Don't fence us in

August 26, 2004

They shoot horses, don't they ... aerial culling took place in Guy Fawkes National Park in 2000. Photo: Andrew Taylor

Barriers are a high-maintenance solution to stop wild horses crossing the border from NSW into the ACT, reports Stephanie Peatling.

And down by Kosciusko[sic], where the pine-clad ridges raise
Their torn and rugged battlements on high,
At midnight in the cold and frosty sky,
And where around the
Overflow the reedbeds sweep and sway
To the breezes, and the rolling plains are wide,
And the stockmen tell the story of his ride.

So ends A.B. "Banjo" Paterson's love song about the glory of station life in the Australian Alps, written decades before land once used for grazing and droving would be transformed into one of the world's great national parks.

Paterson's words immortalised an alpine landscape seen from the saddle and elevated attempts made by the stockmen and their steeds to tame the land to near mythic status in the nation's consciousness.

But the legend disguises the damage inflicted by the horses and their riders on their fragile surroundings, a legacy that is now the responsibility of today's custodians of the alps - the NSW, Victorian and ACT governments.

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If the horse chased by Paterson's youthful rider down those "gorges deep and black" where "cliffs and crags still beetle overhead" were around today, its path would now be blocked by two fences within the ACT's Namadgi National Park.

The fences are part of the ACT Government's attempt to protect the spagnum bogs that naturally filter the headwaters of the Cotter River, the main source of water for Canberra and Queanbeyan, as well as 11 nationally significant wetlands.

The bushfires in January last year made the task more urgent. The flames that ravaged the sensitive alpine area all but wiped out the endangered corroboree frog that lives in those same bogs.

A population of several hundred wild horses was finally eradicated from Namadgi in 1987 with the final 33 either shot or trapped and taken out. But casual sightings in recent years led to the identification of a herd of seven horses last year, just as the most critically damaged parts of the park were beginning to recover from the fires.

"It is considered highly likely that these animals are part of a much larger feral horse population established in northern Kosciuszko National Park, and those animals are moving freely across the NSW/ACT border and may have been using sites within [Namadgi] as part of their territory for a considerable period of time," the ACT Government's feral horse management plan says.

The longer the horses stay in the park, the greater the threat to the bogs.

The manager of Namadgi National Park, Brett McNamara, bemoans the travelling horses' lack of respect for state borders and their failure to understand their impact on the upper reaches of the catchment.

"The spagnum is critical for corroboree frog habitat," McNamara says. "Linked to this is a breeding program at Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve. There's little point raising tadpoles if there's no habitat for them."

As well as acting as natural filters, the bogs also store water during drought. Like a sponge, they can store up to ten times their weight in water and release it to areas as they need it.

When the bogs are damaged, as they were by the fires and the horses, water flows straight through harming what McNamara calls "the liver of the Cotter catchment".

The easiest solution would be to shoot the horses. But that is not something the NSW Government is likely to do, having reversed its policy after the aerial shooting of horses in the Guy Fawkes River National Park in 2000.

Despite evidence to suggest it is the most humane and effective control measure, there was a huge public outcry - a response not repeated when less charismatic feral animals such as pigs are shot. Much was made at the time of Banjo Paterson's enduring poem and the public's romantic ideas about plucky horses galloping through the mountains. The other - much more expensive - solution was to build a barrier.

Over the past year the ACT Government has erected two 300-metre-long fences at Murray Gap and Jacks Flat.

Two more fences will be built at Leura Gap and Mount Ginini if the ACT can convince the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service of the need to keep the horses out of the ACT.

Fences are a high-maintenance solution, one which environment groups say would not be necessary if the NSW Government reversed its opposition to shooting horses as a control measure, a practice it recommends for removing other feral animals such as pigs, goats and dogs.

"It's appalling that the feral horse management in Kosciuszko National Park is so bad that the ACT Government believes it has to put up a fence," says the executive director of the Colong Foundation for Wilderness, Keith Muir. "If NSW National Parks and Wildlife co-operated with the ACT Government to effectively reduce horse numbers, then the fence would be unnecessary."

PESTS of all kinds that infest Kosciuszko, the largest park in NSW, occupy much of the time of Alistair Henchman, the acting director of the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service's southern directorate.

The relatively small number of horses - between 1200 and 1500 - receive more attention than the damage they cause might warrant.

Horses have a similar effect on the landscape to cattle, the effects of which are still being treated although grazing stopped more than 60 years ago.

"We have got a whole lot of pest animal species that we need to manage - wild dogs, pigs, rabbits - and we have got to prioritise our management," Henchman says.

"Putting aside any cultural debate about the value of horses, we simply don't think that we'd ever be able to eliminate them totally from the park. While numbers are reasonably high, a program of removing them will be quite effective. To get the last five horses will be virtually impossible. We need to manage that population so there aren't unacceptable impacts occurring and then we need to move on to focus on other pest species that are causing more damage."

Ironically, while the mythology created by Paterson's poem whips up support for the horses, it also chronicles what has now become the favoured method of control by the ACT and NSW.

"For the bushmen love hard riding where the wild bush horses are, And the stock-horse snuffs the battle with delight," Paterson wrote in 1890.

Governments are still calling for the cracks to gather to the fray believing that hiring contract riders to trap the unwelcome horses is the most effective and publicly acceptable way of getting them out of alpine areas. Michelle Walter, whose 2002 doctoral thesis examined the impact of feral horses on the alps, found trapping could have a similar effect on horse numbers to large predators.

"Selecting young animals in the harvest reduces the impact of harvesting on the population compared to unselective harvesting, while selecting adult females increases the predicted impact," Walter's thesis concluded.

For Henchman and the NSW parks and wildlife service, trapping is the best method "in a social and political sense". Seventy horses were caught and removed this way over the past summer. "While people might criticise us for not using more dramatic methods like shooting, we're in a situation where we need to have a technique which we can keep doing," Henchman says.

But the ACT Government is made of stronger stuff. Two horses caught out of bounds were shot earlier this year in an attempt to again rid the ACT of the pest.