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Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom

Restoring Australia’s Botanic Wonderland

By Ron Geatz

Smooth, white-barked eucalyptus trees rise from ochre soil, topped by umbrellas of brassy-olive leaves. Silvery saltbush hugs the ground, sheltering goanna lizards. The hot white surface of a dry salt lake glistens in the distance. The screech of black cockatoos draws attention skyward, summoning visions of pterodactyls soaring overhead.

This 3-billion-year-old landscape in southwestern Australia has over the past 250 million years gone largely undisturbed by catastrophic events such as volcanoes, earthquakes and glaciers. It is flat, infertile, leached of nutrients and laden with salt. The result, bewilderingly, is a botanic wonderland.
In this isolated and seemingly inhospitable landscape, native plants—about half of which exist nowhere else—adapted and evolved intriguing methods of survival. Some became carnivorous; others established symbiotic relationships with hardier neighbors; still others developed bizarre root systems to scavenge sparse sustenance. And as the climate changed over millenniums, identical plants just meters apart evolved into distinct species—estimated to be some 8,000—as did the animals that depend on them.

“This is a rare part of the world where evolution has proceeded apace,” explains Keith Bradby, coordinator of Gondwana Link, an ambitious effort to conserve this landscape. “And it still can if we give it a hand.”

The “hand” the land needs is substantial. It was post-World War II government policy to clear “a million acres a year” and transform the region into Australia’s breadbasket. Yet much of this geography has proved unsuitable for traditional crops and grazing. Mallee—the thirsty, deep-rooted eucalyptus shrub that once covered much of the terrain and drew heavily from the underground water table—is perfectly adapted to the salt-laden soil. But as nearly two-thirds of the mallee and other native groundcover was cleared and supplanted with shallow-rooted annual grass and grain, the groundwater rose, dissolving ancient salts that then were drawn to the surface. In some places, the semiarid landscape is now drowning in saltwater.

It is in this crazy quilt of wheat farms, primeval plants, orderly vineyards and vibrant wildflowers that The Nature Conservancy has inspired five Australian conservation organizations to think bigger than they ever have. Gondwana Link is a visionary effort to reconnect and restore a 1,000-kilometer swath of native bush land from the desert edge of Australia’s Outback to the tall-tree forests of the Southwestern coast. The initiative takes its name from Gondwanaland, the prehistoric landmass from which most of the Earth’s southern continents broke apart and drifted away.

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