It was 2016, Mark Bachmann was stumped.
He and his team of scientists were three years into transforming a huge tract of agricultural land into the wetland it once was, but had no idea how their small, regional, not-for-profit could negotiate the final step: to buy 1,000 acres of commercial blue gum plantation.
That was when he spotted the platypus.
"I drove out after a big flood to see how our two trial swamps were looking, I'd just taken a few steps off the road and saw a black thing moving up along the bank of a deep drain," Mr Bachmann said.
"I thought it might be a water rat, but then I got a look at the bill and I thought, 'Oh my goodness, it's a platypus!'" he said.
Loading...That platypus appeared at the right time, providing Mr Bachmann with inspiration in the face of what seemed, at that point, nearly impossible.
It's not easy for a small, science-based environmental organisation like Nature Glenelg Trust to buy a 1,035-acre blue-gum plantation, strip it of trees, allow it to flood, and transform it back into wetlands.
"We're rural people, practical people, we work with farmers a lot, science underpins what we do," Mr Bachmann said.
"There are no layers of bureaucracy; we are a very lean operation, but we get a lot done."
At that point, a local band of nature lovers, the Hamilton Field Naturalist Club, had thrown a sum of money in the hat, but a lot more was needed and the land simply wasn't for sale.
"In 2016, I was in the midst of that, 'How the hell do we get this thing to happen?'
"But that platypus had been bunkering down in the permanent pools that our previous work had created. It confirmed that what we were doing was so important for the river," Mr Bachmann said.
"It was an indicator that by allowing the place to flood, we'd enabled everything to go 'boom' and start spreading out looking for food and habitat, or a place to breed.
"That was pretty exciting. Little did we know then that a couple of years later we'd have bought the plantation and fixed the whole wetland system."
Turning back the clock
When the Nature Glenelg Trust ecologists first laid foot on this piece of land, known as Walker Swamp, it was in a highly altered, depleted state.
For two centuries, water had been diverted and drained.
In the 1950s the land was drained for grazing. Then in the 1970s, more water was diverted from the entire catchment to the Wimmera-Mallee headworks system.
Finally in the early 2000s, much of the land was converted to blue gum plantation.
"Now we're trying to turn back the clock, essentially," Mr Bachmann said.
They started with trials — building temporary structures that would allow the neighbouring grazing land to flood.
By 2014, two swamps had been fully restored.
"The birds all came back, the frogs all came back, threatened fish turned up," Mr Bachmann said.
"That was when the juices in my brain really started flowing."
Now, it was just the looming stands of the plantation that stood in the way.
"We knew that the plantation out there would eventually be harvested and the property sold. We wanted to be the ones to buy it," Mr Bachmann said.
Ecologist Lachlan Farrington remembers when he first saw the site.
"It was in a pretty sad state really," he said.
"You could tell it was a wetland but half of Walker Swamp had been planted with blue gums and it looked like it was really suffering.
"What was here was pretty sparse and all the same," he said.
Mr Bachmann explains why the state of the place wasn't thoroughly discouraging for their team.
"When you see the landscape the way we do, as ecologists, you see it through a different lens," he said.
"It was a dry dust bowl effectively, but you could still see that it was a wetland, and it could be a wetland again."
In 2014, this plucky NGO did things the country way; the team knocked on the door of the plantation managers to have a chinwag.
Mr Bachmann was astonished at how well those early negotiations took off.
"Astonishingly, the plantation managers themselves actually suggested that we could run a trial to hold a little bit of water in Walker Swamp. That blew me away," he said.
"So on a day in August the locals got together and helped us build a temporary weir."
Loading...It took three or four years of talking to groups and landowners, philanthropists and funding bodies before the stars aligned to finance the purchase of the plantation.
The pivotal moment came just after Mark spotted the platypus. A new pool of state funding became available just as the plantation land was changing hands.
"By 2018, we owned 1,000 acres out at Walker Swamp," Mr Bachmann said.
A significant place
The newly restored wetlands are within a natural floodplain of the Wannon River, and lie at the foot of the striking Serra Ranges in the Grampians (Gariwerd) National Park.
When viewing Walker Swamp from the new bird observatory, the full length of the jagged escarpments of the Grampians can be seen stretching for miles, edging the wetlands in an ornamental frame.
The Wannon River rises in the Grampians, a national heritage site, then fans out on the flat plains below into multiple swamps.
In the mind of an ecologist like Mr Bachmann, this floodplain is one essential piece in a hugely important network of mountains, rivers, floodplains and estuaries.
