Winter 2026's Green Pages in Wild Magazine rounds up four conservation fights across Australia, and a few of them sit uncomfortably close to spots on many travellers' bucket lists.

The most startling is Tasmania's Wentworth Hills, in the Waykaywirinu/Central Highlands less than 50km from Lake St Clair, the southern end of the famous Overland Track. The Bob Brown Foundation says some of the oldest forests currently being logged in Australia are being flattened there — trees so large that log trucks can only carry one or two at a time — with centuries-old eucalypts exported as woodchips and ancient ferns sold as garden mulch. The area holds what's likely the largest population of pencil pine outside the formal reserve system, plus sphagnum bogs, King Billy pine, and threatened wildlife from Tasmanian devils and swift parrots to wedge-tailed eagles. Much of it happens out of sight: Forestry Tasmania controls access via a 20km horseshoe ring road and locked gates, so bushwalkers driving out from Lake St Clair pass the destruction without being able to stop and see it. The foundation is running a direct-action campaign calling for machinery to be removed.

In NSW, the Cox's River below Centennial Coal's Springvale mine near Lithgow is the problem — it feeds the headwaters of Sydney's drinking water catchment. After a complaint from the Lithgow Environment Group, the EPA issued a clean-up notice in January, but salinity remains high months later; pollution is bad enough in places that platypuses can no longer survive there. Centennial wants to expand, which would mean dumping the equivalent of ten Olympic pools of wastewater into the catchment daily. The Nature Conservation Council, part of the Gardens of Stone Alliance, is pushing the NSW Government for stronger catchment protections.

Up in the Kimberley, the Martuwarra/Fitzroy River — national-heritage listed for its living Aboriginal cultural connections and wildlife like barramundi and critically endangered sawfish — faces twin threats: Gina Rinehart's agribusiness water extraction and a fracking proposal for oil and gas from Texan billionaire Rhet Bennett. Environs Kimberley is petitioning the federal government to stop the fracking and protect the river's flows.

The good-news item comes from Ngarrindjeri Country in South Australia, where the Nature Foundation and volunteers slashed nearly 12,000 square metres of encroaching common reed at Watchalunga Nature Reserve on the Fleurieu Peninsula — a 92ha wetland that shelters the nationally endangered Mt Lofty Ranges southern emu-wren. It's an annual battle that needs repeating across seasons.

Why should travellers care? These are the landscapes people cross the country for: the Overland Track's endpoints, the Gardens of Stone, the Kimberley's gorges and floodplains. What happens behind locked gates or in a catchment headwater shapes the places you'll actually walk through — and several of the campaign groups welcome volunteers, donations or a signature if you want to give back after a visit.

Story via Wild Magazine Australia, Green Pages, Issue #200.