It’s the grass Australian’s love to hate.
Known to botanists as cenchrus ciliaris, the mere mention of its common name—buffel grass —can strike fondness, fear and frustration into the hearts of Australians who make their homes far from the narrow coastal strip where 80% of us live.
Native to parts of Africa and Asia, including Afghanistan, Pakistan and northwest India, buffel has been sown across the globe as a pasture grass and for soil conservation.
But some now call it our most serious environmental weed. In fact, in 2019 Biosecurity South Australia labelled buffel “the biggest invasive species threat to biodiversity across the entire Australian arid zone.”
Some pastoralists, however, applaud buffel, for its value as a cattle feed, its hardy nature, and for Australia’s historic efforts to conserve vulnerable dryland soils by sowing the grass across much of the inland from the early twentieth century.
Indeed, after World War I, buffel was distributed across central, tropical and sub-tropical Australia, including in Western Australia’s northwest and Queensland’s North.
Perhaps such early efforts were understandable given that in the 70% of Australia that is arid or semi-arid, good pasture can be hard to come by.
In the 1960s, a deliberate buffel seeding program was undertaken in the Northern Territory, and the grass sown on cattle stations as fodder, for dust suppression, and to control erosion.
Now, much of Australia’s vast inland is covered in buffel.
And feeling runs deep on the vigorous and pervasive species, some calling it “God’s grass”, others the “botanical equivalent of the cane toad.”
Meanwhile, conservationists and many ecologists rue the species’ propensity to invade and displace native species, reduce biodiversity, disrupt Aboriginal cultural practises and fuel wildfires.
How much is there, exactly?
A number for exactly how much buffel is out there proves hard to pin down.
“Mapping is quite limited,” says NT Government environmental scientist and Weeds Branch Program Manager Buffel Grass for Central Australia Amber Clarke, based at Alice Springs.
Clarke manages buffel across Central Australia, a landscape which, after relatively modest falls of rain this year, once again turned a bright green with fresh buffel growth.
“The issue is often that buffel is everywhere and people don’t necessarily think to map and report it.
“The branch and the Weed Advisory Committee definitely recognise that’s a big gap in our management.”
In the broadest terms, buffel covers large areas of WA, NT, SA and New South Wales. In 2001 Hannah and Thrugood estimated buffel covered 30 milllion hectares of inland Queensland.
Commonly cited Australia wide, is that 70% of the country is climatically suitable for buffel, which is perhaps more of a prophecy, though one we might seem well on the way to fulfilling.
In Alice Springs, Clarke leads a 3-strong team including two technical officers to tackle the vexed issue of buffel after the NT declared it a weed in July of 2025.
The declaration came after years of lobbying by conservationists alongside complaints from some pastoralists and the NT Cattleman’s Association that a weed declaration for buffel would jeopardise their livelihoods.
Striking peace
In May this year, conservation groups upped the buffel ante by proposing it be on a list of Australia’s most problematic plant species, as determined by the federal government.
Called a Weed of National Significance, or WoNS, an application to secure the status was submitted to the Australian Government by Central Australian groups comprising the Indigenous Desert Alliance, Alinytjara Wiluṟara Landscape Board and the Alice Springs based Arid Lands Environment Centre.
While contentious for some, the move attracted strong support in academic circles and widespread attention in media.
Unsurprisingly, positions on buffel can be entrenched. And a somewhat adversarial approach pervaded the lead up to its declaration as a weed in the Northern Territory last year and persists in some quarters.
However, consensus might still be possible.
Adjunct researcher at Charles Darwin University’s Research Institute for Environment and Livelihoods ecologist Dr Margaret Friedel has spent more than 50 years studying arid and semi-arid environments of the Centre and beyond.
About 2010, Friedel and her research group convened a series of workshops across Australia concerning attitudes to buffel, including in Alice, Rockhampton, Port Augusta and elsewhere.
