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 Country as the work of governments, scientists and large organisations. A great deal of it is. But a surprising share of the real labour — the hours, on the ground, year after year — is done by ordinary people in small, persistent, unglamorous acts, and any honest account of looking after this coast 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 work is the Bradley method (see the technique behind mend-the-conditions, and Bradley 1988) written into thousands of weekends — pulling lantana and camphor laurel, replanting natives, fencing stock out of creek lines, nursing seedlings in community nurseries, and slowly, patch by patch, healing ground at a resolution no single agency could ever reach. Much of it is corridor work in disguise: it is these volunteers who replant the creek lines and remnant edges that reconnect the coast’s islands of bush (see habitat-connectivity). It is drudgery, and it is indispensable, because an ecosystem is mended at the scale of the weed and the seedling, and that scale can only be reached by many hands.

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 (Dissanayake et al. 2019), through frog-call and bird surveys, through the logging of sightings that lets researchers see patterns no single team could piece together. The Richmond birdwing recovery ran in large part this way, through schools, gardeners and community groups replanting the butterfly’s one larval vine in their own backyards and parks (Sands 2008) — restoration distributed across a whole community, 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.

And then there is the faster, harder kind of care. Not all rescue is slow. Injured animals — 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 — are taken in by a network of volunteer wildlife carers, at the centre of which sits one of the busiest wildlife hospitals in the world, the Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital at Beerwah, in the shadow of 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 it is worth being precise here, because the figure is often exaggerated: koalas are only about a tenth of admissions — 11 per cent — a large single slice but nowhere near a majority. And it is worth being just as honest about what the hospital is and is not. It does not fix the underlying problem; you cannot treat your way out of habitat loss any more than you can vaccinate your way out of it. What it does is save lives one at a time, return healed animals to the bush, and serve as a casualty ward and early-warning station for the coast — its intake books a running tally of what the landscape is doing to the creatures that live in it (see species-dependence). It is care at the scale of the single animal, and a great many people give their weekends to it.