Waterline is an ongoing series that explores the solutions making rivers, waterways and ocean food chains healthier. It is funded by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation.

“Did you see the pelicans on your way in?” asks Jacob Cassady, pointing to the dirt road that winds along Palm Creek, the lush waterway which feeds into the restored Mungalla wetlands that have been his life’s work. “They came three months ago. Before that, there was hardly any water flowing through that part of the creek. It was just back-to-back invasive species. There were no fish, no birds, nothing. It was a dead system.” 

With his long grey beard and signature navy button-down shirt, topped with a battered Akubra hat, Cassady cuts a recognizable figure in the community of Ingham, a small farming town in north Queensland, Australia.

Not only is he the face of Mungalla, a cattle station turned Indigenous nature retreat located about seven miles from town, but he’s a senior member of the Nywaigi people, whose ancestral lands run through the 880-hectare property (nearly 3.5 square miles). And he plays a key role in helping his community reconnect with their land and their culture.

Cassady has been a catalyst for change for Mungalla for decades. He facilitated the reacquisition of Mungalla by the Nywaigi in 1999, and since then, he has spearheaded the revitalization of its nearly-dead wetlands and weed-infested creek, an effort that has put the property on the tourist trail while also creating training and work opportunities for Indigenous youth. Several currently work on the property, while several hundred have done short-term live-in stays over the years to learn land management skills.

Progress has been slow but sure. “We want to be able to clean out all these waterways so all the birds will come back,” Cassady says. “We used to have black swans down there. It was just an amazing place for bird life, but it was destroyed by bad farming practices.”

Those practices include the introduction of an invasive species, hymenachne, a plant native to Central and South America, as cattle grazing fodder. It quickly became overgrown, depleting the water’s oxygen supply and making it unlivable for fish and birds. 

Moreover, a bund wall was built as a barrier to stop saltwater from the nearby Coral Sea, off Australia’s northeastern coast, from entering the wetlands and adjacent creek, with the goal of maintaining a freshwater source for the grazing cattle. But it only interfered with the natural tidal flow, damaging the wetlands and creek.

Both short-sighted decisions were made by the European settlers who took on Mungalla after Irishman James Cassady — from whom Jacob is a direct descendant — owned and ran the property in the late 1800s, causing nothing short of an environmental disaster.

This stagnant, choked state of the 230-hectare Mungalla wetlands and creek is how Cassady and the Nywaigi people found them. Now, after years of work — involving numerous government grants, guidance and support from environmental bodies like the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and nonprofits like Greening Australia — the birds are back.

A census in 2020 recorded 229 species, including white-bellied sea eagles, magpie geese, black-necked storks, royal spoonbills, forest kingfishers, comb-crested jacanas, crimson finches, rainbow bee-eaters and plumed whistling ducks — more bird life than Australia’s famous Kakadu National Park, Cassady boasts. 

And with the birds have come the bird watchers, from the cruise ship guests who come for a day trip while docked at the city of Townsville, about an hour and half drive away, to the school and university field trippers and those looking for a campsite off the beaten track. Over the past 15 years, Mungalla has been offering tours, talks and traditional kup murri lunches (a feast of meat and vegetables cooked in a fire under the ground). It has even become a venue for music festivals.

The journey has not been easy. Removing the bund wall and the noxious weeds has involved multiple machine excavations over several years, but the perseverance has been worth it. The return of the birds is just one result — the wetlands are now home to at least nine species of fish and now serve as nursery grounds for the barramundi and mangrove jack species, as CSIRO has documented.

The now-functioning wetlands are also helping preserve Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef, where water from the Mungalla wetlands flows to and from. Cassady and his team call the wetlands the “kidneys” of the reef, as they help filter out fertilizer chemicals and silt from the area’s sugarcane farming industry, preventing them from ending up in the ocean around the reef. And as the new weed-free wetlands are now a welcoming habitat for native lilies and grasses, they are able to absorb more carbon from the atmosphere — an achievement Cassady is hoping will create carbon credit opportunities for Mungalla as a business.

Cassady now has a vision to elevate Mungalla’s status as a commercial tourist attraction, with profits injected back into providing training and jobs for the local Indigenous community. The unemployment rate for Indigenous Australians aged 15 to 64 is around 12 percent, compared with the national average of around four percent. The government is hoping to close this gap, with a target to increase the number of Indigenous Australians in employment by around 16 percent by 2031.

