Standing for Tjaltjraak Boodja: Rights of nature on Western Australia's south coast

Abstract The Tjaltjraak Boodja Park (TBP) in Esperance, Western Australia, is a place of international, scientific significance including a 7500‐year‐old intertidal forest and a globally rare botanical “hybrid swarm” of Tjaltjraak mallee. The hybrid swarm is a living, interbreeding assemblage sustained through ongoing genetic exchange, while the intertidal forest represents an ancestral ecological system preserved in peat some 7500 years ago. Together, these elements challenge conventional legal categories that separate living from nonliving, terrestrial from marine, and natural from cultural. Drawing on Christopher Stone's (1972) Should Trees Have Standing? and subsequent developments in the Rights of Nature movement, this paper examines whether—and how—forms of legal standing, personhood, or guardian‐based representation might be applied to protect the Wharton intertidal forest and hybrid swarm. We argue that Rights of Nature and Earth stewardship are interdependent, complementary frameworks whereby the former can establish the legal status of these entities, while the latter supplies the ongoing, action‐oriented responsibility—monitoring, adaptive response, and cross‐jurisdictional coordination—through which that status is realized in practice. We propose that a carefully designed legal standing or guardianship model, operating alongside Wudjari custodianship, could provide a coherent and long‐term mechanism for precautionary protection. Extending this to the broader TBP would not only conserve an ecologically and culturally significant landscape, but also invite broader reflection on how law and stewardship together value ancient environments located at the shifting boundary between land and sea.