Kanpa at sunset
Thank you to the 72 extraordinary FLOW supporters and Ma Earth community who donated to our Ma Earth matched funding campaign bringing our total to close to $20,000. You showed us what a global community can do when it decides something matters. We were selected from more than 800 applicants by Ma Earth, a funder who recognised that small, grassroots organisations doing the heavy lifting in conservation often need a different kind of support to survive. We are humbled and grateful.
And to the Global Rewilding Alliance, who believe in our work and shared our last blog with the world. Project PanGaia’s story about Custodian, Matt Thomas, standing in a butterfly garden saying “this is magic” reached people on six continents. You can read their beautiful feature here.
https://globalrewilding.earth/this-is-magic-mimicking-marsupials-to-heal-country-in-western-australia/
What the soil knows
There is a unique beauty to the light in Kanpa during winter. The nights are extremely cold, sending you deep into your sleeping bag with layers piled on, reminding you just how privileged you are to be sleeping in the very heart of Australia.
With every sunrise the days arrive bright and clear, the warmth of the sun on your face even as the air holds its chill. It is, in many ways, the perfect time to work on Country. The heat that makes summer visits so demanding is gone and the land feels alert, ready and expectant.
This July, following the first formal year of proving the project concept, we made the long drive to Kanpa to deliver the next phase of Project PanGaia: the scientific program for the baseline study, deepening our relationship with the soil and doing the kind of learning that only comes from getting your hands in the dirt.
Kanpa, ‘Moon Head’ Country
Kanpa loosely translates to Moon Head in Elder Preston Thomas’ language. Sacred lands that we are very privileged to be invited to work on’
Getting out to Kanpa in July came with a whole new suite of challenges to overcome. Getting the Curtin University soil scientist, Dr Karla Cautivo-Reyes, officially approved, inducted and cleared for a remote field campaign in one of the most isolated parts of Western Australia required extraordinary patience throughout the process.
We headed out a day later than planned. Elder Preston Thomas arrived in Kalgoorlie well ahead of us, patient as ever. We had a quick dinner and an early night, because the drive from Kalgoorlie to Kanpa the next day, more than half of it on gravel road, demands your full attention.
As the sun began to set, we arrived at the Kanpa sign to take our ritual selfie.
We stopped, as we always do, to mark the moment and Preston introduced Karla to the Lands for the first time. As we arrived in the township an enormous full moon was rising over the desert. Pira-Kata translates, loosely, as Moon Head. It felt less like coincidence and more like Country welcoming us back.
Bogged vehicle / Matt and Preston pulling the vehicle out
Donalea's Mess
There is one more thing I must confess.
On our way out to Camel Graveyard trial site, feeling quietly confident that the ground had hardened sufficiently after the rains, Karla and I were leading in the first vehicle when we came across water sitting across the track. We made a decision to try and go around it instead of waiting for instruction from Matt. What followed was the kind of bogging that requires you to sit very still, reassess your life choices and wait for someone more competent to come to your rescue. A lesson to be patient and listen.
Matt and Preston arrived, assessed the situation with a patience that experienced desert folk reserved for city people in trouble, and pulled us out.
The section of track we so memorably rearranged now goes by a name. Preston and Matt have called it “Donalea’s Mess.”
The Desert Crew at work at Camel Graveyard trial site
720 samples. Send help.
The soil sampling program was intensive and physically demanding. It is also worth recording, for full transparency, that on the very first day of sampling a member of the team (one that shall not be named!) fell headlong into the spinifex bush, which is not, it can be confirmed, the soft landing it might appear.
The focus for this trip was Kanpa 1 and Camel Graveyard, our two largest scientific trial sites, each comprising three hectare blocks. Under Karla’s guidance and with Preston fired up and ready, snake gaiters on which are excellent for keeping spinifex spikes off of your legs as well as for the more obvious purpose, the Desert Crew took to task.
Matt, Bobby Jnr and Jaiden swung the sledgehammer in turns, driving the dig stick to 30 centimetres into soil that had absolutely no intention of cooperating. The recent rains had softened things in places, but this is ancient, compacted, arid earth and it does not give itself up without argument. Nicolie kept meticulous records of every sample, every depth and every grid reference, the documentation that will underpin the scientific rigour of everything that follows.
And then there was Preston with the spectrometer.
The spectrometer is a remarkable piece of technology. It reads soil using light beams, measuring organic matter and carbon content beneath the surface. Watching Elder Preston Thomas, Custodian of this Country, a man whose family has cared for these Lands across generations, hold that instrument to the soil and read what it says was one of the quieter, more extraordinary moments of this whole project. Western science and ancient knowing, meeting in the same patch of red earth.
We all took turns with the water filtration tests and the Penetrometer readings, the latter measuring how compacted the soil is at different depths and how much that compaction has changed over time. Every measurement is a data point. Every data point is an argument for the validity of this work.
Over the course of our time in Kanpa, we collected more than 720 soil samples, logged, packed and labelled. These are now being analysed by Curtin University’s laboratory and will form the formal scientific baseline against which all future measurements of Project PanGaia’s impact will be compared. Every single one of those samples matters.
