They wreaked havoc in Queensland. Now they’re bringing new life elsewhere

This week when waters from the floods that caused such devastation in western Queensland in March first arrived at the home of Annemarie van Doorn and her husband, Luke Playford, creeping along the dry creek beds that feed into the Cooper Creek and Warburton River before sprawling into the great salt pans of Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, they brought with them clouds of sandflies and mosquitoes.

A walk on Tuesday morning from the homestead at Kalamurina wildlife sanctuary, the vast nature reserve owned by the Australian Wildlife Sanctuary that the two manage, quickly became a run to escape the clouds of insects that had arrived with the new waters.

There were other changes too. Light aircraft began to patrol the skies above, carrying tourists intent on witnessing one of the continent’s most spectacular phenomena – the emptying of the monsoon rains from the channel country of the north into Central and South Australia’s ephemeral lakes. Flights of pelicans appeared to feed upon the perch and the catfish carried by the new waters.

Soon wildflowers will appear on the dunes that still stand above the waters and the chenopod and samphire shrubs will be charged with new growth and play host to wrens and robins, cockatiels and budgerigars. Ibis and spoonbills, waders and ducks will join pelicans.

For now, surrounded by the slow-shifting waters where the rivers and tributaries weave around them on the north shore of the lake, van Doorn and Playford are stranded with their dogs.

Each day this week Bob Backway, commodore of the Lake Eyre Yacht Club, based at Marree in South Australia, has been checking satellite maps tracking the flows of the water down the threaded rivers as he plots this year’s sailing season. The club hopes to be on the water by June, but the early dates are not yet fixed.

He hopes the season will end with a race along 3.8 kilometres of the Birdsville Track. “That’s the pinnacle event,” says Backway of the club’s sailing season, which has not been held since the floods of 2019.

When the water recedes from the Cooper and the Warburton, work will ramp up for van Doorn and Playford. Much of it will be pest suppression. Pigs will follow the waters south, creating wallows that cause havoc with the fragile landscape.

Cat and fox numbers will explode, creating another threat to the endangered dusky hopping mouse that is protected on-site.

Rabbits and camels will need to be controlled. Buffel grass, which has spread across the interior, outcompeting native grasses and spreading fires across what should be bare earth, will need to be contained.

“It’s so beautiful, it is such a pity we can’t share it with anyone,” says van Doorn of the thriving, sodden landscape, splendid in its isolation.

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