This article is an adaption of Professor Libby Robin’s presentation at the 2024 Australian Academy of the Humanities’ Annual Academy Symposium.
The world is changing all around us. By 2085, there will be many more of the disasters we already know – fires, floods, heat waves. All these will be worse in 60 years, even if we stop adding to the problems today. What sort of a world will our grandchildren inherit? We can’t spend the next 60 years overwhelmed and feeling helpless in the face of relentless environmental destruction. So, what can we do?
My research explores emerging restoration partnerships that connect ecological and social futures, and give people agency in their local futures, investing in the places where they dwell. Even where these places are damaged, ruined or compromised, there must be hope. The future is a significant part of one’s sense of place in the world. We can no longer escape in the dark of night when we can’t cope with destruction – as John Steinbeck’s Okies did in his novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Where would we go? There is no ‘elsewhere’. We must stay with the trouble.
Today, I will share some of the work that’s happening in the Gondwana Link program, and particularly of the work with First Nations families and groups, including the Noongar Eades family at Nowanup, as well as the Wirlomin custodians of Wilyun Pools Farm and the Yaramoup Aboriginal Corporation at Sunnyside, both near Wellstead, and the Kepa Kurl Wudjari people at Esperance.
Through different ‘carbon enabled’ conservation projects, these First Nations groups are adding cultural restoration to the weft of ecological projects.
But first, a note on the Bidjara wisdom of Professor Maree Meredith who reminds us that Country can be agenda-setting. Unlike luck, Country grounds community experience as expertise. Knowing Country centres community experience as expertise that can expand our intellectual worlds to include us all.
What is Gondwana Link and why is a project like this important to the humanities?
Gondwana Link is an up-beat story of a very special place. It refers to an organisation, a collaboration and a program that is rebuilding the original ecological connectivity over 1,000 kms across southern Western Australia, eastward from Margaret River to Kalgoorlie and beyond. Kalgoorlie is surrounded by the Great Western Woodlands, one of the world’s biggest temperate forests: but they have only recently acquired a name, as Alexandra Vlachos and Andrea Gaynor have explored. Being named as Great is important to becoming visible. This year Eucalypt Australia has identified the Great Western Woodlands among the top-10 Eucalypt Destinations for Australia.
Gondwana Link is a grand social experiment, joining up the aspirations of the public and private sector for conservation. It works to restore biodiversity health in whole landscapes that have been damaged by land clearing and poor farming practices, by mining and by rapacious developments. It aims to make them safe for nature and supportive of the social fabric of local communities.
But, Gondwana Link has difficult neighbours. The Western Australian wheatbelt to its north-west is a cleared area so vast it is visible from space. Tony Hughes D’Aeth FAHA, the literary historian of the wheatbelt, describes it as ‘like nothing on this Earth’.
Yet the Gondwana Link lands embrace some of Earth’s rarest plants and other life forms, many of which only live in tiny pockets of the landscape. Indeed, the wheatbelt itself still hosts surprising jewels of biodiversity despite all the clearing. Ensuring a secure future for many curious life forms in the face of changing climate is a great challenge. It’s a task for many partners.
UNESCO has awarded Biosphere Status to the Fitzgerald River area on the south coast, an area that includes a large National Park and also smaller reserves, the projects of governments and of conservation organisations. And there is a great deal of participation from Traditional Owners and other local landholders.
From an old farm to a wildflower reserve
Keith Bradby is the foundation CEO of Gondwana Link Ltd, which was formed as a loose alliance in 2002 and formally established on 1 August 2009. He continues at its helm, building and filling out philosophies he developed in the 1980s as an activist working with colleagues to force a re-examination, and eventually a halt, to a proposed extension of the Wheatbelt south-eastwards, through bush near Ravensthorpe and Esperance, which he came to know through his beekeeping and native seed collection businesses. He is a leader of people who connects unlikely partners. His own networks have deep roots in this part of Western Australia where he has been collecting seed, restoring damaged lands and enthusing others to help him for more than four decades. His presence in Gondwana Link encourages diverse players and, historically, protected ‘the project from being owned by any of the larger partners’. More than fifty organisations have cooperated to help achieve Gondwana Link on the ground: some are very small and local, crucial to continuity.
It brought together large official NGOs, such as The Nature Conservancy, Bush Heritage and Greening Australia, with local landcare and conservation groups. The Friends of the Porongurup Range, for example, has in just fifteen years, transformed a beaten-up farm into a beautiful wildflower reserve.
