Old Land, New Landscapes: A story of farmers, conservation and the Landcare movement

AREA

Introduction

OLD LAND, NEW LANDSCAPES is a story of nature conservation as practised by people traditionally perceived as being antithetical to the environment—sheep and wheat farmers of the rural Australian bush. The story describes how some of these farmers started protecting fragments of bushland that had survived in their district despite decades of land-clearing or development; and how they went further—working towards reintroducing native animals obliterated from their farming landscapes a century before by the advent of European settlement. Their plans and projects were made legitimate, if you like, through their participation in the Australia-wide National Landcare Program, a program broadly aimed at encouraging sustainable agriculture and nature conservation in rural communities. By forming their own local Landcare Group, farmers from the Peak Hill area of central-western New South Wales effectively initiated a process of landscape change across their family-owned farms. Their involvement in this cultural transformation, no matter how rudimentary, has made them pioneers of a new kind of settlement within the context of Australia’s frontier and colonial history.

Old Land, New Landscapes focuses on the Genaren Hill Landcare Group, located in the heart of the sheep and wheat belt in central-western New South Wales. The story of the Genaren Hill Landcare Group’s various conservation projects is based on the Group’s original fourteen-family membership, as well as many of their non-Landcare neighbours. The aim of this book is to describe the nature conservation ethos that emerged from that local farming culture and out of this Landcare experience.

It is in this respect that Old Land, New Landscapes presents a conservative, considered view of what can be achieved given the realities of farming life. Much can be celebrated in the persistence of people who remain living in landscapes that the largely urban citizens of Australia show very little interest in—despite the convenience of having their food grown there for them. On the other hand, this book looks closely at the notion of ecological restoration as developed through Landcare, particularly at the debate about making community-based involvement in landscape change less incrementalist and less ad hoc. I come to the conclusion that, in most respects, all bets are off: the task we face in making sense of what we have created by settling the bush (especially from a nature conservation perspective) is a lot more complex—and even more bizarre—than any technically perfect government or scientific strategy could imagine.

Forty years ago, the Australian architect Robin Boyd believed his compatriots had a ‘slightly psychopathic pioneering attitude to the landscape’.¹ Today, perhaps, the extremes of psychosis are over but we are all still in therapy, with hundreds of strategies, plans, programs and projects aimed at retaining and restoring a notional pre-European Australia. The commitment to investigate how restoration might proceed, and the potential to make extraordinary changes is, however, real enough, reminding us as George Seddon commented thirty years ago that ‘the imaginative apprehension of a continent is as much a pioneering enterprise as breaking the clod.’²

Australia is unique among countries with a frontier history and high levels of biodiversity (also called ‘megadiversity’), because it is an affluent nation with a low population in a large land mass. It also has comparatively high numbers of ecologically trained citizens.³ Australia was one of the first countries to sign the Convention on Biological Diversity, produced as a result of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio, Brazil in 1992, commonly referred to as the Earth Summit. In accordance with the Convention, which came into force in December 1993, Australia has developed a National Strategy for the Conservation of Australia’s Biological Diversity.⁴ A plethora of similar strategies and plans that inform the restoration movement have been derived from this document, from the state level down to regional and local plans for biodiversity conservation.

These strategies do not necessarily translate into on-the-ground action. We might say diplomatically that this is partly explained by the different stages of development in the agricultural frontier. Australia has a mixture of new and old frontier landscapes. Large-scale clearance of semi-natural vegetation has continued in parts of Queensland until recently. This has created new frontier landscapes comparable to those in the Amazon Basin (a point often made in the Australian national press).⁵ However, in the south-east and south-west of the continent are ‘old frontier’ agricultural landscapes where, in some instances, large scale removal of vegetation finished several decades ago. These landscapes, especially in the south-east, coincide with the earliest pastoral operations of the colonial period where sheep and wheat had become the focus of complementary industries by the end of the nineteenth century. This sheep and wheat belt stretches from inland southern Queensland through New South Wales and Victoria to South Australia, west and north of the Great Dividing Range. It was created out of highly diverse temperate eucalypt woodlands which were subjected to intense ‘ecological imperialism’ to create European agriculture.⁶

