Transcription
[Music] Dad fell in love with Kachana the minute he saw it. He often refers to it, you know, almost in a way as his calling. He said his dream is to leave this planet a little bit better than how he found it, and it has become his life. It has become his life.
[Music] When I came and looked at this, I thought, well, I don't have to keep looking. This ticks all the boxes and [Music] more. But it took us a while to realize, actually, this country is a skeleton of what it could be. This country comes with a custodianship obligation, and, um, we need to look after these beautiful landscapes and to restore them. Chris's work has been absolutely amazing. He has transformed a desert into a noasis. When I first moved here, there was, yeah, so little vegetation around, and now I walk around and I see grass everywhere. I see life everywhere. I see water everywhere. Just watch yourself. It's an extraordinary case of regeneration at a time when we desperately need it, and it was playing out for a couple of decades when suddenly, as far as the station was concerned, they found themselves on the wrong side of the law. I've got better things to do than go to court with my own government. If someone had said, you know, that you're going to be spending seven odd years thinking about how to keep a few donkeys alive, I would have, you know, I would have laughed at the idea. If the science is not on my side, I deserve to be locked up. And if the science is on my side, well, I deserve an apology. Would you go to jail over this?
[Music] [Music] Yes. Our home is Kachana Station, which is 120 km Southwest of Kanara. It's got no road access. You can only reach it by air or by taking a 5-day walk. It's an area bigger than Singapore, but had been abandoned, stripped of First Nations, of course, and then abandoned by white fellas who'd been out there. When we first started, the intention was to do some pastoral venture and have tourism to subsidize us. So I had no intention of becoming a land care apostle or prophet or whatever. Going the Dad's very set in his ways, very single-minded, uh, and it can sometimes be difficult working with such a strong personality as Dad's. Chris is absolutely not afraid to be unconventional, to do things differently. This is go. He swims again the stream. I'm a person who swims very much with the stream. I always try to change. Chris's Kachana has been just a wonderful learning experience that continues, but the, the price has been unacceptable. Had I known the price that Jackie and my children would have to pay for my learning, I would not have embarked on this project.
They called their oasis in this desert Kachana, an African word meaning far away place. 25 years ago, Landline came out and did a segment on Kachana, and our children at the time were small little helpers. I wanted something to do with cattle, at least enough cattle to self-sufficiency. And, um, we had sunshine, we had water. So, yeah, I believe that I could, um, compensate for my lack of experience and lack of knowledge with a bit of common sense and perseverance. At the time when we did Landline, it was still, you know, like I was still trying to find my feet out here. It took a long time. What were your first impressions, Jackie? I really enjoyed it. I liked the place. You know, you're still young and I was in love, and I think anything is possible at that stage. But I did, I didn't realize how difficult it would be. You know, I just, the terrain and everything, it was so new to me. I grew up in Switzerland in a little village called Engelberg. You've got high mountains all around you where you can ski all year around because there is always snow there. It is the total opposite of Kachana, not just the landscape, the way I grew up as well. I had a very privileged lifestyle. My parents managed a hotel in that village. You know, I never had to cook or do much. I met Chris, um, I was in Year Six, and, um, we were told that a new girl was going to join our class and that they had just moved from Africa and that they had lost their farm. And so this new girl was Chris's sister. I grew up on a little farm in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Dad was Swiss-born and Mum was Austrian, and in '73, for security reasons, the family decided to move back to Switzerland. Our farm was in a hot spot, at one of the areas where the Liberation War started, and it was pretty clear that we weren't going to be able to keep the family farm. The new flag was raised, Robert Mugabe's government assumed power, and Zimbabwe was born. What drew me to Australia was really the wide open spaces. Europe was too crowded for me and too controlled. Being a farm boy, I needed land. I was looking for a place to commit to. I was looking for a home. I wanted my children, if I had any, to grow up in a bush setting. When I got to the Kimberley, I thought, this is it. I don't need to go any further. It was far enough to be able to do our own thing and, and hopefully be left [Music] alone. Chris had already immigrated to Australia, but then he came back to Switzerland for quite a few months because his mum wasn't too well. I was probably 24, and he would have been 29. I'd last seen her as a little girl, but, um, I'd never really looked at her as a young woman, prospective wife. He had told me about the project, Kachana. He had told me that this is where his heart was. I couldn't tell that he was stubborn, straight