Despite being hammered by fires and floods, the wetlands on Iestyn Hosking’s property are alive today with insects, butterflies, birds and plants.

Hosking’s 165ha plot near Natimuk is 60 percent wetlands. He originally bought the land in 2008 for cropping before pivoting to restoring the wetlands. 

Eighteen years of effort: It’s been a long game of fencing, planting and learning which species can survive fire and flood conditions.

“We put in 26 hectares of revegetation in 2008, it grew really well, and then early 2009, it all died because of the Black Saturday week. It was a little bit disheartening, then in 2010, I ripped it, mounded it and planted it,” Hosking recalled.

“We replanted some large sections of it, and all the direct seeding started coming up, and all the plants basically lived,” Hosking said.

“In early 2011, when Natimuk and places like that flooded, about 80 percent of the property went underwater.”

Protecting the wetlands: At the 29th Wimmera Biodiversity Seminar this month, where wetlands were the theme, 100 people explored practical ways to manage and restore wetland ecosystems on their properties. 

Why does it matter? Dr Lachlan Farrington, principal ecologist at Nature Glenelg Trust, was a guest speaker at the seminar. He told the Brolga western Victoria had lost about half its wetlands since European settlement,” pointing to drainage as one of the major factors.

“When wetlands are drained, that means they don’t get wet as often and if they do get wet, they don’t stay wet for as long as they used to. A lot of our local species, particularly our threatened species, are wetland dependent, which tells you the role they played.”

Challenges: Nature Glenelg Trust has been working with local landholders to reduce the impact of wetland drainage by adding in small barriers along waterways to slow water flow down and limit “landscape dehydration”.

“You're never making up the losses because the water's not getting time to soak in,” Farrington said . “A drought’s a drought, things are going to dry out, but the problem we’re seeing is these cumulative events.” 

Practical solutions: Restoration work can include adjusting the flow of water through a wetland to help store more moisture, but it can also involve more simple land management like fencing to keep livestock away from wetland soils.

“If you can try and minimise the amount of water that’s leaving the wetlands artificially through drainage regulation, that’s a big step in the right direction,” he said.

Putting it into practice: After years of trial and error, determining what would survive in the soils of his property’s wetlands, Hosking said a key was “finding the right species for the right spot”. 

“We’ve got wetlands where I planted red gums, which seemed fine because it gets wet - but they don’t grow because it’s black box country, not red gum country,” he said.

Transformation: Looking back to when he first bought the land, Hosking said the property was “an overgrazed, [windy] property with active wind erosion”. 

Wind erosion strips away the fertile layer of surface soil that contains the most nutrients to help plants grow.

“I ended up with one fence line that had maybe six inches of topsoil piled against it, solely because we hadn't grazed for at least 12 months,” he said.

“We ended up with a lot of quail in the grass growing on the property. There's also a lot of other bird life in the trees because we've got tree and shrub cover …  a lot of insects as well that are reproducing quite happily in that, and a lot of bird life that eats that,” Hosking said.

The wetlands have also become refuge to the rare golden-rayed blue butterfly, a species only found in the Wimmera. Hosking is trying to confirm the presence of another rare species, the Altona Skipper Butterfly.