Home on the rangelands

Australia’s rangelands are a confluence of grazing livestock, natural ecosystems and the cultural fabric of our heartland.

Story Mandy McKeesick  Photo L.E's Photography

Dr Judi Earl is in her happy place. Seated on a hillside, beneath centuries-old grasstrees, flanked by a kelpie named Punter and a maremma named Lola, she gazes down a white box woodland valley, where a liquorice allsorts collection of cows and five bullock camels are grazing. Calves cavort, their upright tails like periscopes through the thick swathes of grass.

Here, on Glen Orton, on the North West Slopes of NSW, all the animals have names. “Those ones over there,” she says pointing to a couple of cows with long white blazes dripping down their faces, “were stirry when they arrived, always rushin’ about the yards, so they have Russian names. Those girls by the belahs are named after the Matildas and those under the Port Jackson fig are named after female tennis players. The ones eating the dry lick have Indian names because of my travels and because to the Indians the cow is sacred. The camels – well they are named after cigarettes of course.”

Domesticated animals aside, the land around Judi is moving. An eastern long-necked turtle lumbers between dams, eastern grey kangaroos and swamp wallabies graze alongside the stock, dung beetles roll dung. Back at the house, king parrots settle on the eaves, green tree frogs croak from the tank, striated pardalotes nest in the shed and skinks live under the fridge.

Judi is a grasslands ecologist with nearly 30 years of consultancy experience across Australia, the USA, India and Spain, but a long and slow road trip from Guyra in NSW to Darwin was the catalyst for her transition from teacher to student. “I stopped every 5km to take ecological photos and there was not one spot that didn’t have some sort of issue – weeds, overgrazing, bare ground, erosion,” she says. “I realised there is so much potential in raising the ecological production of our land, and in 2011 I bought Glen Orton and put theory into practice. When I came here the place was overgrown with Coolatai grass and I could only find six native grasses. That’s six plants, not six species.”

Coolatai grass was introduced into this area from Africa in the 1890s as a pasture to control erosion, but it has become highly invasive, choking out native species and forming a low-protein, low-nutrient monoculture. The Russians, the tennis players and the smoking camels are Judi’s tools in land regeneration. With high-density managed grazing, the Coolatai is opening up and letting other species through. “I’ve now found 65 grass species, including Queensland bluegrass, red grass, early spring grass, Parramatta grass, wallaby grass and native sorghum, among 289 total plant species,” Judi says. “I’ve identified 87 bird species, 19 species of lizard and 12 types of snake, which is not nearly enough. I like seeing snakes and think they are terribly undervalued.”

2026 has been designated the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists (IYRP). The International Rangeland Congress (IRC) defines a rangeland as: “usually dryland, with predominantly native grasses, forbs and shrubs, that is grazed or has the potential to be grazed by livestock and wildlife”. The name takes various incarnations around the world – steppe, veld, prairie, chaparral – but in Australia, it is most synonymous with the outback.

Covering 75% of our land mass, rangelands have many faces, from the spinifex plains of the deserts to tropical savannas in the north, eucalypt woodlands and magnificent breakaway country. Though they are utilised in different ways – mining, conservation, Aboriginal land, tourism – in many cases rangelands are managed by people who derive a living from grazing animals.