Angus's family has managed the Wyndham Station near the Anabranch and Darling Rivers in southern Australia for 4 generations. That and the promise of a great Australian accent should be enough to make you listen to this episode. But we also discuss managing the earth's Living Skin, Angus's efforts to get others to think broadly about caring for land and livestock and all living things, including improving health care for humans in remote areas. It's a small world, and Angus's challenges in the Land Down Under are quite similar to those in North America.
Transcript
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>> Welcome to The Art of Range, a podcast focused on rangelands and the people who manage them. I'm your host, Tip Hudson, range and livestock specialist with Washington State University Extension. The goal of this podcast is education and conservation through conversation. Find us online at artofRange.com.
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Welcome back to The Art of Range. My guest today is Angus Whyte. He's an Australian rancher in New South Wales on the Wyndham Station, and I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, but we'll find out in a minute. He and his wife Kelly manage about just shy of 32,000 hectares of grazing land, and I think that's about 78,000 acres. We met in Australia at an Australian Rangeland Society meeting a little over a year ago. Angus, welcome to the show.
>> Yeah, fantastic, and you've pronounced Wyndham exactly spot on. So we're in far southwest in New South Wales, about 1,100 kilometers due west of Sydney.
>> Got it, and you're on that Anabranch River. Is that correct?
>> Yeah, the Anabranch River, the Great Anabranch of the Darling River. It comes off the Darling River. It's part of the Murray Darling Basin, and it's a small ephemeral river. It's a beautiful part of the world, and everyone loves where they live, and we're no different.
>> Yeah, I'd like to hear more about that in just a minute. Maybe we'll start with an easy question. As a percentage of the population, or the populations in both Australia and the United States, not a lot of people are involved in growing food, and of course, a much smaller subset of that group are in animal agriculture, growing meat and wool, etc. And you are one of those few. Maybe to quote Shakespeare, I hope it's a happy few. And so let's start with, you know, how did you come to be one of the few that that grow meat? Or maybe we'll back up one step. I've said that you raise livestock in Australia, but that's a pretty flat explanation of what you do. So what is it that you do, and how did you get there? And, of course, maybe the obvious question, your name is Angus, and you look Irish, so there's got to be some story there.
>> Yeah. Look, most people call me Gus, anyway. Ao my great-grandfather took up this block in early the 1900s, and so I'm sort of fourth generation here on Willow Point, Wyndham. In actual fact, we bought Wyndham off my dad's first cousin in 1998. My middle name is Wyndham, so I've had a strong attachment to this land for a long period of time, and so it was wonderful to be able to have the opportunity to buy this patch of land back. Our enterprise mix, we focus on grazing livestock, so we're very nonspecific, so it's sheep, predominantly wool sheep, however we have meat sheep. It doesn't matter. At various times, whatever we can purchase or whatever we can take on adjustment that's going to chew our food down. We have beef cattle and some goats, and we're trying to build up a goat enterprise, just to add to our diversity of livestock to just to encourage a more diverse management so we can encourage diversity of our plants.
>> Yeah, most listeners will not be familiar with your ecological or even geographic context, except that it's people sort of know where Australia is, but I couldn't even tell you very much about what the plant communities are like in that part of the world. Describe a little bit more where you are geographically in Australia, and what does the world look like down there? I suppose it could be the top of the world rather than the bottom if we turn the globe over, but what's the climate like, what are your plant communities? What's the world like there?
>> Well, where we are, we consider ourselves very central, Tip. We're, you know --
>> Eastern --
>> -- 500 kilometers from due east of Adelaide, about 700 kilometers north of Melbourne, and about 1,100 Kilometers west of Sydney. We're in 250ml rainfall. So what's that, about 10 inches? We average -- look, it's around about 20mls per month. Our effective rainfall is in the winter, because we don't get as much evaporation. Now, you know, we're 30 meters above sea level, so we're not very high, and it's gently undulating. You know, I think our high point of our property is maybe 70 meters, so there's not much variation. There's probably east-west running dunes, which are old, old dunes. So essentially, they're just ridges covered with some shrubs and trees. We don't get too much sort of grassland, per se. It's mostly fairly shrubby. We talk about chenopod shrublands, and we have quite a lot of floodplain country as well on the edge of this Anabranch River, and there's significant freshwater lakes that flood when the river is in flood, and that enables us to then crop those lakes as they dry back, so there's, you know, an extra enterprise is [inaudible], which is what we're doing at the moment. We've just finished a harvest on one of our lakes, and we've got two more lakes that have still got water in them that we're hoping will dry out for a cereal crop next year.
