Charlie had always been interested in what the landscape may have looked like prior to European arrival, and he continues to use this as a guide. He was inspired by the way Peter Andrews, landscape restoration innovator and founder of Natural Sequence Farming (NSF), described landscape function and the importance of the water you cannot see.

‘Everyone is obsessed with the water they can see, but prior to 1788 you would have only seen 5–10% of the water, and the rest was underground, much cooler, less prone to evaporation, and most importantly moving slowly.’ Charlie Maslin

Charlie was interested in Peter’s ideas about rehydrating the landscape but initially thought it only applied in the Hunter Valley region, where Peter was based. ‘They’ve got water running out of sandstone cliffs up there and they’ve got permanent water flowing,’ Charlie remarks. It wasn’t until Peter came down to a field day nearby in 2009 that Charlie realised how relevant it was to his, or any, landscape.

A lot of what Peter was talking about had ‘always puzzled’ Charlie but he was impressed that Peter ‘was able to describe how to bring a degraded landscape back’. And so, ‘the lights went on’ for Charlie and he invited Peter to Gunningrah. Peter pointed out aspects of the landscape and water that weren’t obvious to Charlie at the time. Impressed, Charlie ended up going to Peter’s property to learn more about the way ‘rivers used to run – with chains of ponds, big soaks and large marshes – and water moved through the landscape slowly’. Afterwards, Charlie was convinced it could work on his own property: ‘What he was talking about really, really works. And the drier the climate, the more it applies.’

Charlie was also inspired by Tony Coote, founder of Mulloon Institute and owner of Mulloon Creek Natural Farms,⁶ Read more about Mulloon Creek Natural Farms. and his landscape restoration work at Mulloon Creek. He visited Mulloon Creek Natural Farms and invited Tony to run a session on stream restoration at a Soils for Life field day at Gunningrah in 2014. When Tony visited the year before, he counted 165 incised creeks and only one stream that was intact between Mulloon Creek and Gunningrah. Charlie had already started some landscape rehydration, but recognising the extent of the degraded landscape and inspired by the possibilities for landscape rehydration, Charlie decided, ‘Okay, let’s get on with it!’

Charlie began by setting the goal of slowing the flow of water through his landscape. He built simple structures made from materials on hand and started in smaller streams that fed into Cambalong Creek, the main creek running through the centre of the property. This approach allowed Charlie to observe how the natural infrastructure worked and adapt accordingly. Charlie reflects, ‘Trying little bits and pieces here and there, and seeing how they worked, and as you do it, if it works, you do more. If it doesn’t work, you stop. You can pull a structure out of a creek in ten minutes with a tractor, or you can go and build another one in an hour.‘

Earthen structures at Stockyard Creek

Walking down Stockyard Creek, one of the smaller waterways on the property, Charlie began to think about where he would put in simple earthen structures⁷Structures made from earthen materials, or the excavation of earth typically used on hillslopes or ephemeral gullies, for example earth banks, modified graded banks contour banks. to address degradation, reduce runoff and help slow the flow of water. Charlie reflects:

I thought I’d give the structures a go. It’s a bit like changing grazing. If they don’t work, you can just dig them out or put a hole through the wall.

Within two days in 2006, Charlie had built 20 structures with the help of an excavator contractor, spending about an hour on each. These simple weir structures were constructed by putting rock sourced from the surrounding area at the back of the wall-like structure and soil in front of it (see Figure 1 and Image 5 below). 

Charlie positioned the structures to create an induced meandering effect, ‘kicking a little to the right and then a little to the left’ along the creek (see Figure 2). The idea was to improve the stream by slowing water flow so it would become ‘a longer stream and run for a much longer period of time’. Slowing down the flow of water remediates the incised areas by rebuilding steps in the system. Over time, plants are able to grow and more water is held in the system for longer, ultimately building fertility and soil in the landscape and improving the quality of the water. 

Charlie saw these interventions as a way to fast-track the recovery. He explains:

If you just relied on the grazing and waited for it to heal without doing any work with structures, you’d have to live for a very long time to see results, because for the reeds to hold soil and for it to slowly build up would take decades.

Figure 2. Stockyard Creek with icons (green) showing locations of interventions. Source: Grow Love Project.

Image 6. Stockyard Creek in 2024 showing reeds growing where structures were put in. Source: Grow Love Project.

Image 7. Stockyard Creek in 2025 showing vegetation marking the raised stream, where once there were bare banks and a trickle at the bottom. Source: Charlie Maslin.

