In the first days of January 2020, wildlife carers on Kangaroo Island's western end were driving into still-smoking bushland to search for animals that might have survived a fire front many locals had never imagined possible on an island ringed by farmland and sea. They found glossy black-cockatoo nesting trees reduced to ash, a critically endangered dunnart's entire mapped range apparently gone, and grazing country that had taken generations to build turned to blackened stubble within days. Two people were killed defending their home and business on the island's south coast on 3 January 2020. It was the costliest natural disaster in the island's history, and the recovery task it created — economic, ecological and psychological — was always going to outlast whichever government happened to be holding office when the smoke cleared.
What the government did
The Kangaroo Island fires burned from around 20 December 2019 to mid-January 2020, ultimately covering close to 211,000 hectares — approaching half of the island's roughly 440,000 hectares (approx.; Australian Disaster Resilience Knowledge Hub, citing SA Government data). They were fought and, in their immediate aftermath, managed by the Marshall Liberal Government, which held office in South Australia from March 2018 to March 2022. In early 2020 that government commissioned an independent review by former Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty, whose report — released 12 July 2020 — made 15 recommendations on the state's bushfire preparedness, backed by an initial $20.3 million for new CFS trucks, equipment and burnover protection technology (SAFECOM, Independent Review into South Australia's 2019-20 Bushfire Season, July 2020). By the end of November 2020, the state government had invested more than $79 million in bushfire recovery grants and initiatives, alongside a Commonwealth government that put $32 million toward a $40 million Kangaroo Island Road Safety and Bushfire Resilience Package in its 2021-22 Budget, plus $19.8 million toward a new island desalination plant and $15 million for a Softwood Transport Assistance Program to move burnt plantation timber (Premier of South Australia, media releases, 2020-21).
The Malinauskas Labor Government took office in March 2022 — more than two years after the fires — inheriting a recovery program already several years into a rebuild originally expected to run the better part of a decade. It has continued, and in places accelerated, that program: a $19.5 million Flinders Chase National Park Visitor Centre at Karatta, replacing the Rocky River centre destroyed in the fires, opened in mid-2024, alongside a $4.2 million upgrade of the Kangaroo Island Wilderness Trail, a $2.3 million restoration of Kelly Hill Caves, a $2 million boardwalk at Remarkable Rocks and a $0.95 million rebuild of May's Homestead and Postman's Cottage (Premier of South Australia; Department for Environment and Water, 2023-24). Five new firefighting aircraft were added to the CFS fleet ahead of the 2023-24 season as part of the continuing Keelty response, and in May 2026 the government delivered an $800,000 election commitment funding the largest winter feral-cat trapping effort yet on the island's Dudley Peninsula, on top of $1.5 million from the Commonwealth (Landscape South Australia — Kangaroo Island). The state's formal bushfire recovery program was only wound up with a final report published in September 2025 — nearly six years, and two changes of government, after the fires (Government of South Australia, 2019-20 South Australian Bushfire Recovery Report – Final, September 2025).
The strongest case
An unprecedented disaster, a recovery built to outlast any one government
No government could have prevented a fire that burned through almost half an island during a fire season shaped by record heat and drought-cured fuel across southern Australia. The Marshall Government that fought the fire commissioned an independent review within months rather than years; the Malinauskas Government that inherited the recovery in March 2022 has not walked away from a program with a genuinely multi-decade horizon. Rebuilding a burnt national park, a threatened-species population and an island economy was never going to fit inside one term, or even two. The headline achievements are real — a $19.5 million visitor centre delivered, five new firefighting aircraft in the CFS fleet, a glossy black-cockatoo population that has not collapsed despite losing over half its feeding habitat, and a critically endangered dunnart rediscovered and now monitored inside a dedicated predator-free refuge. A government that has kept funding a slow, unglamorous rebuild years after the news cameras left, rather than declaring an early "recovery complete" and moving on, has a legitimate claim to have taken the long view seriously.
The evidence
The scale of what had to be rebuilt is measurable in hectares, animals and dollars. Two people were killed and around 89 homes destroyed, alongside hundreds of farm sheds and thousands of kilometres of fencing (approx.; Kangaroo Island Council; other post-fire counts range somewhat depending on method and date). Almost 60,000 of the island's roughly 600,000 sheep died (approx.; Australian Wool Innovation, 2020). Flinders Chase National Park, the island's oldest and largest protected area, lost the great majority of its vegetation, and the Southern Ocean Lodge — a flagship eco-tourism property — was destroyed outright, reopening in December 2023 after a privately funded $55 million rebuild.
The island's signature threatened species tell a similarly mixed story. The Kangaroo Island glossy black-cockatoo, found nowhere else on Earth, lost at least 54 per cent of its feeding habitat and around 38 per cent of known nest sites in the fires, with roughly three-quarters of the population living in the burnt area (Department for Environment and Water, post-fire habitat assessment, 2020). Its population nonetheless grew from fewer than 200 birds in 1995, when a dedicated recovery program began, to a post-fire census count of 454 in 2020 — but the annual census has since shown the population levelling off rather than continuing to grow, recording 453 birds in 2023 and 446 in 2025 (Landscape South Australia — Kangaroo Island, Glossy Black-Cockatoo census results, 2020-2025).
