Recapping the recent bushfire impacts at Walker Swamp

For anyone who has been on holidays and may have missed it, we sent out a special mid-month edition of the NGT Newsletter a couple of weeks ago, where we took a closer look at the bushfire impacts at Walker Swamp.

In the days following that update, I was invited to give interviews on two ABC Radio Programs. If you would like hear what we discussed, you can listen back to each of these programs in the players below:

• South East SA Weekends (Saturday 18th January 2025), with Rod Sparks

• Regional Victoria Saturday Breakfast (Saturday 18th January 2025), with Gavin McGrath

I also had the chance to swing past Walker Swamp last week, and can confirm that it is now completely dry for the first time in almost six years, since full restoration works were completed in early 2019 and the wetland stated to fill that winter. After limited inflows in 2023, and no-inflows in 2024, we knew it was just a matter of time before complete drying of the wetland basin would occur this summer.

To give you a feel for just how quickly the last of the water has disappeared over recent weeks, please take a look at the sequence of images below…

If you look closely above, you will see some fading evidence of the old drains, and the remnants of the former parallel mounds in the bed of Walker Swamp from its prior land use as blue-gum plantation, now re-exposed for the first time since 2019.

The process from here is now relatively straightforward, as we patiently await the upcoming winter months, and hope to see the return of sufficient rainfall to generate inflows this year. To remind you of what we have to look forward to when that occurs, below is a similar view to the images above, taken just over 2 years ago, in October 2022.

It was this filling event that led to the ‘carryover effect’ which has allowed Walker Swamp to remain inundated in 2023 and 2024, despite two years of below average rainfall. Needless to say, these extended multi-year periods of inundation (creating valuable breeding and refuge habitat for wildlife in the landscape) couldn’t occur when the wetland was in its artificially drained state. So even as Walker Swamp has now dried out, it is worth remembering that for a wetland that barely held any water for several decades, to have experienced almost six years of continuous inundation is a big wetland restoration success story!