Peter Rowles is in his happy place – he’s on the shovel digging holes for trees and native grasses near the banks of a creek. To get to this stage has been a mission in itself – the banks were covered in guinea grass a few short months ago and para grass was doing its best to smother the waterway.

“You could barely see the creek line,’’ he says. “And big chunks of the bank were being ripped out in floods.”
Peter and a crew of volunteers are less than a kilometre from the ocean at Mission Beach, on private land in a cassowary corridor that connects the coastal wetlands with world-heritage rainforest. It’s known as Lot 66 or ‘Garrett’s Corridor’ because Midnight Oil frontman and former Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett stepped in 18 years ago to stop any development on the land.

It’s now a nature refuge owned by Queensland Trust for Nature, and conservation group ‘C4 – Community for Coastal and Cassowary Conservation’ is steadily working to restore deforested and degraded areas.

“We started in 2014, revegetating in the middle of a pile of grass where some land was cleared by the previous owners to plan residential lots,’’ Peter says.

“There was one dead wattle in amongst the guinea grass. The goal is to return this land to something resembling the forest that was there originally.”

The group’s current, and final, section of revegetation work is along an unnamed waterway that flows into Wongaling Creek and then the ocean.

Volunteers are planting Lomandra grass on the banks, and establishing native trees – from seeds collected locally and grown in the C4 nursery – on land behind the creek.

They’ve chosen species that cassowaries will be able to walk through easily, with deep enough roots to also stablise the creek bank.

“We needed natives that can create a canopy to shade out weeds,’’ Peter says. “But we also need to select a range of species that don’t grow too high, given the nearby powerlines, and that improve driver visibility compared to a wall of guinea grass. That way a cassowary has less chance of ‘popping out’ onto the road.”

C4 has been tree-planting and controlling weeds in rainforest and beach areas around Mission Beach, and at Smith’s Gap between El Arish and Feluga, for the last 30 years. Volunteers range from children to octogenarians. The group actively looks for new areas where revegetation can make a real difference – especially patches of cleared or degraded land alongside forests, creeks and wildlife corridors.