>> I've got a bunch of questions that probably sound like dumb questions, but if I don't know, there's probably a lot of people that don't know. Sheep are not anywhere near as common in the United States as they used to be, as in terms of, you know, percentage of operations or the number of head. You know, cattle are very much the dominant by -- the dominant species of livestock by a long shot. How common are sheep in Australia, still?
>> Yeah, well, look, a lot of the country, you know, while we might say it used to ride on the sheep's back, that's no longer -- or wool's back, that's no longer quite the case. There's still sheep are much more common than cattle, especially in the southern rangelands across Australia. Having said that, though, when you go into Western Australia and, say, parts of Queensland, the southern parts of Queensland, there's significantly higher dog numbers now, so wild dogs, dingoes, which makes it tough to run sheep. So we're quite lucky at the moment. We don't have significant dog pressure, and so there's really no other predators around for our sheep, you know, in high numbers. We'll have foxes and eagles that will take lambs, but no, you know, larger apex predators like a coyote or wolf or anything like that, so we're very lucky. So that enables us to be able to run sheep in Australia, and that gives us a better return per hectare. It's much easier to grow grass. It's tall enough for sheep to get at, versus cattle.
>> Yeah. And what kind of land do you run on? As you know, here, it's pretty common to have significant chunks of private land in the United States, but a lot of the bigger operators will have leases or permits on both federal and state land. How much of what you're grazing on is some version of public land, and what do those arrangements look like?
>> All our land is effectively called western lands lease, so it is government owned. It's leasehold land. It's a lease in perpetuity, so we pay an annual rental or annual lease, which isn't too high. So, look, it's a very stable and secure arrangement and, you know, you could call it a de facto freehold, so we're quite lucky in that respect, and so we do have a secure access to the title and the -- you know, to be able to plan going forward.
>> Right. What are your impressions about the future of the livestock industry in Australia, maybe in general, and then, more specifically, for your own?
>> Yeah, that's an interesting question, isn't? We're getting lots of pushback from, you know, larger sections of the community, and the way that methane is being accounted for appears to be quite anti-animal livestock farming, and yet, there's a significant portion of our landscape in Australia that -- you know, somewhere between 75% and 85% of Australia is what would be considered rangelands, and it's non arable, so you can't crop it. So it's, really, it's the home of animal livestock, and if there wasn't animal livestock out here, I'm just not sure there'd be -- well, there'd be even less people than what do exist out in the rangelands or in remote Australia, which is, you know, in remote Australia, you're talking about 2% of the population, you know, not big numbers. And it's a big slab of Australia, so animal agriculture is important, and it is very important in in our part of the world. In western New South Wales, since we've come to Australia, unfortunately, we've -- there's approximately 30 species of small marsupials, small mammals, that have become extinct in our area, and most of those animals were small grazers and burrowers, diggers, gardeners, if you will, in our landscape. And our plant communities really miss those people, those services. And so if we were to take away animal agriculture, then we'd have hardly any disturbance which, long term we've seen lots of examples of the disbenefits low disturbance has in our dry environments.
>> Yeah, that's really interesting. If I were to try to answer the question, I feel like the tide has turned a bit, at least in in the United States, away from that really strong, widespread antagonism toward animal husbandry, particularly on what I would call wildlands, and I think that's for a number of reasons. One is the growing recognition that well-managed ranch lands where you have mostly naturally occurring plant communities, no soil tillage, high plant diversity, you know, at least relative to the potential of the site. Other places where you have wildlife habitat, you have stable below ground carbon storage, you have slightly lower risk of fire, as you're saying, than the places that have no grazing disturbance at all. And even in terms of, you know, greenhouse gas emissions, I think there's growing recognition that the net effect of maintaining intact soils in vegetation outweighs the, you know, the cost, so to speak, of the greenhouse gas emissions from the animals. And the major challenge, probably, is conversion of rangeland to some other use, and I don't know whether that's occurring in Australia but, you know, conversion of rangeland to either housing subdivisions or wine grape vineyards, you know, or other low-intensity -- or, you know, high intensity agriculture, but that has low water use, is one of the main challenges. And of course, we use these economic terms like the highest and best use, which really just means, you know, we'll plow it or plant houses if that makes more money. I'm curious how Australia has dealt with that dilemma, or is there no problem there because of, you know, higher government controls or different market incentives?