From the sheep and wheat belt have come familiar landscape images of pasture, sheep, homesteads and scattered eucalypt trees. These elements combined arguably characterise European Australia’s main trope or guiding metaphor for rural landscape: ‘the bush’. As part of the process of reconciliation with the landscape, the destruction of native vegetation in this former frontier is now mostly prohibited, both to preserve wildlife and to further the functional sustainability of the landscape (for example, to prevent soil erosion or salinity).

In many areas of the sheep and wheat belt, some native vegetation has persisted through the last one hundred and fifty years of agriculture in a mosaic of strips and blocks: along roadsides, on non-arable hilltops or in patches across farms. These fragmented patchworks may have existed in their current form for decades, in and across predominantly privately-owned family-based farms. Concurrent with (and often preceding) new regulatory measures preventing land-clearance, there are government programs that encourage farmers to preserve and better manage what has become known as remnant vegetation. These ‘off-reserve’ nature conservation schemes (that is, conservation not focused on creating National Park reserves, but working outside them) also encourage farmers to reintroduce indigenous vegetation onto land used mostly for ‘primary production’, in the hope that new plantings will connect patches together, reintegrating the landscape for the benefit of fauna and flora.

The National Landcare Program commenced in 1989, and has become one of the main vehicles for encouraging concern for biodiversity in the sheep and wheat belt (both before and after the development of biodiversity strategies).⁷ Landcare works by sponsoring the on-ground projects of thousands of urban and rural Landcare Groups throughout Australia—including large numbers of Landcare Groups in the old frontier landscapes of the sheep and wheat belt. In essence the aim of Landcare is to assist local farmers, through group planning, to work out local solutions for long-term agricultural and/or ecological problems that, by implication, they were once financially or conceptually unable to care about.

In light of the indifference or active antagonism towards native fauna and flora during the settlement process, and the destruction of habitat on a grand scale, the conservation projects developed by some Landcare Groups would appear to represent a radical shift in thinking and practice. Even where Landcare Groups have focused less on nature conservation and more on functional problems for agriculture (such as weeds) their participation in a range of projects and schemes takes farmers out of their individual properties and into consideration of the wider landscape and their place in it.

Given criticisms that Landcare is ad hoc and unstrategic, this book considers the process that led farmers in the Genaren Hill Landcare Group to involvement with government programs that encouraged them to become guardians of local fauna and flora. At times, the continuing economic and social decline of rural communities makes studying ‘management of biodiversity’ amongst farmers a poignant task. Arguably, it is difficult to predict the economic and social circumstances that would allow farmers to stay in rural landscapes long enough to become long-term managers of biodiversity. And yet, in the case of the Genaren Hill Landcare Group, farmers took on the immense challenge of bringing locally extinct animals back to their ecologically fragmented landscape, by and large jumping ahead of any similar agenda by government agencies that manage what are, ostensibly, more pristine National Parks.

What amounts to their creative ad hocery within the framework of Landcare has forced me to analyse nature conservation in the sheep and wheat belt of New South Wales through an environmental and landscape history which nonetheless looks to the future, placing the role of people in the landscape ahead of technical knowledge of ecosystem function or fragmentation. This ethnographic emphasis means that I do not just account for the impact of government-funded Landcare projects as some kind of fixed result on people or the landscape. Rather, I describe the manner in which nature conservation adds new levels of meaning and practice to an old frontier landscape, with the possibility that such practice suggests alternative ways to value these landscapes by both the local and the wider community. I argue that because nature conservation is a cultural practice as well as a science-based movement, it should be allowed to develop its own local flavours across the worn-out landscapes where it is taking root. If we need to create new cultural landscapes out of the much vaunted ‘ancient land’ we have clearly transformed so negatively it may only work by taking local case studies of conservation seriously:

