A FAMILY’S 20 YEAR MISSION

By Claire Bowman

At Beetaloo Valley, where the Southern Flinders Ranges start to rise up from the plains east of Port Pirie, is the 20 acres of rocky land belonging to Anita and Wes Crisp. Once this was ironbark and peppermint box grassy woodland. More than two decades ago, when Wes and Anita first came here, it was cleared and golden like much of the surrounding cropping and grazing land.

No one can speak to the phrase ‘a life’s work' more than their kids, Ellen and Alyssa. Now in their twenties, they’ve spent their entire lifetimes watching trees, shrubs and native lilies take over the land surrounding their family home. The mission to revegetate their property has been a family effort. “The kids could plant trees before they could walk, pretty well,” says Wes.

As Anita, Wes and Ellen show me around on a warm February afternoon, we’re accompanied by a bounding blue heeler puppy called Ziggy, a friendly staffy Cheezle and old Squiz the staffy-cross. The dogs know the place well from their daily walks around its hills and folds. The family points out the original landmarks from early days that still evoke the memory of what this land looked like when they arrived. A lonely old pepper tree stood on one hill. The eroded creek line supported a couple more peppers, alongside gnarled old peppermint box. In a rocky outcrop at the top of the hill, a yacca kept watch, saved from the browsing sheep by a wide moat of grey rocks.

Wes describes the contrast, and how easy it can be to forget how much change their work has wrought. “I can still just picture the bare creeks and the kids having fun … Anita was really good at recording it all. Without the photos you do forget.”

“We’ve used the kids as photo points,” says Anita. She shows me a photo of Ellen as a tiny child, bundled up in her winter coat on a grassy field next to the property’s fence line. Looking at an adult Ellen in the same spot now shows how effective Anita’s time marking method is.

Over the last couple of decades everything has changed. Today the garden right around the house is a thick shield of natives, alive with birds. Blue banded bees work on flowering bushes, almost too quick to see. Throughout the property are tall blue gums, sheoaks, peppermint box and acacias, with a thick carpet of fallen vegetation that crunches underfoot. It’s been a huge effort. “I think we had one box, that old peppermint box, on the whole property,” says Anita. “So pretty well everything you see has been planted.”

Ellen, for her part, was too young when it all started to recall the full extent of the changes. “I don’t remember it being bare, but I remember going down to the creek and the trees being a lot smaller — a lot easier to climb!”

This is rocky, non-arable land, not so good for cropping and grazing like some of the adjoining properties. However, like much of the land in this part of the world, the earth is folded vertically so there are large pockets of soil that can — and evidently do — sustain abundant life.

When given the opportunity, the life in turn sustains the land. Anita and Wes describe the way the creek beds, which only run in a good downpour, used to scour and erode to deep channels each summer. Now they’re wide and gently carved, the soil held in place by the many intertwining root systems of the native trees and shrubs that were planted on its banks.

Wes tells me that the creek banks “were very steep, a very narrow base to the creek … it used to erode down to a V, basically. Nothing holding the soil together. Now the tree roots have made it all the way to the base of the creek and it doesn’t wash [away].”

“It slows the water flow down,” adds Anita. “They’ve filled in and they’ve slowed right down … there’s still a couple of little bits that scour, but mostly it’s just really flattened out and filled in.”

They’ve run a planting effort each year through Trees For Life’s Tree Scheme, and their early efforts were focused on these creek lines.

As we walk through some wellestablished revegetated woodland, Anita notes that it’s “sort of the Girl Guides paddock” — the Crystal Brook Girl Guides helped plant large areas of Tree Scheme seedlings when Ellen and Alyssa were Guides. Along with the Guides came parents, siblings and even exchange students. “The Guide leader at the time, Lorraine Saunders, she was a volunteer grower for a couple of years. She grew the trees and the guides helped plant them … They can come back and use it whenever they like.”

It’s an amazing transformation, though of course the many successes have come with challenges and disappointments in turn. Wes says that despite an average 500 mm or so of annual rainfall, sometimes the conditions here can be harsh on the new seedlings. “Many years we come back the next year and put another tree in the same hole. It’s the same story — you get a really harsh spring and most of them die. But pretty much when we started engaging the Girl Guides the weather turned out really well for us … good wet springs, no frosts.”

Over the years they’ve planted mostly overstorey species, but it has largely been a process of testing and noticing what works, explains Anita. “Every patch we’ve done has been a slightly different approach really.”

“We’ve worked out we get the most success out of ripping lines.” However, using the tractor to rip lines in the rocky soil doesn’t necessarily mean there’s less physical work to be done. Wes tells me about one year at the end of a drought in their early planting years, when the dry soil was clodded to the point that they thought the seedlings would struggle. “It was a really dry winter and the soil stayed blocky. We had to physically smash the clods together. We thought none of [the seedlings] were going to survive. And then it rained and we had well over 80% survival rate.”

Their success rate with some direct seeding effort was also very good, says Wes. “We were ripping our own lines anyway for planting the tubestock and in the end we just dribbled [seed] in the rip-lines and drove over it. And a couple of years after, a lot of it came up. Then we had a few really dry springs and a lot of it dried off. But you can still walk out there now and see where it came up and survived. It was quite effective.”

