Making country good: stewardship and environmental change in central Australian pastoral culture

Abstract

Rural stewardship has been a focus of much natural resource management policy in Australia and elsewhere. Despite landowners professing stewardship, some researchers have cast doubt on the utility of the concept due to its vagueness and difficulties of associating attitudes with behaviour. In contrast I argue that stewardship should remain an important concept for understanding rural cultures, landholder practices and the politics of land. Stewardship, however, needs to be understood as emergent, as a ‘dwelt achievement’, as having temporal depth and as being part of the production of socio‐natures. Moreover, as a key vernacular practice, its capacities and vulnerabilities require critical interpretation. I pursue these issues through an analysis of 20th‐century pastoral stewardship in central Australian rangelands where land‐use ideals have long been tested by aridity and low productivity. Arid zone pastoralism has also been subject to on‐going critique and re‐evaluation as ecological and other values challenge pastoral practice and the very presence of pastoralism. Pastoralists have responded with varying articulations of stewardship. These share consistent foundations even as their form changes. I use Anderson's idea (1997) of ‘critical domestication’ to underpin this analysis and show that pastoral stewardship has been, and continues to be, characterised by interpolations of order and chaos in nature and of continuity and discontinuity. With its focus on humanist ontologies of human distinction from the natural world rather than specific land‐use ideals, critical domestication provides a framework for critically interpreting these interpolations in landscapes where ideals such as cultivation and closer settlement have not been achieved. Allying this framework with recent perspectives on the agency and materiality of nature, I also show that stewardship is not solely a human achievement, but is co‐produced by environmental variability, plants and domestic and feral animals such as cattle and rabbits.

Exploring ecosystem-change and society through a landscape lens: recent progress in European landscape research

“…For example, well-designed collaborative landscape-scale schemes were found to be more beneficial than farm-scale schemes for a small but significant number of key farmland species and ecosystem services, although unlikely to harm species operating at smaller scales (McKenzie et al 2013). Landscape stewardship is also important for understanding cultures, landholder practices, and the politics of land (Gill 2014). It has been shown that landscape stewardship is closely related to place attachment, thus affecting people's attitudes toward conservation and planning (Lokocz et al 2011).…”

Alignment between values of dryland pastoralists and conservation needs for small mammals

“…), which may explain the lack of meaningful difference between many incentivized and nonincentivized proenvironmental actions we examined. As noted by Gill (), linking specific events, activities, or values with overall sense of stewardship can be somewhat fraught.…”

The Paradox of Engagement: Land Stewardship and Invasive Weeds in Amenity Landscapes

“…That landscapes of private property and production predominate in the post-colonial era suggests uniformity in ideologies of nature and land stewardship. Ideas about rural land-use are heterogeneous and evolving, however (Gill, 2014). In recent decades, rural to exurban transitions in Australia are diversifying attitudes and values among rural residents, creating a complex "management mosaic" (Epanchin-Niell et al, Gosnell, Haggerty, & Travis, 2006) and leading to both intended and unintended socioecological consequences (Abrams, Gosnell, Gill, & Klepeis, 2012;Gill, Klepeis, & Chisholm, 2010;Mendham, Curtis, & Millar, 2012).…”

“…Notions of land stewardship evolve (Cooke & Lane, 2015;Gill, 2014), and community discourse in amenity landscapes create and re-craft knowledge about socio-ecological systems (Larsen & Hutton, 2012). Emerging amenity landscapes experience dynamic change.…”