away, but he knew his goals. He knew where he wanted to go in life. She was in love and blind and obviously didn't see how hard it would be. I didn't think it'd be that hard either. Yes, I can remember we watched Crocodile Dundee and I thought, oh, this is my own. This is going to be my Crocodile Dundee, something like that. Yeah. We moved out here in 1991. Our first bedroom was the back of the Land Cruisers. The plan was, oh, we're going to just camp here for maybe two years, and then in that time, we'll build the, the homestead, you know, and, but that never eventuated. And so where we actually camped became our home, and, yeah, that's where we still are. We don't have roads. Everything has to be flown in. So I was very fortunate in so far that I was able to explain to my wife that the aircraft and the airstrip was more important than the house. So we bought an aircraft very early in the piece. I had to learn to fly. Then we started building airstrips. The cooking was all done in camp ovens on the fire, which got really annoying during the wet season because, you know, no sooner had you built a nice fire to maybe bake bread in the camp oven, you had some rain, and then, you know, you had to start all over again. So that was hard work. Yep, very hard work. In those first years, there were many, many occasions where I could have just packed up and left. But to me, at that stage, I already had little children. Chris was the most fantastic father I could wish for any child. They were so involved in, you know, his daily life. I probably would have had to leave on my own because I could not break those children's hearts, nor Chris's heart, because he, he just, he's such a good, he loves family. Chris, Victor, are you there? Over. We could only get into town maybe four or five times a year, and it made you very self-reliant and resourceful. We didn't just have a Bunnings down the road, so you had to, you know, you had to look after your stuff. Where you break the handle in the shovel, or you'd have to go and find a tree, find the right branch, make a new one. We had a very free childhood, I would say. We were always outside, outdoors. When we went to Kanara, our friends would just be like jumping on a trampoline, you know, in a small backyard, and we were like, well, okay, you know, where's the fun in that? From an early age, Dad put a lot of responsibility on us, and we helped out a lot before and after school. So there were always chores, and, you know, he wouldn't tell us how to do things. He'd tell us what needed to get done. For the children, it wasn't unconventional at all because this was reality for the children. The, the rest of the world was unconventional, pretty much. The only thing that's come off this property in the past decade or so is soil, possibly millions of tons of it, washed down the creeks and rivers and out to sea during the wet season deluge. I was passionate about the land, passionate about conservation, but I, I had no inkling that that this country was, that there was an issue here. So by '92, we'd realized that something was very wrong. The very areas that had attracted us, these the lowlands, were being carved up and, and, and, um, draining and dying.
[Music] Every morning I would wake up with sand between my teeth because when you had the wind and the storms come in, there was no vegetation around. It was just dirt. And Chris knew from what he had seen in Africa where desertification had started, he knew the same thing was happening in these rangelands, that we were losing a lot of soil, and unless something was done, done, we, it would all be a desert one day. The conventional thinking is that we had too many animals. When we first arrived on the property, my estimation was about 1,100 to 1,200 head on feral cattle, on about 400 feral donkeys. And so then we did the destock, and when after the destock, things got worse. All of a sudden, we had a fire problem. We forgot to tell the grass to stop growing, and the grass grew, and we ended up with a fire nightmare. That's when he then started going back to, you know, doing, doing different courses, learning more about it, finding like-minded people to talk to. Mostly they weren't in Australia. They certainly weren't in the Kimberley. In '97, I found out about the work of Allan Savory, and that in seasonally dry environments, you need the large herbivores for their manure and hooves to keep the soil healthy. That's when the penny dropped, and I realized, hey, we, we need more manure and hooves, not less. Basically, getting them to do what their wild ancestors would have done prior to domestication, and that's a role that's sorely needed in the Australian landscape. Our cattle are very valuable as a landscape management tool. They mulch, fertilize, and prune vegetation, which helps build the soil structure. Each one will take about 15 kilos of manure and spread it around the landscape. So we've got these landscape, seasonally dry landscape, it's dotted with these biologically active micro-sites. It's still, it's still humid, it's damp. This will be working for another two months, and then it just goes dormant. And when it's, when the rain comes, it'll explode with life. And the question is, what do we do in the areas where the cattle don't really go to? And, um, we already had donkeys, and, and, and I realized, well, well, maybe let's not shoot the donkeys. Let's have a no-shoot zone between this