Section 1 - Where it all began

An insidious disease, not always apparent even to the trained eye, is threatening to kill Australia. This disease is invading the continent’s environmental, economic and social fabric on a scale unimaginable just a few decades ago. Australia will probably never be able to afford the funds to effect a complete recovery. The patient will continue to carry the legacy of abuse and misuse for many generations. The name of this disease is land degradation.

Bob Beale and Peter Fray* wrote those portentous words about the crisis of land degradation in Australia at about the time the very first landcare group was forming.

By the late 1980s, policy makers, farmers and scientists were aware of the devastating impacts of land and water degradation. Australia’s fragile soils are subject to European agricultural techniques, and since white settlement an estimated 20 billion trees have been cleared from the landscape.

In 1983 a massive dust storm engulfed Melbourne, carrying 250 000 tonnes of topsoil from drought-stricken farms in north-west Victoria and dumping it on the city. Eight years later, in 1991, the Darling–Barwon River system suffered a blue-green algae bloom. From the Queensland border to Wilcannia the river was a sickly green colour for 1000 kilometres - the longest bloom ever recorded in the world.

Australia’s landscapes were in crisis. Something had to be done.

^{* Bob Beale and Peter Fray The vanishing continent: Australia’s degraded landscape, Hodder & Stoughton, Sydney, 1990}

^{Joan Kirner (centre), Minister for Conservation, Forests and Land, with departmental representatives and members of the Warrenbayne Boho Land Protection Group, 1988. Photo: Warrenbayne Boho Land Protection Group.}

^{The launch of Landare, Winjallok, November 1986. Photo: Victorian Farmers Federation Photo Library.}

A journey starts with a single step

Across the country, communities, farmers, farming and conservation organisations, politicians and lobbyists were already taking the first small individual steps. In Western Australia, following legislative changes, local communities set their own boundaries for soil conservation districts and formed Land Conservation District Committees involving volunteers.

In Victoria, the Potter Farmland Plan, funded by the Potter Foundation and run in partnership with the Victorian Government and farmers, was an important forerunner of landcare, while pioneering community groups, such as the Warrenbayne Boho Land Protection Group, were forming to tackle the issues of land degradation.

The name ‘landcare’ was coined in Victoria through an initiative of Joan Kirner, who was Minister for Conservation, Forests and Lands, and Heather Mitchell, then president of the Victorian Farmers Federation. With departmental help and community input, they dreamed of multidisciplinary, community-based, autonomous groups involved in land restoration across Victoria.

The first formal landcare group formed at Winjallok, near St Arnaud, on 25 November 1986, building on this groundswell of community support and activity.

In January 1988 Australia’s first dune care groups formed on the north coast of New South Wales at Hat Head, Diamond Beach, Scotts Head and Diggers Beach, and the state’s dune care program was launched later that year.

In 1989 Rick Farley of the National Farmers’ Federation and Philip Toyne of the Australian Conservation Foundation drew on their diversity of experience to spread landcare across Australia, successfully lobbying the Hawke Labor Government to commit itself to the emerging community movement.

‘Conservationists and farmers were not seen as aligned on environmental issues - rather as natural enemies,’ Philip Toyne recalled in his 2006 Rick Farley Memorial Lecture. ‘Indeed the differences on issues such as land clearing were real and somewhat intractable, ruling out an easy cooperation between the two constituencies.

‘It might have been an irresistible political alliance, but it was such an unlikely one - conservative farmers and radical greenies.

‘We had agreed privately that a key to the success of the scheme was bipartisan support from both sides of politics. Rick worked on the farmers and the Coalition parties and I worked on the environment movement and the Labor ministers.’

Landcare became a national program in July 1989 when the Australian Government, with bipartisan support, announced the 1990s as the ‘Decade of Landcare’ and committed $320 million to fund the National Landcare Program.