As we walk around the property they note the photo points from which Anita has catalogued their work. As we look out across treetops from the top of the hill, she shows me the corresponding photos of the dry, empty paddocks that used to be visible below.

They note the yaccas, which according to Wes, were an unexpected addition. “When we first fenced and excluded stock, yaccas were quite surprising … there were no visible yaccas here and they all popped up. The sheep were obviously chewing them down every year.”

Anita tells me that now, as they start to run out of new space for planting, bringing in even more native grasses is the next phase of the mission. On the exposed side of a hill that sports both native and introduced grasses, Ellen spots the last of some garland lilies. Wes says they’re “big tubers, so they throw up a leaf when it’s wet, and then you get a little bit of summer rainfall and they throw up a flower … They’ll only hang around for a couple of days.” It was a lucky time to come past. “It’s actually really nice in spring, you get a real flush of a couple of different types of lilies.”

In the few small areas where they haven’t yet planted, they point out some pioneer acacias, spiky shrubby things that spring up to start the natural process of land regeneration. “As the trees grow up around it, that [acacia] just really thins out, really finds its balance. Because it’s an acacia it fixes nitrogen and helps get everything else growing as well,” Anita explains. Birds love it because it’s spiky. They tell me many of the native bird species were rare to spot here in the early days, or only visited.

“Because there’s so much scrub across the road, and the creek’s just there, we were always getting visitation, but [there weren’t] that many species here all the time. And now there’s habitat we’ve got resident white wing chuffs, resident magpies.

Whereas before they were just in and out — they were feeding here but they were going,” Wes says. “There are always diamond firetails, and I think they might live here. They’re regionally significant — there’s a little pocket population here in the Southern Flinders.”

Both Wes and Anita are well versed in native species and the landscapes they inhabit. For both of them, caring for landscapes goes far beyond their property and into their professional lives.

Anita says, “We both went to Roseworthy and did Natural Resource Management as a degree, so it’s just part of the mindset really. Wes is in National Parks. I worked with the NRM on and off for quite a bit of time on Eyre Peninsula and here.” Anita also spent several years serving on the Board of Trees For Life.

They say it’s different, doing their own revegetation at home compared to working in land management and conservation, though both types of work have their essential place in the process. “It’s one thing to work … and it’s nice to come back and actually just plant some trees,” Anita says.

Walking around the property, I can see the care and attention with which they notice the changes in the land. Anita points out a few small seedlings in the creek line as we walk by, noting each new tree individually.

After the stock were removed and those larger species established, they noticed many species starting to regenerate in the understorey. Anita explains, “We focused a lot on the overstorey. Probably more just blue gums, sheoaks and some peppermint box ... The acacias took off but there’s other understorey that we tried, like bursarias, but they were really hit and miss. So we just thought we’ll keep going with overstorey and then the shrubs will sort themselves out when they’re ready, which they’re starting to do now.”

Anita says, “The casuarinas [Allocasuarina sp.] are often very slow to take off. We’ve got a few native pines.”

“It would have to be about 30 or more species we’ve tried over the years,” says Wes. “If we were planting them back in the same sorts of spots, we went back with the ones that were surviving the best.

“Now the birds are spreading seeds everywhere and the grasses are really taking hold … there used to be a lot of weeds like soursob and even Salvation Jane and they’re all starting to reduce in number.” Though they did a little active weed control in the early years, the land is finding its balance now and the weeds aren’t keeping a hold.

Wes says that working with Trees For Life made the mission easy to maintain. “It wouldn’t have happened to the extent — talking about the reveg program at Trees For Life — if [Tree Scheme] was structured differently. Because they’re so easy to engage with and it’s such a giving organisation … they just make it so easy to get started and get into it. And to keep it going.”

Our Tree Scheme helps people grow and plant seedlings to bring landscapes back to life and provide habitat for wildlife, shelter for stock, hold soil in place and clean our air. Tree Scheme orders open on 1 May 2023, with your plants ready to go into the ground in winter 2024. Subsidies on the cost of seedling orders are available to small community groups and schools in South Australia.

For more information, see page 9, and visit treesforlife.org.au/tree-scheme.

Theirs isn’t the only family in the area that has worked hard to make Beetaloo Valley the green patch it is. Looking out from the top of the hill, Wes says many of the neighbours are doing their own work like this. “There wouldn’t be too many neighbours that haven’t engaged with Trees For Life over the years … lots of our neighbours have done different scales [of planting]. Some of the scales are really big.”

Anita explains that this all-in effort has helped to create a corridor through the valley, connecting various revegetation efforts with large patches of remnant bush. This area is peppermint box and ironbark grassy woodland, which Wes tells me is a nationally threatened association.

“Everything over that side is reasonably remnant, and you can see it. But even just this paddock and along the roadsides have all been reveged (sic).”

Their effort and success has been recognised officially. “It’s under a heritage agreement now. Pretty well the whole lot.”

There’s also a photo point on the property for biodiversity and vegetation assessment, one of many across the region, used to get a handle on the state of the Northern and Yorke’s diverse vegetation.

This green patch on the map, with its renewed corridor for diverse wildlife and increased biodiversity, is the result of one family’s long term vision and life’s work. It’s also the combined mission of an entire community, and the wider mission across the whole state — every volunteer grower, planter and bushcarer — coming together to bring new life to the land.