>> Right at the moment, there's a large push for renewable energy, so windfarms, solar farms, and the transmission lines that take that energy, you know, and connect to our large cities. And so they are sourcing out what they would consider the low-value land, you know, our rangelands, which is really quite offensive to someone like me who's passionate about the rangelands and love the rangelands. And, you know, if we're genuine about respecting cultures and respecting, you know, our aboriginal ancestors who lived here for many, many thousands of years in harmony with nature, then we need to be -- there's no such thing as cheap land or low-value land. All land is valued by someone, and we need to treat it with the same care and respect, regardless of whether we consider it high-value, low-value. That's a value we place on it, a monetary value. It's not a community or a cultural value. So there is lots of pressure at the minute, and that's dividing communities because, you know, with the renewable energy, you've got a windfarm on someone's place, and they see some monetary benefits, and the next one over, he looks at it, and they listen to it and they make nothing out of it, so that divides communities. There is some expansion of irrigation areas, although we do have very finite water in Australia, and we've cleared enough land around our irrigation areas, and so there's not too much expansion going on here, certainly in the southern area, so we're not seeing too much, you know, wine grapes or high-intensity agriculture take up our rangeland environment. It's more, currently, the renewable energies.
>> Mm-hm. I took a look a little bit ago on your website, and you made the statement that you're not the sort of person that sees it important to tick off goals, but the satisfaction more comes from doing the right things, and that you're passionate about being a good husband, father, brother and son, being a good landscape manager, working with animals. I think the thing that I appreciate about that is that there's sort of a commitment to being faithful to means, and that we live in a world that is really outcomes-oriented, which sounds scientific, but on the other hand, if you're doing the right thing, you may not know what those results are going to be but continuing to do it is a good in and of itself. That's an end all on its own. And I'm -- so one of the things I've wondered about is, you know, we have a significant problem with farm succession, you know, transitioning a property in an enterprise from one generation to the other. It sounds like you've been involved in trying to facilitate some of that in Australia. What does that look like in your neck of the woods?
>> I'm smiling as you're asking that question, Tip, because I'm not sure it's [inaudible] better out here. Generally speaking, it's a major issue, isn't it?
>> Yeah.
>> Look, in our own family, I can say we've done an okay job. We have to. We're coming up to a time my mother's 88 and she's still living in her home, and she's still very healthy, and we hope she continues for many years. The reality is she's getting towards the back end of her life, and I've got a an elder sister and a younger brother, and we'll have a fair bit of sorting out to do when we're dealing with the estate. You know, I look at succession as, you know, the only way to achieve succession or the only metric I see for succession is that if all the family can sit around the table at Christmastime and laugh and joke and the kids can play together. That's the only metric I look at. And how each family does that is -- you know, that's how they do that, and that's absolutely fine. There's very few formulas there. It's like, you know, you say -- you're talking about science, and I, you know, look to explain to people about, you know, maybe the way we manage our land is our relationship with Mother Nature, with the livestock and with the people around us, and that's unique to every person and every family, and there's no -- you know, it's a bit like you just -- when you look to get married, you just go and buy a book and do a course on, you know, how to be married and stay married for a long period of time, and that's the end of the story. Nothing's ever that simple --
>> No.
>> -- and nor should it be. And so, you know, I see my life as just having a series of passions and desires to, you know, work with the landscape, to work with animals, to, you know, look after my family, to be an active member in our community. You know, and where that takes me is where that takes me, and I'm just happy to follow those passions. And, you know, right at the minute, my passions for being an active member in the community has taken me towards being part of a group looking to improve remote healthcare across Australia, which is not something I would have expected to happen at all. It's just -- you know, I'm seeing it as so important to have good healthcare to encourage people to live out in this wonderful landscape we have in remote Australia.