At Mungalla, Cassady plans to improve the quality of the accommodation on offer — which is currently just self-catered cabins and camping — and the hospitality too, by establishing an on-site cafe. He is also in talks with a Native Australian food company to plant a native foods orchard and sell products like jams. 

The restored wetlands, of course, will be the centerpiece. Currently only accessible by a four-wheel-drive vehicle, the plan is to create a walking trail and run regular guided walks — potentially replacing the handmade crocodile warning signs — as part of a premium camping package. 

“It’s an opportunity to showcase our beautiful region, for people to learn about our culture, and so our kids don’t have to go away and look for jobs somewhere else,” says Cassady.

“A lot of our kids are just so far behind the eight ball, with literacy, with numeracy, with job skills, with confidence. Some of them come across as completely unemployable. We can turn that around and move people in the right direction. The kids aren’t going to learn numeracy and literacy unless they see the value in it.”

The vision, he explains, is to set Mungalla up as a “center of excellence in Indigenous training,” so young Indigenous people — not just Nywaigi but from any First Nation — can learn skills related to tourism, customer service and land management, helping them get jobs back in their communities.

That off-site experience is crucial, Cassady adds, to extract someone from the distractions and challenges of home and allow them to apply their new skills in ways that have a real-world impact. 

Cassady gives the example of building crocodile traps at Mungalla, which requires measuring the materials for the right dimensions, using steel cutters to cut the parts, then using a welder to seal them all together. They learn other practical skills, too, like how to repair fences, fix engines and tie knots. They can also learn animal care through working with the horses on the property. And as more tourists come, hospitality training will play a big part as well.

“We’ve had guests here before that we’ve asked the youth that we’re training to help, and they just freeze with fear, so we need to give them the confidence to deal with customers,” says Cassady.

“Some of the kids have never engaged with non-Indigenous people, they’ve been sheltered in their communities. Then they get out in the big wide world as a young adult, and it’s hopeless. Some employers have an understanding of the backgrounds these kids come from and have a lot of empathy. Some have no empathy at all and they’re expected to turn up and do the work, without understanding what barriers they might have.”

Change is already happening. The Mungalla Silver Lining School was set up five years ago in partnership with the Silver Lining Foundation Australia, a charity whose aim is to educate Indigenous youth who are not coping in the mainstream school system. While the main campus is at Crystal Creek, about an hour away from the Mungalla property, time spent contributing to the restoration and land management activities is part of the curriculum. There’s also a Junior Rangers program, which passes on tribal knowledge about native plants, animals and the land they come from. Fifty Indigenous young people have now graduated from the school.

“See this kid here?” says Cassady, pointing to a young Indigenous man on the cover of last year’s Silver Lining School report. “He graduated last year. He was one of the worst car thieves in Townsville. Now he wants to just be a Land and Sea Ranger. It just goes to show how the right support can change someone’s life.”

Cassady is also looking to start a Nywaigi language program, following on from the work of his great-great grandfather James Cassady in documenting it. When James Cassady bought Mungalla in 1882, he welcomed the 200 remaining Nywaigi — of a previous population of 500 before European settlers came — back to Mungalla. He allowed them to set up camps and burial grounds, while also turning Mungalla into the most famous cattle- and horse-breeding station in the region. 

James Cassady was one of the few white people at the time to speak out against the treatment of Indigenous people. At that time, Indigenous Australians were regularly hunted down, shot and forcibly removed from their native lands by European colonialists, in the interest of developing the then-new Australian society and economy. Jacob Cassady believes his ancestor’s attitude came from the oppression he had experienced in Ireland under English rule, and a recognition that the new society was “being built on bloodshed.”

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“There’s a real demand from our young people to know their language. It’s all about reintroducing cultural value back here,” says Cassady. “I just want to make a better quality of life for our kids, and break that cycle of welfare mentality, because when you’ve had that for the last three or four generations, you grow up believing there’s no other way. How do you get kids like that and then show them a different vision?”

Integrating them into Mungalla’s story and future is one way to do that, Cassady believes, by showing them how a seemingly thankless task like digging out earth and weeds from blocked wetlands can lead to beautiful new beginnings. He references the “Welcome Home” sign that hangs by the entrance to the Mungalla homestead. “We want the kids to feel they are coming home when they come here,” Cassady says. “That they’re on their homeland, with family.”