Working together

00:04 Tiahni Adamson: In 2024, I was awarded Young South Australian of the Year. As a part of that process, I was flown around the country to tell my story at schools and conferences. When I fly over places on a plane and I look out the window and you can see the borders and the lines of agricultural land and how much that's changed over what it used to look like. A very non-homogeneous landscape where there's so much diversity, there are no boundaries or borders. It all links together in a really beautiful way. I talked about conservation, nature and solutions to climate change. I spent a lot of my year on planes, and I passed the time by peering out the window, looking down on the land, trying to imagine how the birds see it. Now, back on the ground travelling east through South West Western Australia and with my friend and one of the producers of this podcast, Bee Stephens.

01:04 Bee Stephens: The foliage is so much more green, like a verdant green compared to home.

01:11 Tiahni Adamson: Big golden blossoms. Yeah, orange flowers like wild red, purple wildflowers.

We are in the country’s far bottom left corner travelling through mostly heathland. No ginormous trees taking up space. Just all these uniquely shaped shrubs and small trees and so many warm colours. Soft orange morning light coming from the east as we drive towards it.

01:41 Bee Stephens: Yeah. How are you feeling? Looking at it, Tiahni.

01:45 Tiahni Adamson: I always think about what the landscape used to look like, like when our old people were managing and looking after country and I had a dream recently. Actually the perspective of being a First Nations woman, which I am, back then and watching the land be cleared and what that would have felt like, which was a pretty intense dream. In my dream, people are entwined with country again, the land, waters, plants, animals and humans in a circular and reciprocal relationship. Not above or below one another in any hierarchy. I'm sitting by a riverbed collecting water in a basket my grandmother has made, hearing the thundering crash of our ancestral burden trees fall in the distance. Birds fly overhead, screeching in fear as they flee their destroyed homes. Wallabies, kangaroos, snakes, lizards and frogs race towards me and seek shelter in the protection of rocks and dense scrub.

Climate change is here. And you've heard all about what that means. Warmer temperatures, extreme weather and biodiversity loss. But what about biodiversity as a solution in and of itself, this podcast is about where nature and climate change intersect. Join us as we traverse the back roads of this magnificent continent, finding the stories of hope that we all need right now. I'm Tiahni Adamson and this is Big Sky Country, a podcast by Bush Heritage.

First, we need to learn why Southwest WA is so special. We chose this place because it's a microcosm of the broader challenges we face, and that is finding common ground in a melting pot of perspectives. It's one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, but it's also the southern edge of the western wheat belt. This amazingly unique environment is home to lots of different types of people, many of whom want different things from the landscape. This presents both challenges and opportunities. We can learn valuable lessons here about bridging these differences to address the climate and biodiversity crisis. We're meeting with local landowners, conservationists, and Noongar Traditional Custodians. They'll explain what it's like living between all these worlds and what we might be able to learn from it.

04:36 Stephen Hopper: There are more species of plants here than in most temperate zone areas on Earth. It's eclipsed only by parts of South Africa and parts of China.

04:48 Tiahni Adamson: Stephen Hopper is a professor at the University of WA. He specialises in conservation biology with a focus on evolution and ecology. He's devoted himself to these landscapes in particular.

05:00 Stephen Hopper: So, they're old, and by that I mean tens of millions of years as landscapes. More or less as you see them today, was how it was 100 million years ago. The northern hemisphere, most of it was under glaciers, just 12 to18 thousand years ago. Here, 250 million years ago was the last time a glacier covered this landscape and the opportunity for continuous evolution has existed for terrestrial organisms for unthinkable lengths of time, essentially timeless, which is what Aboriginal people tell us.

05:36 Tiahni Adamson: OK, so it's old, it hasn't changed for ages, but that doesn't mean it won't. I'm wondering in this scope of a rapidly changing climate, we're seeing the climate changing and inevitable warming. What will that mean for the biodiversity of this place going forward?

05:52 Stephen Hopper: Yeah, well, it means it's had tens of millions of years to adjust to gradually changing climate. But there must be thresholds. I didn't really think we'd reached those thresholds until last summer, when we had the longest dry period  here on the South Coast that humans can remember, something like eight months without effective rainfall.

06:19 Tiahni Adamson: Stephen has had his eye on the southwest WA landscapes for decades. It was during this record dry summer that he saw some usually hardy, tolerant vegetation begin to suffer.

06:30 Stephen Hopper: So things like Marri trees, for example, which I've never seen die, that have all defoliated.