Signs of an improved water cycle 

Charlie found that once the sheep and cattle were removed for ‘reasonable amounts of time’ and there was moisture in the creek, ‘we could see the results pretty quickly’. Birds started to arrive carrying seed, reeds began to grow and grasses colonised the area. The corridor became healthier and water began to move across the landscape, which Charlie would monitor with a drone. Even in the middle of a dry summer, he could see where the water was spreading. 

‘Before, the water trickled in just the very bottom of the incised stream. And all of a sudden, once we raised the stream up a bit, water was spreading further and further, so that when a storm came, all those ponds filled up, and water began to move laterally across the landscape.’ Charlie Maslin

‘Now Stockyard Creek is always flowing, even in a drought it never dries,’ reflects Charlie. Once it begins to flow well at the top and the middle of the creek, it will continue to flow at the bottom. The meandering has also taken the energy out of the water, which helps to reduce sediment loss and erosion (see more outcomes below). 

Learning and adapting

Charlie would monitor the structures and adjust the design where needed so that they functioned more effectively. For example, occasionally, when some structures that were built higher than the banks of an eroded river filled up with water, there was overflow that would create damage to creek banks upon re-entry into the watercourse or the water re-entering the stream would carry soil with it. In this case Charlie might add a log to spread the water out or put in an overflow pipe to provide an outlet for excess water and stop it from cutting another erosive channel. Once groundcover was established on and around these structures, overflow wasn’t an issue because the plants and resulting softer soils would either better absorb water or, in a larger rain event, be able to hold the soil together and prevent damage.

With confidence that the interventions were benefitting the landscape, Charlie began building structures in other streams. He ‘tried anything and everything’, using materials he had on hand, including rocks, logs, branches and earth. Charlie recalls how the structures were put to the test in a downpour:

When the first gully rush came down…the leaves etc. would build up, forming weirs. In the space of a couple of years, the weirs would be covered in grass, the streams full of reeds, and you could barely see them.

Where possible, Charlie started building these structures high in the catchment, where the energy of the water flow was gentler, and worked his way down. If he were to start with structures further down the catchment instead, Charlie explains, ‘There’s going to be a heap of energy hit when a flood comes through and it’ll probably go.’ Charlie also worked in the small streams leading into the Cambalong Creek (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Hand drawn map of Gunningrah showing smaller streams running into the Cambalong Creek (blue) and intervention areas (red). Source: Charlie Maslin.

Keeping the sediment at No. 1 Creek

For years, one of the gullies on the western part of the property had been deeply incised. Charlie had planted trees and fenced off the area in 1988, but the gully was still actively eroding. So in 2008, Charlie put in an earthen structure that used earth and rock from either side of the bank (see Image 8). The materials were loosely track-rolled in and the structure took a couple of hours to build. He then stepped back ‘and let nature take its course’. Quite quickly, the water slowed down and the sediment began depositing.

Before the intervention, Charlie says the area was ‘so incised that you couldn’t drive a motorbike over it,’ says Charlie. He put in a series of metal posts to measure the sediment build up. At the time of the intervention, the length of the incised gully was about 30–-40 m long, 15 m wide and 2.5 m deep. Charlie thought it would take about 30 years to repair, but over the last 15 years, the sediment has built up 2.5 m to reach the pre-incised level of- about 2.5 m (see Image 9). 

Image 10. Charlie demonstrating how deep the incision had been prior to the repair work. Source: Grow Love Project.

Figure 4. Earthen structures (green) and direction of water flow (blue) at No.1 Creek after 16 years. Source: Charlie Maslin.

Charlie believes that his approach has been successful in managing one of his most important resources – water. ‘The water can’t rush through or evaporate as easily, it moves through slowly,’ says Charlie. ‘In places we’ve lifted the water table up about a metre.’

Lengthening and slowing the flow

Before putting in all the Stockyard Creek interventions, Charlie could see fewer areas of the main creek where the water was flowing. He recalls that at one stage, ‘it went from being a 7 km long stream to only running for about 3 km. It was dry for 2 km at the top, and for 2 km at the bottom.’ 

Now, the creek flows more consistently along a longer stretch. Charlie regularly measures the volume flowing through by timing how long it takes to fill a 20 L bucket. Prior to the interventions, he says, ‘In the good years I measured it and it was flowing at about 2 megalitres a week. In the dry years it was getting down to just under 1 megalitre a week.’ It now flows at 3.2 megalitres a week, which Charlie says is indicative of the flow since the landscape rehydration works.  

