Odonata Academy – helping us look to the future

Exploring new opportunities for Forest Farm, we enrolled in the Odonata Academy course.

Endangered southern brush-tailed rock-wallabies thriving at Mt Rothwell, a fenced Odonata Sanctuary

Odonata Academy is the education branch of Odonata Foundation, and in August 2025 I began the Saving Species: for Landholders and Farmers course.

At Forest Farm, we’re doing lots of work with restoring and creating natural habitats, and we think that the next stage is to improve fauna biodiversity on the property. We are especially interested to see what else we can do to aid threatened species of our region. The koalas are here, echidnas love the ants, and wallabies bound around joyfully. But what about potoroos, pademelons, yellow-bellied gliders, greater gliders, quolls, and powerful owls, who all once frequented this land? I have a particular dream of seeing quolls return to the land here at Forest Farm.

And serendipitously, along came the opportunity to join the Odonata Academy.

What an absolutely outstanding experience Odonata has been so far. It is far beyond my expectations of what might emerge through participating in the course. Odonata is more than just a course – it is an immersion in conservation work and conservation community building.

We have now passed half-way through the course, and completed our first retreat at the amazing Odonata Mt Rothwell Sanctuary.

Some of the things I’ve learned

• I’ve learned just how valuable eco-engineers are. Previously, we just thought of bandicoots as cute. They are now a source of wonder and research, and the desire to have many more living at Forest Farm. As well as the rakali, bettongs and phascogales, who should be in abundance in this landscape. Perhaps ignorantly (at least for me) taken for granted, these little Aussie animals are critical to a healthy environment and our forests.

• How valuable Fencing is for providing respite from invasive predators such as foxes. Forest Farm is far from a nice rectangle. It is shaped more like a hand with crooked fingers. So predator-proof fencing remains a challenge for us. However, it is wonderful to find likeminded landholders who want to implement fencing to dispense with these unfortunate animals without the use of poisons, as challenging as that is.

• The importance of starting with an action plan. At Forest Farm we’ve learned from our own experiences, and Ben’s skills (our family’s restoration and regeneration expert). If we were to start over again, we’d join the Odonata Academy on day 1 of our conservation journey! We’d be measuring and monitoring before we started anything else. Whilst we’ve learned the importance and value of monitoring ourselves, and have no regrets for the path of our journey, having those measures from the start would be so rewarding for someone starting out.

• Through participation in the Odonata Academy, we’re seeing community building in practice. We are keen to continue to participate in this form of community connection, where everyone supports one another and wants and needs each other to succeed. We see this an important model for the future of humanity’s survival on the planet.  

I am most grateful that Odonata honestly and openly shares the hows, whys, and pitfalls of the conservation journey.

First Retreat

We’ve now been to the first retreat at Odonata’s Mt Rothwell Sanctuary, with a side-visit to Tiverton, another Odonata sanctuary.

As a preliminary experience we visited Tiverton, a case study in how caring for the natural environment improves productivity on a working sheep farm. Tiverton was a lesson in weeds and feral animal management, restoring habitat, knowing your soil and topography, and learning and monitoring via cameras. We had wonderful conversations and Damien and Tim, both happy to impart their knowledge and wisdom on all topics sanctuary and conservation management.

Once at Mt Rothwell, Sam, Sheryl and Dale of the Odonata team, took us on walks and experiences to see the great successes at Mt Rothwell:

• the predator-exclusion fencing;

• removal of feral pests;

• an abundance of endangered rock wallabies;

• the bush-stone curlews;

• we saw and learned about the dingoes;

• night spotlighting, which revealed eastern quolls running freely in the safety of the fence, along with heaps of bandicoots and bettongs.

A key teaching from the course has been that once you fence off land from the bigger invasive predators – such as foxes and cats – you then have to deal with a possible explosion of other invasives; rabbits in the case of Mt Rothwell. What a special experience watching Sheryl (and Max) operating with conservation dogs Roo and Digby. 

Sheryl and conservation dogs Roo and Digby digging for rabbits

We experienced a program in action - trapping the night animals to remove them from one of the internal paddocks within the sanctuary fence in preparation to deal with the pest rabbits. It was fun to see the little bandicoots up close, as well as a mother and bub possum when they were safely removed from one paddock to the one beside.

Some of us even participated in a dawn chorus wander bright and early on day 2, listening to the birds sing their special morning songs.

Sunrise on the dawn chorus walk

After two days at Odonata, we almost felt like part of the furniture.

The Odonata staff are some of the most magnificent humans I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. Turns out, Kate, who brilliantly runs the course, is also a chef extraordinaire, so all our meals were outstanding. And personally, on a vegan diet, I’ve never been catered for better at an event!!

How wonderful to meet up with kindred spirits, facing similar struggles managing their land for conservation. It is an absolute pleasure to be part of a cohort of such caring and passionate landholders.

The staff at Odonata are dedicated, passionate, caring, wise and so open and honest. They stand proud of the work they are doing for our most vulnerable species and their sanctuary work is most highly commendable.

The two days of the retreat were full to the brim with awesome experiences and knowledge sharing. There’s no better way to learn than through experiences and seeing how things work on the ground. Brian and I are very grateful for the opportunity to see what Odonata is doing and witnessing the commitment of the Odonata team.

We were also fortunate to have the opportunity to meet Nigel Sharp and hear his and the Odonata story. Personally, we are most grateful that Nigel accepted an invitation to visit Forest Farm, which amazingly was able to occur a couple of weeks after the retreat. We hope to see Nigel at Forest Farm again - likewise anyone else from the Odonata team.

Odonata: A great find for Forest Farm

From Forest Farm’s perspective, Odonata has been a most instructive learning experience, and we feel that we’ve been welcomed into a community where we feel we belong and are valued for the work we do. A community that understands the sacrifices, the hard work, the things worth celebrating and are on a similar path, where we are moving to do the best we can for the land we are lucky enough to be custodians of.

I’m loving being a part of Odonata Academy.

Look out for an update at the end of the course.