THORNY PROBLEMS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 120

land use practices that, over time, led to degraded soils and vegetation. Cycles of
drought and floods added to land damage on a large scale. The conjuncture of
greater environmental awareness, falling productivity and increased export
competition, and recurring drought during the 1980s, motivated the Australian
Commonwealth Government to reorient the discourse of land management from
'use' to land 'care'. Following the launch of the Victorian Landcare initiative in
1986, the Federal Government adopted the concept and founded Landcare at a
national scale in 1989. Landcare was conceived as both an organisation and
approach that would instil an ethic of 'stewardship' of the land among farmers and
pastoralists and educate them to become 'adaptive resource managers' (Curtis and
de Lacy, 1995). Farmer groups were to be mobilised for collective action centred
on environmental repair and sustainable land use. A large part of the environmental
repair involved eradication of invasive plant species.
By the end of the 1990s, the link between environmental repair, biodiversity
protection, and agricultural productivity came to be predominantly centred on the
threats posed by 'exotics' or 'alien invasives'. Reports on pastoral land management
declared that 'the sustainability of the grazing industry is under serious threat from
the invasion of exotic woody weeds' (March, 1995). In 1999, the Commonwealth
Ministers of Agriculture, Forestry and Conservation, and Environment jointly
announced the inaugural list of top 20 Weeds of National Significance (WoNS)
that posed a threat to the Australian environment and which would receive priority
funding for eradication programs. All the plants on the list were, without exception,
'exotics' and 'aliens' that had arrived during previous eras of experimentation with
acclimatisation and land improvement, including the prickle bushes that had been
introduced in Outback Queensland to aid the sheep industry.
A subtle shift in the Landcare discourse began to occur during the first decade
of the twenty-first century. Holmes (2011) argues that this was largely due to the
government's need to acknowledge the Australian High Court's recognition of
Aboriginal Native Title to land: 'In this context, it became impossible for Landcare
to continue to overlook Aboriginal people as both land managers and the traditional
owners of the land.' (ibid.: 235). She points out that the discourse changed to both
acknowledge indigenous sensibility and simultaneously appropriate it to reinforce
settler-descendant narratives of stewardship and land ownership. Landcare became
the symbol of restoring Australian landscapes to their earlier, pre-acclimatised state
by removing alien invasive plants and replacing them with appropriate native
species. Holmes quotes Kylie Mirmohamadi, who describes the enthusiastic
adoption of native species in Australian gardens as 'effecting a recuperation of the
landscape; purging the space of undesirable plants has restored it to its pre-lapsarian
(in Australia, a pre-invasion) state of grace' (ibid.: 237).
In 2008, the Australian Government initiated a broad natural resource man-
agement program called Caring for Our Country (bold in original). Planned to
operate over a five-year period, Caring for Our Country integrated a number of land
management programs such as National Landcare, Environmental Stewardship and
Indigenous Land and Sea Rangers, which all involved, to varying extents, invasive