Rediscovering a role for dingoes on Wooleen Station

Abstract

We have never been able to rest our country. Pastoralists could move the sheep or the cattle from the paddock, but 61 per cent of the grazing by goats and kangaroos remains. This continual grazing of the most valuable plant species, to their local extinction, has left the land unproductive and bleeding. The dingo has allowed this landscape to be effectively rested for the first time in 130 years because, in the past 10 to 15 years, the dingoes have entirely removed the goats from Wooleen and almost entirely removed them from the Murchison, Gascoyne and Goldfields districts. But that’s not the half of it, I estimate the dingoes have also removed 80 to 90 per cent of the kangaroo population. So overall, a 50 to 55 per cent reduction in grazing pressure over the great majority of an area larger than France, in the last 12 years. A stupendous achievement. Dingoes give us the opportunity for the first time in 130 years to manage the unmanageable. Without them, the supposedly renewable resource that is the southern rangelands can only continue its downward spiral.