Reaching the summit: How Australia united to save the bilby
It’s almost Easter and Kevin Bradley is trapped on high ground surrounded by slow-moving floodwaters in Currawinya National Park in remote southwestern Queensland.
The inundation has, in part, resulted from Cyclone Alfred. This once-in-a-generation weather event hit the Queensland and northern NSW coasts a month earlier during the first week of March 2025. It was the same week the second ever Greater Bilby Recovery Summit was scheduled to gather at Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast for a once-in-a-decade event.
Kevin was instigator of the first summit in 2015. As a result of that historic coming together of a diverse range of organisations and individuals involved in bilby conservation, the current Greater Bilby Recovery Team was established with Kevin as its Chair and a new Bilby Recovery Plan as its manual.
Conservation is a complex web of actions and interactions that needs examination from a higher perspective to be able to honestly check what’s working and what’s not. At risk is the survival of species, some on the brink of extinction, for whom time is running out. Human and financial resources are thinly stretched, and all too often forced to compete with one another. The efficacy of any strategy needs regular review to ensure effort is being directed towards the best possible outcomes. Kevin knew this was certainly the case with the greater bilby (Macrotis lagotis). He had served as chair of Save the Bilby Fund for six years before becoming its CEO in 2014 and had long identified the need for a nationally coordinated response for the bilby.
Image credit: courtesy Save The Bilby Fund
“What drew me to the Save the Bilby Fund was that it was nimble, small and very focused on the task at hand. It was driven by passion, and by people who understood that unless you were willing to roll your sleeves up and get all hands to the pump, nothing was going to happen,” says Kevin. “We’re real people and we’ve attracted others and our incredible supporters who share that passion for the Australian environment and just getting in and getting the job done”. Among the real people Kevin’s referring to are two legends of Australian conservation collectively and affectionately known as the Bilby Brothers, Frank Manthey OAM and Peter McRae, both now sadly deceased. “I listened to Frank Manthey speak when he won the Australian Geographic Conservationist of the Year Award in 2002. I’d always wanted to do more to assist bilby recovery, but it was difficult because they were so tightly managed by state and federal governments as an endangered or threatened species, and it’s not as easy as people might think to be able to practically support these types of programs from outside of government.
Frank and Peter, who founded Save the Bilby Fund in 1999, were both Queensland government employees working with bilbies, Kevin was a supporter of the Fund and had a long background in the zoological parks industry and saw an opportunity to improve the reach and provide direct support for the projects initiated by Frank and Peter. “I was in a position where I could provide access to important funding and additional resources purely because of the business that I was in. I was running a high profile and successful wildlife display at Dreamworld on the Gold Coast and was actively involved in the broader zoological industry across Australasia. We had funds and a significant audience of potential supporters that I could make available to the Bilby Fund, but it wasn’t as easy as one would think to put that support in place.” he says. Kevin has committed himself to getting rid of some of those old roadblocks and improving government and non-government partnerships in conservation and it’s an attitude he clearly maintains today.
“Originally, it was all about elevating the profile and educating people about the existence and plight of the bilby because in Frank and Pete’s day the vast majority of Australians didn’t even know what bilbies were, let alone have any genuine concern or interest in saving them.” That all changed because of the Bilby Brothers and the Save the Bilby Fund’s groundwork, and today the medium sized nocturnal marsupial is a beloved, iconic native species to most Australians, but saving them from extinction and the ravages of human impacts is an altogether grander challenge.
Peter McRea was the Queensland Government’s pre-eminent bilby scientist for over 30 years and to support the national recovery plan for the species in the mid-1990s he wanted to reintroduce bilbies to part of their former range in Queensland. Save the Bilby Fund raised the money and constructed a specially designed 25sq.km bilby sanctuary within Currawinya National Park in Queensland in 2001.
Other fenced sanctuaries were also constructed by conservation groups and government agencies in other states of Australia during the 1990s, and since that time predator-free enclosures have proved very successful in increasing metapopulations of many at-risk native species, and are an incredibly important and valuable tool in conservation and recovery of threatened species. Kevin acknowledges this value and importance but believes that we need to stay focused on finding solutions to threatened species recovery beyond fences.
“The whole idea of providing safe havens has been successfully applied to multiple species at multiple sites across Australia with appropriate geographic separation so you don’t have all your eggs in one basket. But I have always been curious to know, “-well- where to from here?” And that wasn’t laid out anywhere in a conservation planning document that I could find for the bilby.
At the time that Kevin took responsibility for the Fund, the fence Save the Bilby Fund had built at Currawinya NP had failed, possibly due to flood waters undermining the fence’s skirt netting in 2010-2011. Feral cats breached the enclosure and decimated the bilby population inside.
“I called that first Bilby Summit in 2015 to find as many stakeholders involved in conservation and recovery projects for the bilby across Australia as I could, to get some agreement about what the priorities were for the species and to really identify whether there was a clear role and purpose for Save the Bilby beyond Frank and Peter’s incredible work to create awareness of the plight of the bilby, which they did incredibly well and the facility they had worked so hard to establish at Currawinya.”
