GROUNDED Live - 2026: Caroyn Hall - What’s With Water? Tales from Mulloon

Welcome to a new season of GROUNDED Live. This season features presentations recorded at GROUNDED Festival 2026, held over two memorable days on Yan Yan Gurt West Farm in Victoria, Australia. Each episode captures the ideas, stories and practical knowledge shared by the farmers, researchers, chefs, practitioners and thinkers who came together to explore healthier landscapes, healthier food systems and healthier communities.

In this presentation, Carolyn Hall shares the work of Mulloon Institute and its pioneering approach to restoring natural water cycles across whole landscapes. Exploring the principles of landscape rehydration, Carolyn demonstrates how thoughtful water management can improve resilience, restore ecosystem function and benefit farms well beyond the property boundary. 

GROUNDED Festival is a cross between a farming conference and a food festival, held on a different farm each year. Every festival is unique, celebrating the people, landscapes and food of its host region through an inspiring line-up of speakers, local producers and hands-on learning.

With multiple stages running concurrently, GROUNDED brings together science and technology, ancient wisdom and fresh thinking. It provides a respectful place for lively discussion, an audience as interesting as the speakers, and an excellent menu of local food, drinks and music, all on a beautiful, regeneratively managed farm.

Each year, we record many of the presentations and make them freely available as the GROUNDED Live podcast. We hope you enjoy the conversations.

Thanks for listening, and if you enjoy this episode, we'd love to welcome you to a future GROUNDED Festival.

Transcript

SPEAKER_05 0:05

G'day there. I'm Matthew Evans and I'm the founder and curator of the Grounded Festival. And what follows is the Grounded Podcast. Now, this is the audio that we capture from the speakers in the tents live on the day. It's unedited, and I hope you enjoy it. If you're thinking water in the Australian context and you're thinking how we can look at landscapes differently, well, Malloon springs to mind there. It's a property not far from Canberra on the outskirts, skirts of Canberra, where they've actually changed the way they look at how water flows through a landscape, thanks to the work of um predominantly Peter Andrews. Anyway, uh Carolyn Hall is the CEO of the Malun Institute, and she's going to talk about uh what they've done there and how those lessons could be taken further afield so we can all look after uh this wonderful resource, water, which doesn't stop at the fence line.

SPEAKER_02 1:01

Uh my name is Danny Valant. I'm a Melbourne food journalist and host of the Dirty Linen Food Podcast. Um and yeah, I'm just overwhelmed uh by the number of inspiring people uh on this site, the incredible stories that I've heard, and all the ideas that I have to take back to Melbourne and to my work as a journo. So many stories to tell. Uh this session is with Carolyn Hall and it's called What's With Water? So Carolyn will talk about her work at Mulloon Institute, uh, where yeah, it's some focus on the large-scale restoration of agricultural landscapes across Australia in partnership with rural and First Nations communities. Will you please join me in welcoming Carolyn?

