Cassie Price – the Tuckean Swamp restoration project

Cassie Price has over 20 years experience in aquatic habitat restoration projects and is preparing to take on one of her biggest yet projects yet in her role as the Director of Habitat programs for OzFish.

The Tuckean Swamp – an enormous wetland area that drained much of the Big Scrub rainforest on the Alstonville plateau – underwent drastic hyrdrological changes as a result of colonialism in the Northern Rivers. Massive drains were constructed to accommodate ever-increasing demand for agriculture on the Richmond River floodplain and now the Tuckean suffers from catastrophic ecological issues derived from acid sulfate soils and repeated blackwater events.

That’s where Cassie and OzFish come in – with their new project to start regenerating the Tuckean Swamp. Read on to hear more about the project, Cassie’s path to aquatic restoration and her favourite Northern Rivers species.

When we sent our questions to Cassie, we replaced the word ‘swamp’ with ‘wetland’ due to our belief that swamp had negative connotations. Cassie retaliated, arguing that we should normalise the word ‘swamp’ and recognise the integral role they play in our wider environment. She makes a good point!

Hi Cassie! Thanks for taking the time out for a chat. To start, we were wondering how you ended up working for OzFish?

While I am sure this isnt a life story question I cant really tell it without starting with my childhood. I grew up farming in South Australia’s mallee, there was literally no surface water anywhere on or near our 4500 acre grazing and cropping property. So I craved our holidays to the coast, quick ones to the Coorong Beach or Goolwa and our 3-weeks after harvest ones to the Yorke or Eyre Peninsulas – in western SA. It was a very long drive from the farm to go fishing! I learned to fish for whiting, squid and snapper in SA’s gulfs. So grew up with a strong passion for sustainable agriculture, mallee heath and its secrets, and the ocean.

Moving from the farm to the coast in Ballina when I was 16 meant I deepened my experiences and knowledge of the ocean and fishing. With those passions in mind, considering my career direction late in high school, I felt aquaculture was a natural fit. I enrolled at Southern Cross Uni in Applied Science with a Fisheries and Aquaculture major.

A journey unfolded over the next 5 years that would take a somewhat unexpected turn. As I learned about sustainable fisheries management and aquaculture during my 3 years and SCU, what I discovered was.. it was not at all sustainable, really no matter what we tried and aquaculture definitely was not the answer. My determination for a healthy and thriving wild caught fishery was born, more fish for everyone, naturally from the ocean was the answer – but how?

Starting out my early career work through an internship initially and then as a Project Officer under Craig Copeland at NSW Fisheries, Craig introduced me to the biggest barrier to a naturally thriving fishery.. lack of habitat! It made so much sense to me then, that I’ve built my whole 20+ year career on it.

I must admit to not enjoying my almost 12 months in the confines of State Government, with ants in my pants to get things done, I took my second career job with WetlandCare Australia. Working in community driven wetland (fish habitat) restoration felt like home! I spent the first 15 years of my career in various roles with WCA and some epic career highlights like being the Secretariat for the Australian Wetland Network and representing our Aussie NGOs at Ramsar COP in Korea in 2008. As well as playing a vital role in establishing WCA across NSW and Qld.

With changing funding landscapes, WCA rolled up in 2016 and I landed a role as Operations Manager for Landcare NSW and built up some fantastic experience in a peak NGO. At that time, OzFish was a fledgling organisation, of which I was right behind and I was a founding member – but at that stage I had no inkling that I would one day be a big part of OzFish as the thriving organisation it is today.

So I was more than excited when Craig let me know he was employing in the Director of Habitat Programs role, at that stage OzFish was running about 4 projects and had even less staff. I guess that was a risk, but I had more than a feeling that this could be just the perfect job for me – fish, fishing and community driven restoration all in one place!! I have now been in that role EXACTLY 5 years!

You’re the Director of Habitat Programs for OzFish – what does an ordinary day at work look like to you?

Oh gosh. An ‘ordinary day’. Well firstly, there is no ordinary work at OzFish! We are doing our best to break the mould on conservation and the rec fishing sector in every direction! But there are some boring bits, as there is to any job I guess  - those would be budgets, project management, funding bids, and permits and approvals. But I take great pleasure in developing project opportunities for OzFish and capturing the ones that come our way. I do a lot of team management, but we have a brilliant team and they are crazy passionate, so are mostly a joy to work with!

Working as part of an NGO you really do get involved in every part of the operation, so it is hugely varied work – I could be sampling fish, making videos, podcasting with fishing celebs, presenting at conferences, planting trees, and heaps of meetings – you know what I mean right!! And representing OzFish in both NRM and recreational fishing circles.