The Kangaroo Island dunnart, a mouse-sized marsupial already critically endangered before the fires, lost more than 95 per cent of its known habitat. It was feared extinct until camera traps — sorted through by more than 550 volunteers reviewing almost 25,000 images — detected survivors at a single unburnt site in the island's north-west later in 2020. A 13.8-hectare predator-free refuge, protected by an 8.8-kilometre exclusion fence, was subsequently built around that site, and detections there rose sixfold by August 2022 (Australian Wildlife Conservancy, 2020-2022). On the economic side, Kangaroo Island's tourism sector recorded visitor expenditure of $294 million in the year to June 2023 — an all-time high that beat the region's original 2025 target two years early — before easing back to $197 million in the year to December 2024, still around 4 per cent above pre-fire December 2019 levels but around 12 per cent below the December 2023 peak (South Australian Tourism Commission / Tourism Kangaroo Island, visitor expenditure data, 2023-2024).
The critique
Three pieces of evidence complicate the government's account of a rebuild well in hand. The first is pace. Flinders Chase National Park's Rocky River precinct burned in January 2020; its replacement visitor centre did not open until roughly four and a half years later, in mid-2024, even though funding and planning had been under way across two governments for most of that period. For an island whose economy leans heavily on nature tourism, a half-decade without a proper gateway to its single biggest natural attraction — Remarkable Rocks and Admirals Arch — is a long time to operate on temporary arrangements, and neither government has published a full public account of what caused the gap between funding announcement and doors opening.
The second is the scale of investment relative to the stated ambition. The Dudley Peninsula feral cat eradication program is framed by the government and conservation groups as a chance to create the largest human-inhabited feral-cat-free area on Earth — a genuinely significant conservation goal made more urgent by the fires' habitat loss. Yet the government's own election commitment funding the program's largest-ever winter trapping effort was $800,000, delivered in May 2026, against a $6.2 million appeal conservation groups say is needed to finish the job (approx.; Invasive Species Council, appeal, 2025-26). A program with a globally significant goal is being funded in increments well short of what the people running it say completion actually requires.
The third is fragility hiding inside good news. The glossy black-cockatoo population's stability since 2020 — levelling off at 446 to 454 birds rather than continuing the growth trajectory the recovery program had achieved before the fires — is being presented as a conservation success, and in the narrow sense that the species did not collapse, it is. But a population that has not grown in five years despite an active, funded recovery program suggests the fires may have permanently reduced the island's carrying capacity for the species, a harder problem than upbeat census headlines acknowledge. The dunnart's recovery, meanwhile, rests on a single 13.8-hectare fenced refuge — real progress from a species feared extinct, but one fire, fence breach or disease event away from being undone. And the tourism recovery the government has publicly celebrated sits alongside expenditure data showing a 12 per cent fall in the year to December 2024 against the December 2023 peak, a wrinkle that upbeat "leaps and bounds" messaging tends not to mention.
Underneath all three sits an unresolved question from the Keelty review itself. SAFECOM's own implementation reporting shows all 27 short-term recommendations from the 2020 review complete, but only 20 of the 42 longer-term recommendations finished as at the most recent public update, with the remainder still described as under way (SAFECOM, Independent Review implementation status, accessed 2026). Nearly six years after the fires that prompted the review, roughly half of its longer-term fire-resilience recommendations remain incomplete — a gap the current government has had almost four full years in office to close.
A conservation program with a genuinely world-significant goal is being funded in six-figure instalments, on an island that cannot afford to find out the hard way that half-measures were not enough.
The risk to the future
The risk to the future
An island with one road in, one fire season away from repeating 2020
Kangaroo Island's exposure has not gone away; broader climate trends recorded by the Bureau of Meteorology point to a longer, more intense fire-weather season across southern Australia in recent decades, not a shorter one. An island economy now leaning harder on nature tourism — visitor spending built substantially around Flinders Chase, the glossy black-cockatoo and other wildlife experiences — is arguably more, not less, exposed to another major fire than it was in 2019, because so much of the post-fire rebuild has been designed around showcasing a fragile recovery rather than diversifying away from fire-dependent natural assets. The dunnart's entire confirmed population sits inside a single fenced refuge; the glossy black-cockatoo population has stopped growing; and roughly half of the state's own long-term bushfire-resilience recommendations remain unfinished six years on. If the next severe fire season arrives before that unfinished business is complete — before the CFS's longer-term capability gaps are closed and before threatened-species refuges are expanded beyond single sites — Kangaroo Island risks a repeat disaster with a thinner ecological and economic buffer than it had in 2019, and considerably less patience from a public that has already funded one long, expensive rebuild.