SPEAKER_03 1:51

Thank you. Thank you, Danny. Thank you, everybody, for coming. Um, how good is grounded? I just want to say, like, wow, such a joy to be here. Um, I I want to start by acknowledging the Eastern Ma nation, uh, the people that belong to this country and have belonged to this country for a very long time. It's uh it's a privilege to be on country here today and to tell the story of Maloon. Um I've thought a lot about what I wanted to say today. I know that there are people in this audience who knew my founder, Tony Coote, or the founder of the Malloon Institute. Um it's hard to express the um the privilege that I feel to have continued Tony's legacy. So I just want to um acknowledge those people in the audience that knew Tony and let you all know that he is never very far from my thoughts. Um so maybe just a little bit of a show of hands so I get a sense of who you are. Um have we got farmers in the audience? Yay, that's great. Um have we got NRM folk in the audience? Yeah, yeah. Have we got people that know about Malloon or that have worked with us in the past? Fantastic. Okay, so um today I want to I want to sort of talk about three things to to frame. Wow, I've got so much that I could tell you, but I want to kind of contain it in amongst three things. I want to talk a little bit about where we've come from, so the origin story of Malloon, because it's really very special and we're quite unique. Um, I want to talk about where we are now because that's a story of just uh an incredible story of really what is now success. And then I want to talk a little bit um about my thoughts about where we're headed. They don't necessarily align with our corporate strategic plan, um, but they're lots of thoughts that I have about where we're headed. So I'll start very quickly with um with the origin story. I don't want to spend too much time on it, but it is important. So um we come from philanthropy. We were founded in 2011 by a man called Tony Coote A. M. and his wife, Mrs. Tony Coote. So Tony and Tony, or the two Tony's, um, the Tony's plural. Um amazing, amazing, a man of great vision, uh, a high net worth individual. So a person at that level, he was one of the few people um with that kind of wealth that I'd ever met in my professional journey. Uh, a man of great vision and who had great concern for the food and water security for this country. So it is really on um on the shoulders of a giant, really, that that I stand. Um, a complex character, not an easy man. Um he ruled the roost, it was it was his charity. He founded it, and it all revolved around a project that we now call the Malloon Rehydration Initiative, and I'll I'll touch on that a little bit later. Um when I think about Malloon now, the structure that Tony created, he he used to say um very often that you can't be green if you're in the red. Uh so having successful farms were really important to him. So when we think about the institute structure, we've got the Malloon Institute like an umbrella over the top, and we've got two for-purpose or for-profit arms underneath. One of those is Malone Creek Natural Farms, and this was really important to Tony, the fact that we came from a farming heritage, and um he actually bequeathed two farms to us on the Southern Pablland. So incredible generosity. Those farms continue to support a very successful egg enterprise. So that is producing around about 100,000 eggs a week on free range pasture raised on biodynamic pastures. It's a big job. We have a farm manager, uh, general manager of Ameline Creek Natural Farms who is just wonderful. And we also have a small beef cattle enterprise that kind of works like a breeding herd, but only when conditions are good. For some of you that are aware of conditions on the southern tablends, it can be quite tough country. Um, we have the halter collars, so we're all about innovation and you know pushing the boundaries on our farms. So that's a really fun thing that I get to oversee with all the incredible ups and downs of farming and the occasional bouts of sheer terror around managing the risk on the farm. Um, the other side of the coin is Malloon Consulting. So the institute does lots of education work and we do lots of landscape rehydration, and I'll I'll get to that in a moment. Um, but Tony always thought that we needed a we needed a way to deliver that work on a fee-for-service basis. So we have this kind of other plank that allows us to work with farmers directly or to work with corporates or to work with um businesses of all kinds. And um that's been a really interesting challenge to build that business model. Uh, and it's been uh a long road. I joined the institute in 2017 as the general manager of Malone Consulting, so to try and kick off that kind of commercial business. Um, it it took a while uh and it's still a bit of a stop-start thing. But at the core of our work, um, you know, we can we can talk about landscape rehydration and landscape restoration and the design and building of um natural infrastructure that helps reconnect streams and floodplains and all the wonderful things that that does. Um, we can talk about the education and capacity building program that we have. These are kind of building blocks of the institute, what we've focused on over particularly the last five years, getting those in place with a view that you've you've got to build the business from the bottom up if you're creating a business that's got to go on in perpetuity. And this is not new to lots of farmers in the room. That's kind of the mindset that farming has, but it's often not the mindset of startup businesses. The startup mindset is let's build a business that we can um take to a certain commercial level and we can sell it. We're not about that at Malun. We've been very purposeful in concentrating on our technical work, that technical piece of how we do the work that we do. And we've heard some beautiful presentations over the last couple of days. I don't know if anyone heard Katie Ross's um presentation. It was just yet, shout out to Katie, that was fantastic. I I won't go into the sort of heavy technical detail of what we do, but we restore small water cycles on farm, and it's wonderful. Alongside that, we've developed an education and capacity building curriculum, a whole program that uh takes not just farmers, but takes NRM professionals on a structured learning journey so that they can understand the work that we can do, they understand how we do that work, they understand the challenges that we face, but then they can also gain skills and capacity so that they can introduce landscape rehydration onto their own properties. And we do that using a communities of practice model, and we're very purposeful about that. The idea is not that we're there delivering education forever, the idea is that we work with communities in a very intense