Environmental history makes best sense on a regional and/or global scale, and rarely on a national one. Historians will have to reach for boundaries other than the national, state or shire ones. Australia, being a nation continent, may be one of the few exceptions, but I think we need to resist this obvious continental framework and discover instead the many smaller biological and human regions that make up greater Australia.⁸

The histories of small communities and their relationships with government programs are often much more quirky and idiosyncratic than that portrayed by government promotional literature and reports. Old Land, New Landscapes explores this perhaps hidden element of creating change through government programs. In presenting descriptive detail of events, places, processes and lives within an agricultural landscape, I hope to counterbalance the technical and utilitarian perspectives that dominate discussions of agriculture, farmers and biodiversity. This is not because these perspectives are not valid, but because I believe they are inadequate for understanding the specific reality of people’s lives in the landscape. The important point is that whether farmers care or don’t care about wildlife, their local environment or the ecology of landscape, they still live in it, and therefore have an interest in their surroundings that is both rich and revealing.

In some ways, Old Land, New Landscapes is based on the notion that most Australians don’t know much about life in rural communities. With a personal and professional interest in nature conservation, and with an expectation that recent government investment in and growing philanthropic support for environmental restoration will continue, I aim to bring a case study of that investment to wider attention. Increased care and concern for native biota in frontier landscapes, and public and private investment for that purpose, will require better appreciation and description of what occurs when agriculturalists become nature conservationists, and the cultural landscapes created from this process. As an account of biodiversity conservation and an exploration of landscape and community, this book does not move very far from its local setting. However, as local as it may be, the story does not make sense unless explained within the wider context of international concern for the world’s ecosystems and wildlife.

The biodiversity crisis

The circumstances that led a national government to form a program to encourage farmers to protect nature, and to fund projects with a very local character and flavour, ultimately derive from the conviction of many scientists that the Earth faces a catastrophic loss of species—a mass extinction crisis.⁹ The factors that threaten species and ecosystem diversity are well known and include urbanisation, land clearance for agriculture and forestry, and climate change. The long-term consequences of these widespread changes, while unpredictable, could make the Earth uninhabitable, if not simply a more degraded and indeed boring place to live.¹⁰ Preserving biota (all plant and animal life) and ecosystems amounts to a global ‘macro-problem’: ‘multi-faceted, complex, fraught with uncertainties, spatially and temporally diffuse, highly connected to other issues ... and beyond the grasp of existing policy abilities’.¹¹

The significance of life’s diversity has become a key tenet in efforts to conserve nature in the modern world, rendered through the term ‘biodiversity’. As a scientific concept that partly exists to popularise concern for conservation, biodiversity includes ‘the variety of all life forms and their patterns in space—the different plants, animals and micro-organisms, the genes they contain and the ecosystems of which they form part’.¹² The language of nature conservation has shifted from discussing the right of wild plants and animals simply to exist and continue evolving. It now engages in harder, more economic arguments: conserving biodiversity is important because diversity provides insurance against ecological change and underpins ‘ecosystem services’ like air, water and soil upon which human society depends. Destruction of biodiversity is thus equated with using up ‘natural capital’.¹³

Levels and types of biodiversity vary across the planet, as does the speed of modification to landscapes that support life. Megadiversity tends to occur in the tropical and sub-tropical regions. Countries in these regions are often poor, subject to population pressures, with their economies increasingly tied to the vagaries of international markets. In Brazil, clearing rainforest from the Amazon Basin not only eliminates plants, animals and other life-forms (such as fungi), before they are scientifically described, but also destroys indigenous tribes whose knowledge of biodiversity has developed over thousands of years. In this dynamic frontier a new landscape is being created out of the old, with large beef-cattle ranches and smaller peasant holdings interspersed with isolated remnants of the former rainforest.¹⁴