Landcare took one small step that day on a journey that its founders could barely have imagined. Farley and Toyne envisaged 2000 groups by the year 2000: by the end of the century, there were 4000 groups involving 40 per cent of farmers and influencing another 35 per cent.

This army of volunteers has changed the face of Australia’s rural and urban landscapes. It has planted millions of endemic trees, shrubs and grasses; repaired riparian zones and restored water quality by reducing erosion and fencing out stock from riverbanks; protected remnants of native vegetation; regenerated areas to provide habitat for native wildlife; and improved ground cover, grazing methods and soil conservation to reduce soil loss.

Landcare has changed people as well as landscapes. It has encouraged farmers, known for their strong sense of individualism, to form groups and work together for the greater good, as well as their own benefit.

And what started as an environmental movement has also developed into a social movement. Communities have understood the benefits of joint action to tackle problems that are beyond the capacity of individuals to solve.

While many rural communities have been struggling and declining, landcare has been recreating powerful social bonds and networks. Women, children and Indigenous people find themselves welcome in landcare.

Land care today includes volunteer groups of all ages and from many cultures - school children to retirees - and across all landscapes, including agricultural, urban and coastal.

Government support, too, has grown far beyond the original sum pledged by Prime Minister Bob Hawke, with funding for landcare and natural resource management becoming a major area of investment for all levels of government, and for the corporate sector.

As landcare has matured into a highly sophisticated way of tackling the problems of land and water degradation, it has also become a model for other countries. South Africa, New Zealand, the Philippines, Iceland, Canada and the United States are among those joining a growing international movement.

The stories in this book provide a glimpse of the work being done by thousands of landcare volunteer groups and their supporters across the country, and reflect 20 years of achievement by the movement.

Landcare awareness

• 99 per cent of Australians are able to nominate an environmental issue important to them
  
• 85 per cent of Australians are aware of at least one aspect of Landcare
  
• 74 per cent of Australians are aware of the Landcare Australia logo

^{Roy Morgan Research—2007 Landcare Awareness Survey}

Landcare’s launch site

Group: Winjallok Landcare Group
Location: Central Victoria
Formed: 1986
Focus: Erosion

A degraded grazing property at Winjallok, a small farming community near St Arnaud in central Victoria, became the launching place for Australia’s first formal landcare group program more than 20 years ago.

Some thought the state government should buy and repair the block, known as Stricta Hill, and then allow it either to remain public land or be resold when the land was stable. The St Arnaud branch of the Victorian Farmers Federation (VFF), however, believed otherwise.

The federation had been keen to involve its St Anaud’s branch in landcare because it was the only branch with an active conservation farming sub-committee, according to the Victorian landcare pioneer and historian Horrie Poussard.

With local farmer Terry Simpson leading the charge, the VFF began working with the block’s owner. Local farmers and the owner agreed to restore Stricta Hill through soil conservation, tree planting, rabbit control and pasture improvement.

On 25 November 1986, the Victorian Minister for Conservation, Forests and Lands, Joan Kirner, and Alan Malcolm, representing VFF president Heather Mitchell, launched the landcare group program at the site.

Winjallok Landcare Group is still active, and its president, Rhonda Fernandes, now owns Stricta Hill.

‘When we bought Stricta Hill, it was in the third year of a five-year plan,’ she said. ‘At the start, it was in poor condition–very eroded, with gullies running all down the hill. It looks very different today.’

Rhonda said a loose approach to group management had contributed to Winjallok Landcare’s longevity.

‘We’re a very unorganised organisation. We don’t have a lot of meetings, and I think that way people don’t burn out in the long term. We’re also a fairly close-knit community. Nearly all the district - about 30 families - is involved in the landcare group.’

^{Stricta Hill today—a far cry from the degraded grazing property of 20 years ago.}

Pioneering times

Group: Warrenbayne Boho Land Protection Group
Location: North-eastern Victoria
Formed: 1983
Focus: Bringing farmers together to work on land degradation

During the 1970s, noticing that all was not well with the surrounding landcscape, neighbouring fine-wool farmers Pam Robinson and Angus Howell came up with the idea of bringing farmers together to work on land conservation.