way and we take them on this structured learning journey, and we have our fantastic Tam Connor in the audience here today, our learning programs manager uh who is deep in this space. And we want to create these communities of practice so that we can ultimately withdraw and that those guys can take that work forward. So the other part of what we've built that emerged from a high net wealth, high net worth individual like Tony, this man with this incredible vision, but he had his very, you know, it was like his personal pet charity that he'd created. And it was all about a project that related to the Malloon Creek that was kind of ran through his farms. And so it was very um central to his very personal experience. But what we were building and where we were heading was something much bigger. We were building a business, we were building an organization that could take in big licks of public money, that could take in big licks of philanthropic money and ultimately work with big organizations that can turn and face natural capital markets and do this work at scale. So the idea was always that the Malloon project was a model that we could scale up and we could deliver all across the country. So I just kind of wanted to frame it in that way so you get a sense of the time and effort that we've spent on those three building blocks. And it's easy to kind of push the governance one over to the side. Um, but any of you involved in the nuts and bolts of governance work can appreciate just how challenging and how hard that can be. The work in the boardroom, getting consensus decision making there about the direction of an organization is some of the most challenging work that I've ever done. Um, but some of the most important work that creates the bedrock of how an organization like Malloon actually turns and faces the world. So these three big building blocks, the technical piece, so that we know how to do our work and we know how to deliver landscape rehydration and natural infrastructure that's not going to wash away, that's gonna do what it was designed to do, and it's gonna reconnect streams and floodplains, it's gonna deliver more productive landscapes and biodiversity and all the fantastic benefits that you get on farm and particularly at the catchment scale when you do the work that we do. The education and capacity building, the projects that we deliver are social projects. At the core of these projects, it's winning the hearts and minds of the people that we work with, and you don't get that through building stuff or showing the data or talking about it. You actually get that by getting down and dirty and building relationships with the people that you're working with, and ultimately, what I've learned and what we do, what we actually practice is awareness-based systems change. So the kind of the mechanics of doing what we do are one thing, but ultimately what we're trying to do is change the system that we're working in as the same time that we're working in it. So, for those of you familiar with a sort of a social science background, it is action research. We're trying to shift the way landholders perceive their landscapes, and that means developing skills in reading the landscape. And when people start to see their landscapes differently and they see that their landscapes are part of nature and the work that they do is working with nature, that's a different way of seeing a landscape. And when they see their landscapes differently, they can begin to value their landscapes differently. So when we think about natural capital, that's been a sprinkle of the conversation around here over the last couple of days, that that valuing of landscapes in a different way can underpin a shift in the way people manage. So when we think about that structured learning journey that I was talking about, you can't ask for the holy grail of practice change without doing the hard work. You can't get practice change unless you take people on a journey that's meaningful to them, that understands the challenges that they face and deals directly with the management issues that are confronting them on the ground. And there are there are lots of people here that partner with farmers and help to take them on those types of journeys with different aspects of enterprise management. And we've got a couple in the audience, and um I'm smiling at Graham because he's going to come to Malone and take our farm team on a bit of a learning journey as well. So um, but we're not just limiting ourselves to awareness-based systems change within agriculture. Um, and I want to touch briefly on um where we've come from, and one of the big challenges that we've we've faced and that we continue to face is uh the regulatory frameworks that are not fit for purpose for our work. So we recognize that 200 years of changed land use in this country has changed the way water moves through the landscape, and it's moving much more rapidly now. All that clearing has meant that water rushes through the landscape and it concentrates into drainage lines and they erode down. And so that that big shift has gone beyond fencing it off and planting trees. We can't we can't fix it like that. We have to do more. And that can often look like building natural infrastructure, building rock and log in-stream structures. We're not allowed to call them leaky wee's anymore. Um, and building those big in-stream structures across a catchment means that you've got big yellow machines in the creek. Um, and this is really confronting for regulators who like to see these incised systems as the status quo and what should be there. So we're quite often at the state and territory level pressing up against these regulatory frameworks that are no longer fit for purpose. They don't serve nature repair, they don't serve agricultural productivity, they don't serve biodiversity, they're they're outdated, and we need to shift them. Um again, when I think about how we do that, it's through awareness-based systems change. And what is the metric that measures awareness-based systems change? It's the depth of the trust relationships that we build in the ecosystem that we work in. Kind of sounds pretty simple, um, but it takes time, it takes time and real effort to build trust relationships. It means doing what you said you were going to do, it means turning up to meetings, chasing money when there's no funding to do that. It means keeping on going, even though things aren't easy. It means facing down some of those challenges. It just means keeping on going, keeping on turning up. Um just just keeping on, keeping on. Um, and it it can be really taxing on a team that is trying really hard and working really hard but not getting any traction. And that's a little bit of where we've come from. Um, there's a part of the origin story that I that I've I've kind of missed. Um, so when