06:37 Tiahni Adamson: I'd love you to chat about how we can protect what's left.

06:40 Stephen Hopper: Look to our Aboriginal culture. Yeah. First and foremost, ask sensible questions about how did they live, because we know that's a system that’s 65,000 years old, so there are genuine learning experiences to be had.

06:59 Tiahni Adamson: If a landscape this old and this resilient is showing signs that it's close to the edge, we need to pull out all stops to build that resilience. And that means working across fences. Yes, with Traditional Custodians, but also with farmers. We drove from Stephen’s place and maps took us on a long route through a heavy agricultural area towards our next stop where we're going to meet someone who's found a balance. We turned a few corners and grey pastel monotones eventually turned back into technicolour heathlands. I'm also really glad we've driven from an area that was super cleared. Now we're back in some more dense vegetation, that feels really good. Just driving through this space, I feel much more connected to country. 

So, I'm really excited to see this example of this farm that we're going to. Because most of the land that we have here now in Australia is agricultural and pastoral land and we really need to work together to do better practices in this space.

08:05 Sylvia Leighton: Howdy. How are you doing? How's it going, honey? Nice to meet you. Hello. Lovely to meet you. Hello. Good day.

Peter Leighton: Hi. Hi, Tiahni. Nice. Yeah. Nice to meet you too.

08:14 Tiahni Adamson: We're meeting Sylvia Leighton at the front gate to her sheep farm. This place has earned quite a reputation, so we need to see it for ourselves. Walking in from the front gate out to the back of the property, we begin to understand why we've been told about this place. Dense pockets of scrub weave their way through the property, and once you set foot behind the tree line, it's easy to forget where you are.

08:38 Sylvia Leighton: While still running a commercial livestock property with sheep, we decided we would revegetate wildlife corridors across property, protect buffer plant remnants of bush like this and see if we could get wildlife moving back across the farm.

08:56 Tiahni Adamson: Sylvia's parents came here in the 60s when the government opened up the area for agriculture. They were living on a smaller farm in Lutruwita, Tasmania, but they wanted something more substantial, and they were looking for adventure.

09:09 Sylvia Leighton: So, they had to wait until I was born. Then they just shoved everything into the back of utes and a truck and drove across the Nullarbor. I was probably about eight months old as a baby, so we arrived. It was 100% bush. So, I always see the history of this agricultural district sort of equalling my age and I'm not that old.

09:33 Tiahni Adamson: Sylvia's memories of the early days on the farm vary from nightmarish visions of ash and grey sand as the land was burnt to make way for farming. And when the smoke cleared and the colour came back, beautiful encounters with native wildlife.

09:48 Sylvia Leighton: One of the animals I most miss is the Brush Wallaby, which is about half the size at least of your Western Grey Kangaroo, and they have a big brushy tail and a lovely stripe on their face.

10:02 Tiahni Adamson: Now, after decades of heavy agricultural expansion, she doesn't see Western Brush Wallabies anymore.

10:08 Sylvia Leighton: I love them and we haven't created safe spaces for them. There's some down on the coast. So, there's a hope that they will hop northwards. Come back. We've got wildlife corridors for you.

10:22 Tiahni Adamson: Come back and have lots of babies.

It's these experiences that informed how Sylvia would spend the second season of her life. I mentioned she's a farmer, but that's not all.

10:34 Sylvia Leighton: I became a young adult and then I left the farm. I left the district and I went and I studied botany and geology. Then I went right up to the Northern Territory. I was just backpacking and working. Having my eyes opened everywhere I went. It was my first insight into Traditional Custodial connection to land. And then I worked as a Land for Wildlife officer for 17 years with Department of Parks and Wildlife. So I had the privilege, compared to some of the other local farmers here to go away and have a different kind of identity, a different way of seeing the land.

11:15 Tiahni Adamson: In 2014, an opportunity came up to run the farm, and Sylvia's first life as a modest farm kid converged with her second life as a conservationist.

11:24 Sylvia Leighton: We felt we had a responsibility to try and protect the natural heritage that was left and then try and revitalize it and bring it back to life.

11:36 Tiahni Adamson: Sylvia and her partner Peter have spent the past decade restoring a large portion of their farm back into native wildlife. And make no mistake, they didn't approach this as any old weekend hobby project. The job they've done here is informed by hard science and scaled by significant investment both out of their own pocket and with the help of grant funding. And it's not just an altruistic pursuit for the love of the environment either. The project has reduced soil salinity, which is a big problem for farmers in these parts, and generally increased the well-being of the sheep by creating a richer, more drought resilient landscape.

