Imagining 2085: There is no “elsewhere” — restoring ecological & social connections in our environment

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 the work Gondwana Link, and particularly of the Ngadju Conservation Group at Norseman, as well as the Wirlomin custodians of Wilyun Pools, the Yaramoup Corporation at Sunnyside and the Tjaltjraak Wudjari people.

Through different ‘carbon enabled’ conservation projects, they 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?

The area of “reconnected country” across south-western Australia, where habitat has been restored under the Gondwana Link. Source: https://gondwanalink.org/

Gondwana Link is an up-beat story of a very special place. It is an organisation that is rebuilding the original ecological connectivity over 1,000 kms across southern Western Australia, eastward from Margaret River to Kalgoorlie and beyond. East of Kalgoorlie are 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 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.

The United Nations has awarded Biosphere Status to the Fitzgerald River reserve on the south coast. There are 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 eastwards, through the country near Ravensthorpe, where he ran a beekeeping business. 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 protects ‘the project from being owned by any of the larger partners’. More than fifty organizations have cooperated to help achieve Gondwana Link on the ground: some are very small and local, and are crucial to continuity.

It brings together large official NGOs (The Nature Conservancy, BushHeritage Australia and others) with local natural history groups. The Friends of the Porongurup Range, for example, has in just fifteen years, transformed a beaten-up farm into a beautiful wildflower reserve.

Bradby has worked closely with Noongar families and the NgadjuConservation Group through Gondwana Link Ltd, which has helped them to own and operate their Nowanup property. At Nowanup, they hold cultural camps for Curtin University students and others.

The Gondwana Link idea originated with the coming together of five big groups, ‘Bush Heritage, Wilderness Society, Friends of Fitzgerald RiverNational Park, Fitzgerald Biosphere Group and Greening Australia’. Then, in 2002, ‘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’,4 and other initiatives, creating what is now called the Fitz-Stirling Link.

‘The big groups might have kicked off Gondwana Link, but it is the small local groups that keep it going’, Bradby says.5 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 the 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.

Gondwana Link does support science, even studies of yellow-bellied whatnots. It does it through its own healthy restoration projects. ‘Scientists come to Gondwana Link – not the other way around’, Bradby observes: ‘we don’t get caught up with [organising grants for] science. Like the mammals and the birds, [scientists] want to work with good restoration’.7 Restoration has attracted some 112 published scientific papers already.

Gondwana Link also draws on the creative arts, music, dance, museum exhibitions. Traditional Owners use all these methods to keep their culture strong. The newly refurbished Western Australian State Museum/Boola Bardip has both environment and Indigenous galleries filled with Gondwana Link objects, stories and small films.

Film-making is a growing enterprise: an hour-length film of The Stars Descend, is Annette Carmichael’s project that danced across Gondwana Link from Margaret River to Kalgoorlie in 2023.

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, tell stories and do cultural work. They also benefit from sales of carbon credits.

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.

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