Through Gondwana Link, Bradby is working closely with Noongar families and groups to support their access to and custodianship of land. In one case, Gondwana Link and Greening Australia have helped the Eades family to own and operate their Nowanup property. At Nowanup, cultural camps are held for many groups, including university and school students.
The Gondwana Link program originated with the coming together in 2002 of five groups: Bush Heritage, Wilderness Society, Friends of Fitzgerald River National Park, Fitzgerald Biosphere Group and Greening Australia. Encouragement and support came when ‘The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest non-government conservation agency, chose Gondwana Link as the first Australian project to receive its support’, initially by funding Bush Heritage to ‘purchase 800 ha of bushland and 70 ha of cleared farmland along Chereninup Creek’, and other initiatives, as part of creating what is now called the Fitz-Stirling Link.
‘The big groups kicked off Gondwana Link, and Bush Heritage and Greening Australia remain active in the Fitz-Stirling area, but the smaller local groups and conservation landholders are pivotal to keeping it going along the Link’s 1000-kilometres’, Bradby says. He is critical of three-year funding arrangements that cut across long-term outcomes. ‘National priorities change rapidly – local priorities stay local’.
Diversity is strength ‘ecologically and organisationally’. So Gondwana Link encourages farmers, conservation activists and Traditional Owners to find new ways to work together. The important thing is to keep on working together, rather than disappearing off to some other biodiversity ‘hotspot’, as governments and some bigger conservation organisations tend to do.
Social networks and partnerships are at the heart of the work of the humanities, as Bradby commented to a student of environmental humanities, who asked how she could help.
We need the humanities people for projects that hit the heart as well as the head. After all, the physical sciences haven’t convinced nearly enough people about climate change over the last forty years. You can do all the studies on the yellow-bellied whatnot that you like, but getting people to find ways to work together is our biggest challenge.
The Gondwana Link program does support science, even studies of yellow-bellied whatnots. It does it through ecological restoration projects. ‘Scientists come to Gondwana Link – not the other way around’, Bradby observes: ‘generally, we don’t get caught up with [organising grants for] science. Like the mammals and the birds, [scientists] want to work with good restoration’. Restoration has attracted some 112 published scientific papers already.
Gondwana Link also draws on the creative arts, including dance, the visual arts, storytelling and museum exhibitions. Traditional Owners use all these methods to keep their culture strong. The refurbished Western Australian State Museum/Boola Bardip has two galleries containing Gondwana Link stories as short films.
Film-making is a growing enterprise: as well as Gondwana Link’s film ‘Breathing Life into Boodja’, the extraordinary Annette Carmichael Project’s The Stars Descend, which danced across Gondwana Link from Margaret River to Kalgoorlie in 2023, is now an hour-length film.
Planning a future helps the present
The experience of place is rarely acknowledged in handouts about ‘natural resource management’. Yet experience is crucial for the future. And finding ways to foster that experience is also good for culture.
Funding from big investors like L’Oreal has enabled Tjaltjraak traditional owners to buy up 5,500 hectares of freehold land near Esperance. Here they take charge of revegetation work, share stories and do cultural work. They also benefit from sales of carbon credits. Closer to Albany, a partnership with other investors and the firm Carbon Neutral is enabling more revegetation and perpetual access to freehold land and employment for members of the Yaramoup and Wirlomin First Nation groups, a process Bradby calls ‘carbon enabled’.
So-called Natural Resource Management teams typically arrive with ‘toolkits’, ideas from elsewhere, and often a grant to get an outcome – a deliverable, in the ghastly parlance. They have a fixed deadline that forces each team to finish and move on.
Dwelling on, staying with the trouble, even just bearing witness to a singular place takes grit and determination. It rarely attracts ‘grants’ or even dollops of cash. Best practice is about making what is already there work harmoniously. It is not about quick fixes from elsewhere. Pastoral degradation often comes from elsewhere places, in the form of introduced fertilisers, weedicides, big digging machines and cash grants themselves. There is an important role for the humanities in creating pathways for home-grown care as well. Healing most often comes from within.
Together ecological repair and celebration serve to restore torn social fabric and landscapes ruined by extractive practices. They also build reconciliation in troubled times. Local and global together are crucial to engage people from all walks of life in the present and are essential to planetary health. Enabling Traditional Custodians to become the long-term owners and managers of restored ecosystems is one of the most important ways Gondwana Link contributes to Australia’s future.