Tony established the institute, there were two key influences um that I reflect on often. And one of those, um, many of you will be familiar with him, a guy called Peter Andrews, a legendary um landscape thinker and reader. And he really introduced the focus on water to Tony. Um, but then there was another man who was very influential, a man called Uncle Max Delamun Harrison, a UN elder who held the law. Um Uncle Max and Tony had many conversations around culturally attuned water management and what that looked like and what that meant for young Gurungi, young men from the UN nation, and how how Maloon could foster that that sharing of knowledge, that knowledge exchange. It was something that took us a long time as an organization to evolve into, but we're kind of we're getting there now. Um, I want to I want to talk a little bit uh about where we're at now. I kind of, it's easy to skip over um probably five years of absolute hard yards. I can't tell you um how hard we worked at Malloon to build what we've built today. Um, creating a container to foster an amazing creative team, to create a culture within an organization where we shared our wins, we shared our pain, we had incredible faith and trust in one another. So when we think about awareness-based systems change, we're not just practicing that um from an external face, we're practicing that internally. We're building the rocket ship as we're going to the malloon. We're building the rocket ship as we're going to the malloon moon. And it like it's it's really tough, right? And you you don't have the systems in place. You don't have, you don't have all that stuff that people that came from the Australian government that came from other organizations where, you know, you had a HR department, you had all this other stuff. We didn't have any money, we didn't have any secure funding to help us build that. So we just had to get on and do the bloody work. Um, and we just we just kept at it and we did what we said we would do, and we started to build those trust relationships across the regen ag sector in this country. We started to build those trust relationships across the NRM sector, and we started importantly to build those trust relationships with the regulators. And we invited them in and we invited everybody to Maloon. I think I've I don't know, I've hosted thousands and thousands of tours at Malloon and inviting people in to see the work that we do. The first big break that we got was $3.8 million in funding through the NLP2 program in 2018. Sounds like a lot of money, but when you've got a catchment scale project that needs monitoring. It's kind of like, oh great, okay, yep, we can pop in some instruments, we can pop in some piezometers that measure the groundwater, we can pop in some soil moisture sensors, we can pop in some climate stations, and we can do some telemetering and we can do all this fantastic stuff. And then five years down the track, you realise Peter Peter pumpkin eater had a wife and couldn't keep her. We like so much instrumentation, so much data coming out of it, so much requirement for data management and data security. I understand now why there aren't too many long-term ecological monitoring sites in this country, and the Malloon project stands singly as an amazing example. So just a huge amount of effort to keep that project going because it was the cornerstone of everything that we've built. Fast forward on a few years when the data started to flow, we um we held a conference in 2024 and we invited a whole lot of people. We weren't quite sure how it would go. It was fully hectic. I just hats off to Matthew and the team here because that little conference that we ran, it kind of pushed us to our limit. But wow, what a response we got. And I it it feels to me in retrospect that that conference was a big shift and a big change for us. And right now we're sitting on over $11 million of Australian government funding to help us do what we do. It's it's amazing. It feels like we're the biggest overnight success that's been 20 years in the making. Um, and I want to talk briefly to the key projects that um that we've been able to secure funding for and kind of why we went for those projects, um, why they're important to Maloon, and why we hope that they are the building blocks of scaling landscape restoration in this country. And after speaking to Rain today, it's actually not scaling landscape function restoration, it's scaling the management of risk for supply chains in the agricultural sector. So, anyway, that I'll I'll come a little bit to that in a minute. Um, the first project that we've been successful with is the First Nations Water Skills Certificate. So, thinking back to Uncle Max and his influence on Tony Coote, how do we as an organization share the knowledge that we have so that young Indigenous people can get skilled up in water management to be part of a restoration economy so that they can do culturally appropriate work? You co-design a water skills certificate with them that acknowledges where they're from, the country that they care for, the country they belong to, and you work with them to share the knowledge that we have that will equip them to be part of that restoration economy that we all know is coming. That's been a big adventure, and Tam is leading that project and with such diligence and skill and heart, the work we do is often heart-led. I can't express to you the level of values alignment across our whole team. Um and just together, yeah, together we are heart led, and how that gives us some kind of special power just to keep on going when it all seems too much. The next project that we were successful with under the Natural Heritage Trust through um through DAF is the landscape function monitoring toolkit. So that project came out of necessity because the Malloon Rehydration Initiative across 23,000 hectares with 23 landholders and 50 kilometers of Creek, all that monitoring equipment, wow, unreal, but nobody's ever going to pay that kind of money to monitor a catchment ever again. So, how do we, doing what we do, monitor and measure that when it's a little land care group, it's the kerangamite CMA who want to do something here on the creek, or it's ultimately a big corporate that wants to turn and face the market. So that whole challenge of how we measure and monitor what we do, we sought that funding and we were successful. But it's not just about the biophysical elements of the landscape that we're measuring and monitoring, it's about what is a culturally functioning landscape as well. So just bringing it back to that, bringing it back to that cultural connection that Tony had with Uncle Max, that commitment that we have to First Nations, and that incredible opportunity for knowledge exchange. That project is a big adventure and is enabling us to connect with a whole lot of