The challenge for nature conservation in these frontier agricultural landscapes is not only to minimise or halt clearing, but also to investigate whether the recently-created fragmented landscape can support the diversity of life once found over the unfragmented area. Isolated conservation reserves based on remnants of once larger ecosystems are likely to be inadequate for preserving biodiversity in the long term. This is because isolation itself has a negative effect on plants and animals, mostly because it makes them susceptible to genetic in-breeding and unpredictable one-off events such as fire or disease epidemics. In addition, the great bulk of remnants are found in the newly-formed agricultural landscapes, where private ownership of land precludes the setting aside of large government reserves. For this reason, while conserving wildlife in state-sponsored nature reserves is necessary, biodiversity protection must also occur off-reserve in modified ecosystems, amongst farmers and private landholders.

This means that while in the Australian situation so many of our agricultural landscapes seem degraded and even beyond repair, any restoration exercise has to embrace the reality of human occupation and involvement with nature and wildlife.

In the case of Landcare Groups, farmer members are frequently advised to design projects according to relevant regional, state or national strategies, and to adopt the latest standards for best practice whether for land degradation amelioration or nature conservation. New laws to enforce management of biodiversity on private land (regardless of landholder participation in Landcare) have left some farmers feeling like ‘unpaid park rangers’.¹⁵ In theory at least, the experience of protecting remnant vegetation or native animals on Landcare farms should be a positive one, if only because many Landcare projects are voluntary and designed by farmers themselves. Old Land, New Landscapes is about such a farmer-initiated vision of nature conservation.

Chapter One explains how I became involved in the Genaren Hill Landcare Group’s projects. Old Land, New Landscapes is based on my PhD research but is, I hope, a non-academic, accessible account of my experiences and how I came to be interested in studying farmers, Landcare and nature conservation. I have decided to be relatively candid about how the PhD fieldwork evolved, not just to give essential context to the story of the Genaren Hill Landcare Group but because social research remains a mysterious process to many people—for students and non-students alike. For this reason, the book’s first chapter lays out my study path in a fairly straightforward manner so that for some readers the research process may be de-mystified. Much of the book’s material is drawn directly from observations, experience and conversations recorded in my research field notes.

Chapter Two provides traditional scene-setting detail about the Genaren Hill Landcare Group, describing the landscape, climate, ecology and agriculture. It also introduces the history of local involvement in nature conservation through recent government funding.

Chapters Three and Four look exclusively at the property Genaren, from which the Genaren Hill Landcare Group takes its name. More precisely, these chapters describe the interest in nature conservation of the property owners, Mike and Kylie Sutherland, who instigated a large and well-publicised nature conservation project shared with their local community through Landcare. I examine the balance between nature conservation and agriculture on the Sutherlands’ farm, and their key experiences in dealing with government agencies responsible for off-reserve conservation.

In Chapter Five I move beyond Genaren to the wider district landscape. I look at several farms within the Genaren Hill Landcare Group and the mixture of design philosophies that have informed agriculture and nature conservation on these properties.

Chapter Six considers those new to, or on the outside of, the process of government-funded nature conservation participation: more recent members of the Genaren Hill Landcare Group, indifferent neighbours and local Aboriginal people. This chapter also considers how information on biodiversity reaches farmers as ‘extension’, describing significant instances of expert judgement of the landscape.

Chapters Seven and Eight consider whether the Genaren Hill Landcare Group’s experience has any wider implications for the rest of the sheep and wheat belt. These chapters look at what has occurred as nature conservation in the Genaren Group and consider the key issue of whether this recent local history suggests opportunities for creating new cultural landscapes across rural Australia—landscapes our entire society might value and enjoy despite the current perception of widespread degradation and ecological loss. Finally, Chapter Nine details what has happened to the Landcare Group in the years since my research took place.

