#111 Movement at the Station
David Pollock on the Minister’s return & big changes at Wooleen
David Pollock is one of Australia’s most prominent regenerative pastoralists. He and wife Frances have featured a few times on the award-winning ABC TV series Australian Story. But I’m more fond of telling people these days they’ve featured a few times on this podcast! David’s also known for his brilliant book, ‘The Wooleen Way: Renewing an Australian Resource’. That was aptly described as ‘The astonishing story of reviving the oldest land on Earth’.
Minister Alannah MacTiernan, David Pollock & Debbie Dowden, Chairperson of the Southern Rangelands Pastoral Alliance, at Wooleen Station for the big announcement last week (sourced from the Ministers ‘social media’ post).
“That’s a big part of the reason that I’m doing what I’m doing, because we went and visited a property north of Alice Springs back in 2004 and it just blew my mind. It’s like, well, you don’t have to do it the way we’ve been doing it. Just to have that sort of vision that there is a different way is so important. And the more of those visions that we can have, and the closer they are to people, the more likely they are to take them up.”
When the book was published a few years ago, the Western Australian State Minister for Regional Development, Agriculture and Food (& now Hydrogen) paid David and Frances a visit to talk about it. A few years on, just last week, the Minister returned with a big announcement. This was going to be a shorter episode about just that – that was big enough. But when David and I were talking about that, we ended up talking about some other big changes – in himself.
So you’ll find the first half hour of our conversation is on the brilliant array of developments afoot right now. And the rest, the personal transformations at the heart of them all.
This conversation was recorded online on Thursday 3 March 2022.
Get more:
David’s book ‘The Wooleen Way: Renewing an Australian Resource’.
The Minister’s media statement on the Southern Rangelands Revitalisation Pilot.
Landholders for Dingoes website and more here.
You can hear more of David and I in conversation, out at Wooleen Station, for episode 66.
You can hear the detailed conversation David and I shared on the release of his book ‘The Wooleen Way’ in episode 44.
You can also hear David and his wife Frances in a live panel conversation with Charles Massy and I in episode 16 ‘Grassroots Revolution’.
And my conversation with Frances back at Wooleen Station in episode 9 ‘Regenerating Land & Food Systems’.
Music:
Regeneration, composed by Amelia Barden, from the soundtrack of the new film Regenerating Australia, launching this week.