Caring for Country today

For seventeen chapters’ worth of story, more or less, the Adelaide region’s ecological history reads as subtraction: forests cleared, wetlands drained, animals lost. This entry is about the other half of the ledger — smaller, slower, less certain, but real: somewhere in the last few decades, people here began trying to add some of it back.

The most visible form is trees. Since 1981, volunteers with a charity called Trees For Life have grown and handed out tens of millions of native seedlings for landholders to plant, while a sister program sends trained volunteers 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 and expect it to survive, because the foxes and cats are still there. So the return of the fauna has meant fences: at Warrawong, near Mylor, a predator-proof fence closed in 1982 and rebuilt bettong, bandicoot and potoroo populations behind it — though the sanctuary itself later closed in 2013 and reopened only in 2019, a case study in how precarious even a defended island is to keep staffed and funded (InDaily 2019). Water is coming back in patchier ways: aquifer-recharge schemes now bank winter stormwater underground rather than letting it run to waste, and the battered samphire and mangrove coast north of the city is being nursed back after brine damage, while a new national park on the city’s southern edge, Glenthorne, is being replanted tree by tree into what was once paddock.

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 is the public record, respectfully told, and no more.

None of this restores 1836. The mammals that are gone are gone, the climate is warming, and the country will never again be what it was. 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 this generation was given.