different experts across the sector and delve into what the financial markets and what natural capital markets can potentially offer us in terms of scale. The big grant that we were successful with from the Futures Drought Fund is we call TIMI. So training, implementation, mentoring, monitoring, and evaluation. Sometimes it's hard to remember what the acronyms all mean, but ultimately that'll be six different subcatchment groups that we work with using our communities of practice project, upskilling them so that they can lead in their communities and that they can deliver landscape repair that suits them, that's place-based, that reflects the challenges that they're confronting and leaves them totally upskilled to lead further work, and also using the results of Lyft to be able to monitor and measure the success of that work. So that's a really big one, and it'll include two First Nations communities as well. The other project that I wanted to touch on is it's really remarkable, and I think it's one of the first partnerships that we're seeing that recognizes landscape restoration as contributing to ecosystem services. So Water New South Wales in New South Wales they have the responsibility for supplying water to Sydney Water at a reasonable standard for supply across Sydney's drinking water network. Back in 2019, uh there was a Sydney drinking water catchment audit, and it recommended that if Water New South Wales wanted to continue to supply water at a potable standard to Sydney water, then they should do more regen ag and they should do more landscape rehydration. It was like, hooray! How good was that? And so all of a sudden, there was this basis for a partnership with Water New South Wales, who now fund us to the tune of a little bit over a million dollars a year to go into subcatchment communities across Sydney's drinking water catchment, engage with them, use our communities of practice model, deliver our learning programs, upskill them, and then actually deliver landscape rehydration infrastructure in those subcatchments so that we can contribute to water quality outcomes for Sydney's drinking water catchment. We believe that that can be a kind of a model for other partnerships in Australia with other water agencies, and that ultimately the commercialization of the ecosystem service and the natural capital that we deliver can be part of a future for Maloon that takes us beyond grant funding, that takes us beyond philanthropy, that takes us beyond pilot projects, which are wonderful even when they're large scale, but they're still pilot projects. So when I think now I'll touch on a little bit about the future for Malloon. Storytelling has always been a massive part of what um of what we do. And Tony Kutz saw that early on, and one of the first hires that he made um was a communications and marketing officer. And so when I joined the institute in 2017 and there were five people, one of those people was committed to the storytelling, which was just amazing. Now that we're 29 people, almost 10 years down the track, um, that that storytelling remains really critical. And I was so um so buoyed today to hear Rain and to hear Carmel talk about the importance of storytelling as a part of um proving what we do in terms of caring for natural capital and building natural capital. So um a big part of the focus of our efforts as we move forward from here is about telling the story of our good work. And not just telling the story, but getting that story out. I had a um I had a political advisor say to me one day, well, the story's just too good, Carolyn. There's no there's no drama. You're doing all these wonderful things for landscape and you're delivering food and water security for the country, but there's no kind of there's no drama that a politician can get their hook into. So there's kind of a lot of thinking about how we can tell that story and making it making it appealing and making it newsworthy. Because that just seems a little bit elusive for us at the moment. So we'll do a lot of work on on how that might happen. A lot of thinking that I do is about scaling what we do. So we know how to do it. We've kind of cracked the code. We've got that technical piece of work, we've got that learning programs piece of work, we can do the capacity building, we've got the governance firing, and we've had two of our newly minted skills-based board directors here with us over the course of this festival. We've got a skills-based board now at Maloon. It's this remarkable adventure that we're going on. But we need to do more of this work and we need to do it quickly. At a four-degree temperature rise, the world becomes uninsurable, and we'll have well and truly reached a tipping point in terms of climate change. We'll have well and truly reached a tipping point in terms of the ability of our landscapes to be resilient to climate shocks. We feel that urgency, and we know that we've got to do more, and we've got to do more quickly. We believe that the markets provide an opportunity to bring some of those large capital flows that are circling around the world, that that Canadian pension fund money that was referred to earlier today. How do we get hold of some of that and bring it down and put it into our landscape restoration projects? We know we've got a, we developed a tool to rank catchments across New South Wales to prioritize them for landscape rehydration work. We know how to prioritize where the investment could be delivered. But what I've grown to understand is that we develop shovel-ready projects. We know how to develop a project that's ready to implement. We're really good at that. We do that hard work and we build those relationships and we get connected and we understand the social ecosystem that we work in and we get it all ready and we know what it's going to take to deliver it, but they're not ready, they're not investment ready. They're not ready for that money. So the conversations that have gone on today and the shift in thinking about how we pitch our work and how we create that connector, that connector that plugs us into those global financial flows and enables us to bring that money into Australia and into the projects that we do and to deliver those projects at scale across this entire country.Anywhere we go, from the north of the Northern Territory to the far north Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef attachments to Western Australia, to the central desert, to Victoria, we see the same impacts. We see massive changes in landscapes that have led to water concentrating and becoming incised, these systems becoming incised and water rushing through the landscape. We know how to fix it. We know how to fix it. Technically, we understand how to fix it, and we can do it anywhere. We can do it anywhere, and we can train other people to do it anywhere. We can engage