This year's State of the Environment report showed there are now more foreign plant species in Australia than native ones.
Worse, the number of threatened animals species has risen 8 per cent since 2016, the report said, with more extinctions expected.
So how did Australia get here?
Climate change and habitat loss have played a huge role in the problem.
So have invasive species. Closely connected to their proliferation in Australia is a group called the Acclimatisation Society.
It was a gathering of white settlers who wanted nature's bounty to thrive in Australia.
The problem is it did.
Far too much.
A group sets out to 'fix' nature
For Bunurong writer and language researcher Sonia Marie, Pareip (spring) is her favourite season.
"It's the season of the nesting birds," she writes in her book Kulin Tales Seven Seasons of the Bunurong.
The season of "Barroworn (magpies) protecting their young" as "Garrong (black wattle) slowly begin to bloom, dropping their flowers into the running water".
"This lets the Bunurong who are down in the lowlands know that Koon-warra (swan) eggs are ready to collect. It is the return time of Eoke (eels), which brings much celebration and Yain Yang (dance and song)."
This deep understanding of nature has been held by Indigenous Australians across thousands of years.
But what happened to this knowledge when white settlers arrived?
Lynette Russell is a laureate professor at Monash University's Indigenous Studies Centre, and a descendant of the Wotjobaluk people of Western Victoria.
In the mid-1800s, there was a very popular — and "very white" — idea of nature as separate from culture. And to Aboriginal people, it "doesn't make any sense", she tells ABC RN's The History Listen.
"From an Aboriginal perspective, everything in the landscape has a name, has a relationship, has a kinship. It's connected … it's all culture."
This understanding was lost on one particular group of educated, passionate colonists who, in 1857, were keen to be part of a "new Victorian era of natural history", says Karen Rawady, a historian who has worked at Melbourne Zoo for 22 years.
These men joined forces in Victoria under the banner of the Acclimatisation Society with a lofty aim.
They considered "that nature was somehow flawed" and that their role was "fixing nature", says Jenny Gray, CEO of Zoos Victoria.
"At present, it seems as if the world were only partially furnished," Edward Wilson, the founder and head of Victoria's Acclimatisation Society, told an audience at the Royal Colonial Institute in 1875.
"In going about so serious a task as that of remodelling the arrangements of nature herself, we ought, I think, to assert our right to destroy some things for the purpose of smoothing the path of more valuable things."
The Society's motto was: "If it lives, we want it."
Specifically, the Society sought to introduce "useful" animals to Australia, Rawady says.
"The thinking was, let's acclimatise this country basically for profit," she says.
The Society sent animals like pigeons, kangaroo rats, wombats, kangaroos, black swans, magpies and kookaburras to various European cities.
In return, those cities sent to Australia alpacas, Angora goats and different types of sheep, as well as "grouse, quails, pheasants — anything that could be eaten or released for game", Rawady says.
The Society also introduced European carp to the Murray River, deer to some mountain areas, starlings, sparrows and Indian myna birds, and other "animals that we probably would prefer they didn't [introduce], many of which are now in plague proportion", Professor Russell says.
The Society also wanted those creatures that quelled their homesickness.
"A lot of the colonists lamented the fact that they didn't have the beautiful bird songs of home," Professor Russell says.
"They started by introducing songbirds, particularly things like blackbirds and thrushes."
Indeed, Wilson, in his 1875 speech, said that several years earlier he'd "sent down to Melbourne … the common song thrush of England … and when I was last in the colony, I noticed them … singing as cheerfully as in their native land.
"Since that day, the song of the thrush has been productive of a degree of pleasure to my ears very difficult to describe."
'They didn't include Indigenous knowledges'
Professor Russell keeps an 1856 quote from Wilson saved on her phone:
"This country has been shamelessly stolen from the blacks. In less than 20 years, we have nearly swept them off the face of the earth. We have shot them down like dogs and consigned whole tribes to the agonies of an excruciating death.
"We've made them drunkards and infected them with disease, which has rotted the bones of their adults, and made few children as exist amongst them a sorrow and a torture from their very instant of birth.
"We've made them outcasts in their own land and are rapidly consigning them to entire annihilation."
For Professor Russell, the quote is evidence that the early Europeans knew exactly what they were doing.
And that global trade was more important than local knowledge.
"Most Aboriginal people in Victoria were removed on to missions and those that were not living on missions were probably quite invisible to the European settlers, so they didn't include Indigenous knowledges into any of their decisions," Professor Russell says.
If they had, they might've understood sooner that the work they believed would be of lasting benefit to the land was, in fact, doomed to fail.
'A failed experiment'
By the start of the 20th century, the Acclimatisation Society realised they had a serious problem on their hands.
Animals they'd introduced had died out because the environment was inhospitable to them, Dr Gray says.
Those more adaptable became invasive pests, along with domestic animals that arrived with colonisation as well.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, flora and fauna was "there to be exploited … a case of, 'Oh, there's something very interesting. Can somebody shoot it?'", Professor Russell says.
"That's how it operated. That's how our museums are filled with all the things that they're filled with. Because those animals were sacrificed. It's a sobering and rather grisly history."
But by the 20th century, people were starting "to think in terms of ecological systems, rather than just individual species or individual plants or individual rocks", she says.
"They start to think much more holistically and start to imagine that everything is connected."
Rawady says there was a growing understanding among white people "that there was a value to the native flora and fauna, [and] that several species had already gone extinct or [were] on the brink of extinction".
"Being a scientific-based organisation still, they wanted to research and make sure that that didn't happen."
So, in 1937, after a decline in membership, the Society was dissolved and recreated as the Zoological Board of Victoria. It sought financial support to extend its work to include research on native animals now threatened with extinction.
Dr Gray describes a "wave of massive change" that, by the 1970s, had washed over zoos and aquariums in Australia. These institutions were starting to use their skills to address conservation, "telling stories of critically endangered animals … [and] habitats".
The work of the Acclimatisation Society had been "a failed experiment", Dr Gray says.
"They thought that they would be able to have animals being the same all over the world. And what we now know is that animals need pretty specific environments to thrive in."
Where the Society would bring animals over "to adapt to our climate, for our needs", today we're observing animals and what they need, Rawady says.
And we are using that knowledge "to recreate the environmental conditions that they need … so that we can breed endangered species and re-release them back into the environment".
It's work that is set to get only more pressing.
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