AUSTRALIAN GEOGRAPHIC - Story by Victoria Laurie, Photography by Rick Dawson
This patch of remnant bush on the edge of the West Australian wheatbelt is a place loved by one of Australia’s rarest bird species and the man who has studied the site for more than 50 years.
A flock of Carnaby’s black-cockatoos feasts on a harvested canola crop.
HERE’S A STORY in every hollow of the grey-white trunks of Wando woodland at Coomallo Creek, 220km north of Perth in Western Australia. The handsome eucalypts stand like leafy islands in a sea of floral heath. From the 1950s, farmers cut a swathe through the native bush to tame and clear it for agriculture. By 1969 land was released for farming around Coomallo Creek and clearing had begun. That was the year “Cocky Whisperer” Dr Denis Saunders AM first visited Coomallo Creek. Exploring ridge tops and breakaways where the Wando grows, Denis was transfixed by the open woodland’s beauty and age. He realised the knotted trunks were so old they’d been standing long before Captain Cook arrived in Tahiti to monitor the Sun’s eclipse in 1769.