with communities, we can take them on a learning journey, we can get them excited about it. We know that it will deliver agricultural productivity, we know it will deliver biodiversity outcomes, we know it'll deliver ecosystem services like cleaner water, improved riparian vegetation, habitat for threatened species. We can even reinstate wetting and drying regimes on floodplains to favor the breeding habitat for specific species. Like we're all over this stuff. It's just, it's unreal, right? The kind of the goosebumps that we get from kind of having had the opportunity through grant and philanthropic funding to practice this stuff, it's just fantastic. But to scale it, to get it happening at scale across the whole country, we need more and we need markets, we need activation and tapping into those big global financial flows that are going to enable us to bring those big licks of money that then can partner with the likes of MLA, that can partner with the likes of DAF so that we can deliver much bigger projects all across the country. We can't possibly do all that work, and we don't necessarily want to do all that work. So building those communities of practice all across the country, raising the skill level of the NRM practitioners, the professionals that work in the field, pivoting the likes of flood engineers that are currently all concerned about mitigating the impacts of flooding on local communities, pivoting those guys to designing and constructing landscape rehydration infrastructure. Like it's many plates spinning that if we can just line it all up and plug that money in, away we go. So that's a kind of that's a little um vision for the future. And then for agriculture in Australia, whatever the production system is, whatever agricultural enterprise you have, if you're practicing that on a functioning productive landscape with water, with soil health, with increased microbiology, with increased riparian vegetation stable systems where the energy is flowing, where the carbon, where the minerals are cycling, where everything is functioning in that landscape, even the most conventional approach to agriculture is going to do better. If we can put that together with farmers that are actually managing with nature, that are actually looking after and building their natural capital, we can produce the cleanest, greenest food on the planet. You talk about market access, we talk about gaining a premium for produce delivered and grown and produced and exported from this country. Like it, it the opportunity is just it's incredible in my view. Um, but anyway, I get a little bit carried away, a little bit carried away with the potential of what could happen. Um but it's not all ponies and rainbows. We face some pretty significant um policy constraints. We don't currently have an enabling environment here in Australia to help us to do this work. We need regulatory reform at every state and territory level. We need true leadership so that we can bring the leaders of those states and territories together. They can think about the outcomes that they want to achieve from something like a nature repair market in this country. They can think about the outcomes that they want to deliver from nature restoration or nature repair. They can agree on those. They can decide on a preferential regulatory pathway to let farmers do what farmers do best. Farmers as land stewards, skilled up with the capacity to repair and restore their landscapes, to deliver clean, green, sustainably produced food while they're looking after and growing their natural capital, they're the best risk managers that we have. Let's open that gate, let's let's let's let that happen. But at the moment, we're not quite there. We're not quite there, but I do um I do believe through the effort and intention that is growing in the sector by the um the sheer necessity if we're going to um if we're going to be resilient in the face of climate change, what we've been doing, what we've been doing for the last 200 years, it's not working. We're all at every turn with extreme bushfire events. Cass Moore, our comms media officer, experienced one just after Christmas. Um, she's not alone. Many people we know across the country have ex um have experienced extreme bushfire hazard. Here in the Otways, if it's not bushfire, it's flood. If it's not bushfire or flood, it's drought. We can help build more resilient landscapes, and we can help farmers do that in partnership with each other across the whole country. And we need increased pressure from everybody in the sector to deliver those outcomes. I think it's coming, and I think the opportunity that natural capital markets offer will drive some of that reform. So I'm quite excited about that. I think um there are a whole lot of other measures that we can bring. This this story of hope. Um, I don't get to just tell it in forums like this. I get invited to countries, different countries around the world to talk about this, um to discuss the opportunity to use nature-based solutions to solve some of these really difficult problems. Like we're actually we're world leading. Australia is amazing, and we fund this innovative stuff, right? We get we get millions of dollars from the government to do it. It's it's remarkable. And so we're not only doing it here, we're showing other people and other countries around the world how to do it too. So it feels like that um the more successful we become externally to Australia, the more opportunity we bring to put some pressure on the government and the elected officials here at home. So it um it feels like it's been a long journey from those early conversations with Tony Coot, um, from getting the phone call and hearing um that he had passed away, from getting the call three months later that his wife Tony had passed away, um, from a couple of years later watching my chairman Gary Nan AO get sick uh with cancer and then ultimately pass away. And it sometimes feels a bit like I'm the last standing, which is not a comfortable place to be. But when I come to these events and I meet people that knew Tony and that understood some of the vision that he had and have seen what we've been able to do pretty much on a smell of an oily rag, when I think about the funding that we have now, and I think about the connections, and I think about people like Katie telling the water story, um, you know, helping people to understand that really that technical piece. When I think about the amazing resources that we've generated out of our education program, when I think about the trust relationships that we've built here in Australia and globally, um, I do have a sense of optimism for the future and curveballs like what's going on in the Middle East with the geopolitical situation that we see now, they're opportunities for us, and I look forward to them being something special.

