Wirey Swamp sits in the Strathdownie district, a 25 minute drive west of Casterton and just short of the South Australian border, in brolga country. For decades a drain had carried its water away so cattle could graze, and the peat soil that should stay wet all year dried out every summer. In 2025 Nature Glenelg Trust, a small not for profit that restores wetlands across the region, asked its supporters to help buy the first 180 acre parcel. More than 120 people gave $300,000, two timber companies, Australian Bluegum Plantations and OneFortyOne, matched it dollar for dollar, and the reserve settled in June last year. Then Mark Bachmann, the trust's founder and managing director, went back to the well. In January he announced Stage Two, a further two wetlands and a stretch of remnant woodland a few hundred metres to the south that would roughly double the reserve, bought with an $800,000 impact loan from Bank Australia that the trust would pay down month by month as donations came in. Two supporters, Adrian Heard and Meredith Reardon, gave the proceeds of a block of land they sold, $200,000, and the forestry companies New Forests and Timberlands Pacific matched it. On 30 June the loan balance reached zero. Over two years, more than 200 donors had bought a swamp, twice. In Bachmann's words, the impact loan was the ingredient that made the whole arrangement feasible, and the reserve will now be restored, conserved and protected in perpetuity.
What the money is buying is water. Ayesha Burdett, the trust's senior wetland ecologist, is leading four years of restoration funded by the Ian Potter Foundation: the cattle are off, weed plans are under way, and the trust is working with its neighbours and the local drainage board to keep the wetland wet for longer each year without flooding the farms around it. Brolgas, growling grass frogs, Australasian bitterns and a tiny native fish called the little galaxias all use the place. And last November, walking the site, Jonathan Tuck and Ayesha Burdett found 30 to 50 plants of the swamp everlasting, a golden paper daisy listed as critically endangered in Victoria and, since February, the floral emblem of the City of Melbourne, growing where nobody knew it was. Tim Von Ess, who runs impact lending at Bank Australia, said providing flexible finance for the purchase is one of the things his team is there for. In plain terms, a bank lent the money, a couple of hundred ordinary people paid it back, and a wetland in the far west of Victoria gets its water back in return.
Sources and links
Our short take: from Nature Glenelg Trust's own account by Mark Bachmann (29 July 2026) and its earlier updates on Wirey Swamp, with the loan detail from Bank Australia's story by Taryn Stenvei.
