Retired forester Rob Youl has marked 40 years of Landcare by giving Wood Central a 19-point answer to why the movement worked, with his list tracing the rise from a single group of farmers at Winjallok to national programs running in six countries.
“An operational system to successfully generate, plan, manage and monitor community-based environmental projects,” is how Youl defines the movement four decades on, with local decision-making, transparent accounting, good communications, and professional coordinators among the tools he counts.
It comes as Environment and Water Minister Murray Watt and Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry Minister Julie Collins opened Landcare Week on Monday, backing the movement with $14.5 million under the Natural Heritage Trust and crediting the late Joan Kirner, then Victoria’s Minister for Conservation, Forests and Lands, and Victorian Farmers Federation president Heather Mitchell with beginning the program in 1986.
“The Albanese Government will continue to support the thousands of Landcare groups and volunteers,” Watt said in the joint statement, which carries this year’s theme, Experience Landcare, with Landcare Week running from 3 to 9 August.
“For decades, farmers have been an important part of the Landcare movement,” Collins said, thanking volunteers for helping to balance productive agriculture with the sustainable management of land and natural resources.
Youl answers with the authority of someone who never left, with the Creswick-trained forester working from 1981 to 2009 across Victorian government departments, Greening Australia, and Conservation Volunteers Australia, including 13 years as Landcare Australia’s Victorian projects officer. Awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in the 2012 Australia Day Honours, he serves today as deputy chair of Global Landcare, volunteers with the Buloke and Northern Grampians Landcare Network, and remains a proud Forestry Australia member, holding 177 hectares of box-ironbark woodland and 95 hectares of revegetating mallee near St Arnaud under Trust for Nature covenants.
Forestry, Youl argues, shaped the movement from its earliest days.
Jason Ross: Landcare turns 40 this week. Four decades on, why has the movement been so successful?
Rob Youl: Landcare is democratic, built on community-based planning and decision-making, and it is flexible, with few rules. It started as an organisation for farmers but soon found a place in coastal, metropolitan, Indigenous, urban, and peri-urban communities, and this flexibility is a great strength when it comes to facing the challenge of climate change.
It is multi-disciplinary, fosters creativity and indeed excitement, promotes sustainability, and rather than blaming, learns from failure. It has bipartisan support, strong government funding, and the capacity to seek commercial, corporate, and philanthropic support.
Jason Ross: The movement runs on volunteers. What has Landcare got right about managing that effort?
Rob Youl: The movement recognised early on that volunteer effort can only be successfully managed by employing professional coordinators, sometimes referred to as facilitators, who among other things must ensure a safe working environment.
Landcare embraces Indigenous knowledge and the spirit of reconciliation, and it also embraces local knowledge and continual training, bringing together happily and fruitfully scientists and practitioners.
Jason Ross: Where do you see its greatest achievements?
Rob Youl: Over the years, Landcare has quickly moved from single groups to complex and effective networks, many of which are best described as community enterprises, and perhaps this is why its greatest achievements are at local and regional level. It can readily play a vital role in disaster planning and post-disaster rehabilitation, and it lends itself well to schools programs.
It has a strong and wholesome social component, and it is able to work with all tiers of government, including the 56 regional resource management bodies across Australia. Landcare recognises individual and group achievements through various awards and the official Australian honours system, and it has strongly promoted the use of regionally indigenous plants in revegetation, taking into account provenance and climate change.
Accordingly, I would describe Landcare as an operational system to successfully generate, plan, manage and monitor community-based environmental projects. Its tools are local and regional decision-making, transparent accounting, good communications, tapping in to broader social and institutional networks, professional support from coordinators, and the capacity to recognise and utilise otherwise uncapped resources.
Jason Ross: You spent your career as a forester. What role did forestry play in the formation of the movement?
Rob Youl: Forestry has played an important role in the formation and activities of the Landcare movement in Australia. In the 1970s, private plantation owners, especially poplar growers from the north coast of New South Wales, launched the Australian Forest Development Institute, later Australian Forest Growers.
Victorian Premier Dick Hamer fostered a Garden State Committee to look at broad environmental issues, and in 1981, a conference in Melbourne entitled Focus on Farm Trees concentrated on the need to restore trees to Australian farmland. Several farm trees and land protection groups formed across Victoria afterwards, and at the same time, salinity had emerged as a major problem both in irrigation areas and overcleared grazing regions.
The Forests Commission Victoria launched its Tree Growing Assistance Scheme, which involved the state-run nurseries and the Natural Resources Conservation League. The scheme provided advice to landowners backed by modest funding, but also promoted the emergence of private regional and district nurseries and forestry contractors, as well as direct seeding.
Jason Ross: How did that work turn into Landcare and the first group at Winjallok?
Rob Youl: In 1982, John Cain’s newly elected Labor government established agroforestry and urban forestry committees, and set out to amalgamate Victoria’s six land management agencies, covering forests, parks, soil conservation, wildlife management, lands administration, and pest plant and animal control. After two to three years, they formed a Department of Conservation, Forests and Lands, and the department’s second minister, Joan Kirner, wanted a community-based program that reflected the department’s multidisciplinary spirit.
The first Landcare group was launched at Winjallok, south west of St Arnaud, on 25 November 1986. Numerous local soil conservation and pest plant and animal control groups had functioned in Victoria for 25 years or so under the aegis of the Soil Conservation Authority and the Vermin and Noxious Weeds Destruction Board.
Compared with them, the farm tree and land protection groups of the early 1980s were multi-disciplinary and independent, and the new Landcare groups from the late 1980s immediately took up those traits.
Jason Ross: How far has Landcare spread beyond Australia?
Rob Youl: Less widely recognised is the movement’s success overseas. New Zealand, Iceland, South Africa, Uganda, Germany, and the Philippines all have national or major regional Landcare programs.
Today, the main body in this field in Australasia is Global Landcare, which has run training programs in Uganda, Malawi, Zambia, South Africa, Fiji, and the Caribbean. Its small projects fund has raised over $600,000 in 12 years for 264 projects in 27 countries.
Australian agro-foresters and bushland managers took the model to Japan in 2023, spending 12 days in central Honshu sharing Landcare experiences and techniques with their counterparts.
Three young women joined that delegation, with Molly Marshall, an agri-forester with Private Forests Tasmania in Burnie and Forestry Australia’s Tasmanian chair, travelling alongside Jacinta Douglas and Sharlee Dunolly-Lee, Indigenous land managers from Bendigo who brought the traditional environmental perspectives of Aboriginal people from Dja Dja Wurrung country in central Victoria.
“Being on and looking at and listening to Country with a custodial viewpoint,” Douglas said of what she and Dunolly-Lee carried to Honshu, 37 years after the first Landcare group formed at Winjallok.