12:13 Sylvia Leighton: You don't own land in Australia. Yes, you've purchased a title, but you don't actually own it. You're stewards or custodians of that land for the short time that you're there. Yes, you can farm it for commercial purpose, for agricultural purposes, but you do not own the natural heritage, and we felt we had a responsibility to try and protect the natural heritage that was left and then try and revitalise it and bring it back to life.

12:58 Tiahni Adamson: Sylvia seamlessly bridges both worlds, demonstrating that being a farmer and a conservationist go hand in hand. Her deep connection to the land reflects the shared commitment that many farmers hold to care for and sustain it for future generations. While perspectives around nature and biodiversity might differ, the common ground is a love for the land and a responsibility to nurture it.

We haven't been in this extraordinary part of the world for very long, but we had already started to see just how complex it is, not just ecologically. Just to drive for 90 minutes to get to Sylvia, we passed ordinary farms, handed through families for multiple generations, industrial farms owned by corporations, huge carbon plantations, land owned and managed by indigenous Ranger groups, as well as land owned by conservation organisations funded by donations. To have this much going on in such a small area is unique. Bee and I had a lot to think about before our next stop.

14:02 Bee Stephens: I guess just really opening up to all the different sort of perspectives, A lot of people have a similar goal and of the 58% or more of Australia that is managed for agriculture. There's a lot of people that really, really care about the land and want the best for the land.

14:22 Tiahni Adamson: The agriculture sector has a really tricky problem. We are trying to feed the world. We're trying to create resources for the world. We're trying to make enough food for everyone and things that are affordable and nurture people. It's a conundrum that Alex Hams, Healthy Landscape Manager for Bush heritage, is familiar with. He grew up around farmers himself.

14:45 Alex Hams: My granddad, although he did clear a lot of country back in the day, he had a really strong affinity for the land and he used to take us to some of the local reserves out here and just spend the day wandering around. Just exploring in the bush, it really gave me a strong passion for wanting to be able to do something in that space and to contribute something.

15:10 Tiahni Adamson: Now Alex is on the other side of the fence, managing a corridor of nature properties that are contributing to an ambitious vision.

15:18 Alex Hams: So, the program that we run here has really been built on the concept of corridors. We are helping to deliver the vision of Gondwana Link that's looking to connect the bushlands in the far southwest reaches of the state of WA. Down across the South Coast, using some of those existing bushland areas that have been protected and left behind right out to the greater Western Woodlands, which is the largest intact woodland in the world. 

15:51 Tiahni Adamson: Achieving a vision of this scale means closely working with the people who live and work on this land. Part of Alex’s skillset is building these connections in a landscape shaped by both conservation and agriculture.

15:58 Alex Hams: We don't question the fact that we're working in an agricultural environment, we need to gain a social license to operate in this landscape and part of that is to work as closely as we can and find that common ground. So we've actually worked with all of our neighbours, and we've got 21 different farms that we're working on that surround our reserves. It’s always a challenge. They're running businesses and they want to see that they're going to maximise their profits.

16:28 Tiahni Adamson: Sometimes it's the interactions we share with wildlife that ground us in nature. Such interactions are common here.

16:34 Alex Hams: There are a lot of farmers out there that love seeing Malleefowl coming out of their little bit of bush, yeah. They love seeing the black cockies come over the top and make their awkward call. Really, it's exciting to hear because the Carnaby’s Cockatoos are really reducing in numbers and when they do come across, they're magnificent big birds. They have a special place out here and you know. Like Tammar Wallaby. Like I love wallabies. These cute little marsupials that we have out here, that are really just declining in numbers because they don't have that habitat available. 

We're starting to excite kids that come out and have a look at our reserves. We're starting to excite the Noongar community that are starting to see the opportunities of these species that are really important to their culture coming back. We're exciting some of the farmers that we're working with, that our neighbours to go, hey, look, these are some small things that we could do that can actually have a big impact and they don't need to have such a huge impact on agricultural sustainability or viability. We're really careful about choosing the right parcels of land to change from that traditional agriculture. You know, cropping and wheat, sheep type farms over to revegetated for those corridors. We want to see all of these trees, all of these shrubs, all of these grasses, the birds, the little mammals, the little reptiles, all still being here in a 100 years time, in a 1000 years time. You know, how many generations is that? That's a lot. But that's it. That's our aim.

