Bush Heritage Australia: where the ten dollars goes

Ten dollars from every direct booking goes to Bush Heritage Australia.

Bush Heritage is a national conservation organisation. It buys land, protects it permanently and works to bring it back to health. It's been doing that since 1991, and it now holds more than 1.5 million hectares in its own name.

It started with two blocks of forest

In 1990, Bob Brown was walking above two bush blocks in Tasmania's Liffey Valley that had come up for sale. Logging companies were interested. He had been awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize for his part in the Franklin River campaign, and he put the $49,000 that came with it down as a deposit, borrowing the rest from friends and the bank.

The campaign to clear the remaining $200,000 became the Australian Bush Heritage Fund, founded on 11 October 1991. Those two blocks are now the Liffey River and Drys Bluff Reserves. Parts of them are World Heritage listed.

Thirty-five years on, the method is the same. Buy the land, hold it, and look after it for as long as that takes.

What it holds now

Bush Heritage works three ways, and publishes the figures for each on its own site.

Its reserve network covers 1,568,197 hectares that it owns and manages directly. A further 9.3 million hectares are managed in partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander landholders. It also works with farmers and other land managers across more than 14.9 million hectares of agricultural land, which is already past the 10 million hectare target it set itself for 2030.

Those are three different kinds of involvement, and Bush Heritage reports them separately rather than as a single total.

Across its reserves, 8,700 native species have been recorded.

What the work involves

On the ground, regeneration is a list of specific jobs: ecological fire management, feral predator control, weed removal, revegetation, and repair of eroded soil and degraded waterways. Alongside that runs species monitoring, which is slow, expensive, and the only way to find out whether a decade of work did what it was meant to.

Some of it runs for decades. Pullen Pullen Reserve in western Queensland was established in 2015, after Night Parrots were confirmed there following most of a century without a verified sighting.

In April 2026, Pilungah Reserve, more than 220,000 hectares in Queensland's north-west, was granted Special Wildlife Reserve status, the strongest legal protection available to privately owned land in Australia. In July 2026, Bush Heritage secured Wanarra, 107,000 hectares in Western Australia's Mid West, which shares a 50-kilometre fenceline with Charles Darwin Reserve. Together the two form a single protected area of more than 175,000 hectares.

Evelyn Downs, in South Australia's painted desert, came into the network in 2024 at 235,000 hectares. Bush Heritage describes it as the largest reserve in its history.

"Whilst ten dollars seems small by itself, it's proof that a contribution from many can go a long way. It feels very special to be part of this story."

— Cass, founder

What the ten dollars is

Wander's relationship with Bush Heritage is a funding relationship. We don't manage land with them or run projects alongside them. Ten dollars leaves with every direct booking, goes into Bush Heritage's national conservation work, and Bush Heritage decides where it is most needed. As at June 2026, the cumulative contribution stood at $27,000.

Direct means a booking made on wander.com.au rather than through a third-party platform, where the margin on a stay is largely out of our hands.

You can check all of this

Bush Heritage intends to be protecting, restoring and regenerating 30 million hectares by 2030, an area it notes is larger than Victoria, and to double the land it owns outright from 1.2 to 2.4 million hectares. The Impact Report and the 2030 Strategy are both published in full.

It is a registered charity with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, ABN 78 053 639 115, and its financial statements sit on the ACNC's public register rather than only on its own website.

Wander is a transformational travel company with a growing network of considered architect-designed, off-grid pods sitting lightly across Australia's wildest and quietest places.

B Corp certified, low-impact and deeply quiet. Ten dollars of every direct booking goes to Bush Heritage Australia.

stay with us

Find your time to Wander.

Architect-designed, off-grid, Certified B Corporation.
Ten dollars of every direct booking supports Bush Heritage Australia.
Stay a few nights and let the days lengthen.