gorge and the next gorge, and we started experimenting. We have very, very, um, rough country out here. We have a lot of rocks. We have a lot of, you know, steep banks. The cattle won't go up there, but the donkeys will. We've learned that we can manipulate the donkey behavior through lick blocks, through how we shift the cattle around. It's actually been a surprise to me that that donkeys are a key ingredient because I didn't like donkeys. By appreciating that the value that these animals could have in a landscape, that's when I started getting enthusiastic about it. When I was young and Dad first started out there, they'd have after him, they would say things behind his back. No doubt, most people, you know, thought he's a crazy redneck. Maybe I guess they couldn't really understand because, you know, like, obviously you have to have an income somewhere, and with a young family, why would you suddenly put all your efforts into regenerating land? It is a bit of a challenge because Kachana hasn't paid its own way yet, um, and, and we are supporting it off by our farm income. Oh, there's a spider there. Chris had some investments. We've got an apartment in town that we rent out, and then I sometimes go and work a little bit as well. The hardest part was the social rejection and the ridicule. I found the peer pressure was more an issue for Jackie and the children. I could always see the reward in what I was doing by looking outside and the nature responding, but the drudgery of being based in the camp and having primitive conditions and people thinking your husband's a nut or your dad's a nut, you know, that, that was the pressure that the children suffered from, like especially when they left here and realized, oh, nobody can relate to what we've been through. I think now people are starting to wake up and listen, and more and more people are going towards the regenerative way of managing the land, and that's really exciting.
[Music] The method of regeneration is 100% ground cover, 100% of the time. So he achieves this with what he's framed as the new megafauna, large herbivores that used to run on the Australian continent. The dingoes of today, he would say, this is a fledgling experiment in many ways. They still don't have enough megafauna to cover their whole 200,000 acres, but they've got these model areas which show extraordinary regeneration of grasslands at [Music] Kachana. Now we've got this ground cover. It actually acts as a filter. So all the water that goes through here into the main river gets filtered, and you've got clean water going out [Music] there. I can only admire the work that he's done at Kachana Station, you know, and he's, he's used his cattle and he's used his donkeys to take care of country, you know. I believe that what Chris is doing is a perfect example of what Aboriginal people want to see on their country. A few years ago, Chris, uh, won an award as Soil Champion for the Kimberley region for, you know, the work he was doing, and I think, wow, this is amazing. There are a number of tests for rehydrating your property, and the simplest test is go to the lowest end of your property and drink what runs off it. And I'm perfectly happy to do that.
[Music] Good. Yeah, good enough for me. He's slowly starting to get recognized, which is really nice, um, because it's been a long battle for him, and I think it still is a fairly big battle, especially with the [Music] donkeys. We thought we were doing quite well, and it was looking very promising, and then all of a sudden, 2018, the rules seemed to have changed. We were told now we'd have to get rid of the donkeys, and, yeah, I guess there was, on my part, it was just disbelief. The Department of Agriculture and Regional Development issued a shoot order to Kachana Station to kill the donkeys. They observed in a helicopter flyover inspection. It's effectively a culling order that they're expected to implement. The wild donkeys are descendants of pack animals used in the old gold rush days. The wild donkey story started when donkeys were brought out to Australia as transport and beasts of burden, and like many other pests today, they were let go, and then came to be regarded as feral, as they were doing extraordinary damage to the landscape. In the Kimberley alone, upwards of half a million donkeys have been culled in the last four decades or so. In relation to Kachana Station, I can't comment on the specifics of what they're looking to achieve and the use of donkeys on their property, but donkeys are certainly, um, one of the major problems in Northern Australia. They can carry weeds, and they do have the tendency to change soil structure by removing the native grasses, and in some cases, they will create erosion on the banks or actually get into the water and and and increase turbidity. We think of donkeys in line with lantana, cane toads, um, feral horses, etcetera. Under the guidelines of the WA State legislation that has declared donkeys as a feral pest, it is the responsibility of the landholder to control and manage, uh, donkeys on their land holdings. I'm not for one minute suggesting we need to sort of unleash wild donkeys all over in the Kimberley. I'm interested in managing the resource that I'm responsible for. The feral behavior, we've always culling against right from the start, and we still do. We had up to 150 odd, depending on the seasons. If it was a dry season, um, we'd bring that number