18:17 Tiahni Adamson: It's a wildly ambitious vision to create a gigantic animal highway of existing or restored bush. A lot of different conservationists are involved.

18:26 Keith Bradby: To quote the eminent Professor Kingsley Dixon “Here you will see things that confound your knowledge of life on Earth”. You come to WA and you get smacked in the face by this freaking amazing levels of ecological richness and the wacky and weird ecosystems and plants and everything we’ve got here.

18:47 Tiahni Adamson: This is Keith Bradby, who played a role in lobbying for tighter land clearing laws in this region throughout the 90s. After seeing its impact on biodiversity, he eventually founded Gondwana Link. It's an umbrella organisation that provides a link between the many on-ground organisations working towards the vision.

19:06 Keith Bradby: Gondwana Link's ended up being quite a few things. Fundamentally, Gondwana Link represents our best opportunity to salvage the grand ecosystem function and evolutionary process across southwestern Australia. It's a 1000 km vision. Can we have connected, healthy functioning bush from the Nullarbor through to the south west forest? 1000 km. Pretty bloody ambitious, but over 900 km of that is existing habitat. It's not an impossible connection.

19:39 Tiahni Adamson: The link makes up an extremely important patch of refuge for animals because of its position. North from here, the soil starts drying out, the weather gets hotter and the vegetation sparser.

19:51 Keith Bradby: As things get hotter and drier, everything moves out and we're the last stop before they have to swim in the Southern Ocean.

19:59 Tiahni Adamson: Keith has a lot to think about and a lot to manage. He creates the space for all this collaboration to exist.

20:06 Keith Bradby: Being in the middle of a bloody, continual frenzy of activity and trying to balance local scale with bigger scale and all the complex interactions between people and places that go on in the Gondwana Link program. Well, that's exhilarating and exhausting. And then there are lots and lots and lots of more complex aspects to the job we can discuss in more detail, but it feels good to be making a difference.

20:36 Tiahni Adamson: There are 50 different organisations involved in the link. As we've heard, some are farmers, some are bigger organizations like Bush Heritage, with hundreds of staff and thousands of donors, and some are small land care groups with a revolving door of local green thumbs. Some are in it to rewild their own backyard. And there are people involved who will never set foot on this country, supporting the project for its tangible vision and broader impact on climate mitigation. It's a mixed bag, to say the least. There are so many lessons that come from country, right, and there's been a few of these that I've been thinking about throughout the different interviews and episodes, but you know, nature teaches us that we have to celebrate diversity.

21:18 Bee Stephens: And everything has a place.

21:20 Tiahni Adamson: Everything has a place.

21:21 Bee Stephens: Thinking about what you were talking about earlier in terms of land management practice for over 65,000 years, if we're now in one of the oldest landscapes and most diverse landscapes in the world. Gondwana Link Traditional Custodians have such an incredible deep understanding locally of that diversity. Of nature's ability to collaborate.

21:51 Tiahni Adamson: Nature's not discriminatory. It has to celebrate everything when things go out of whack. We've talked to conservationists and scientists who studied this landscape using English and Latin terminology and reflected on what it's like to be a farmer settling here half a century ago, trying to wrangle an unfamiliar landscape using fundamentally European farming techniques. To Noongar people, the language of the land has a very different story, a rich story that spans tens of thousands of years, a story that was radically interrupted when settlers came to these parts and started burning and clearing their country, erecting fences to keep animals and people out. Now, of course things are changing. This is our farmer friend Sylvia Leighton again.

22:41 Sylvia Leighton: We finally brought some younger elders in here in 2015 and took them down to the top of the creek. That was a deeply emotional moment because really Noongar people had been pushed off these lands, probably between 1910 to about 1930 to 40. And we sat in this extraordinary clearing, which is now being recognised as a cultural site. It was like a piece of the puzzle that had always been missing. It was deeply emotional. It was very emotional for the elders that were there that day. If you've grown up here and connected to land. You just knew there was a cultural component. Where was it? Where were they?

23:28 Tiahni Adamson: There's been a shift in how we value traditional knowledge and its capacity to shape how we protect country, particularly in the face of climate change.

23:37 Lester Coyne: I was born in Katanning, which is 100 km away from here.

23:39 Tiahni Adamson: Lester Coyne is a respected elder who we sought out to speak for Noongar country. His story is one that reflects the enormous changes that have occurred across these parts.

