Wooleen Station couple taking radical stand to recover ancient outback property

Updated

David Pollock is a cattleman with no cows. He would rather watch the grass grow on the historic Wooleen Station. He is slowly returning his childhood home in remote WA to its ancient splendour. In a landscape more than 3 billion years old, it's going to take a while.

David is the new, young face of pastoral conservationism.

He and his wife Frances Jones are upending what it means to be a modern-day pastoralist. They are implementing a series of radical steps to rescue his beloved Wooleen from the brink of environmental disaster.

It is a do-or-die approach and it almost sent them broke. But as David sees it, there is no other way.

"If we don't recover the land, we're not going to be able to run anything at all and we all may as well walk off," David said.

Wooleen Station is a 400,000-acre property located in the southern rangelands in the Murchison region, 700 kilometres north of Perth.

The property became rich riding off the sheep's back. In its heyday Wooleen ran 50,000 stock and was like a small town, supporting a workforce of about 60 people.

The crash in sheep prices late last century saw the Pollock family and most of their neighbours move into cattle.

But 100-plus years of intensive grazing saw the grass die and their land disintegrate into red dust, taking their livelihoods with it.

Today, most properties in the region are down to a workforce of just two; usually a husband and wife team, with at least one person seeking an income off-station. For David, the writing was well and truly on the wall for their district.

Ten years ago, David took over Wooleen's pastoral lease from his father who made the difficult succession decision between David's conservation approach and his brother Richard's traditional pastoral approach.

His ultimate goal is to run cattle sustainably on Wooleen.

"Conservation and pastoralism have traditionally been apart. But they have to meet for either of them to actually function," David said.

David's first decision shocked not just his brother, but his neighbours as well. He got rid of all the livestock, affording the land some breathing space and giving the long-lived perennial plants a chance to return.

But without an income stream from cattle, it was a hand-to-mouth existence.

About six months into the bold experiment, Frances turned up. She was an 18-year-old on a gap year from Melbourne and looking for holiday work on the station.

"It gets up to 50 degrees here and it was the hottest day I'd ever experienced in my life. I distinctly remember him saying 'you won't last a summer'," Frances said.

In her first two weeks, she was bitten by a redback spider, a centipede and a scorpion but still she fell in love with the land and with David and so she stayed on.

"Since then, everything for us has been about the bush," Frances said.

The granite outcrop, "Tanjimooka", made the stunning backdrop for their wedding last month.

Bringing ancient lands back to nature

For the first time since white settlement, sapling ghost gums are growing along the Murchison River which courses its way through Wooleen.

They grow in the shadow of relatives that are up to 600 years old.

Their roots will shore up the river bank, protecting it from erosion.

Long-lived grass has also returned to many parts of the station, particularly in and around the massive lake area.

The dense grass matting is over a foot high and provides habitat for a spectacular range of birdlife and native animals.

"For Dave, grass is always an indicator of success," Frances said.

Sheep getting 'absolutely massacred'

But the delicate ecological balance shifted about three years into the destocking program when a thunderstorm left an abundance of water on Wooleen.

Within a month the kangaroo population exploded, threatening the couple's success.

"Kangaroos are natural to the Australian environment. But definitely not in the proportions that we've seen them. Grass is the preferred food of kangaroos. They can wipe out a whole year's worth of effort," Frances said.

"I reckon we had 20,000 kangaroos on Wooleen Lake. In one month, I shot 3,500 of them and a professional shooter shot another 1,500. We didn't even make a dent in them," David said.

Over time, the couple found an ecological solution to control kangaroos and non-natives such as wild goats. This time, it was even more radical.

Dingoes.

Dingoes keep the grass-feeding populations down, as they did before white settlers arrived with their livestock.

But their strategy threatens to ostracise the couple from the community where David was raised.

Neighbour Sandy McTaggart is also the district dogger. He is charged with exterminating wild dogs and dingoes on properties in his region, including Wooleen.

He has known David since he was a child and "grinds his teeth" in exasperation over the situation.

"Dogs are definitely vermin. They do all the damage, all the killing. Especially with sheep, they get absolutely bloody massacred," Sandy said.

Neighbour Josh Pumpa runs sheep and is battling dog attacks on his property.

"It's common to go into a paddock and see a dozen dead sheep. To say you like dingoes seems to take it to ridiculous levels," he said.

David said he was sympathetic but determined to see his regeneration project through.

"It comes back to recovering the land. The longer time goes on, the more I realise we're going to be able to do it," he said.

Wooleen dingo plan puts neighbours at odds

Frances said she and David were bracing for a backlash.

"Maybe there's people that won't talk to us again. Whether I've got the strength to stand up to it I don't really know. I know Dave does," Frances said.

But David said he was working to appease his neighbours.

He and Sandy have discussed the possibility of an exclusion fence to separate the dingoes from sheep.

"I'm very confident that we can work out a program that won't interfere too much with what he wants and hopefully won't interfere too much with what his neighbours want," Sandy said.

Wild dogs and dingoes are a declared pest in Western Australia. By not participating in baiting programs, the couple risks breaking the law.

But it's a risk they are currently prepared to take.

It took 100 years to degrade the land and it will take another 100 years to fully restore it, if at all.

David will never see his project completed — that is for future generations to enjoy.

But he is making progress on Wooleen.

Once a cattleman always a cattleman, David still yearns to work with cows again. He says it is possible to bring back a small herd on Wooleen, even now.

"When we do, the land will be ready for them," he said.

Watch 'Splendour in the Grass' on Australian Story 8:00pm, ABC TV.

Credits

Producer and photography: Kristine Taylor

Photography: Marcus Alborn and Glyn Jones

Digital producer: Megan Mackander

Topics: environmental-impact, rural, agricultural-machinery, women-in-agriculture, beef-cattle, livestock, sheep-production, weld-range-6640, wa

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