Where there's water, there's life

00:00 Eliza Herbert: Bush Heritage acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the places in which this podcast was recorded and in which we live, work and play. We recognise the enduring relationships they have with their lands and waters and pay our deepest respects to elders past and present.

00:19 Greg Carroll: Yeah, the first thing you notice is that really beautiful smell that everyone in the bush, I think really loves, because it means that there's rain on the way. That beautiful smell of water on dirt, on dry dirt and it's amazing. The water sits there, and you can almost not see the water moving, but all of a sudden, it's there and it's arrived. And it Just slowly creeps through the landscape, giving everything a drink as it goes and bringing life everywhere it goes.

01:00 Vanessa Westcott: These plants and animals have adapted to just wait for that moment when it arrives, and boy do they take advantage of it and make a go of it. The frogs start singing straight away, the shield shrimp, the clam shrimp. Everybody's out.

01:25 Greg Carroll: These water birds somehow know that it's all happening, and they turn up from nowhere and start to look at the conditions and see whether it's worth nesting and you know the conditions are going to be good for long enough for us to get a breeding event going. And if so, where do we go?

01:45 Vanessa Westcott: It's very smart country that knows what to do when that little bit of water comes.

02:00 Eliza Herbert: I've never been to Bush Heritage’s Naree Station Reserve, out the back of Burke, as it's colloquially known. I was born a city girl, but I grew up with vivid ideas of the country’s arid interior, inspired by poets, such as Banjo Paterson, who portrayed a landscape of gum trees and billabongs, impenetrable heat, and the harsh realities of life in a place where water is scarce.

Australians, I think, are generally pretty familiar with the idea of drought in remote places. What we know less intimately is what can happen when the water arrives. The relief that comes with the first sounds of rain on a tin roof, or how a creek that was bone dry one day can be filled with life the next. I'm Eliza Herbert. This is Big Sky Country, the podcast by Bush Heritage Australia and today we're taking you to Budjiti country, to a wetland of national significance. On the last free flowing river in the Murray Darling Basin.

03:05 Greg Carroll: Naree is about 145 km northwest of Bourke and just north of a little place called Yantabulla, which used to be a little village some time back.

03:16 Eliza Herbert: That's Greg Carroll, the manager of Naree. He's lived and worked on this conservation reserve for almost four years now, about half the time, that it's been under Bush Heritage's care.

03:26 Greg Carroll: I love being out here because I feel a connection to this land from my childhood, spending time out in this sort of red country. So, to be able to start working here was a real privilege for me. And then to meet Phil and the broader Budjiti community and working closely with them too, has been an even bigger privilege.

03:48 Phil Eulo: By the way, my name is Phillip Eulo. I'm Budjiti elder now, because I've taken over the role of looking after Country from my mother, aunties, grandmothers and uncles.

04:00 Eliza Herbert: Phil, well, let's just say that Phil's connection to Naree goes back a little longer than four years.

04:06 Phil Eulo: Oh my ancestors, my grandmother and my family, my mother and her family, grew up here on the Paroo River, and Naree was part of that Paroo River system.

04:20 Eliza Herbert: Eleven hours’ drive from Sydney, eleven hours from Brisbane, Naree is deep in the outback near the NSW and Queensland border. It is a landscape of booms and busts, of drought and flooding rain. It's clay pans and floodplains, wetlands and lignum swamps, a place where coolabah trees stand and wait over cracked ground, and life revolves around a very precious resource, water. Back in 2018, just after Greg first moved to Naree, he witnessed, firsthand, what happens when water touches this landscape.

04:53 Greg Carroll: I didn't really understand it until I saw it with my own eyes. And you know the cycles here can be ten, 15, 20 years long. And so, to be able to observe so much change has been a real privilege.

05:06 Eliza Herbert: When it rained further north across the border in Queensland, the water flowed south, moving slowly, slowly along the Paroo and Warrego rivers, and threading its way through some of Australia's most arid landscapes until eventually, it arrived at Naree.

05:21 Greg Carroll: That came through on about the 10th of April, and that was just magic, just everywhere for about a kilometre, either side of the main channel was just green all of a sudden. But then about two weeks later, we got about 70 mm of rain across the whole landscape. So, our neighbours all benefited from that as well as us, and it filled up all their ephemeral swamps and everything in between.

05:43 Eliza Herbert: Naree and the adjoining Yantabulla station, which Bush heritage also manages on behalf of South Endeavour Trust, form a gateway to Yantabulla Swamp.

