Big Sky Country

In this episode, we drive down the Gunbarrel Highway to the Birriliburu Indigenous Protected Area in WA’s central deserts to find some of the oldest sandalwood trees in the world. Underneath their scrambling canopies, we ask: How are they going in the wild? What makes these trees so special? And what does their future hold?

Different phases of plant and animal lifecycles, variations in animal behaviours, cloud formations and wind directions can indicate the right time to harvest different plants and foods, and the right time to burn different vegetation. But lately, with climate change accelerating, the seasons aren't always as they used to be.

We take you to central Arnhem Land to learn about the Rembarrnga and Dalabon seasonal calendars, and the community-wide effort to keep their language, culture and country strong.

We take you to its home, where water from deep in the earth below has travelled up to the surface of an arid, inland environment and given rise to what some scientists have called the ‘most significant natural springs for global biodiversity in the Great Artesian Basin.’

So, how did the fish come to be here in the first place? And what’s being done to save it?

They call it boom and bust country, out the back o' Bourke, and it's part of the last unregulated river system in the Murray Darling Basin. Dry soil transforms into wetlands full of frogs singing, waterbirds flocking and insects buzzing.

Water has sustained people, plants and animals for millennia, but in recent decades, Budjiti people have seen water, and the species that depend on it, disappearing. How much more can we lose?

They can fit in the palm of your hand. They have death-inducing mating habits. And, while they were once widespread across the southern half of Australia, they're now mostly restricted to the wheatbelt region of Western Australia.

Over a decade ago, a small group of these phascogales were bundled up, driven 100km and translocated to their new home: Kojonup Reserve on Wagyl Kaip and Southern Noongar country. Today, we find out how the population is surviving.

Grey Box and Yellow Box trees form the eucalypt backbone of our Nardoo Hills Reserves on Dja Dja Wurrung country in central Victoria, providing crucial habitats for all sorts of woodland birds, insects and tree-dwelling mammals.

When the woodlands began to die in 2008 and again in 2014, Bush Heritage scientists and volunteers devised a plan: an innovative climate-ready experiment to help keep trees in the landscape as temperatures rise and rainfall decreases.

Learn about seasons and ceremony, teeny tiny fish and phascogale sex, and the sounds a tree makes when it dies.

Hear the untold wonders of this precious and sometimes precarious land. And take the time to listen to the people who are protecting it against a barrage of ever-growing threats.