Further downstream, the refreshed, filtered water runs to Glenelg River, one of Victoria's most important waterways.
The lower stretch of the Glenelg flows through a spectacular limestone gorge, protected inside the Lower Glenelg National Park.
As it tips into the ocean, another wetland forms, the Ramsar-protected Glenelg Estuary.
"That estuary is recognised as an internationally significant wetland," Mr Bachmann said.
"By itself, the restoration of our Walker Swamp wetland is a big deal, but when you look at where it is on a map, you see this is a really important catchment.
"So it is a really big deal."
Monoculture transformed into flourishing breeding ground
Mr Bachmann said like all plantations, a blue gum plantation was a very simplified ecosystem, a monoculture.
"They're not a biodiversity desert; common birds would still be using that environment for instance, but it doesn't have the complexity of native bushland, let alone a wetland," he said.
After felling the rows of pin-straight blue gums, one of the first revelations for the Nature Glenelg Trust team was discovering that the landscape was strewn with huge, old river red gums: the giants of Victorian forests and the bushwalker's beacon for billabongs and rivers.
"All of a sudden we could see the red-gum-studded landscape," Mr Bachmann said.
"Then when we put the water back into the landscape, the place transformed. There was a reversal of states.
"When the soil is inundated for long enough, it completely alters the soil characteristics from aerobic to anaerobic [with oxygen to without oxygen], so all of a sudden the pastoral grasses make way for the native wetland plants to come back in.
"The beautiful nature of Victorian wetland plants is that they can lie dormant for long periods of time because of the intermittent nature of billabongs and wetlands. They have to be somewhat drought resistant.
"So when it fills up, all of a sudden this biodiversity response starts to happen like magic," Mr Bachmann said.
"It's fantastic. You can't believe your eyes, it's a landscape completely transformed.
"And the animals? They don't even need to wait to be invited. They just find their way back there."
Watching the animals come home to roost
A reason that many species become extinct or endangered is that we destroy their habitat. They lose their place to live, eat, drink, and reproduce.
Wetlands are no exception, even though they are mass breeding grounds for all sorts of animals.
A 2020 study authored by the Royal Swedish Academy of Scientists estimated that globally, 85 per cent of wetlands have been lost due to agriculture and human population expansion.
It was published as a warning to humanity.
The scientists surmised that "global civilization is reaching important boundaries of what the Earth's biosphere can support" and that "effective management of freshwater resources and ecosystems must be ranked amongst humanity's highest priorities".
But reversing the process is still possible, which is exactly what Nature Glenelg Trust ecologists have been doing here in Australia.
The Nature Glenelg Trust team even collected a pair of copulating "growlers" — growling grass frogs — while sampling with dip nets in December.
"I've never heard a chorus as loud as what was playing in the southern portion of the Walker Swamp Restoration Reserve," Mr Farrington said.
The scientists were elated by the find, because growling grass frogs won't breed just anywhere.
In order to breed, the frogs require a body of water that is inundated throughout the summer months while the tadpoles develop.
In August, the males of the species begin their noisy call to attract a female, however, she won't lay her thousands of eggs until October or November.
"To see the change, the ways these things bounce back is pretty incredible," Mr Farrington said.
"There's just so much life here, so all sorts of things are going to come in here to feed, but it's when they come in here to breed that you really start to see a change. That's a fairly unique thing to see.
"It's also another place of refuge for all the animals in the Grampians National Park, the fact that there's going to be water here throughout the driest times of the year means it will be a critical drought refuge for such a big habitat area as the Grampians."
Many of the species returning to the wetland are endangered or threatened, and endemic to the area, like the western swamp crayfish.
The tiny, 35-millimetre-long freshwater cray is dependent on wetland vegetation to deposit its eggs.
"What we've done here through the restoration is increased the period of inundation, that's really key to supporting the recovery of a lot of these species, particularly ones that are threatened," fish biologist Lauren Brown said.
"So many species, the growling grass frogs as well, rely on water hanging around in the landscape in order to complete their life cycle and reproduce."
With the aquatic bugs and little native fish, come the birds.
"We did have a pair of brolgas nest here last year," Mr Farrington said.
"That's important because there are just 600 individual brolgas remaining in Victoria."
In a global context, this community, grass-roots effort is a glimmer of hope flying in the face of world-wide depletion.
Mark Bachmann has more than a glimmer of hope for Walker Swamp.
"It's proof, or a demonstration; a place we can to use to educate, share and inspire others."