Jen Quealy, a social geographer has been a landcare advocate, for over three decades, as it evolved from a few, into thousands of active local networks of Landcare influencers and practitioners, across Australia and globally.
Jen, one of the original 8-person national team of Australia’s Decade of Landcare Coordinators from 1990, roles created after direct advocacy by farmers and environmentalists, to help plan, promote, and attract co-funding for landcare.
Her efforts helped landcare evolve from an early ‘start-up’ model of rural-regional community-led projects, motivating and supporting local farmers and communities, and to appeal to government, industry, business, and media, for help to promote and co-fund landcare outcomes.
Through short-term roles and volunteering, Jen helped co-create many visionary, creative, and pragmatic projects, and to attract and deliver funding to landcare networks, organisations, and community enterprises.
If mapped, these projects would show a dense and deep landcare ‘impact map’ of partnerships and achievements, failures and ‘experiments’.
Jen is motivated by the welcoming, curious, and risk-taking leadership of grassroots landcare farmers and First Nations leaders, environment, research, and agency advocates, educators and students, and the renewing energy of bright, young, coordinators and facilitators, added to their smart guiding older ‘hands and minds’. Jen credits local innovators as the real legends, who entice collaboration and inquiry, within supportive communities – one paddock, one neighbour, one partner, one threatened species, one production challenge at a time: and in reality, often all together.
Highlights: Bringing Landcare into disaster recovery, Far North QLD cyclones, flood recovery and Blitz’s, co-creating RabbitScan and FeralScan, International Landcare Conference, ACIAR Journal, Olympic Landcare (Lithgow’s Community of the Year (2000) Award), personally Awarded a National Emergency Medal in 2023.