Weeping Myall is a wattle that grows into a small grey tree with drooping branches, and the open woodland it forms across the western plains of New South Wales and Queensland is one of the most reduced ecosystems in the country, cleared over a century for wheat and sheep until only scattered remnants were left along roadsides and fence lines. Near Coonamble, about 500 kilometres north west of Sydney, a farming company is now putting it back on a scale that is rare for private land. Registered this month, the Nortongong Biodiversity Restoration Project, under the Australian Government's Nature Repair Market, will replant 968 hectares of cleared paddock with native vegetation chosen to bring the Weeping Myall open woodland back, the whole community of plants and not just the one tree. Wilga Farming is the landholder and proponent, with Verdant Partners acting as the project's agent, and it is only the third project registered under the scheme since it opened.

Read the full story: Third project registered under Nature Repair Market, Australian Government via Mirage News.

What makes this one worth watching is what happens after the planting. Once the trees are established, the landholder plans to bring grazing back under them, which is how myall country worked for a long time before it was cleared: stock in the shade, grass between the trunks, birds in the canopy. It will also earn carbon credits under the ACCU scheme through its reforestation plantings, which is the income that makes the sums work for a working farm; we note it here plainly, as the funding behind the trees. Australia's Nature Repair Market itself is new, a voluntary national scheme in which landholders who improve habitat on their land earn biodiversity certificates that others can buy, and with Nortongong and two earlier projects more than 2,600 hectares across Australia are now being restored under it. For the plains around Coonamble that means a paddock the size of a small town going from bare to woodland over the next few years, and a farm that will still be a farm when the shade comes back.

A slow river between sandy banks and gum trees
The Castlereagh River at Coonamble. Photo: Mattinbgn, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Our short take: from the Australian Government's Nature Repair Market announcement of 2 October 2026, carried by Mirage News, with the Weeping Myall woodland background from the NSW threatened ecological community listing and the scheme total from National Tribune's report of the same month.