The Desert Crew delivered an extraordinary body of work over the course of this trip. By the time the final samples were packed, logged and labelled, the scientific value of what had been collected was clear to everyone and we were well spent.
Matt, Bobby Jnr and Jaiden taking turns driving the sledgehammer to 30cm in soil that can feel like concrete / Nicolie meticulously taking field notes.
Deeper roots
There will be scones – there always are. And this trip, warming roasts too. Around the fire and at the dinner table is where a great deal of PanGaia’s most important work happens. Not the formal work of sampling and measurement, but the slower work of trust. Yarns about life, family, wildlife, community, Australia’s history. Stories about younger generations coming back to Country, the intersect between Eldership and tech. The kinds of conversations that cannot be scheduled and cannot be rushed.
Ferns, mosses and lichen in the dry riverbed near the Breakaway
The land continues to answer
When we last visited in April and May, we came back from the first meaningful rain in years to find grasses, wildflowers, butterflies and succulents bursting from the micropits. Matt Thomas stood in a field that had been a dust bowl and said “this is magic.”
What we found this time quietly exceeded even that.
The plants we documented in April and May are bigger. Stronger. More established. The grasses are deeper rooted, the succulents are spreading. The micropits that filled with leaf litter and rain between visits are producing the next generation of growth from those seeds. The land isn’t just responding. It is building.
But the thing that stopped us in our tracks this time, the thing we are still thinking about, is what wasn’t there before.
Ferns in the Western Desert!
Near the Breakaway trial site, in the bed of a dry river some distance from the micropitting area, we found ferns.
Ferns in one of the most arid landscapes in the southern hemisphere. Not in a micropit. Not on a trial site. In a dry riverbed that has no obvious reason to be supporting this kind of moisture-dependent life right now.
Whether this is connected to the broader changes in how rainfall is moving through this landscape after a significant wet season, or whether it is simply an extraordinary discovery in its own right, we honestly do not know yet. The 720 samples Karla has collected will help us understand what is changing beneath the surface, but we cannot attribute these ferns to the micropitting. What we can say is, ‘they were not there before. And now they are’.
I also glimpsed what looked like a fern at Camel Graveyard. By the time I called anyone over, we couldn’t find it again for a photograph. If the land is keeping some of its secrets, we can hardly blame it. We’ll be looking harder in September.
What is lichen?
Alongside the ferns, we found lichen in places where there had been none before. Lichen are pioneer species, among the very first organisms to colonise degraded or bare surfaces. Their arrival is ecological, not decorative. They fix nitrogen, retain moisture and begin the slow, patient process of building the conditions that allow other life to follow.
Their presence suggests the soil’s surface chemistry and moisture profile are shifting. The conditions for life are being created. The samples we took will, in time, give us the measurements, but the appearance of lichen are already telling us something.
Taken together, these observations represent a meaningful early signal. The appearance of pioneer species such as lichen, the establishment of moisture-dependent vegetation in adjacent landscape features and the continued strengthening of growth first documented in April represent a pattern of ecological recovery consistent with the objectives of the micropitting program. Formal confirmation of these trends will come through Curtin University’s analysis of the samples collected on this trip, the results of which will be reported once the laboratory program is complete.
Camel Graveyard
Kanpa 1
The growth documented in April and May has continued to strengthen, spread and diversify. The land is building.
A conversation about hope
Before this trip, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Anil Narain Matai for his podcast, Tails of Hope India.
Anil is a compassionate entrepreneur, author, podcaster and advocate for animal welfare who has built something remarkable at the intersection of artificial intelligence and heart intelligence. His work uses technology in service of vulnerable animals and communities, and that convergence, the newest tools in service of the oldest needs, resonates deeply with Project PanGaia.
You can watch the interviews here:
Encouraging innovation in conservation
The WA Landcare Network has invited me to serve as a judge for the innovation category of their annual Landcare Awards.
Innovation in land stewardship doesn’t always look the way you’d expect. Sometimes it is a solar-powered rover in the Western Desert. Sometimes it is a farmer in the Wheatbelt quietly trialling something that the textbook says shouldn’t work and watching it work anyway. Western Australia is full of this kind of innovation – the kind that happens in remote places, without fanfare, because someone decided that the land and the community it sustains were worth the attempt. I can’t think of a better thing to be asked to recognise.
The desert crew
What comes next
We are heading back to Kanpa in September for our last trip of the year and we are excited. September holds a particular significance for Project PanGaia: it was in September 2024 that nine extraordinary people paid their own way and donated their time to make the very first journey to Kanpa, the trip that seeded everything. Two of them, Josie Gibson, FLOW Director and Eric Algra, our project photographer, will be joining us again this time, offering their talents pro bono as they did at the very beginning.
Preston is predicting a bumper wildflower season after all this rain. The micropitted soil, now more deeply hydrated than it has been in years, will be meeting that season ready. We can only imagine what we will find.
There is also a story we are saving for its own telling; the Senior Ladies of the Pira-Kata community came to Kanpa. We are not ready to write about it briefly. That story deserves its own time, its own space and every word it needs.
With ferns and lichens in our hearts.
Donalea and the FLOW team
Caring for Country is not a project. It is a timeless practice.And practice, by its nature, has no end.
Help us keep going.
Become a monthly donor here.