1

Seeing Land, Seeking Landscape

THE AGRICULTURAL LANDSCAPES of southern Australia, created for sheep and crops by European settlers in the nineteenth century, replaced temperate eucalypt woodlands that had been managed by Aboriginal people for thousands of years.¹ In the process of transformation these eucalypt woodlands lost much of their indigenous biodiversity with many local and regional extinctions of native mammals, particularly medium-sized marsupials such as bilbies, bettongs and quolls.² The newly-created rural landscapes never really gained the kind of functional stability that could have made an Antipodean agriculture seem likely to persist for millennia as farming has done in China, India and Europe. Even allowing for the triumphs and successes of traditional Australian agriculture—commercial, social and in some sense, ecological—‘riding on the sheep’s back’ was Australia’s lot for less than a hundred and fifty years, and has finally become both metaphorically and practically unsustainable.³ The oldest rural landscapes have lost their mythological significance for many urban people and wool especially is no longer vital to Australia’s economy.

Whatever the case for the future of agriculture in the bush of temperate inland Australia, whether positive or negative, one thing is certain: it is entirely a new thing for the massively modified ecosystems of its rural landscapes to be regarded as more than just a sheep and wheat belt, a place where special significance and care might be applied to indigenous plants and animals as well as to agricultural species.

Closer settlement policies of successive colonial, state and Federal governments, with their idealism for yeomanry and small landholdings, greatly exacerbated what have become contemporary land degradation problems.⁴ Today, almost all districts of the sheep and wheat belt suffer from some form of acute land and water degradation. Land degradation coincides with fragmentation of native vegetation into remnant patches across a landscape of privately-owned farms. These realities alone—fragmentation of nature and human-defined spaces—make the task of achieving nature conservation in rural Australia a complex one.

The background to this is by no means the usual neat account of naive Europeans stumbling into a totally alien environment and finding it difficult to see the consequences of their actions. Problems like soil erosion, acidification of soils, eutrophication of water ways, soil structure decline and dryland salinity are not unique to Australia, nor are they newly discovered.⁵ Like the United States, Australia experienced severe soil erosion problems in the 1930s, which led to the establishment of various soil conservation agencies across the country. As early as 1901, a Royal Commission had investigated overstocking, drought and rabbits as the causes of severe degradation in the pastoral rangelands of western New South Wales with many lessons learnt (but not necessarily applied in practice).⁶

By the early 1980s it was not surprising that the effects of settlement on the landscape were clearly affecting agricultural production itself, not just the aesthetic sensibilities of those (landholders or otherwise) who were appalled by the sight of scalded soils, saline paddocks and bare, eroded hills. In financial terms, land degradation in Australia costs between $600 million and $1.2 billion annually,⁷ making traditional Australian agriculture sometimes seem an archaic national enterprise compared to new millennium service industries such as tourism.

The creation of Landcare

In 1989 a pre-existing National Soil Conservation Program operated by the Federal Government was transformed into a ten-year program launched as the Decade of Landcare. The National Farmers’ Federation and the Australian Conservation Foundation, overcoming traditional mutual antipathy, lobbied together for financial commitment by the Federal Government to help rural communities restore and better manage Australia’s natural resources.

Landcare as a national system depended on program facilitation by state governments and their agencies. The broad objectives for the program as a whole were contained within the Federal Government’s Decade of Landcare Plan. Each of the states and territories developed their own Decade Plans with various agencies, non-government organisations (NGOs) and community representatives contributing to their drafting. A cost-sharing arrangement formed the financial basis for specific local projects so that Landcare Groups, effectively local clubs of neighbouring farms, provided in-kind labour in exchange for equivalent financial assistance that paid for items such as trees and fencing materials. Funding for Landcare Groups was available through the National Landcare Program for many years, now incorporated into the Natural Heritage Trust. Landcare Groups are increasingly obliged to link their local project ideas and farm plans to larger strategies, particularly through regional river catchment strategies linked to sub-catchment plans and down the line to individual whole-farm plans. Although based on volunteer participation there are now over 4,000 Landcare Groups in Australia involving, in theory at least, 40 per cent of all farmers.⁸

Landcare was designed to target land degradation problems at scales much larger then the individual farm, farm business or indeed commodity industry, chiefly through this bioregional framework of the sub-catchment, river catchment or vast drainage system such as the Murray-Darling Basin. Landcare could still seem, however, largely concerned with the functionality of landscapes for agriculture, without necessarily tackling better outcomes for other ‘non-market’ goods such diverse wildlife or landscape aesthetics. Nevertheless an underlying ethos of restoration of native plants and animals pervaded even the earliest proposals for projects.