Not only do more of the creeks flow more of the time, but they have slowed down. Charlie is often thinking about how water would flow in pre-degraded times. Talking about one of the main creeks on the property, he says:

In 1788 it might have taken 12-24 months for a storm flow to make it from the source to here, and the same amount of time to then get to the Bombala River. Now the interval is reduced to literally a matter of days. What I’m trying to do is extend that interval back out, and there is still a long way to go.

When one of the smaller creeks, Walkers Creek, was still degraded, a heavy rain event would see water rushing through the property and down to Cambalong Creek in about one to three days before stopping completely. Now, after installing just three structures in the creek, the flow is slower and the same rain event would see the creek continuing to flow for 12 weeks.

‘It usually flows for about 12 weeks, which is really interesting. It’s only just a trickle at the end of the 12 weeks, whereas before it was a muddy one day wonder. I can see that adding even more structures could return the creek to a permanent watercourse.’ Charlie Maslin

Images 13-18. Different views of Walkers Creek in flood (left) and dry (right) times. Source: Charlie Maslin.

Connecting old streams and filling billabongs

Charlie is very aware that it’s not only about the water that you can see, but also the water you can’t see – 90 to 95% of water is underground, stored in soil and utilised by plants. When the water table is lifted, plants can access this underground water. Digging down about half a metre is a good way to see the water that is invisible on the surface. Charlie has observed a hole filling up with water in under a minute where the surface seemed fairly dry. Looking at vegetation from a drone, he can also see areas where the water is moving through the ground. He explains, ‘This is especially obvious where there are lucerne plants or deep rooted perennials growing, as they are now able to access the water in the soil where it is raised by weirs, and remain green’ (as seen in Image 18). Charlie is also now starting to see where water would have historically moved through the landscape, and is now beginning to return.

‘You can see green strips where water’s running now, where it didn’t used to run. So you can see where the streams used to connect. There are a few billabongs that have been dry all of my time, until recently when they’ve started to fill up.’ Charlie Maslin

Image 19. Drone image showing billabongs and streams starting to connect. Source: Charlie Maslin.

Vegetation and ground temperature

After changing his grazing management, Charlie began looking down more and recording changes to the groundcover. Within four years, the groundcover went from 65% to 80–85%. It then took another 10 years to reach 90%, where it has plateaued. Charlie reflects that areas previously plagued by weeds have recovered:

There were weed-infested areas that you couldn’t get to, which became mostly grasses, and the grasses basically choked out the thistles, and the thistles stopped germinating. Now it’s mostly a strong native perennial pasture. 

Charlie acknowledges the odd thistle growing here and there, but says that now ‘there’s nowhere near the problem’. He puts this down to the increased rest, which allowed perennials to grow and not to be nipped down by livestock all the time. 

Mulloon Institute’s general manager, Jono Forrest, has been to Gunningrah several times over the past 10 years and has observed changes to groundcover. He says, ‘One of the things that we look for to understand how landscape rehydration infrastructure impacts the environment is the enabling of more water in the landscape that fuels plant growth.’

At Gunningrah, the rehydration structures resulted in huge improvements to the riparian areas. At the end of a drought, one of the most denuded areas on the main creek went from 15–20% groundcover to 95–100%. Now, reeds, rushes and other vegetation are abundant along the watercourses, preventing further erosion, providing habitat for biodiversity, and helping to keep sediment at the source, thereby improving water quality for animals (see Image 21). Once an area ‘starts to fill with plants and the roots are going down obviously much further, the ground is much better covered’.

Images 20 & 21. No. 1 Creek in 2008 immediately after the intervention (left) and in 2024 (right), showing vegetation growth along the watercourse. Source: Charlie Maslin.

Images 22 & 23. Stockyard Creek looking downstream showing vegetation growth along the watercourse. Source: Mulloon Institute.

The landscape now also bounces back quickly in dry times because it’s had an opportunity to rest. Charlie says it’s important to ‘keep enough perennial plants and not graze the life out of them when it gets dry. It looks pretty dismal when it’s dry, but it’s amazing how quickly it responds and how quickly you get the groundcover back.’ The perennial plants may brown off, but they maintain living roots and are ready to start photosynthesising as soon as they receive moisture.