23:49 Lester Coyne: We didn't have any running water and no electricity at all, and all six of us slept in one bedroom, big bedroom, and the girls had their own beds and boys, we just had a partition between the two of us. Mum was a disciplinarian, like big time. Because she spent 10 years incarcerated in Moore River Native Settlement at Mogumber. So they put her on the boat aged nine, stole her, put her on the boat.

24:14 Tiahni Adamson: Oh my God.

24:16 Lester Coyne: She’s stolen generation. 1967 was when Aboriginal people were first involved or counted in the census, so before they were not counted. Aboriginal people were flora and fauna, which on reflection now I'm quite happy to have been a plant or an animal. There's no one else could say that.  White people can't. But that's that intimacy that Aboriginal people have with land. I can go to places I love, and I know where to go, and I have the feeling as soon as I get there, I love it. It's an intimacy.

24:52 Tiahni Adamson: It's this intimacy Leicester shares with his country that's made him one of the most respected voices in the region. He speaks for the history of his people, representing those values on boards as a spokesman for his country and the history of Noongar people.

25:07 Lester Coyne: They walked through the country, harvested, ate, drank, lived, died. But that country was left for the next group. We didn't fly, we didn't drive, we didn't have equipment. And we are only harvested what we need. Just what we needed. We allowed the plants to reproduce more and more. We didn't grow them, but we started a process where it's going to demand more from the land for more and more people. And at some point in time, something's going to give. Farmers have cleared millions of acres. But look at what all animals lost and all the birds, all the insects. They're all part of the foundation part of Earth. And I don't think I'm alone either. I think there's a lot of people thinking that way. I think people like yourselves will change that.

26:03 Tiahni Adamson: You're never alone when you're part of an ecosystem grounded by moments big and small, where we get to spot Malleefowl, making their big nest mounds in the scrub, or a flock of Carnaby’s cockatoos making their twilight trip inbound across the farms, national parks and conservation reserves back to their roosts for the night. On their way, they'll see all the fences that have come to divide this landscape’s ecology into squares and rectangles. But just like water, birds know no boundaries. Their liberty is fluid, influenced by the seasonal availability of resources, or by tuning into Earth's magnetic field to guide migration. They rise above human attempts to contain or control their path.

Southwest WA is unique, but it's also familiar. This area bears resemblance to the melting pot of perspectives that can be found right across the country and the world. Us humans, when we're at our best, we're working beyond boundaries, borders and fences, overcoming our differences and seeing the bigger picture. Seeing the land, how the birds do, when it comes to solving the biodiversity and climate crisis, that's the lesson I'll take home with me. Our trip was one I'll never forget. Bee and I drove back to the Albany airport, back the way we'd come a couple of days earlier, past the farms and into those dense heathlands.

Wow, two big hawks or eagles above us.

27:40 Bee Stephens: Wedgies. Two wedgies. A couple.

27:42 Tiahni Adamson: You've got good eyes.

27:44 Bee Stephens: I love that couple.

27:46 Tiahni Adamson: Circling around. Bee and Tee’s eagles, yeah.

27:51 Bee Stephens: We're going to have a good day then. Is that another one? Oh, my God. Thanks birdies. Thanks country.

28:03 Tiahni Adamson: We'd like to acknowledge the Noongar people, the Traditional Custodians of the land we've recorded this podcast on, as well as the lands you're listening in from. We pay our respects to elders, past, present and emerging, and acknowledge the deep and ongoing relationship our First Nations communities have with the ocean land, freshwater and all living beings. Big thanks to our guests for this episode, Professor Stephen Hopper, Sylvia Leighton, Alex Hams, Keith Bradby and Lester Coyne. Sylvia and Peter recently sold their farm and the new owners intend to build on its legacy with further biodiverse revegetation and carbon sequestration projects. The farm now has a Noongar family living on the property, with agreements in place that future ownership of the land title will return to the Traditional Noongar Custodians.

Alex Hams has since left Bush heritage to pursue new adventures in the conservation space. This episode was produced by Will Sacre, Bee Stephens and myself, Tiahni Adamson with mixing by Mike Williams and original scoring by Mike Williams and Timothy Nicastri. Theme music by the Orbweavers. Bush Heritage recently purchased another property in the Fitz-Stirling Region, which will be revegetated to create a better connection corridor between existing reserves and protected areas. Visit the link in the show notes to donate towards our reserves in southwest WA as we continue to contribute to the Gondwana Link vision.

Next time, join me for an exploration of indigenous knowledge and its role in fighting climate change and ecosystem loss. It's a deeply personal and touching episode. You won't want to miss it.