Years of restoration, written in layers
A morning in Hindmarsh Valley National Park, where a cleared paddock is becoming a forest again
A few years ago, this hillside off Hindmarsh Falls Road was nothing but pasture. Now it has layers: bushes, shrubs and trees taller than a person at the top of the hill, and new seedlings pushing through at knee height behind them. This is a 60 hectare section of Hindmarsh Valley National Park that was only recently brought into the park, and restoration here has been underway for a few years already. With the support of our partners at One Tree Planted, those layers are what years of steady, dedicated work look like on the ground.
We came down to the Fleurieu Peninsula in late May to walk the site with Anthony Abley, the regional ecologist leading this work for National Parks and Wildlife. What he showed us was a work in progress, done paddock by paddock as time and funding allow. You can never do it all at once, he told us, so you do it piece by piece and keep on top of it. But the pieces are starting to join up, and the species are starting to answer.
A valley found nowhere else
To understand why this corner of South Australia matters so much, you have to go back millions of years. Hindmarsh Valley, along with the neighbouring Inman and Back Valleys, was shaped by ancient glacial activity. Those old valleys created natural breaks and boundaries that, over an enormous span of time, produced something unusual: a dense pocket of endemic species, plants and animals that live here and nowhere else on earth.
That uniqueness is what makes the work urgent. When a species exists in only one valley, fragmentation is not an inconvenience, but an existential threat. For years, many of these species had been written off, hanging on along roadsides and in scattered remnants. The arrival of this park changed the maths. With 500 hectares now available to restore across the broader Hindmarsh Valley landscape, there is a genuine chance these species can have a future rather than a slow managed decline.
From pasture to wet and dry mosaic
The restoration here is not simply about putting trees in the ground. It is about rebuilding a whole ecosystem, including the parts you can’t see. The nationally endangered Fleurieu Swamps and their associated woodland are the heart of this site, and recreating them means recreating the way water moves through the land.
Walk the paddock at the end of winter and you would struggle to cross it without gumboots. It turns to bog. Rather than drain that away, the plan embraces it. The site has been mapped into a patchwork: forest along the watercourses, and discrete swamp patches set into the low, wet ground, each planted with a community of species suited to its conditions. The result, over time, is a gradient of habitat rather than a uniform block of trees, and that structural variety is what wildlife needs.
It is already drawing life back. The native swamp rat, an animal with an unfairly grim name, is one of the gentlest creatures you could hope to meet. Nothing like the introduced black rat, it looks more like a small guinea pig and will often put its paws up on your leg for a sniff before wandering off. Bush rats are turning up too. These small native mammals are a quiet proxy for recovery: when they return, it tells us the food web underneath them is starting to function again.
The hidden network underground
Some of the most important players here never see daylight. Beneath the soil runs a vast web of fungi, with best estimates suggesting ten times as many fungal species underground as plant species above. Plants and fungi depend on each other, and many native animals feed on the fungi and spread them as they go. When we talk about restoring nutrients to degraded land, this is much of what we mean. You cannot rebuild a forest by planting the canopy alone.
Why corridors change everything
The single most important idea on this site is connection. A patch of habitat on its own, no matter how healthy, can only hold so much. Genetic viability for most species needs something in the order of 500 interconnected individuals, breeding and moving freely across enough habitat to sustain themselves.
In a fragmented landscape, that is almost impossible to achieve.
Rosenberg’s goanna makes the point vividly. It needs roughly 100 hectares per animal, which means this park on its own might support only a handful. The only way to build a viable population is to connect this land to neighbouring parks and willing farmers, stitching the fragments into something whole. By doubling a 200 hectare remnant toward a 500 hectare contiguous patch, we give every species more room, more genetic exchange and more resilience.
Connected, multi-storied habitat does something else too. It gives animals a way to move when conditions turn dangerous. Plantings that include ground shrubs, a mid-storey and a canopy create escape routes through the landscape, koalas using the trees and smaller mammals using the cover below. It is the difference between a population that can survive a disturbance and one that gets wiped out with nowhere to run.
Living with fire
It would be easy to assume the great threat to all this new growth is fire. The reality is more interesting. Many of these species have evolved with fire over millions of years and actually depend on it.
Some plants, including Banksia, need the heat of a burn to release their seed. The danger is not fire itself but fire in a broken landscape, where a single blaze can erase an isolated population with no neighbouring habitat left to recolonise from.
The southern brown bandicoot shows how recovery is supposed to work. When most of the Scott Creek and Mount Bold remnant network burned several years ago, with seventy to eighty per cent lost, the bandicoots vanished from the burnt ground. Within three years they had recolonised most of the burn scar, and within five they were back to pre-fire numbers. That bounce-back only happens when connected habitat sits alongside the burn for animals to shelter in and return from. On this site, the team has even used a prescribed burn to regenerate long-unburnt understorey, because bandicoots favour habitat in that five to fifteen year window after fire. Done well, and increasingly in partnership with First Nations fire knowledge, fire becomes a tool for creating habitat rather than destroying it.
A future worth planting for
There is a lot of good news threaded through this landscape. The glossy black cockatoo, doing well on nearby Kangaroo Island, is visiting the mainland more and more often, and the answer to keeping it here is gloriously simple: plant a great deal of she-oak for it to feed on. The local bandicoot is the subject of genetic studies likely to confirm it as a species in its own right, distinct from its eastern cousins, with a new name drawn from Aboriginal language, Marti, and the scientific name Isoodon nauticus. Recognising it as its own species means we can protect it properly, and even guide where animals are reintroduced to rebuild the strongest possible populations.
That endangered orange daisy we found flowering through the paddock tells the whole story in miniature. Once locked into the roadsides, it now has a new home in ground that was recently just pasture, coming up everywhere across the restored block. It is no longer hanging on. It is spreading.
Stand on that hillside and look across to the cleared land opposite, and it is not hard to picture what it could become: a forested hill instead of bare ground, a new home for species that have spent decades surviving on the margins. Thanks to the support of partners like One Tree Planted and the people who fund this work, that picture is getting closer paddock by paddock. We intervene where the land needs a hand, and then we let nature do what it has always known how to do. What comes back is more than trees. It is a whole living system, finding its feet again.
