The work of many hands

It would be easy, reading about native title determinations, university vaccines and council-scale wetland projects, to picture caring for this coast as the work of governments, scientists and large organisations. A great deal of it is. But much of the real labour, the hours on the ground year after year, falls to ordinary people in small, persistent, unglamorous acts. Any honest account of looking after this country has to put them near the centre.

The backbone of it is the community landcare movement, in all its guises: the Landcare and bushcare groups, the catchment and rivercare volunteers, the dune-care teams, the friends-of-this-reserve associations that have each adopted a patch of bush or creek or foreshore. Their days are the slow discipline of bush regeneration, written into thousands of weekends. They pull lantana and camphor laurel, replant natives, fence stock out of creek lines, nurse local seedlings in community nurseries. The method is to weed from strength and let the natives recolonise the cleared ground themselves. Much of it is corridor work in disguise, replanting the creek lines and remnant edges that let an animal cross from one island of bush to the next. It is drudgery, and it is indispensable, because an ecosystem mends at the scale of the weed and the seedling, and only many hands can work at that scale.

Alongside the hands have come the eyes. Ordinary residents now feed the science itself, through community koala monitoring of the kind that has tracked the animals across South-East Queensland, frog-call and bird surveys, and the logging of sightings that lets researchers see patterns no single team could piece together. The Richmond birdwing came back largely this way, with schools and gardeners and community groups replanting the butterfly’s one larval vine in their own backyards and parks, one vine at a time. When enough people are watching a landscape, it gains something no reserve fence can give it: a population that would actually notice if the frogs went quiet.

Then there is the faster, harder kind of care. A network of volunteer wildlife carers takes in the injured: the koala hit on a road or torn by a dog, the flying-fox pulled from a heat-struck camp, the seabird tangled in line. At the centre of that network sits one of the busiest wildlife hospitals in the world, the Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital at Beerwah, below the Glass House Mountains. It treats close to ten thousand native animals a year, better than twenty-five through the doors on an average day, with koalas the largest single share of the intake, though the figure gets inflated in the telling. Koalas are about a ninth of admissions, some eleven per cent: a large single slice, but nowhere near a majority.

Be just as honest about what the hospital is and is not. It does not fix the underlying problem — it patches the symptoms of an illness it cannot cure, and the illness is habitat lost. Bandaging the casualties does not slow the rate at which they arrive. It saves lives one at a time and returns healed animals to the bush. It is the coast’s casualty ward and early-warning station, its intake books a running tally of what the landscape is doing to the creatures that live in it. This is care at the scale of the single animal, given weekend by weekend.

The work divides three ways. The weekend weeders healing ground at the scale of the seedling, the watchers turning ordinary sightings into evidence, the carers holding one broken animal at a time. None of it is glamorous, and none of it, on its own, is enough. But between them these many hands do what no single project can. They tend the country at the fine grain it recovers on, and if this coast slips, a great many people will be the first to know.