05:52 Greg Carroll: Looking at the map and looking at the area of Yantabulla swamp, I would say that between Naree Station and Yantabulla Station we probably have some control over about, I think it's about 17% roughly, of the Yantabulla swamp in its entirety, yeah.

06:11 Vanessa Westcott: So, what you've got here are these two major systems that dominate in Naree, one is this floodplain system. The main way that water comes into that system is through the Warrego River and that requires it to rain heavily in Queensland and the catchment, the Warrego catchment. It has to flood down and be of a certain height to go over the Cunnamulla Weir and then comes down into the Cuttaburra Creek and comes into here. 

And when that rain happens up there is unpredictable. It's usually associated with cyclones or summer storms at all sorts of different times of year.

06:47 Eliza Herbert: Yeah, that's Vanessa Westcott, Bush Heritage’s ecologist for New South Wales. She works closely with Phil and Greg to monitor and manage this landscape. You might notice the next bit of audio sounds a bit different. That's because Vanessa took a microphone out with her to Naree when I was in lockdown in Melbourne. The rest we recorded over the phone.

07:06 Vanessa Westcott: And then that floodwater arrives from the north and it gradually fills the little channels and the creeks and the wetlands along the way. And it's amazing how the earth just sucks up all that water and drives a whole bunch of species to kick Into gear and grow and breed.

07:27 Greg Carroll: Your neighbouring property might be bone dry, but you might have all this greenery happening in that channel area, that is just from that one flood event from rainfall that might have happened weeks previous and not even in your area.

07:40 Vanessa Westcott: Then you've also got rainfall, local rainfall, that can fill the clay pans and also different species can emerge from dormant soil, plants and animals. And then you've got the combination of rainfall and flood, and do they occur at the same time, or what's the difference in the amount of time between those events? Do they occur multiple times in a year, summer or winter? And all that is rarely the same out there?

08:11 Eliza Herbert: As you might be starting to realize, the Yantabulla Swamp is a fairly unpredictable wetland system. It can fill from rains up north, or local rainfall, or both at any time of the year. You can get multiple floods within the space of a few months, or none for years on end, and that unpredictability. It's very rare in the Murray Darling Basin.

08:32 Vanessa Westcott: Partly the reason that Yantabulla Swamp is so special is because the water that fills the swamps. It comes from these relatively unregulated river systems like the Warrego River. Relatively unregulated, compared to the rest of the Murray Darling Basin. And it's my understanding the Paroo River catchment is actually the last unregulated river system in the Murray Darling basin and so they are both critical to filling the Yantabulla swamp.

09:02 Eliza Herbert: Elsewhere in the basin, dams and weirs regulate the amount of water that is released downstream. So rather than the dramatic contrast of flood and drought that would naturally occur, you end up with a kind of steady trickle. That element of control is really important for farmers, who need constant flows to irrigate their crops and sustain their livestock, to produce the food that we eat, but the plants and animals that live in the Yantabulla Swamp have adapted over thousands of years to a life of harsh extremes.

09:31 Vanessa Westcott: That unpredictability makes it really, really rare and special in the Murray Darling Basin and it allows different species to have an opportunity to thrive. So, some species prefer when the water is starting to recede, particularly water birds and things like that. But some birds prefer to be there right at the start when the water is just arriving and some you know, like the deeper water, some the shallow water. Some like it in summer and some like it in winter and so that unpredictability provides opportunities for lots of different species to thrive.

10:04 Eliza Herbert: Yantabulla Swamp is what's known as a wetland of national significance and one of the most important water bird breeding sites in northern New South Wales. When conditions are right, birds will flock to this landscape from all over Australia to build their nests on islands of lignum or in the elbows of half-submerged trees, far from the reach of predators.

10:25 Vanessa Westcott: There's a study that really top scientists in Australia, waterbird experts, did years ago, where 70,000 waterbirds were recorded on the Yantabulla swamp, which is one of the highest numbers of birds recorded in a wetland system.

10:39 Eliza Herbert: By nature of living on reserve, Greg has been lucky enough to witness the sudden congregation of water birds a few times at Naree.

10:46 Greg Carroll: So, you get straw-necked ibis, we had brolgas turn up, things start nesting. We didn't have a bird breeding event as such. Which I'm a little bit disappointed in, but these guys know when the right time is to do that, so they'll come in when there's enough food and enough water, when it's falling at the right time and all the rest of it.

