VISIONARY OR MADMAN? John Wamsley has set up a profit-making company to protect Aus tralia's native wildlife. Is this the road to salvation, or damnation?

International Wildlife, Jan-Feb, 2001 by Tim Thwaites

JOHN WAMSLEY is an imposing figure. He has a ruddy face and a gray, shovel-shaped beard, and he is larger than life in almost every dimension. He has big ideas, too: He wants to save Australia's wildlife.

His language and his message are as blunt and forthright as his looks. Bureaucrats and conservationists are idiots, he says. They are losing wildlife at an extraordinary rate. The key to restoring Australia's living heritage, according to Wamsley, is through private enterprise: buying up and fencing off huge tracts of land; eradicating introduced rabbits, foxes and feral cats; replant-ing native vegetation where necessary; and then bringing back the animals. To realize his vision, Wamsley has created Earth Sanctuaries Ltd. (ESL), which he says is the world's first conservation-oriented public corporation, and raised nearly A$30 million (about $18 million in U.S. currency) from investors.

"I once said that I would sell my soul to the devil to fry in hell forever to save one species of mammal from extinction," Wamsley says.

Some of his critics worry that he's done just that. "It's dangerous to put our wildlife into the hands of a private individual," says Deborah Tabart, head of the Australian Koala Foundation. "As animals become more and more endangered, they become more and more expensive. I've heard Japanese interests have offered A$25 million for one platypus. That puts objective decision making under tremendous economic pressure."

Others take a more charitable view. "Why not find a way of bringing private money in?" says Steve Morton, chief of the Division of Wildlife and Ecology at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia's national research body. "Somehow in Australia we've got to wean conservation off dependence on the public purse."

Wamsley has been shaking things up for most of his 62 years. And his obsession with native wildlife stems from his childhood. He grew up on the east coast of Australia, about an hour and a half's drive north of Sydney. When he was seven, his father bought 166 acres of bushland, cleared 35 acres of it for an orchard and left the rest.

"It was this wonderful place with huge trees and a parklike effect in between. And all these animals lived there-big glider possums, pygmy possums, koalas, kangaroos and wallabies, wombats, platypus, just everything in the trees, on the ground and in the creeks. It's the only land I can remember anywhere that had a semblance of balance. And by the time I was 16, it was all gone, the whole bloody lot."

What happened on his father's land (as in other parts of Australia) was that invading rabbits, foxes and feral cats destroyed the balance by removing the native animals. The parklike understory turned into rank undergrowth, and the inevitable result was a bushfire that destroyed all the old-growth, hollow trees. With them went the abundance of arboreal wildlife. Wamsley has been searching to regain that sense of balance ever since and when he couldn't find it, he decided to create it.

He left home at 16 to make enough money to buy his own block of land. He held a series of jobs, and renovated and sold old houses on the side. Working as much as 80 hours a week, he became a millionaire by his early 20s. But at the age of 25 he recognized that, if he were to realize his dream, he would need free time as well as money-so he decided to educate himself and become an academic. Within five years, he had a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Newcastle.

In 1969, he moved to Adelaide and found a job at Flinders University, where he worked for the next 17 years. More importantly, he bought about 35 acres in the hills to the east and began to put his ideas about wildlife into action. He called his sanctuary Warrawong and immediately embarked on rubbing his neighbors the wrong way. He began by chopping down the carefully planted, "productive" exotic pines and replacing them with native vegetation.

"You rotten bastard!" Wamsley recalls one of his neighbors yelling at him from across the road. "Old Stoney spent his life clearing that hillside, and you're planting it back again." But that was mild compared to the outcry when he started shooting cats.

It all came to a head in 1991 at a second sanctuary he'd established, Yookamurra, about 75 miles northeast of Adelaide. Wamsley was removing feral animals there, and a group of animal protectionists turned up. Their leader announced that they would report Wamsley to the police if they saw him kill a cat. In those days, killing cats was against the law. Wamsley responded by striding out to greet the protesters wearing a hat fashioned from a cat pelt. His picture appeared on the front of almost every major newspaper in the country.

The resulting controversy provoked a change in the law. The state environment ministers, who just happened to be meeting in Adelaide at the time, used the incident to test grass-roots views on taking action against feral cats. The result was legislation to make it legal to control cats across Australia. It was the start of a sea change in public opinion. Nowadays, as a conservation measure, local councils have imposed curfews for domestic cats and begun impounding felines found wandering the streets at night.