Then, the WA Department of Agriculture judged that a quarter of the plain suffered moderate or severe erosion, and another 66 per cent was in poor condition.

That had turned around when the Carbon Capture Project reassessed Cheela Plain Station’s health in 2008. The project rated nearly half the station as now being in good condition and only 11 per cent as being in poor condition. There was no sign of erosion.

The plain’s rundown, and its restoration, were both due to human management.

Current leaseholders the Pensini family have conservatively stocked the 188,000 hectare lease since the 1980s, and after Evan Pensini did an RCS course in the late 1990s they have actively used time-controlled grazing.

As well as bringing about the ecological restoration documented by the Carbon Capture Project, the Pensinis have also tripled their carrying capacity.

Mr Pensini, pictured with wife Robin and sons Fraser, Lawson, Preston and Gavin, believes that if carbon trading can provide incentives for other landholders to take the same road, Australia will be better for it.

“It would be the only time in white man’s history that we’d be paid for something that improved the landscape,” he said in Brisbane this week.

“Governments have poured money into drought relief and landscape rehabilitation without much return, but this has a lot of potential.

“But we still need government to get this right.”