the South Australian government adopted them as approved state soil conservation policies in 1936. Legislation introduced in 1939 codified these policies. In 1936 mining assayer Albert Morris and his restoration colleagues initiated the Broken Hill regeneration area project. This project involved the natural regeneration of indigenous flora on a severely wind eroded site of hundreds of hectares, located in arid western New South Wales. Morris was responding to the widespread wind erosion that had arisen from pastoral industry overstocking practices. It is quite likely that he was influenced by the South Australian research work of Professor Osborn. Completed in 1958, the successful project still maintains substantial ecological functioning today as the Broken Hill Regeneration Area (1700 hectares). Morris was a pioneering and highly skilled arid-zone botanist, and was also familiar with some basic principles of ecology. Local and state governments, and the Broken Hill mining industry, supported and funded the project. The Broken Hill regeneration area project has been described as an irrigation and tree planting project, and as a USA "dust bowl" shelterbelt planting project. However, to revegetate 1700 hectares by planting, hundreds of thousands of plants would have been required, but there is no historical documentation that reveals planting programs of this scale, or near it. Furthermore, although Morris did design some small tree planting and irrigation projects for the local community and a mining company, it is well documented that his main revegetation interest was in a stock exclosure and natural regeneration technique. As the historical documentation reveals, the regeneration area project relied almost entirely on the germination of the naturally distributed seed of the local indigenous flora species (natural regeneration), and the exclusion of damaging grazing animals (stock exclosure). In fact, as the regeneration area project was so well adapted to the harsh arid-zone conditions, the New South Wales state government adopted it as a model for the proposed restoration of the twenty million hectares of the arid western portion of the state that had been reduced to a severely eroded condition. Legislation to this effect was passed in 1949. Another significant early Australian settler ecological restoration project occurred on the north coast of New South Wales. From approximately 1840 settlers forcibly occupied the coastal hinterlands, dispossessed First Nations communities, destroyed extensive areas of biologically diverse rainforest and converted the land to farms. Only smalll patches of rainforest survived. In 1935 dairy farmer Ambrose Crawford, alarmed