The Nowanup Ranger team were very keen to undertake some culturally driven restoration plantings on the Gondwana Link properties between the Stirling Range and Fitzgerald River national parks. There were suitable cleared areas available for these planting on the Yarrabee, Nowanup and Peniup properties. So the rangers set about designing the plantings they would like. They took the form of three giant animals – a 300 m long karda (goanna) on Yarrabee and similar sized gnow (malleefowl) on Nowanup and yonga (kangaroo) on Peniup.

It was quite a team effort to achieve these plantings. Noongar artist and ranger Errol Eades drew up the designs then the team worked together with Greening Australia to choose the plants that would give the right height and colour to make the animals look real from above. The designs were digitised and put into GIS then exported to a file that could guide the tractor GPS when doing the soil preparation. The planting was then a mixture of direct seeding by machine and hand planting by the rangers.

This image gallery shows the plantings which were undertaken in 2017. We have most drone imagery of the karda on Yarrabee near the eastern end of the Stirling Range. It is an awesome sight and reminder that can be seen from space that the Noongar people have always been involved in managing their country.