>> Yeah, I appreciate that. I don't know if I've said on the podcast before that my younger brother manages the family's business, which is a nursing home in north central Arkansas. I'm not sure nursing home is the proper term for it anymore, but that's what we called it, and approaches to that have changed, but yeah, I do think it's an indicator of the health of a culture, the extent to which and the ways that we take care of our elderly. One of the things that I ran across, and I think we visited about briefly when we were together, is this living skin project. What is -- I like the idea, and I even like the terminology. What is that about?
>> Well, the living skin was coined by a lady, Susan Orgel [phonetic], or Dr. Susan Orgel. She's an extremely passionate and gorgeous soil scientist. So, to her, soil is everything and the living skin, the name, sort of came about easy to her. So we're just focusing on the soil, and so we're one of four landholders that were picked to be part of that, just to assess, you know, different management regimes, and we've seen improvements in our landscape and working out how to measure them, and going through that process, connecting us with lots of scientists, people that were really, you know, really knew their soils, it just made it awesome from our perspective, because we're saying, well, we're seeing all these changes, we're seeing renewed plant growth, and we're seeing more diversity. What's driving it? And together, we had some difficult questions to answer. We thought it might have been soil carbon or an increase in soil carbon. I don't think it was that simple, and it took us two or three years to, you know, to try and figure out that it was probably more about the soil carbon or, sorry, the carbon that was cycling. So we'd increase the amount of carbon that was cycling, and it wasn't so much stored in the soil. It was just going through the process of going through the soil, going through the plants, going through the animals, and so we'd increase that amount of carbon that was cycling, and that's what we were seeing, the change, and that's not that simple to measure, you know, apart from us viewing out in the paddock and saying, gee, it's fantastic to see this growth from this amount of rain. You know, 10 years ago, we wouldn't have seen half this growth from this amount of rain.
>> What has been your philosophy of around grazing management to get those results?
>> So we started in in about '03, a reasonably intensive rotational grazing system, and we saw some really good benefits. Even though we didn't have great rains until about '09 or 2010, we were seeing some small benefits. And then we saw a significant improvement in our landscape, and then it plateaued out. Yeah, we had some dry years, but we weren't seeing the advances that we'd seen before, so then we're going right-o, we need to be -- we need to put some chaos into our management and some genuine diversity, and the more chaos, the better. So we've now, you know, looked to change our rotational grazing system to one that that really looks closely at what's growing and how we manage plants, and focusing on giving grasses a graze through a green period, and seeing if we can really get some -- kick start some bugs under the ground and, you know, focusing on one or two paddocks this year, and focusing on different paddocks the next year, maybe dropping other paddocks and leaving them for a full year, sabbathing them, if you will. And, yeah, just inviting a bit more chaos into our management and, you know, that's not that easy to manage. It's not that simple to plan for and coordinate for. However, we are seeing much more diversity now in our landscape and also seeing, you know, paddocks that were -- I don't know. For some unknown reason, you put stock in, and they just didn't like it. It wasn't -- I don't know whether the grasses weren't sweet, but just didn't like it, and so we've been able to turn some of those paddocks around by grazing them through a period where the stock were enjoying them and maybe changing -- I don't know. I'm not sure what we changed in the plants. We certainly made them now a paddock that stock enjoy going into So, yeah, I guess I'm probably not explaining it very well, Tip. It's not a simple explanation. We don't -- you know, what's your plan? Well --
>> Right.
>> -- you know, it's not that easy. It's what we do plan, we absolutely do plan, and we do a feed budget. Our plan has got to be flexible because Mother Nature, she does what she does, and we've just got to work with her.
>> Now, that was a new term in the context of grazing management for me, but I like it, adding chaos, and I like the idea of changing the -- yeah, changing the pattern of grazing duration and rest periods in a way that isn't regular, if what I'm hearing is correct, because we often put together because it's easy to plan that way. You know, you follow a mathematical formula to do a grazing plan, and then maybe you adjust that the next year, but you're adjusting sort of in a clockwise -- I mean, a clockwork fashion, as opposed to taking an area and resting it for three months this year and grazing it twice, but then maybe next year, you rest it for the entire year, if I'm hearing you correctly.