A special funding source within the Landcare Program, administered by the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service (ANPWS) (later the Australian Nature Conservation Agency, and now known as Environment Australia), was established to fund projects focused on nature conservation. The Save the Bush scheme (later re-packaged as Bushcare) promoted the protection of remnant vegetation, its funding frequently paying for fencing material to exclude livestock. According to ANPWS’s promotional literature at the time, Save the Bush was explicit about the symbolic and functional value of native vegetation being meshed together:

In many areas the ‘bush’, that enriches our culture and heritage, has all but gone. Clearing for agriculture and livestock grazing, the introduction of new plants, pests and predators, the expansion of town and city, have produced a very different landscape ... Hidden in the changing scene is the loss of variety and diversity among Australia’s native plants and animals. The more direct cost is land degradation ... Practical use, beauty, inspiration and scientific interest abound in the Australian bush. It is time to pick up the pieces and look after the remnants.⁹

Because Landcare Groups planned projects, such as vegetated ‘wildlife corridors’, across farm boundaries and increasingly on a catchment basis, here was an opportunity to encourage remnant vegetation management at scales not yet accounted for in legislation or everyday farming culture.

Implementing the National Landcare Program required employing a new style of community outreach agent, the Landcare facilitator or coordinator. This provided opportunities for recent graduates from natural resources and environmental management degrees to apply new ideas for improved natural resource management in the field, ideas often different from those taught in traditional agricultural degrees and diplomas. From this brave new academic world of holistic ecological thinking came certain assumptions about improving land management among farmers. These assumptions were shared by many Landcare coordinators and project officers, with varying degrees of intensity or passion—myself included.

Researching Landcare

I began my PhD research in 1997, investigating the effectiveness of the National Landcare Program for achieving nature conservation amongst farmers. This followed several years as a Landcare project officer for the Australian Trust for Conservation Volunteers (ATCV) in Sydney. The main focus of my work with ATCV was to provide volunteers for community-based environmental restoration projects. I had a post-graduate qualification in vegetation management that helped me contribute technical information to certain projects. Some of these had been initiated by farm-based Landcare groups in the sheep and wheat belt of New South Wales. Volunteers helped pull out weeds, erect fences to keep stock out of remnant vegetation, plant trees, collect seed and conduct educational programs in schools.

As an employee of an NGO working in a network of other NGOs, government agencies and Landcare Groups, I found that there were many people keen to discuss the technical and social relevance of this new ferment of grass roots activity, especially the nagging question of whether any of it was strategic or not. However, moments of critical reflection on strategy and purpose were rarely the central focus of involvement with Landcare at this level. As in any industry dependent on short-term and minimal government funding, the day-to-day goal was organisational survival—obtaining funds and applying them to on-ground works.

At the time, any apparent gaps between the rhetoric of voluntary community involvement and the reality of dependence on government funding could be ignored for pragmatic reasons: ‘talking up’ Landcare felt like an implicit condition of being involved because it seemed like a minor miracle to have funding for environmental projects in the first place. In addition, Landcare was about facilitation, so that one major principle underpinned all activities and moments of inspiration or doubt alike: landscape change was dependent on personal learning by farmers and facilitators alike, and not on a regulated prescription of attitudes and behaviour by government. As a consequence, mediated workshops became a ubiquitous feature of Landcare. These never proceeded without reams of butcher’s paper being pasted over walls and whiteboards in order to record community visions and priorities for restoration of local catchments and landscapes. Sometimes these workshops were exhausting (even tedious), but anything seemed possible through education and facilitation.

The process of exploring and nurturing community interest in