What do you love about the Tuckean Swamp?

There isnt a lot to love about the Tuckean Swamp right now I must admit. But I do love its history, it makes me whimsical and long for the past. The imagery of the written descriptions will blow your mind, talk of skies black with the flocking waterbirds, shoals of tiny silver fish and even spawing runs of stingray right up in the swamp. The traditional meeting places, celebrations and ceremony and the coming together and feasting of many thousands of people from the Bundjalung nation and beyond. Its magical to imagine, and not to hard to do – if you squint a little at the heavily drained, acid impacted, mostly mono-culture that exists there today.

After 20 years of working in wetlands, I am hell bent on normalising the word swamp. We shouldn’t need to change the word to convince people of a swamp’s value. My mission has always been to make swamps valuable and recognised as such.

What do you see as some of the biggest issues currently facing the Tuckean Swamp ecosystem?

The biggest issue for the Tuckean is that we’ve altered its natural hydrology. It’s a critical swamp for the effective function of the whole lower part of the Richmond River and we’ve messed with it. It should be a natural ecotone, a transition area between salt and fresh. But the drainage is major and it has altered both in and outflows, it has sped up the water movement, when swamps should go slow. And it has exposed the acid sulfate layers that sit under all of our best coastal floodplain swamp ecosystems, making the soil and water highly acidic. Down to 2.4 in places, just like lemon juice. The worst pH reading in a natural swamp in Australia and thought to be anywhere in the world.

A friend of ours, Col Peak, was involved in water quality monitoring around the Tuckean for over 20 years. He once told us: “if you fix the Tuckean you go a long way to fixing the Richmond River system.” Do you agree?

I absolutely agree. The Tuckean is a natural transition zone between salt and fresh, it holds the limit of the tidal salt up into that stretch of the river. For the lower part of the river and the estuary in particular the Tuckean would have slowed and filtered the water from seven major creek catchments that extended from Lismore and Alstonville all across the plateau and beyond. It also captured and filtered the tidal waters being pushed back into it by the River itself. It was once an ‘engineroom’ for fisheries production, we know now that the most productive landscapes for fish production are coastal wetlands – juvenile fish, crabs and prawns thrive on the massive source of food, nutrient and shelter they provide, there is nothing else like them for ‘making fish’.

Fixing the Tuckean would make a significant difference to the lower 1/3rd of the river. To take that a little further, I think the ‘mid Richmond’ catchment is in need of restored floodplain wetlands and also filtering powers of a riparian zone – of which it is mostly cleared. Again to slow and filter the water.

Cassie’s invested in keeping Tuckean ‘engine room’ going.

What are the main objectives in restoration of the Tuckean?

We want to achieve mimicking a natural hydrological regime, as much as possible within the significant modifications to the landscape. It’s a balancing act now that is centred around using the drainage controls that we have to protect the productive parts of the landscape, but to also mimic the natural system to restore as much of the natural function of the swamp as possible. I like to call it managing forward, or reimagining the Tuckean – because I don’t believe we can or should aim to go back to say ‘pre-settlement’ times, too much has changed – by human hand and in the environment itself. But we can make it the best it can be, and we certainly are not achieving that now. Ultimately we would like the Tuckean to hydrologically function so well that the water quality leaving the swamp has minimal impact on the main river, and that it may even act as a haven for fish, birds and all wildlife again.

 Do you think we have an obligation to repair and restore what ecosystems that have been damaged by colonial expansion in Australia?

I wouldn’t put it that way. I think there was a lot we didn’t know about farming in Australia all of those years ago. We’ve had a lot to learn about our landscape. And now that we have that knowledge, we have an obligation to put it into practice. We know what to do now, we know how to work with our landscape and we are obliged to change our practice with that knowledge at hand.

 What’s important about OzFish?

A key thing to know about OzFish is that we believe that fish habitat restoration is in big trouble, it needs to be done at scale. And the only way to achieve that is by having a huge amount of the community on board and being active to fix it, we strive to achieve that every single day. Our fishers are contributing more than 30 000 hours of their time to restoring Australia’s waterways and we believe this is the only way we will achieve real and lasting change.

And we couldn’t finish up without asking you what your favourite Northern Rivers species is….

What a great question! I have a lot. Can I say the rare Eastern Freshwater Cod. I don’t believe there is any of the wild population left in the Northern Rivers, but there are still some pockets of past stocked fish. It would be a dream to see a healthy river that supports a fish food chain right up to the apex EFC. They are such a beautiful fish, with their green and golden snake skin patterning, who couldn’t fall in love with them!