>> Yeah, and that's exactly right, you know, so there's you want, you know, a patternless pattern. It's -- yeah, so, like I said, it's a little bit more difficult to plan for. It just -- I think -- we were at a conference up at in Queensland, oh, in September, and just, you know, a really impassioned plea from one of the landowners was we just need to observe more and open our eyes and just look around us. You know, don't spend so much time looking at a grazing chart or a plan or, you know, we need to move them today or tomorrow. Go out with your eyes and really, really look and have a great look around and take in all aspects of the plant community, the birds, the animals. What are they all telling you? And, yeah, you know, that's a lovely discussion, and it certainly makes sense with the direction we're now going with our management to one of observing and, you know, interpreting what the animals and plants are telling you.
>> Mm-hm. Now, one of the criticisms of approaches like that, I think, in the United States, has been that that may work well for perennial-grass-dominated plant communities, or perennial plus annual grass, but can cause some problems with things like riparian areas, where you have different needs besides just taking care of the dominant forage species. But you've been involved a lot in what we would probably hear called watershed management groups. You call them catchments. Ironically, I just did a couple pieces on the podcast with Dr. John Buckhouse, who is a riparian and water quality scientist out of Oregon for many, many years and maybe he got the term from Australia, but he had been saying for a couple of decades that we should not call them watersheds, because we're not trying to shed water. We want to catch it, so I really like your term catchments. I don't know how far that goes back, but describe a bit some of your - how did you get into doing work with these watershed or catchment groups>
>> Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? It must have been early '90s, there was a lot of talk about, you know, I'm on the Anabranch River, and there was a lot of talk about, like, we're wasting all this water to put down the river. We should be using it for irrigated agriculture, so let's deliver water to the land holders down the Anabranch via a pipeline, rather than letting water flow down the river, which they're not really respecting, they're wasting and it's not good for the environment. So I was infuriated and really angry about this. So I got involved in catchment management to stop this pipeline, you know, at all costs, because I just saw it as being a complete disaster. And it was such an interesting journey for me, because as I read about catchment management and rivers and riparian areas in Australia, and specifically the Anabranch River, being part of the flood plain of the Darling and therefore ephemeral, that the river didn't need water in it year-round, although we did as grazing business operators. We needed water 24/7, non-negotiable, for our stock. That was -- we had to have that. So it became sort of clearer to me. Look, it took me six or eight years to reach this conclusion that we just need to separate our needs from the river's needs and a pipeline made a lot of sense, so I was, you know, I was seen by many in our community as a turncoat. It was just me learning more about, you know, rivers, how they operate and so now we have a pipeline that delivers water to all the landholders along the Anabranch, and we manage the river more for its river's needs and more natural flow regime, and all of us are a lot healthier now. It was a very difficult change, extremely difficult to negotiate the way through, and I'm not sure, given the chance, I'd want to do that again. It was pretty costly on a personal level. However, there's no question it's better for our community, so that's what got me involved in catchment management. And then, you know, now, I'm -- sooner I'll use my Twitter account, and are quite active there in being fairly critical of the way we do manage our rivers, currently. There's a lot to be learned from other parts of the world, and a lot to be learned, especially from parts of America that, you know, that may be in some of the -- I remember listening to a presentation from someone talking about an area north of Los Angeles where they -- where it's Los Angeles watershed, and they were managing it specifically all around,getting good quality water for Los Angeles. And I just reckoned, you know, maybe watershed isn't the right term. However, there's a lot to be learned from other countries in the world about how we can value our catchment management, our watershed management, and place a value on landscape management, connecting it better to our rivers, so that we can place a value on, you know, reducing nutrients in-stream, reducing sedimentation, reducing salinization, cleaner water and healthier ecosystems.
>> Yeah, I think that's good. It makes me think your comment about learning from other places, I think oftentimes other people have not the solution to our problem, but our understanding of how they solve their own problems may may lead us where we've done a good job observing and looking around us and thinking. You know, you add one more little ingredient to that mix that might have come from outside of your context, and it spurs a whole new idea that becomes a solution.
>> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, that's right. You know, we're a connected world, and we can be, and so we don't have any excuses for not utilizing skills, knowledge, experiences from other parts of the world to help us deal with our respective issues. You know, it's certainly -- and it's by listening to podcasts such as this, as one means to share some knowledge, some information and maybe connect a few people that that just might need -- it might be the light bulb that goes on that takes them closer to some options of how to resolve their issues.