Groundcover, even when dormant, also helps keep temperature down. In a quick test with a thermometer, Charlie found that on a 31° day, the soil at a depth of 10 cm measured 41°C when it was below bare ground, 28°C with very thin litter cover, and just 23°C with thicker dormant plant coverage (see Image 24). Charlie points out that the low temperature supports healthy soils with microbial activity, which in turn improves infiltration rates, whereas not much life can exist underground if the temperature is above 30°C. 

‘Once you get plants growing, the temperature is better underneath and there can be more microbial and worm life, and as a result, the infiltration rates are much higher.’ Charlie Maslin

Image 24. Temperature measurements indicating differences in soil temperature with bare ground (41°C), light cover (28°C) and thick dormant plant cover (23°C). Source: Charlie Maslin.

Water quality and regular flow on the Cambalong

The management changes have allowed the water to slow down and to infiltrate into the soil and for sediment to deposit. When water flows into Gunningrah, it is quite dark and soil laden, but by the time the water reaches the Cambalong, Charlie says ‘it’s slowed down, the sediment has dropped out and it’s basically, clear drinking water’.

Charlie regularly checks the water sediment by filling a clear bottle near the top of a stream and another bottle lower down below the structures, and visually comparing the difference (see Image 25). Another indicator of the water quality occurred when Charlie and a neighbour observed clear flood waters about half way down Stockyard Creek in 2015, a few years after building the structures. The neighbour lower down on the catchment has also noticed more regular water flow.

Image 25. Charlie holding a bottle of sediment-filled water collected from near the top of the stream (left) and a bottle of clear water from lower down the stream below the structures (right). Source: Grow Love Project.

Increasing biodiversity 

One of the obvious signs of an improved water cycle is the abundance of animals that rely on quality water. Charlie has observed platypus in 14 holes on the Cambalong Creek where it runs through Gunningrah. He also says that with the permanent water, the birdlife is more abundant. By listening to frogs croaking in the streams, Charlie has also observed large numbers of a range of frog species on the property. He recalls:

At one of the field days here, someone just said, ‘Everyone be quiet’, and all of a sudden, they could count the number of different frogs they could hear croaking along the stream. So there’s obviously a lot of life.

Stabilising costs of production

Charlie recalls that in the 1980s there was a lot of variability around costs of cattle and sheep production and profitability. This alarmed Charlie and encouraged him to diversify income off farm. He remembers:

In the 1980s, our cost of wool production at the time went from $2.50/kg to $5.00/kg in one year, purely with a decrease in the amount we were producing and decrease in numbers. Cattle were worse. They went from $0.40/kg to produce a kilo of beef to $1.20. 

Once Charlie shifted his management focus towards the landscape – changing grazing and remediating the watercourses – his profitability started to stabilise. ‘Our profitability started to not have the highs and lows it did before,’ says Charlie.⁸See Gunningah Profit/Rainfall Index 1992–2009 in a previous Soils for Life case study.

Charlie puts the stabilisation of profits down to management changes: ‘I don’t think we were fighting the droughts anywhere near as hard.’ As well as allowing areas to rest, he also wasn’t bringing in truck loads of feed, but would instead adjust numbers to the conditions.

Increase in production and animal health 

Once Charlie began changing grazing management, his drenching levels started to drop as well because the stock was being moved onto cleaner pastures. 

He is also now running a higher DSE per labour unit and the annual days spent doing stock work have decreased.⁹When Charlie returned to Gunningrah in the 1980s, the DSE per labour unit was 5,000–6,000 DSE/person. After implementing practice changes, it went to 15,000 DSE/person where it stayed for 20 years. The days spent doing stock work decreased from 300 employee days per year to 180–200. In the last five years, Charlie has taken on one employee, and the DSE per labour unit has decreased to about 10,000 DSE/person. When Charlie was a child, there were four to six staff, whereas under Charlie’s management, most of the time it’s been him and sometimes one other person, all while stock numbers and land area have increased. 

Making a positive change at Gunningrah and beyond

Charlie feels positive about the changes he’s made at Gunningrah. He can see real changes occurring in the landscape and so can his neighbours downstream. 

‘It’s a good feeling having a good year. But all this – the streams and pastures – you see changes all the time, and you sort of have a good year almost every day. It’s a satisfying thing for me.’ Charlie Maslin

At a Landcare meeting some years after Charlie had finished much of the rehydration works, a farmer downstream remarked how keen he was to see more projects involving the same type of work done at Gunningrah because he could see the improved stream flow.