In Kanimbla, in the Blue Mountains, Anna Culliton spent 17 years caring for injured kangaroos and wombats as a volunteer with WIRES. When an email arrived in September 2024 asking her to approve a new constitution with a seven-day deadline, she read the terms, disagreed with the changes, and made a decision that would become increasingly common across the organisation. She left.
Culliton was one of a thousand members who walked away from WIRES, Australia's largest wildlife rescue charity, between July 2024 and early 2026. That exodus tells a story that extends far beyond one Blue Mountains property. Six years after Barack Obama, Ellen DeGeneres, and Lewis Hamilton helped mobilise global donations for injured wildlife, WIRES is struggling with the weight of success.
From windfall to governance crisis
In the financial years of 2020 and 2021 combined, WIRES raised a record amount of more than $100 million in donations. The scale was unprecedented. A survey of donors indicated that 88 per cent expected donations to be used within a few months. But managing a sudden thirty-fold increase in funding, for an organisation accustomed to working lean, proved harder than it looked.
Financial documents filed by WIRES show that it raised $102.4 million in donations in the financial years 2020 and 2021, with $90.4 million of those funds flowing into a bushfire emergency fund. Yet critics ask whether the organisation has treated this gift like the emergency it was, or as an opportunity to fundamentally restructure.
The numbers are striking. In 2019, before the bushfires, employee expenses totalled $2 million for nearly 40 full-time equivalent staff. In 2025, it totalled $8.1 million for nearly 77 full-time equivalent staff. Media reporting emerged suggesting that charities were not distributing money to people in need fast enough, that they were stockpiling money, and that they were spending too much on administration.
Stephen Van Mil, an Australian vet and chief executive of the Byron Bay Wildlife Hospital, said he was frustrated with the organisation. More than 24 months later and the money wasn't spent where it should have been – saving wildlife.
The wider questions about accountability
The frustration is not limited to the community. Independent senator David Pocock says Australians responded to the plight of wildlife in the black summer bushfires with extraordinary generosity. This created a unique opportunity to transform a historically under-resourced sector, but he's concerned WIRES is yet to do that and is sitting on huge amounts of money while other organisations struggle to survive.
Sue Higginson, a NSW Greens MP and former wildlife carer, points to a concrete alternative vision. The Northern Rivers Wildlife Hospital was built on crown land and cost $2.5 million to build and equip, a model that she says could have been replicated elsewhere. That kind of capital investment might have created lasting infrastructure. Instead, the money pooled in WIRES accounts.
Even in October 2025, WIRES reported that all emergency funds were committed to projects but only 42 per cent had been spent. The organisation argues this reflects prudent long-term planning. CEO Leanne Taylor says the money raised during the bushfires was not a windfall but a reflection of the trust the charity has built over decades, and denies that the money could have been transformative for the entire sector.
The prosecutions that fractured trust
The financial disputes might have been manageable had the organisation's relationships with its own volunteers remained intact. But the Tracy Dods case changed everything.
Former WIRES volunteer Tracy Clare Dods, 55, of Kanimbla in the Blue Mountains was found guilty in March of aggravated animal cruelty for not taking Dolores, a female eastern grey kangaroo with injuries from a barbed wire fence, to a veterinarian. Dods had cared for hundreds of injured kangaroos over years of volunteer work. She was also Culliton's mentor.
A contentious element of the case was a Zoom call organised by WIRES. Tracy believed this was a routine three-monthly welfare check and says she was given no warning that her care was under scrutiny and no concerns were raised before, during or after the call. Yet a recording of this meeting later became central to the RSPCA court case. Days later, Tracy was referred to the RSPCA. On 8 March 2021, the RSPCA, accompanied by WIRES, raided Tracy's property and Dolores was seized and euthanised.
Dods won on appeal. The appeal judge criticised WIRES for not raising any concerns with Dods before calling in the RSPCA, and described the behaviour by WIRES and RSPCA during the raid as at times aggressive. But the damage was done. The infighting at WIRES has played out at member meetings, on social media and in the courts and the most profound effect has been the impact on volunteers. In July 2024, WIRES had 3465 members, and it now has about 2400.
Culliton quit partly because of what happened to Dods. Within a week, five other local volunteers also left. In a sector where unpaid volunteers are the backbone of rescue operations across rural Australia, each departure matters.
The fundamental tension
WIRES defends its decisions. Taylor points to measurable achievements: the organisation assisted 164,000 native animals in the last financial year, purchased a raptor hospital in NSW, and expanded to Tasmania. The Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission review, made public in October 2020, found the charities acted legally and responsibly, allocating funds to bushfire response programs and their delivery, and were found to have balanced immediate relief with the need to supply funds for the long-term recovery phase.
Yet a legitimate question lingers about opportunity cost. If 42 per cent of a $100 million fund had been distributed more rapidly to smaller groups building infrastructure, would the wildlife rescue sector today be stronger? Would volunteers feel heard? Independent senator David Pocock says serious concerns have been raised about increased administration costs, declining membership and a growing lack of transparency and oversight over management of the remaining Black Summer bushfire funds.
None of this is simple. Large organisations need staff, systems, and governance. Managing $100 million responsibly is harder than opening a tap. Long-term habitat restoration matters as much as immediate rescue. The problem is not that WIRES tried to scale up or invest in the future. The problem is that it failed to bring its own volunteers along on that journey.
The bushfire crisis was a moment of national unity around wildlife in distress. What happened next was internal to one charity, but the cost has been shared. In the Blue Mountains and across NSW, volunteers who were ready to dedicate themselves have stepped back. The money that was meant to transform the sector may instead become a cautionary tale about how institutions can mistake organisational growth for genuine progress.