Peter and Pamela Woolford arrived on the limestone cliffs of Flinders Island in 1979, establishing a pastoral life on the edge of the Great Australian Bight. For decades, the rhythm of the island was set by the shearing of wool and the quiet encroachment of feral cats and rodents. When Jonas took over the management of the family’s 3,854 hectares, he chose a different legacy, initiating a partnership with the South Australian Government and the Eyre Peninsula Landscape Board to erase the ecological footprint of the last two centuries.
The transformation reached its peak during a period of enforced stillness in 2025. While the island was closed to the world, helicopters flew meticulous grid patterns, and specialists from New Zealand and Tasmania moved through the coastal shrublands. Liz McTaggart, a senior ecologist and the project’s manager, coordinated a "radical" sweep that utilized thermal drones to track the last predators. By the end of the year, five invasive species—cats, rats, mice, feral cattle, and feral sheep—had been humanely removed from the landscape.
The island reopened in early 2026 under a new set of rules. Visitors must now scrub their boots and inspect their gear, ensuring that no stray seed or stowaway rodent undoes the work of two decades. The air on the cliffs is different now; it carries the scent of drooping sheoak and coastal daisybush rather than the heavy musk of the flock. As the land regenerates, it awaits the return of the banded hare-wallaby, a small, shy resident that will soon reclaim the ground where sheep once stood.
This is no longer a station defined by what it can produce, but by what it can protect. Local school children from Elliston have already begun to visit, following the science of the restoration. They see in Jonas Woolford a man who looked at his inheritance and decided that the most valuable thing he could do with his land was to let it become itself once more.