But yeah, we had a significant amount of other birds turn up, stilts and dotterels and yeah, all sorts of things that you don't normally see. So that was pretty cool, and helped me with my bird ID skills which need some improvement.

11:20 Vanessa Westcott: We've got some species that love the deeper water, some that come as the floodwaters start to arrive. They come before they arrive and feed on little animals and insects, that get trapped in the floodwaters. As that flood water moves down the creeks and channels, so they have there to opportunistically grab those little morsels. Also got the waders, the species that like to live around the edge and feed on the shallower areas. So, there's such a big variety of birds.

11:47 Eliza Herbert: Seeing so many water birds like this is a special but increasingly rare spectacle. The Eastern Australian Waterbird Survey has been running for 38 years and is now led by the University of NSW. It's found that waterbird populations are declining right across the Murray Darling Basin as opportunities for breeding disappear with the loss and degradation of wetlands. 

In Australia, we have lost more than 50% of wetlands since European settlement. The reasons for this are numerous. For Naree and Yantabulla, floodplain harvesting, climate change and increasing water extraction further north, are all likely to mean less water flows into the wetlands in the future.

12:30 Vanessa Westcott: And the heating, the hot and the dry that's predicted with climate change also may reduce that flooding. It may also reduce the amount of flooding and the length of time the floods stay in the landscape. Those sorts of things are what we're worried about.

12:44 Eliza Herbert: Phil Eulo recalls the time when water was more abundant on his country.

12:48 Phil Eulo: And water, it means a big thing to us. We never had to leave the Paroo River. And we never had to. We never went without water, put it that way. The river’s our river, the Paroo with our native fish, our native crayfish, shrimp. black fish, bream and mussels. None of that's in the Paroo now, none of it's in any of the western rivers now.

13:33 Vanessa Westcott: I think one thing that strikes me is every time you get out of the car there are special signs of Budjiti life out there. Because the springs were permanent, there was a lot of permanent water out there. People didn't have to move long distances like they did in the desert or other places. And so, there's so much, so many artifacts, so many stone flakes, axe heads, oven hearths, just signs of Budjiti life, and treasures that you see when you're out there. And yeah, so it's a really special place.

14:08 Phil Eulo: When it rained out here, we get plenty of water and all the vegetation and we get our, we get our native food, our bush tucker, our medicine. That's what water means to us. You know, it brings back life to the country and then we live and we feed off the country. 

But water, water, water, that's what we need, and we can't get it. Because the water in the artesian basin is gone, and all we see now are big cracks in the ground everywhere.

14:44 Vanessa Westcott: The major change that is obvious at Naree and Yantabulla, is the fact that the permanent springs that were there are largely now extinct, and that's because the pressure has been reduced because of groundwater extraction within the Great Artesian Basin. In these systems, where permanent water is rare, being able to drill down into the ground and access groundwater, gave early settlers and pastoralists an opportunity to graze those areas that would have otherwise been impossible all year round because it gave them access to permanent water. 

There's a study that shows that some of the water as it percolates down in the Great Artesian Basin, it goes through this sandstone. It takes a really long time to percolate down into the water, the basin, the aquifer underground and it can be 200,000 to 1,000,000 years old. Some of that water. 

Since European settlement, we have taken so much out, there has not been the opportunity for that water to recharge at the rate at which we're extracting it. So that's where we get those situations where the pressure is reduced and we lose all these incredibly important springs across this huge area of Australia. It's pretty sad to think about.

16:03 Phil Eulo: So, how do we get that back? Never, I suppose, but I'm just going to manage what we got now and try and look after it and look after the world around us, the environment and everything. Look after that. We look after that, that looks after us.

16:30 Vanessa Westcott: Just on the main track, yes and then there'll be a right turn. There will be be a pink flag.

16:35 Eliza Herbert: So, how do you even begin to look after the world around you? Well, the first step is understanding what you're looking after.

16:44 Vanessa Westcott: You're going to say, come on, cool. Tag this next one. Nice phascogale.

16:48 Eliza Herbert: Every year, Vanessa and her colleagues survey the species on Naree and Yantabulla.

16:57 Vanessa Westcott: Quite a good feeling about this one. Beautiful. Hey, last one.

17:12 Eliza Herbert: They visit the same sites and record all the different animals they find, and almost always, they find something a little bit different.

17:22 Vanessa Westcott: OK, I've done those. Have you done that one?.

Speaker: We haven't done that funnel.

Vanessa Westcott: Then do this funnel down here.