SPEAKER_02 44:00

Uh such a powerful talk, Carolyn. Thank you so much. I love the optimism and the breadth of what you do. As a journalist, I reckon if you could, there's definitely a story in someone turning on their tap in Sydney and having a nice, cool, clean glass of water and a farmer who is uh looking at some a worm in the paddock or a bird that he hasn't seen for a while. I reckon that's a really good story. Springs out at me of many stories. Um but I did want to just barge in and um ask for some questions because I'm sure there are a lot of them. Suza's got a microphone if anyone wants to put up their hand and um she'll uh come over and you can ask away.

SPEAKER_06 44:45

George Housen from Del Pura Farm. Uh just one of the disadvantages of being a federation is the regulation uh paradigms from state to state. Um I have a bit of a sense of some of the battles that uh Malone had to go through, but I have a feeling that doesn't then translate to Victoria. Do you have uh any experience in dealing with um various levels of government in Victoria and how whether that would then be starting from scratch again to educate and uh communicate with uh governments about um catchment authorities?

SPEAKER_03 45:22

Um yes, so Victoria is a relatively new adventure for us. We've got a project that we've done with Bush Heritage in the Strathbogie Rangers, um, which has gone well, but it's probably modest by the standards that we can do. What we've seen here is that CMAs particularly have um variable levels of um reception to our work. So for us, uh it's just you know, get on. We know what we've got to do, we've got to work with them, we've got to build that confidence, build that trust, show them what we're going to do. We've done some a little bit of work in Bass Coast, um, over on um, you know, over toward the ocean near Melbourne. Melbourne Water funded that work. That was a big step forward. That took a few years, that project in the making. We um we created a community of practice down there. So we just keep coming, we just keep coming. Um, and I think uh the opportunity for our work in Victoria is quite it's quite massive. So um once it starts rolling, I'm sure that it will be um hopefully an easier uh uh experience than we've had in New South Wales.

SPEAKER_01 46:45

Thank you for that. Um I'm curious, I spent a few years in the UK and their agriculture industry is Oh yeah, my name's Katie. I farm in Kolak just up the road. Um their agriculture industry is a highly subsidized one, but their government has shifted those subsidies to be public money for public goods. So ecosystem services are being funded and farmers are getting subsidies based on the ecosystem services that they're providing, including at a landscape scale. So there's a lot of public money coming into the to like community-based landscape scale recovery, bioregional or catchment scale. I'm wondering where the equivalent, if there is an equivalent for that in Australia, where that money might be coming from or could be coming from, given that we're not a heavily subsidized ag industry in this country.

