Australian couple bought a cattle farm and planted 34,000 trees. Years later, koalas and wildlife are returning

In 2020, an Australian couple bought a run-down cattle property and decided to do something with it that most farmers wouldn't: give it back to the forest.

Brett and Lisa Vercoe picked up a 30-hectare block called Narlu, tucked inland from Coffs Harbour in New South Wales, on land that belongs to Gumbaynggirr Country. Like most cattle farms in the region, Narlu had been cleared decades ago, its native cover stripped away for grazing. But long before the cattle arrived, this stretch of land held something far rarer, Lowland Subtropical Rainforest, an endangered ecological community, along with patches of wet and dry sclerophyll forest. The Vercoes weren't interested in running the property the conventional way. They wanted to bring back what had been cleared.

Five years on, that decision has turned into one of the more remarkable private restoration efforts on Australia's east coast.

34,000 Trees And Counting

The numbers alone are striking. With support from North Coast Local Land Services, the couple has restored close to 17.5 hectares of forest so far, planting more than 34,000 trees in the process. Some of these saplings weren't bought off a nursery shelf — Brett and Lisa grew a number of them themselves before putting them in the ground.

The species aren't random either. Each one has been chosen to match the specific forest community it's meant to rebuild, so the land eventually resembles what it looked like before it was ever a farm. The project falls under the Australian Government's Saving Koalas Fund, part of a larger push involving private landholders across the NSW North Coast to stitch fragmented koala habitat back together. That's really the point of it all, not just growing trees for the sake of it, but rebuilding corridors wildlife can actually move through.

Fire As A Tool, Not A Threat

Here's where the story gets a little more interesting than the standard tree-planting narrative. Alongside the planting, the Vercoes brought in the Yurruungga Aboriginal Corporation and First Nations practitioners to carry out cultural burning on the property.

It sounds counterintuitive, deliberately setting fire to land you're trying to restore. But a controlled, low-intensity burn does something a bulldozer or a herbicide can't: it knocks back introduced pasture grasses that choke out native seedlings, while leaving the soil and surrounding vegetation largely undisturbed. Unlike the high-intensity blazes that devastate landscapes, this kind of burn is deliberately gentle, drawing on generations of Aboriginal land management knowledge rather than modern machinery. It's one of the clearer examples of how restoration work today is starting to lean on Indigenous ecological practice instead of working around it.

The Wildlife Is Already Coming Back

Perhaps the most convincing sign that the project is working isn't the tree count — it's who's showing up. Government records for the site list sightings of platypuses, turtles, several bird species, and two genuinely threatened animals: the giant barred frog and the eastern freshwater cod.

That last part matters more than it might seem. Threatened species don't return to just any patch of green. Their presence suggests the restoration is doing more than adding vegetation, it's rebuilding food sources, shelter, and the kind of connected habitat that wildlife actually needs to survive, not just pass through.

None of this has been easy. The Coffs Harbour region has thrown extreme heat and repeated flooding at the young plantings, both serious threats to saplings still finding their roots. Restoring a forest, it turns out, isn't a one-time job of digging holes and walking away. It demands ongoing care, monitoring, and a fair bit of patience.

A Forest They'll Never See Finished

Maybe the most striking part of this story is the timescale involved. Brett has said plainly that even his grandchildren might not live to see the project reach its full potential, some of the trees being planted today could stand for hundreds of years.

That's not a small thing to accept. Most of us plant with an eye on results we can watch unfold. The Vercoes are working toward something they'll only ever see the beginning of.

Narlu is one property among many taking part in a wider restoration push along the NSW North Coast, where government programmes are backing private landowners willing to do exactly this kind of long, unglamorous work. It won't make headlines the way a wildfire or a flood does. But quietly, tree by tree, a piece of what this land used to be is coming back.