>> Mm-hm. Speaking of rivers and watershed issues, I think we've done maybe -- in the United States, we have at least made some efforts, I believe, to incorporate some of the historical knowledge of indigenous peoples into that, into those planning efforts, and I don't even know enough to know if it's a sensitive question in Australia, but to what extent has there been an effort to learn from some of the ways of people that were there long before Europeans arrived?
>> I reckon there's been a lot of tokenism around that.
>> Yeah.
>> And, you know, I reckon you and I might have spoken to it -- about it a little bit in Broome about, you know, we talk about welcome to country and recognizing our forebears and aboriginal communities that have held onto those lands and held a connection to those lands. We don't, however, actually incorporate their knowledge into our management and respect the landscape the way their culture did, and learn from that, and that's where I reckon we need to get to this. There's so many opportunities for us to learn about management. You know, I was lucky enough to go up north of Broome and see just what the wonderful communities north of Broome were doing in their fire management and landscape management. And I'm thinking instantly, my goodness, how good would this be, some of this knowledge being used on eastern Australia to reduce our annual spend on bush firefighting when these guys are managing the landscape to reduce the damage from wildfires and, you know, being connected to the community and being proud of what they do? And I thought it was just wonderful, and I'm just thinking we do need a lot more of that.
>> Yeah, it was impressive. A couple years ago, I gave a talk at a state conference here in Washington State, linking some of the practices of indigenous peoples in the Inland Northwest, west of the Rocky Mountains, with some of what is, you know, sort of the leading edge of scientific discovery on wetland management, and of course, if a principle is true, then we ought to be able to arrive at it from different directions but, you know, one of my concerns is that I think we're often giving lip service to indigenous peoples and not actually listening very well or paying attention to what they used to do. Then there was a tribal member who was present for part of that talk, and he came to me afterwards and said that he appreciated it, but that he was -- one of the biggest problem is that he said many of these Native American groups, anyway, have nearly totally lost their own history. They don't know what their historic cultural practices were for land management, and I realize that's not the case everywhere, but there were enough, you know, relatively small groups that were distinct that some of that is being lost. I was similarly impressed with that group north of Broome in how they were managing fire.
>> I don't think there's any question that there's large portions of you know, indigenous culture that are not connected to the landscape and are losing language, losing culture, losing an understanding of interpreting the landscape the way their forebears used to. And that's part of the reason that they -- there's large crime in that section of the community, and they're lost to a certain extent. Well, they feel lost, and I genuinely feel for them, and that's why I do get a bit offended at the tokenism of, you know, of a welcome to country thinking that resolves it or, you know, our Prime Minister said he was sorry, and that's it. We need to learn. We need to involve and be respectful from all our cultures, and especially ones that have long held their land for a long period of time.
>> Mm-hm. And what are some of the ecological challenges in raising sheep in what is a fairly tough environment, I would call it, low rainfall, chenopod shrubs? And what are some of your challenges?
>> Well, I guess it's always straight up to make sure we provide good quality water --
>> Yeah.
>> -- and, you know, managing stocking rate to carrying capacity in making sure we don't overuse our plants is not that simple. You know, large variations in our rainfall, you know, that becomes complex. We have dust and vegetable matter that is in our wool, so then our wool is a lower quality that we deliver. Finishing our lambs so that they're a prime lamb is always a tough issue too, because, you know, you might not feed at the right time. You mightn't be able to take their way through to where they're meant to be. You know, we have a written policy in our business that we don't handfeed commercial livestock, and this -- there is some costs associated with that in our reduced production. At the same time, though, that drives us to destock as our first step when we see reducing rainfall and we're heading into a dry period, so we accept that that's what we produce with. I guess you would almost call a store stock producer, seed stock producers for someone else to take an article on and finish, and so we focus on having reasonable stock that are reasonable genetics, are well-handled, and someone else can take them on and, you know, if they've got the feed, they can finish them and turn them out to the right markets. We very rarely sell direct to a market with any of our stock.
>> As you're aware, 2026 will be the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists, and one of the stated goals for this year, for this period of international attention is to highlight, I guess, the lifeways and the practices and sometimes the plight of various pastoralists or nomadic cultures around the world. Do you have any -- I guess, a couple of questions, do you have hopes that that may change some of the perception, sometimes negative perception, that that we might say the general public has toward livestock producers, and how do you see people like you being involved in that, if at all?