SPEAKER_03 47:34

Yeah, it's interesting. I think um obviously for Australian ag there's you know, there's the CRCs, there um there's funding that goes toward research for particular um particular production systems. Um I reckon it's actually what we're seeing happen there is through the Futures Drought Fund. So there's been a large chunk of money invested, and then every three years they give away a hundred million dollars uh in grants, and um through that they fund a series of drought hubs. There's seven drought hubs, drought and climate um resilient hubs around the country, and those um those hubs and the grant programs that the Futures Drought Fund are running are um quite quite a few of those are targeted toward capacity building at the community level. And of course, in Australia we enjoy the privilege of land care, um and land care in New South Wales being it looks like it will be funded again. Um the the challenge I think that we face is those kind of funding buckets deliver fantastic project level funding, but they don't deliver long-term program funding. So, how do you how do you deliver um change or how do you deliver transformation in the corporate words? Um you need longer-term program funding. So you need people to be secure in their jobs to get on and do what they're doing and not just be on the roundabout the hamster wheel of grants. So um still got work to do there, I think, is really the answer.

SPEAKER_00 49:23

Hi Carolyn, thanks for your talk. Um my name's Luke Considon, and I actually farm here at the NGERT, so it's pretty uh local context. Uh as everyone's probably seen with the walks along the creek, we've got issues literally 100 metres away. Um in terms of that work that would require a whole catchment uh approach, are there still things on farm that we can do in the interim that can stop an um issue that's happening every year or every big rainfall event?

SPEAKER_03 49:58

Yeah, um absolutely, absolutely. Um every project starts with a catchment champion. Every project, every catchment project that we do starts with somebody in that catchment who's willing to go first and willing to have a go. So um absolutely there are things that that can be done, and often they begin with um the the delivery of our education and capacity building program that allows for small scale um low risk, or if we don't call it small scale low risk, we call it low effort. Low effort endeavors that can just be can be really simple. Um, but the most important thing is to go on that learning journey about really starting to see how water is moving through your landscape. And once you start to see how water moves through your landscape, then you're in a position to um to really think about how you can um manage that better. And often um we can we can assist with that, we can help, and ultimately, yeah, we try to create that community of practice where you're not alone doing that sort of thing. But yeah, there are, you know, every project starts with the first reach, the first workshop, the first, the first boot camp. So yeah, I'm I'm really encouraged with the conversations that we've had here and that we've had with the Karangamite CMA and the kind of the support we're feeling for what could be an emerging project. So I reckon we look forward to working with you. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 51:45

Anybody else? Hi Carolyn, Pearson. How are you? Hi, good thanks. Um I'm I'm very aware of the value of research or data or evidence base. Can you talk about that for us, please? There may be some people here are not aware of that also important relationship that you have with researchers and and how that evidence is collected and used and for what reason, please?

SPEAKER_03 52:13

Yes, absolutely. So the MRI project that I mentioned and that um that monitoring array across that um that catchment scale project is producing a vast amount of data. We have a close relationship with ANU, the Australian National University in Canberra. We have a close relationship with a number of researchers, and we um we treat that project as a honeypot model for research. So our intention is to um scrub that data up. We need to do a little bit of QA on that data before we make it accessible, but we want it to be open source and we want to invite researchers in so that they can undertake deep levels of analysis on that data. We have released one um peer-reviewed scientific paper that we call the Framework Paper, and that's been overseed by our Science Advisory Committee, and we're just about to release the follow-up peer-reviewed scientific paper that describes the trends that have been observed over the 19 years of data that has been collected from the MRI. So when we think about reassuring government and when we think about reassuring the scientific and the research community, um, we're we're kind of finally in a reasonable shape to share that data and to help people understand there are some limitations. That's one catchment in one part of the country. Um, we've taken a state and transition model approach rather than a paired catchment approach. So there's, you know, there's always issues. There could always be more data, there could always be um different approaches to managing that data. But yeah, there is a lot of it and there's a lot more coming. There um the interest that we're getting, particularly in Rangelands environments and for universities connected to the Rangelands, is great. So, yeah, watch this space, I think is what I'd say there.

SPEAKER_02 54:19

Sing, thank you so much, Carolyn. Um will you join me in thanking Carolyn Hall from the Malone Institute?