‘Angus and I went to the local Soil Conservation Authority office and started to learn a bit about what was happening with the trees and land,’ Pam said. ‘We decided we should get people together and start talking about it.

^{WBPLG member Adrian Buykx installing a nesting box. Photo: Helen Rapacholi}

‘We called a meeting and, as a result, a conservation plan for our area was developed. Then, in 1983, we officially became the Warrenbayne Boho Land Protection Group. Our first achievement was actually getting the group together, because it hadn’t been done before. It was a pioneering time in landcare.’

Angus Howell said they were privileged to be part of a groundswell of land managers who grasped a wide range of issues across Australia.

‘These gatherings of rural people announced to all tiers of government that from here on they would take the initiative in managing and combating land-degradation issues inside and outside their property boundaries, and that they expected full government support for this work,’ he said.

After significant community consultation, the group obtained funding from the National Soil Conservation Program to employ a full-time coordinator.

‘We wanted one of our own to work in the community under the group’s direction to enhance awareness of land management issues and help landholders get on with the task themselves,’ said Angus.

This approach of recording actions and methods that could be transferred to other landholder groups was to be a model for landcare.

‘At all times the group took a professional approach to its activities,’ said Pam. ‘Landholders needed to feel in control of their own projects and, above all, group activities needed to be fun.’

Angus believes that the continued activity of the group and its landholders is testimony to genuine community ownership.

Taking a new approach

Group: Hat Head Community Dune CARE Group
Location: Mid-north coast New South Wales
Formed: 1985
Focus: Restoring the dune barrier system

Wind and wave erosion at Hat Head Beach on the New South Wales mid-north coast had long been a serious problem for the small coastal community. The village was built just above sea level. The sea sometimes breached the dune barrier system, and sand blew and drifted into the village.

Ted Sorby, then deputy director of operations for the state Soil Conservation Service at Kempsey, owned a house at Hat Head Beach and knew a new approach to dune restoration was needed.

‘The old-style beach improvement programs had been running for 10 or 15 years along the coast,’ he said. ‘They spent tens of thousands of dollars fixing up sites, but there was no maintenance afterwards. Within two years they’d be vandalised and looking a disgrace.’

‘We knew it would be better to approach local communities who had an interest in doing something about it.’

‘The Soil Conservation Service approached the local citizens—about 300 people—and put up a plan to manage the whole area. The community thought it was a great idea, so we formed the Hat Head Community Dune CARE Group. I was the inaugural chairman.

‘Dune CARE is two separate words - ‘CARE’ being an acronym for the Community Actively Repairing the Environment,’ said Ted.

In the first year, the group built a bush hut to grow coastal seedlings. They grew their first 900 and planted 300, hand-cleared and sprayed 1000 metres of the coastal weed bitou bush, planted marram grass on the dunes and built 600 metres of fencing.

A bowls day organised in cooperation with the Hat Head Bowling Club helped raise funds. The group also involved local primary schools in seed collection and raising the seedlings, and then planting them in the dunes. Local Lions and other service clubs provided each school with a shade house for the seedlings.

‘About 55 kids from kindergarten through to year 6, plus parents, used to come out one day a term to do dune management works. I felt like the Pied Piper with so many kids behind me walking up the beach collecting seed! Schools adopted their own areas of the dunes,’ said Ted.

‘Over the first 10 years we had about $32 000 of funding but put in $1.2 million worth of voluntary work. The best way of adding value was local labour, as long as you had local ownership of the project.’

The activities at Hat Head inspired other communities, and in the same year three other groups - Diamond Beach, Diggers Head and Scotts Head - formed on the NSW north coast.

The state agriculture minister officially launched Dune CARE in September 1988, and within a year another 11 groups had formed along the coast.

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