Australian Story: Apr 11

Tonight on Australian Story profiles Dr Rebecca West and her husband Dr Reece Pedler as they seek to re-introduce seven locally extinct animals into safe havens of the Sturt National Park.

This episode is introduced by famed conservationist Jane Goodall.

A young couple are braving danger and isolation in one of the most remote areas of Australia to help turn around the country’s extinction crisis.

Ecologists Dr Rebecca West and her husband Dr Reece Pedler run the Wild Deserts project in the Sturt National Park.

It’s a vast and ambitious ten-year collaboration shared by UNSW Sydney, National Parks and Wildlife and Ecological Horizons to re-introduce seven locally extinct animals into safe havens and restore the health of the desert into the bargain.

But when they embarked on the project, neither knew the challenges they would face.

“It’s really hard work and there have been moments where I’ve told Reece that I’m not sure if we can keep going,” Rebecca West says.

“But working on a project like this, I feel like I’m doing something. There are species that have gone extinct on our watch and we need to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

Everything about the location, six hours’ drive northwest of Broken Hill, is made more difficult because of the isolation.

Groceries come by truck once a week and they teach themselves how to fix things using YouTube. When Rebecca fell pregnant, specialist appointments were a 10-hour round trip.

The project began in 2016 with the construction of two giant enclosures designed to keep out predators like foxes and cats. But a record-breaking drought stalled the project because there was no food for the arriving animals to eat.

Dust storms were frequent and the couple came close to walking away in frustration.

But in 2020 the rains finally came and with it, the first ten Bilbies bred at Taronga Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo.

“I felt a bit like a worried mother. Were they going to survive? I had a sort of stress and nervous tummy,” Rebecca West says.

The Bilbies bred ‘like rabbits’ as did the crest-tailed Mulgara and Bandicoots that followed.

With Australia’s extinction crisis among the worst in the world, re-populating the desert with the animals that once thrived there is a ray of hope in a race against time.

Producer: Vanessa Gorman

Monday 11th April at 8pm on ABC.