NEGOTIATING ‘COUNTRYSIDE’: A landscape-first approach to agriculture
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2022
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There is a pervasive precariousness around pastoral landowners’ economic position, as they are forced to adapt to the constant flux of our contemporary climate. This changing climate has seen Australian landscapes become increasingly consumed by environmental extremes, where droughts are increasing in both length and severity, and damaging instant floods are rapidly depleting precious resources of topsoil, further degrading grazing land. Furthermore, the superimposition and practice of maladapted farming methods over the past century have constituted a vulnerability to these conditions of instability, leading these landscapes to gradual demise. Pastoral landowners are often framed as the perpetrators of this detriment, however, these practices are a product of socio-political forces that have shaped Australian farming culture over the past 150 years. This research approaches the effects of climate change on Australian agriculture by questioning the origins of our attitudes toward land ownership and the artificial divisions it imposes on the function of rural landscape systems. It also argues for the pressures around regenerating rural landscapes to be redistributed to include those that have the agency to influence change. It learns from indigenous methods of land management that once governed the area, and intends to understand how we may begin to deconstruct these colonial legacies. Understanding the site through a multi-scalar analysis, the research will oscillate between Australia’s state and federal levels of administration, the Central West region, the Macquarie catchment, and the scale of a single lot. Using a method that is non-impositional, and detached from the often polarising nature of activism or conservatism, the perspectives of pastoral landowners form the foundation of perspectives needed to design the underlying framework. The Landscape Architect lends the ability to mediate across disciplines, and navigate the web of narratives that are critical in understanding how to approach such a multifaceted issue. Through the use of the cooperative as a structural tool, the landscape architect is able to establish landscape-scale planning, and improve the dialogue between on the ground planning and the regional-scale strategy. This establishment of landscape-scale planning has the ability to connect the perspectives of the landholder with the greater narrative of the ‘site’, breaking the conventional farming mentality that is associated with the modern application of Australian property law. This expansion of the notion of stewardship beyond the single landholding has the ability to build landscape resilience in response to the perseverance of a changing climate.
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