>> Well, straight off the bat, I am involved, you know, but taking on the role of sort of chair of New South Wales section of that, so that's going to keep me busy. So certainly, I see it as being a great opportunity to raise the profile of pastoralists and rangeland managers, people that live out in the rangelands across Australia, obviously, as well as across the world, but doing my bit to raise that profile. And I do think there is a certain thinking that we'd be better off, rather than having all these, you know, pastoralists out there in the dry parts of Australia, wrecking the country with their animals, we just lock it all up and make it one big national park, and that'll solve all our problems. And, you know, you and I know that that's not as simple, and not at all, and so to focus on the value of pastoralists and people that live in the rangelands and how much they love the landscape, and how the landscape reciprocates and appreciates being loved by the people, and the role that people play in the ecosystems that we have in a dry environment, because people are an important part of our ecosystem.
>> Mm-hm. There was a short book that I read some time ago about -- I think it was called A Little Manual of Knowing, and the author of the book was making the case that to really know a thing involves almost entering into a first-person relationship with the thing that you want to know, and I very much see land being that way. We can learn lots of things from research, but as you said, the most insightful learning happens when we're paying close attention and we're thinking and looking around us and trying to evaluate what's actually happening. That very much reminds me of this idea that I think the claim in there was even that truth is subjective, not in that it's not objective, but that in order to know it, you have to have what philosophers called an "I/thou" relationship with the land, instead of an "I/it" where we see everything that's out there is just raw material waiting for me to put my imprint on it. It has almost its own identity that requires some humility in order to know it properly, and I'm hearing that in what you're describing.
>> Yeah, that's good, isn't it? You know, I was sort of thinking back to, you know, I forget who you were talking to, but describing the rangelands as saying that it's an area that is such low value because of its variability that it hasn't been explained very well by science, because we haven't invested much science out there, because we don't get much returns. And I really like that part of the rangelands because, you know, I remember hearing Fred Provenza saying, you know, that, you know, our pastures or our ecosystems, plants need to be complex. In fact, the more complex the better, and there's no need to understand it. We just want them really complex. And I thought that's a really good way to look at it, isn't it? Let's not spend too much time trying to explain every mortal thing. We're just, yeah, gee, isn't that a lovely, complex ecosystem? Wonderful.
>> Well, I've asked most of the questions. Was there anything that was on your mind that you wanted to talk about that I didn't ask about?
>> Not particularly, Tip. I do just really want to -- I just encourage people to really take that view of the relationship they have with the landscape and the livestock and see that for -- you know, that it's a challenge and something you need to build on and feed. And, you know, that's such a key part of my life, and the reason I live out here. I certainly could be -- I do cop a bit of flack, and probably rightfully so, for not focusing strongly enough on money. Money's just sort of -- I guess, doesn't bring me the joy in my life that a love of a person, a love of the landscape, a love of animals, a love of plants, birds, a love of being involved in the community, those things bring me so much joy. And, you know, maybe I'm lucky that I don't have to focus too much on money, possibly. I just try and live my life focusing on those relationships. And I put a high value on my own mental health, so I don't wait for my mental health to drop. So the joy of, you know, the love and being associated with my passions, that feeds my positive mental health, and I know that if my mental health drops, my productivity falls with it, and so it's so important for me to keep in a good state of mind, and I know that feeding my passions keeps me in a really good state of mind. You know, and it's not that I don't mind working with people. I say to people that I only really work with them because I have a passion for working with animals, and people are just animals. And so I have said to people before in a presentation, that if they feel that I'm being a bit harsh on them, they should ask me to treat them like an animal, and they might be pleasantly surprised. So, yeah, I guess that's just probably explaining a bit more of me, Tip, and the -- and, you know, why I have a love and a passion for the landscape and our communities, because it's very important to me.
>> Well, I think that's a good last word. Gus, thank you for what you do, and for continuing to do it in a way that is respectful to people and to the land, and I look forward to talking some more about these things.
>> Look, thank you very much, Tip. It's been a joy to speak to you today, and I really appreciated meeting you and the time we spent together in Broome, and I certainly appreciate listening to your podcasts and, you know, right back at you with the respect you demonstrate for the people that you interview and the perspectives they bring on the rangelands and the ranches, the art of the range, so thank you very much, Tip.
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