2024 Rocklily Wombats Calendar is SOLD OUT Thankyou everyone whom, purchased we value your support!

Our online shop - what does it fund?

Our online shop—what does it fund? in a word everything! 

We are based at Wombeyan Caves, just tucked inside the south-west corner of the Blue Mountains National Park NSW in the middle of nowhere!

We run an online shop to fund our own wildlife work rescuing, rehabilitating and soft-releasing wombats and macropods (wallaroos, swamp wallabies, red-necked wallabies and eastern grey kangaroos). We also take any injured or orphaned native animals, birds, echidnas, snakes, lizards and goannas, and koalas. We put a lot of time and effort and money into treating treat mange in wild wombats and helping other people treat it too.

Since we had 2 firestorms go thru here on dec 31st 2019 we have the additional costs of feeding and looking after hundreds of displaced wildlife. We have a Gif of food, 200 lt water feeder, hay etc program going on our shop and thankfully we have raised enough to cover costs of just on $1,100 per week for first 6 weeks then cost has reduced to around $600 per week.   We have not been eligible for any grants for the ongoing cots of this sadly and continue to work hard at ensuring what we sell on our online shop is what people want so we can continue to fund ourselves.  

More recently in June we have been getting sewn patato free from Arc which has really helped. And our destroyed dam has been fixed by the Humane Society as wildlife would not drink the alkaline water from the tons of ash and silk that filled it.  

Our family have been major contributors to shortfalls and we are grateful. 

We value our supporters/customers and enjoy getting feedback.

The online shop is our ONLY source of funding. As well we have used our own savings, which were intended for our do-it-yourself upcycled renovation.

We prefer to offer some really great handmade Australian wildlife-themed items and some beautiful collectable items and make a profit from them than to be begging for donations. It’s a win-win for us all, we can make an income out here in the middle of nowhere and you can buy some really nice items and not only support the artisan who made them but help us feed and care for our wombats and kangaroos.

We continue to fund our work in educating, and also treating mange in wild wombats and we enjoy and are proud to help support those who also do this too.  ‘Share the love’ is what Wiggles the wise wild wombat says! We endeavour to post all that we make and use for our wombat care to give others ideas. We’re always happy to talk to or have visits from other carers in their efforts and ours in improving our caring. We adaptively manage, constantly learning—it never ends.

We feel our range of Australian-made, native animal-themed products complements what we do. We choose items because of their uniqueness and quality, making sure that they are easy to post or take as gifts for travellers overseas. Finding these products has not been easy!

We are always happy to stock handmade items that complement our range, so contact us if you make something that you think we would be interested in.

 

Our First 2018 Wombat Calendar has been a great success allowing us to tackle some really big fire safe clearing after we allowed too much bush to regrow near pens and the house.

Our 2019 Calendar will be funding research equipment that we can use to look and record the wombat densities at night in the area here and at our other release sites. We take the final release of our wombats very seriously, after two years of hard work bringing them up to be resilient wild wombats. We are already looking at the impact on other wombats in the area, and try and look at just what is sustainable in the release areas. It’s not easy finding suitable areas to release, and that we can monitor longterm. But we have and will continue to constantly look at what we are doing and adaptively manage our release programs. We will be updating our website with what we are doing so others can give feedback, learn from or be inspired by what we get up to.

Our 2020 Wombat Calendar was very timely allowing us to have funds to prepare for the fire by purchasing medical supplies for burns and 45 bails of hay many bags of kangaroo and wombat pellets which we stored in the house as we knew we would be locked in by falling trees and fire. We were locked in for 8 days and were able to continue feeding the drought and now fire effected remaining wildlife from day one. 

We have a rocklilywombats Facebook page now and word of mouth is our main form of advertising.

 View from Rangers pen by wildlife camera of the fire. 

A little bit about raising just one wombat. Wombi came into care March 2018.

Mum was left on the road where she had been hit by a car, luckily Dianna came along to move mum off the road and rescue little Wombat. She weighs just a tiny 492g (4 months old) and will take 2 years to grow to around 23kg. She is now getting fed every 4 hours around the clock. She will drink around 60 litres of specialist marsupial milk with the sale of one brooch buying 1/2 L milk! Also chewing her way through around 24 teats, although sometimes they can shred a $4 teat a day when teething. She will need to be kept warm on a special heat pad for the next two months till she has grown some nice fur. Little ones with no fur, nude as we like to say, are called ‘pinkies’ for obvious reasons. She will also require us to cut many kilos of grass roadside and she will journey through 3 stages here to her eventual supported soft release. With so many dead mums on the road it won’t be long before we have a buddy for her, sadly.

 

In the foreground is middle school with the newer addition to the right of class 5. All pens are connected with lockable wombat doors, and have water and of course numerous burrows!

Middle school in foreground and top wombatorium right of pine on hilltop