In this blog, Andrea Gaynor expands on the themes of her keynote at the 2025 Australian Historical Association Conference.
As tree-planting season wound up in southern Australia and the pottiputkis were put away, the warming weather brought new growth and my thoughts returned to regenerative histories: historical stories and practices that contribute to the regeneration of earth and community, centred around care. One form of regenerative history involves stories of regeneration and the various relations they render visible. In Australia, the landcare movement is a rich source of such stories.
Labours of love – and leadership
The landcare movement emerged from partnerships between government and community, conservation and agriculture, in the 1980s. As the name suggests, the movement was (and remains) about bringing people together to care for their local environment – and in doing so to strengthen community relationships. While we might casually consider care to be a positive orientation and set of practices, political scientist Joan Tronto has pointed out that the ways in which we think about care are ‘deeply implicated in existing structures of power and inequality’ (p.21). She disaggregates care into four elements: caring about, taking care, care-giving and care-receiving. Tronto argues that the first two of these – identifying and taking responsibility for making decisions about needs for care – are taken up by the powerful, while the physical work of providing care, as well as responding to care, is relegated to the powerless. In the global North, where caring has conventionally been characterised as a feminine trait, the bulk of unpaid or low-paid care work has been undertaken by working-class women, people of colour and Indigenous people (pp.113-4).
How might these insights inform regenerative histories of the landcare movement? In Victoria the movement was launched by two women in leadership roles – Minister Joan Kirner and Victorian Farmers’ Federation president Heather Mitchell. They and others saw the movement as offering opportunities for women to take on more prominent public roles in rural communities. In 1993, when the rural landcare movement was in its ascendency, research shows that on average women comprised a little under a third of landcare group members in most states. They were, however, overrepresented among group secretaries (from 34% in Western Australia to 51% in Tasmania), who did a lot of the administrative heavy lifting for the group. On the other hand, women rarely occupied the leadership role of chairperson (20% in both Queensland and Tasmania and only 3% in Western Australia) (pp.37-56). The exception being Western Australia, where women comprised just 20% of Land Conservation District Committee members on average. In all states, there were some groups with no women members.
Women’s experience of landcare varied considerably. Some joined groups to try to shift their husbands’ approach to farming while others joined as farmers in their own right. Some found that the men in the groups wouldn’t listen to them, while others were recognised as experts (p.50). Some groups met at night when women with children found it difficult to attend, while one group in Stuart Lockie’s study area in south-western New South Wales organised childcare to make it possible for women with young children to get involved (p.78).
Changing landscapes, changing landcare
There is a tension here – or perhaps a continuum – between landcare as a source of empowerment and exploitation of women. In the early to mid-1990s, sociologist Ruth Beilin noted that given a strong association between women’s work and community, the community-centred nature of landcare gave rise to potential for women to shape the movement for change (p.64). However, at this time many rural communities were experiencing population decline and withdrawal of services, increasing demands on women’s time. In this context, the framing of women as ideal landcarers tended to ‘exploit women’s unpaid and largely unrecognised community labour as a necessary component in the success of grass-roots community organisations’ (p.57).
Still, women have made momentous contributions: in the WA Landcarers’ Hall of Fame in 2025, 15 of the 32 inductees are women. And in recent decades, women have made up an increasing proportion of landcarers: in 2018, 50% of participants at the 2018 national landcare conference were women. Women made up two-thirds of respondents to Perth NRM’s community capacity survey in 2017, suggesting a particularly high level of women’s involvement in urban landcare. This shift is perhaps explained partly by changes in the nature and locus of the movement’s activity. In Western Australia, for example, the number of landcare groups peaked in the early 2000s, with a subsequent decline in groups in agricultural and pastoral regions. This was partly offset by an increase in women-dominated urban and peri-urban ‘friends of’ groups, as well as rural grower groups and Indigenous groups (p.6).
The landcare movement has not attracted the sustained attention from researchers that we might hope, given the scale of both the environmental degradation it seeks to address, and the public funds invested in various landcare programs. The lack of attention to the gender dimensions of the movement, in particular, makes it difficult to discern change in women’s involvement over time, and the conditions under which landcare has been inclusive and empowering. It appears, however, that as funding paradigms have changed and landcare has become less community-led and more directed by (government) funding, the proportion of women active in landcare groups has increased. That is, in terms of Tronto’s four elements of ‘care’, the power in landcare – of identifying and taking responsibility for care-related decisions – has moved toward bureaucrats, while increasingly feminised landcare groups have been relegated to physical care providers.
Even here, however, there is diversity of experience among groups, with the rural groups more constrained by the funding required for large-scale work, and small urban groups less tied to external funding and so freer to set their own priorities. There are also many unanswered questions about the gender dimensions of men’s engagement with the work of environmental care within the landcare movement. In sum, landcare histories present a rich repository for thinking through the relationships between gender and care in regeneration, with opportunities for learning.
Regenerative history was the theme of my recent keynote talk for the Australian Historical Association’s annual conference in July 2025, recently published in History Australia (October 2025). Many thanks to Danielle Brady for sharing ideas on sources for this blog.
Andrea Gaynor is a Professor of History and Australian Research Council Future Fellow at The University of Western Australia. As an environmental historian, she seeks to research and tell historical stories that can spark ideas, conversations and action for more just and sustainable societies. Her ongoing research and activism have focused on nature conservation, community-led land management, agriculture, fisheries, and urban sustainability.
Copyright remains with individual authors who grant VIDA holding a perpetual, world-wide, royalty free and non-exclusive license to use, distribute, reproduce and promote content. For permission to re-publish any VIDA blog post, in whole or in part, please contact the managing editors at auswhn@gmail.com.au