“We drew in people who were pastoralists or conservationists, who, for whatever reason, had an interest in buffel grass or the environment,” she says.
“What we found was that there was more agreement (than expected) … once they were given a framework to operate in and (could) consider … what the problem was and where it was.
“Eventually they came to acknowledge the other side’s (point of view), they could understand why they (did or) didn’t like buffel grass, and also what management was acceptable and whereabouts in the environment management would be most effective.”
Having written previously on buffel, Dr Friedel is this year writing for the Australian Rangelands Society on potential solutions to the contention around the proposed WoNS declaration.
But recently her attention has also turned to buffel’s history and exactly how it came to be so pervasive.
In a 2020 paper entitled ‘Unwelcome guests: a selective history of weed introductions to arid and semi-arid Australia’, Dr Friedel outlined how buffel came to Australia and how it spread through the red Centre.
As it turns out, the grass arrived via camel harnesses. From the very first camel delivered to Port Adelaide in 1840. Many more camels followed through the 1860s, with some 10-20,000 eventually arriving, half to two thirds to South Australia.
Present in hay aboard the camel ships and on the wharves, the seed was also distributed in the harnesses as camels carried goods and produce across vast areas of the inland, to remote towns and pastoral lands.
Explorers Gosse, Warburton and Giles used camels on expeditions north and west from SA during the 1870s and likely aided the spread.
After the First World War, buffel seed was distributed to station properties near Port Hedland and by the 1920s to experimental plots in NSW and Qld.
Until 1929, camels ferried goods from where the rail ended at Oodnadatta to Alice Springs. Indeed, according to renowned cameleer Walter Smith (clarify), from 1914 to the 1930s buffel grass was deliberately spread along the camel routes and northwards to Newcastle Waters and out to cattle stations and missions.
[Cameleers] had carried small cloth parcels of seeds and, at favoured localities such as good soil at watering points, loosened the soil, broadcast the seeds, covered them over, and watered.
Making a plan
The NT weed declaration for buffel had followed earlier steps by South Australia, which declared buffel a weed in 2015, the first Australian jurisdiction to do so.
A year down the track, the pair stands alone.
Clarke’s team hopes to have a draft Central Australia Weed Management Plan available for public comment by the end of the year and is accepting public submissions via a Have Your Say portal until 11 August.
But there are only 3 on the team and a vast area to manage.
When the NT Government made its 2024 declaration, it allocated $750K annually to tackle the issue, allowing for the employment of Clarke and a technical officer, and another technical officer due to start work this month.
“We’ve been brought on to have that extra operational capacity to focus on just buffel,” says Amber, her priority regions being Alice Springs and Tennant Creek regions, where most Territory buffel grows.
“Our role is to provide advice and support, Territory-wide coordination and to administer the Weeds Management Act.
“For the buffel grass officers, it’s more about land holder support and capacity building, community engagement and extension.”
Clarke stresses any Weed Management Plan for Central Australia will not be an operational plan in the sense that most people (might be) familiar.
“In terms of: ‘This is who is going to do what, with what money and in what time frame’.
“It will be very much a high-level regulatory document (with a) focus on what you have to do to comply with the Act.”
The plan will set out broad objectives that the government wants landholders to achieve, she warns, but the methods to achieve those objectives will not be prescribed.
“Methods will be flexible,” she says, “based on landholders’ or managers’ unique circumstances.
“And we’ll provide guidance, best practise guides; but they’re guides, not legislative requirements.”
Still, maps would be handy.
“(Mapping) would help us identify new emerging threats,” says Clarke. “And to have the best possible understanding of the scale of the problem, a way to measure impact, the success or otherwise of management efforts.”
Maps would allow Clarke and her team to identify areas they might want to target (with) management, she says.
“Like where (buffel) is only just starting to incur.
“And priority areas like Indigenous Protected Areas, or Conservation Areas that don’t necessarily have heaps of buffel, where you can make some inroads.
“Everyone acknowledges we need better maps and better information.”