The Bilby summit brought together 39 experts from 29 organisations to help develop a unified plan for recovery of the bilby. This included a commitment to the adoption of a national metapopulation management approach which would integrate wild, fenced, and captive populations of bilbies to ensure genetic diversity and establishment of an appropriately sized genetic insurance population. It emphasised the critical importance of engaging Traditional Owners, recognising their cultural connections to bilbies, their role in conservation and noting that approximately 80 per cent of the extant wild bilby population remaining in Australia only now occurs on Indigenous Protected Areas and managed land. Delegates also agreed on the urgent need for coordinated national monitoring, harmonised legislation and effective predator control.
The summit’s findings laid the groundwork for a revision of the 2006 National Recovery Plan for the Greater Bilby, aiming for a collaborative and sustainable conservation framework. “One of the key priorities was the need for some kind of leadership; people who took responsibility for coordination of all the moving parts of bilby recovery. It was suggested and finalised right there that I should be the interim Chair to lead the recovery team, a role that I have filled since that time” says Kevin.
Currawinya was identified as a priority to reinstate as a viable and thriving bilby population which could contribute animals to support the metapopulation plan. With about $800,000 of Queensland Government funding and 100 per cent of Kevin’s focus for the two and a half years following the summit, the fence was upgraded, and feral cats were removed from the enclosure so that bilbies could be reintroduced. Thirty-six bilbies were released back into the sanctuary between 2019 and 2021 and the population of bilbies is again thriving with approximately 400 bilbies inside the enclosure and bilbies also being detected and persisting outside the enclosure.
It was always intended to hold a second recovery Summit to track progress and provide for adaptability of the recovery effort. It was hoped this might occur in 2020. But with the onset of COVID that year upending normal life for the subsequent three years, Kevin recognised that 2025 was probably going to be a more realistic time frame for a second bilby summit and health check on the recovery effort’s progress since 2015.
The 2025 Bilby Summit was scheduled to take place at Skypoint Tower in Surfers Paradise from 4-6 March this year. Delegates hailed from conservation organisations across the country. As a group of rangers from the Indigenous Desert Alliance made their way there over many days from remote regions of WA and the NT, a tropical cyclone was brewing and heading toward the Gold Coast.
By opening day, interstate travel plans had been scuppered by the threat of wild weather, and Kevin and the team from Save the Bilby Fund had to quickly pivot to a hybrid format. The Indigenous Ranger team stayed in Sydney while a few delegates didn’t risk travel at all, and those who attended in person would head home early to avoid airport closures or to prepare for the impending cyclone, if they lived in southeast Queensland. The Summit proceeded despite setbacks well beyond the organisers’ control. Reports were given, workshops convened, and information and experiences from the previous 10 years shared.
“We identified some really big priorities in 2015, and throughout the summit, it became pretty obvious that we’ve achieved a lot of those.” says Kevin. “We have a current National Recovery Plan that was endorsed by the Australian Government last year. We have a functional recovery team and specialist groups that sit underneath the recovery team to focus on particular areas like the scientific side of what we do, which is a huge component when one considers the sheer scale of our work over thousands and thousands of square kilometres of Australia’s harshest arid environments. The Metapopulation Management Plan was also identified as a major priority ongoing as it evolves to beyond the fence translocations of bilbies back into the wild.”
Population biologists have earmarked 10,000 individuals as the magic number under management to ensure appropriate genetic insurance for about 100 years to support survival of the species. In 2015 there were approximately 1200 bilbies held in zoos, parks and safe havens. Today that number has risen to over 6000 animals conservatively. Well over halfway to the target.
Determining wild population numbers is obviously much harder, and monitoring in remote areas is difficult and incredibly costly with the methods that are currently available. At Currawinya, wild bilbies have been observed surviving beyond the fence for 4 years now. Landscape management and feral predator control at a landscape scale to ensure those wild populations are robust enough to weather normal boom/bust cycles is the next step in the bilby story, and that of other native species.
But for now, as floodwaters flow through Currawinya , Kevin’s daily focus is on checking the integrity of the fence and working with Queensland Parks and Wildlife staff as the water recedes to repair damage and manage the threats on the outside of the fence. Feral cats are always poised and ready to take advantage of any chink in the sanctuary’s defences. Kevin is as hands on as his predecessors the Bilby Brothers and is as committed as ever to the mission of his mentors Frank and Peter, to save the greater bilby.
The results of the Greater Bilby Recovery Summit are yet to be compiled into a report and the Bilby Recovery Plan fully implemented, but cooperation across so many stakeholder organisations, the sharing of experience, knowledge and data and the unified commitment to continuing an upward trajectory of the known population numbers bodes well for the greater bilby and all those native species who’ll benefit from the success of this flagship species.
Australian Geographic is raising funds for bilby conservation throughout March and April 2025. Save the Bilby Fund will be the beneficiary of funds raised. Please donate to help the bilby bounce back.
