Perth billionaires give $120M to 10 Australian conservation groups

The Australian Wildlife Conservancy's $25 million slice is the largest grant in the group's history. Regional ecologist for northern Australia Rebecca Diete said it took her a while to grasp the scale of it. AWC currently manages about 1.7 per cent of the continent and wants to push that to 5 per cent — an area roughly the size of Germany. "We may not have known exactly how we were going to meet that ambition, so a donation like this makes us sit back and go, 'We might actually be able to do this,'" she said.

Bush Heritage Australia landed the same $25 million, and its science and conservation boss Bruce Webber called the money "completely transformative." It will go almost immediately toward buying Wooroora, a 20,000-hectare cattle station near Cairns that the organisation describes as its most ambitious single acquisition ever. Webber said the next 10 to 15 years will make a significant difference to how much biodiversity Australia keeps.

Some of the cash is headed somewhere unusual: bats. AWC bat specialist Oli Aylen said bats make up more than 20 per cent of all mammals but are generally left out of conservation management. The funding will let researchers tour the group's sanctuaries nationwide to map where bats live, work out which species are threatened, and probably log new records.

Alexandra Burt's grandfather, Peter Wright, was the business partner of Lang Hancock — Gina Rinehart's father. Forbes estimates Burt and her sister Leonie Baldock share a net worth of $4.2 billion, and Burt has spent years in legal fights with Rinehart over the spoils of the Hancock-Wright mining empire, a dispute the donation casts in sharp relief. The couple also owns Top End cattle property Bullo River Station, which AWC co-manages and runs land management programs on.

Neither Burt was available for an interview. In a statement, Alexandra Burt said the donation "felt like the right thing to do." She added: "We see nothing but rapid decline in our natural environment and that needs rapid assistance."