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Australian Story: May 8

David Pollock has built a tourist ecology haven, but his neighbours are not happy.

Tonight Australian Story returns to a farm first featured in 2012, battling our harsh climate.

Five years on, WA farmer David Pollock has built a tourist ecology haven, but the neighbours are not happy, and the law may rule his dingoes are not here to stay.

In 2012 Australian Story featured one of its most popular rural programs – an epic story of droughts and flooding rains, and a young pastoralist’s dream to restore his beloved land north-east of Perth back to nature after a century of over-use for predominantly sheep farming.

David Pollock’s radical project to remove income-earning livestock from his historic property, Wooleen, shocked his neighbours. And it might have failed, but for the unexpected arrival of a young woman on a gap year from Melbourne.

Together, they concentrated on creating a tourist ecology haven and finding a non-destructive way to run cattle.

Five years on, Frances Jones and David Pollock now showcase their remarkable efforts. The grass on the semi-arid mulga country, traversed by the Murchison River, is now greener and the river gums are growing for the first time in a century. 

“You only have to see a few little plants coming up and you think well, why aren’t they growing everywhere?  And you look back to the early explorer’s records and they were everywhere.  And they could be again.” – David Pollock

The Wooleen country made a stunning setting for family and friends who came to celebrate their wedding last month.

However, some of the couple’s regeneration methods are not without controversy. Their latest strategy risks pitting the newlyweds against their neighbours and ostracising them from the community where David grew up.

Across Australia, pastoralists view dingoes and wild dogs as a savage pest that destroys their livelihood. 

But David Pollock and Frances Jones claim that the native or hybrid canines can be used to control explosions of kangaroo and non-native animals, such as goats, that are decimating their efforts to recover land degraded after so many decades of overstocking.

“He’s excluded everything else but his one tunnel view. Something needs to be done to pacify his neighbours.” – Sandy McTaggart, neighbour and ‘dogger’

“Maybe there’s people that won’t talk to us again. We’re prepared to stand up for what we believe in.” – Frances Jones

Legally, they are obligated to ‘control the dogs’. 

But the couple say they are committed to doing whatever it takes to return the landscape to its former glory, even if it means defying the law by not discouraging dingoes on their property.

“It is a pretty serious stand.  And he risks being taken to court for his actions.  But he’s obviously prepared to risk that.” – Greg Brennan, WA Dept of Agriculture, 1993-2015

For David Pollock and Frances Jones, it’s all about creating an environmentally and economically sustainable environment.

“What we’re doing is for future generations.” – David Pollock

8pm tonight on ABC.

One Response

  1. You cannot please everyone…all the time….they are doing something different….no one else around wants to do anything different to what they are doing….everyone feels they are right….Life is always like that.

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