General News
17 September, 2026
Nature helped to heal creeks
RESTORATION to sections of Martins Creek, Cassowary Creek and Saltwater Creek are about to get underway with Terrain NRM working alongside landholders, Douglas Shire Council, Jabalbina Yalanji Aboriginal Corporation and Neilly Group to use a range of nature-based solutions which will include pile fields, bank reprofiling and tree-planting.
Work is scheduled to begin during September.
The $2.7 million Daintree riverine recovery project is focusing on damage caused to creek banks in the floods that followed Cyclone Jasper and is jointly funded by the Australian and Queensland governments under the Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements (DRFA).
Tree-planting will be funded through the Australian Government’s Reef Trust Landscape Repair Program.
“Almost three years on from the devastating impacts of Cyclone Jasper, we are still finding ways to grow back better, protecting our communities and building a Far North better prepared to weather the storm,” said Federal Member for Leichhardt Matt Smith.
Terrain NRM project manager Max Brownlow said Martins Creek was an important tributary for the Daintree River, which received heavy flows off the mountains.
“We’ll be working at a series of erosion sites along about 1.2 kilometres of the creek,’’ he said.
“At Saltwater Creek, we’ll be restoring and stabilising a creek area that has seen dramatic erosion and land loss since Cyclone Jasper, where floodwater has been coming over the top of the bank and cutting a channel behind it and where the banks are continuing to collapse and recede.”
“Cassowary Creek is a smaller creek with very high flows in floods. One side of the creek has receded 3m since the start of this year alone and almost 30 metres of creek bank has been lost since 2011,” Mr Brownlow said.
Two pile fields will be built at Martins Creek, along with bank battering, strategic rock placements and tree-planting while at Saltwater and Cassowary creeks there will be bank battering and widespread tree-planting.
Pile fields are multiple rows of timber piles, driven up to 7m into the earth.
They are designed to slow down water and build up sediment, to protect and repair damaged riverbanks. The design allows for vegetation to replace the piles in the long-term.
Mr Brownlow said a hybrid nature-based solution, combining earthwork, trees and, in some instances, engineered rockwork was the best option for these sites, with the earth and rockwork acting as reinforcement until the trees established themselves.
“With the level of erosion, there is nothing left to hold soil in place,’’ he said.
Terrain NRM’s waterway health leader Tamara Wilson said the current project followed similar work led by Terrain NRM, also jointly funded under the DRFA, in the Mossman River system and in different parts of the Daintree river systems.
“After severe flooding in 2019, erosion sites were restored at Bamboo Creek and the Mossman River using a combination of nature-based engineering techniques and revegetation,’’ she said.
“We are taking our learnings from these projects – about how nature-based solutions respond in the Wet Tropics and how they complement other engineering solutions – and we are applying them to this new project.”