17:27 Vanessa Westcott: And what I find fascinating is there's a whole bunch of species that are resident, that rely on Naree, year in, year out, throughout the year, but then there's an absolutely huge bunch of species that only come when things are looking healthy when there's a bit more water around.

Beautiful moth.
Hmm.
Yeah. Oh, oh, yeah. Hmm. He's doing that “I'm not here thing”. Yeah, it's beautiful.
It's got golden lines on it.

18:06 Vanessa Westcott: And it makes it quite tricky to monitor and look after, because healthy can look different under different scenarios of water and rainfall and flooding.

Count how many legs it's got. Sometimes I have two and sometimes I have none. They don't have the front ones. None. OK. Yeah, yeah. And then we can narrow it down quite quickly. So, this one's got 4 legs with three digits on each.

18:31 Eliza Herbert: So of course, understanding a landscape can take a long time.

18:35 Greg Carroll: I think with this sort of country, you have to spend years here to even get a handle on what responds at what time, and how it responds, and for how long does it then live and procreate and do everything else that's needed in the life cycles of these.

18:48 Eliza Herbert: And it's not just the native animals that this team is looking at.

18:52 Phil Eulo: Pigs for one. Yeah. I don't like what they're doing to the countryside. We've seen a few of the places around the swamps and the spring areas where they root up all the soil. And down in the lignum area, same thing. They're just destroying everything and also digging up yams and stuff like that, native food that we eat.

19:24 Vanessa Westcott: The thing about the pigs is where they dig is often around the edges of special wetlands and places where there's lots of Budjiti artifacts and treasures.

19:30 Phil Eulo: Yeah, they do.

19:36 Greg Carroll: And you know, the ground can get pretty bare out of here. So, whenever you get a bit of vegetation, the last thing you want is for something to come and dig it up. Not only does that remove carbon from the soil, but it removes whatever's holding that soil together so that anytime you get a bit of wind, which happens regularly out here, or another decent bit of rain, it'll just wash that soil away rather than hold it there.

20:00 Eliza Herbert: As well as pigs, there are also feral goats and stray stock eating native vegetation and destroying wetlands with their hard hooves.

20:08 Greg Carroll: Yeah. It's mainly about competitive advantage. So, eating the food that a native would eat or drinking the water that a native would drink and just making a mess of the landscape while they're doing it.

20:19 Eliza Herbert: On top of that, there are bushfires, weeds, rabbits, foxes and feral cats.

20:23 Greg Carroll: Yeah, the foxes and cats. Yeah, they're just killing machines in the night time. They're, you know, just smashing whatever. Waterbirds, whatever. You know, bird life, small mammals, anything they can find.

20:39 Eliza Herbert: It's a long list to think about, but the hope is that the team can keep these immediate threats under control. Then the landscape and the native species that rely on it will be better prepared to face the challenges that are coming for them.

20:52 Vanessa Westcott: So, if we can really, really reduce the impacts of those threats on the landscape, we're going to make sure it's as healthy as possible to withstand these bigger changes that are predicted in the future.

21:03 Greg Carroll: You know, it's like that old saying. Watch the pennies and the pounds look after themselves or something. You know, you just do your best at ground level. Try and get a healthy system going and everything sort of flows out from that, and yeah, it's nice to be able to see some of that in action by trapping and seeing what's moving around out there.

21:26 Vanessa Westcott: We're in it for the long haul. We're not going anywhere. We want to work with the Traditional Owners to look after this country and give those water birds every chance when the conditions are right here to go for it, you know, to make hay while the sun shines. And if we can alleviate some of those other threats in this landscape, like the feral pigs and the goats. We can reduce the weeds, feral cats and foxes. Then we're doing a small part of a big big job.

21:55 Phil Eulo: Know what? For our children, your children, my children's grandchildren, their grandchildren. Looking after our mistakes? We're got to leave them something that they can appreciate and love. That's my goal, for grannies and all their kids, all their friends. It's about Australia to live in.

22:25 Eliza Herbert: Big Sky Country is a podcast by Bush Heritage Australia. A conservation not-for-profit, that buys and manages land and partners with Aboriginal people to protect our irreplaceable landscapes and magnificent native species forever. To learn more about our work. Follow us on social media or sign up to our newsletter via the link in the show notes.

Thanks to Vanessa Westcott, Phil Eulo, and Greg Carroll for sharing their time and stories with us. This episode was produced by Amelia Caddy and myself, Eliza Herbert. Theme music is “Invertebrate City” by the Orb Weavers and audio was mixed and mastered by Mitch Ansell.