilled the Adelaide Hills every night, sowing truffle-fungus spores as it went — gone from the whole mainland but for a handful of fenced sanctuaries, one lost gear in the underground loop.
- Spear-grass & wallaby-grass — The tussock grasses that once floored the whole of the Adelaide Plains under scattered gums — now the most vanished habitat in the book, surviving as less than one per cent of its former self in scattered fenced scraps.
The end-check — put it together
You've walked the steps. Now answer these from what the pathway taught, not from the pages — getting them here is what tells you it stuck.
You are walking a cleared, grazed paddock in a high fold of the southern Mount Lofty Ranges or the Fleurieu. Most of the paddock has dried off for summer, but one low corner stays black, sodden and fringed with rushes long after the ground around it, and it feels slightly slumped underfoot, as if something beneath it has shrunk. What are you standing on the last trace of?
Cues: A low corner that stays wet and rush-fringed long after the rest of the paddock dries off · Black, peaty soil rather than ordinary duplex paddock soil · Ground that feels slumped or subsided underfoot · Otherwise unremarkable, cleared and grazed pasture all around
Permanent waterlogging starves the soil of oxygen, so dead vegetation there does not properly rot but piles up as peat, century by century; drain that ground and the peat itself shrinks and subsides, leaving exactly this kind of dark, slumped, still-damp hollow inside an otherwise dry paddock. It matters because these swamps were never extensive — something over two thousand hectares once dotted the high country, and only a slim remainder, on the order of a quarter of that, still holds its water and peat rather than having been drained away (Armstrong, Croft & Foulkes 2003), which is why the community is listed nationally as critically endangered.
The brush-tailed bettong (woylie) is now extinct across the Adelaide Hills outside a few fenced sanctuaries. Every night of its working life, what underground partnership was it maintaining as it dug through the leaf litter?
Native hypogeous fungi such as Mesophellia and Hysterangium fruit underground and cannot release spores to the wind the way a mushroom does, so they depend entirely on being smelled out, dug up and eaten by mammals like the bettong; the spores pass through its gut and are deposited, still viable, wherever it next digs (Claridge 1994; Danks 2020). Losing the bettong does not stop the loop cleanly, but it removes a fire-tuned, purpose-built disperser from the system at exactly the moment recently burnt ground most needs reseeding.
Fewer than one in a hundred hectares of the tussock grassland that once floored the Adelaide Plains survives today, yet most people driving across the plains assume the paddock grass they see is simply what grass has always looked like here. What is going on?
Less than one per cent of native grassland survives across the whole Adelaide and Mount Lofty Ranges region, mostly in scraps under 31 hectares (DEH 2009) — a loss so old and so total that no living witness can measure a paddock of wild oats or veldt grass against what it replaced. That is a shifting baseline: each generation inherits a more depleted 'normal' and mistakes it for the original. Fragmentation describes a different problem — remnants broken into isolated patches — and it doesn't by itself explain why the loss goes unnoticed; the pasture grasses are also genuinely introduced species, not renamed natives.