Connecting
People to
Country
Yarrie Station
Lead: Charlotte Riseborough
Region: East Pilbara
Hectares: 430,000
Environment: Owners, managers, long-term staff, seasonal staff, station staff, farm staff, Outback Beef staff, and visitors.
Challenge Identified: Giving people a vested interest in observing, monitoring, and caring for the vast Yarrie landscape they move through.
Status: Perpetually ongoing within Yarrie. Production of key educational resources via PEN is complete.
Approach
Yarrie have identified that people with a vested interest in the landscape they live and work on, and the team they are a part of, will go the extra mile in caring for country and people. So, how do we deepen the connection between people and between people and country?
- Help them understand the landscape they move through.
- Give them a way to connect to the why behind people being at Yarrie.
- Bring emotion and engagement to the science of landcare.
- Utilise technology to bridge the vast distances between camps on the station, the stations and farm, and the cultures we all come from.
So, how do we achieve those goals?
- Produce a pocket-sized booklet that identifies different trees, grasses, soils, scats, animal tracks, and even ways to ID why a landscape is dead or dying.
- Record podcasts with Yarrie team members to tell their own story of why they’ve come to be at Yarrie and what makes them tick.
- Install new rehabilitation sites alongside existing ones on Yarrie that team members can practice their observational skills on.
- Produce an educational and engaging video outlining what an Environmentally Sustainable Resource Management (ESRM) plan is and what it aims to achieve.
Research and collate the information to put into the booklet. Utilise Yarrie team members and experts in the field.
Produce the booklet and engage the team in ways they can utilise it.
Partner with a podcast production company and create the template for Yarrie’s podcasts.
Record and host the podcasts for Yarrie. There is a plan to have these accessible publicly if the interviewees are willing to do so.
Install new monitoring sites on rehabilitation areas identified via the ESRM plan.
Educate and engage the team in using the GCG monitoring tool, and begin sharing the landcare load.
Work with a film-making professional at Yarrie to produce a video that takes the 100+ page ESRM document from a long read to an engaging watch.
Utilise all of these tools for inducting staff into the Yarrie team, and continuing to invest in them as people who help Yarrie flourish as an enterprise and ecosystem.
Key Insights
1
The video produced has given us an incredibly simple way to introduce the idea of landcare as a team pursuit, and provide a grounding in the basics of an ESRM plan.
2
The booklets are proving themselves to be useful identification tools in every day station life.
3
Pastoral living and working are about being in tune with your country. Highlighting that has been highly rewarding.
4
Once you start observing effectively, you can’t stop.
Impact & Results
Reporting on results from a human perspective is a difficult thing to achieve objectively. We are seeing an invested team in regards to landcare and being a part of the process that leads to landcare decisions.
We hope to see the booklet, podcast, and video we’ve produced become a tool that other stations can use with their teams as well. First we need to perfect it here at Yarrie, then we can work out how to extend this project into the rest of the Pilbara in a format that stays relevant to each station. Stay tuned for more information.