07/10/2026
Dear Save Wallum community,
It is difficult to express the incredible amount of work, emotion and determination that has gone into the last four weeks since our Federal Court case was dismissed.
Behind the scenes, our team has been working around the clock to understand every possible pathway still available to protect Wallum, while making decisions that none of us wanted to have to make. We returned to the Federal Court in an attempt to prevent destructive works from beginning while we explored an appeal, and then to the NSW Land and Environment Court seeking to stop works there. We have sought further legal advice, examined our case from every possible angle, considered the significant financial risks of continuing, and worked incredibly hard to find a viable pathway forward.
At the same time, we have been forced to witness what has been happening on the ground at Wallum and bear the weight of watching heavy machinery destroy endangered frog habitat and the wildflowers currently in bloom.
But through all of that heartbreak, we have also felt the extraordinary support of this community: the messages, the offers of help, the people continuing to stand beside us, and the donations that came in when we asked for your help to explore an appeal.
When we asked for your help a month ago, we genuinely believed an appeal may offer us one final pathway to protect what remains of Wallum.
Your donations gave us the ability to pursue that possibility properly, to seek further legal advice, examine the grounds for appeal, understand what could still be achieved and assess the significant risks involved.
Approximately $30,000 has been spent on that work. We are also carrying substantial outstanding legal and court-related costs from the Federal Court proceedings.
After that work, and after considering both the legal and financial risks involved, we have made the heartbreaking decision that Save Wallum Inc will not proceed with an appeal of the Federal Court decision.
We know this will be incredibly difficult news for many of you to receive. It has been incredibly difficult for us too.
What became clear through this process is that an appeal could take up to 12 months. During that time, the development could continue progressing through its stages, including towards the clearing of trees.
We have now been unsuccessful in both the Federal Court and NSW Land and Environment Court in our attempts to stop works while further legal avenues were pursued. Without the ability to protect Wallum while an appeal was heard, there is a very real risk that the destruction we are trying to prevent would already have occurred by the time an appeal was determined.
We’re not spending another year and potentially enormous sums pursuing a legal avenue that may come too late.
However, we are aware of philanthropic efforts being explored that may offer another pathway towards the permanent protection of some of Wallum’s rare and precious trees and the surrounding ecosystem.
While these efforts are still in their early stages, we remain hopeful that some of this extraordinary place may yet be protected for future generations.
We hope to be able to share more about these initiatives as they develop.
For more than three years, this community has done everything it could to protect Wallum. We have fundraised, organised, researched, protested, engaged experts, commissioned ecological and hydrological work, entered the Federal Court and, even after losing our case, returned to both the Federal Court and the NSW Land and Environment Court in an attempt to prevent works beginning while we explored what legal avenues remained.
And yet, despite everything we have placed before these systems about the ecological value of Wallum and the irreversible nature of what may be lost, we have repeatedly encountered the limits of what our institutions are currently equipped to recognise.
One of the deepest things we have learned through this legal process is that we have built institutions that are extremely sophisticated at recognising certain forms of value.
They can recognise dollars, contracts, timelines, property interests and financial loss. These things are legible within the systems we have created.
It is much harder for those same systems to adequately account for an ancient ecological community; for the relationships between water, soil, geology, plants, fungi and animals; for the cumulative consequences of habitat fragmentation; and for the loss of intact ecosystems that carry the stories and wisdom of Traditional Custodians across thousands of years.
The system has not been able to recognise the enormous amount of unpaid labour required of a community trying to protect the land that keeps us all well, and it cannot measure what these losses will mean for future generations who will inherit the consequences of the decisions we make today.
Our systems have become remarkably sophisticated at calculating how much value can be extracted from a place, while remaining remarkably unsophisticated at calculating the true cost of destroying it.
So one of the larger challenges ahead of all of us who care deeply about the environment and the sustainability of the Earth for future generations is that we need to start requiring our institutions to become more sophisticated at recognising other forms of value, forms of value that cannot be reduced to the same currencies that have put so many of our landscapes at risk.
There will be much more to say about what has happened here at Wallum.
There will be time to talk about what we won as well as what we lost. About what this campaign revealed about our planning and legal systems. About the extraordinary community that formed around this small piece of Wallum heathland. About the scientists, lawyers, ecologists, volunteers, donors, First Nations Elders and wisdom keepers, community members and countless others who gave their knowledge, money, labour, courage and love to this place.
And there will be time to grieve.
But today, we mostly want to say thank you.
Your donations did not simply fund a court case. They gave this community the capacity to exhaust all the avenues available to us rather than walking away wondering whether we could have done more.
We know that we did everything we could.
And while we may not have been able to make the systems we entered understand the full value of Wallum, thousands of people now love this land with the very marrow of their bones.
And that matters.
So our story is not over, and neither are the stories of future environmental activism that will grow from what has happened here.
We have seeded a desire for systemic change that we know will continue to grow far beyond this campaign. And we are incredibly grateful that you have been part of that with us.
With gratitude,
The Save Wallum team
Photo by Mark Seiffert
Written by Amanda Jayne Fisher