back down. You know, I've shot an awful lot more donkeys than any one of those people sending us letters in the department have. But to go out there and shoot our little population of donkeys that we know to do good, no, that won't be me. And it won't be Chris. I realized we've got to look at it from the science point of view, and the role of science is not to defend your hypothesis, it's to challenge it. So we need to have research. And we came across Arian Wallock. Thanks for coming up. I'm an ecologist interested in feral and invasive species. The first time I came to Kachana, I was struck by the complexity of what was going on here. So around this country here, you know, it's, it's, it's too rough to cycle, and, um, as you can see, the donkeys, they're up here regularly. Keeping, in this case, we have an opportunity to ask some really interesting ecological questions, such as the relationship between donkeys and fire. Burning through thousands of hectares, a bushfire shuts the Kimberley Outback's main highway. Fire is an extraordinary problem in the Kimberley. Everybody agrees we have to prevent wildfire. Yeah, so then this is this year's prime dust bath. One of the interesting things that donkeys do is dig dust baths. They'll rub around in the soil until it becomes powdery and soft. These dust baths are a good thing if you don't like fire. Once it rains, those depressions fill up with water, vegetation grows on the edge of it, the soil becomes wetter, and the fire becomes less likely to spread through the environment. I'll use those later in the year if there's a fire. I can, I can burn back, burn off one of these pads. Can see donkeys can cut down fire risk in ways that cows cannot because they can eat dry, senescent vegetation, the most flammable vegetation, and they can go up into the hills where you really can't control fire. So in the hills and places as rocky and steep as the Kimberley, it's either fire or donkeys. In 2021, we were given an infringement notice and a pest control notice, which we've challenged and are still challenging. And so we asked for the pest control notice to be reviewed under the State Administrative Tribunal, and it appears at this point in time there will be a hearing scheduled for later in the year. One thing I do believe that Chris deserves is an ear, you know, and great constructive conversations because looking after a country is everyone's responsibility. I don't want to go to jail, but I don't, I want to be able to look my grandchildren in the eye and say, listen, I knew what was going on. I did my best to communicate that. I'll go visit him in jail if they want to lock him up, and if I need to go as well, as being one of the directors, we'll, we'll see. This is another example where I would have given up years and years ago. I don't know if Chris actually knows how to give up, but, you know, it's, it's up to him. It's got to sit right for him, and I will just support [Music] him. How are you? Hello, Christina. Um, so today was the deadline. We sent in all the witness statements, so that's happening. That process is continuing, and we have faith that that'll do its thing. Are you feeling a little bit less stressed now, Dad? You know, we've got science. I believe we've got science on our side, and let the science prevail. It's had a lot of impact on Dad. Um, he had health issues last year that would have definitely been related to stress. Well, it's totally derailed my whole, um, succession plan. Like, I'd hoped to be retired long before now, like, I'm ready to step back the moment someone steps up. If, um, any of the children come back to live here, that would be great. I can't see it happening within the next five years.
[Music] If you just penalize innovation, well, we're not going to expect young people to step up to the plate. I do want to see Kachana, if possible, stay in the family with, you know, either myself or a combination of us running it, managing it, and making that happen. But I'm definitely hesitant to keep investing more money and time, uh, until we have a clear way forward. We're hoping that once we get a positive result with the donkeys, we can start focusing on our succession planning a bit more as a [Music] family. It would be disappointing to see the land go back to what it was. As a family, you're going without a lot of the day-to-day conveniences which most people come to take for granted. What has it done for you, and what do you think it's doing for your kids? I actually think it's, it's very good for the children, and also for us. You learn to communicate because you can't run away from each other. You just have to, you know, sort your problems out. I think the love story is stronger, much stronger. So you're going to retire with me on here, aren't you? I will. I will support you. You're going to say I do. I learned to love Chris as Chris, and that's nice. That is much better than just, you know, falling in love. It's been tested, hasn't it? It has been tested a lot. I think, um, I might have fallen out of love a few times, but I have, I certainly love you much more now than then, I would say. And it's, yeah, it's a strong love. So likewise, it's good. It's been a success against the odds.
[Music] I don't want to get lost. Get lost. I'm swimming with my clothes on. Mommy, with your clothes on? Yeah. [Music] [Applause] You done, is that perfect? That's cold. What a shot. How cold is it? [Music] Cold. For.