What caring for Country teaches us about leadership
Some leadership plans for the next quarter. Some plans for the next generation. The oldest leadership traditions remind us that neither time horizon is long enough or really matters.
Across Tasmania, Palawa people have cared for Country for millennia, carrying knowledge, responsibility and cultural practice across countless generations. Leadership has never been understood simply as influence or achievement. It has been a commitment to care for something held in trust, recognising that the land, waterways, stories and communities we inherit were shaped long before us and will continue long after we are gone.
This understanding offers a powerful invitation for all leaders. That leadership is not defined by what we build during our lifetime, but by how well we care for the systems we temporarily hold and allow the transmission of knowledge held outside of traditional authority to be incorporated in here and now thinking.
That philosophy shaped the Drought Resilience Impact Preparedness (DRIP) program with Tasmanian Leaders, where emerging leaders from across northern Tasmania came together to explore climate resilience, futures thinking and community leadership alongside First Nations perspectives. Rather than viewing drought solely as an environmental or economic challenge, participants were invited to consider the relationships between land, community, culture and the long-term wellbeing of place. The program deliberately brought together agricultural leaders, regional communities and Palawa participants, recognising that resilient futures are built when different knowledge systems learn with one another rather than alongside one another.
For Lyndon O’Neil, this story is also deeply personal. After completing our Leading Australian Resilience Community (LARC) program, he encouraged his sons to apply for DRIP. When they joined the program, it demonstrated something farming families have always understood: knowledge is not simply transferred through instruction. It is lived together. Seasons become teachers. Country becomes memory. Responsibility passes between generations through shared work, story, observation and trust.
Tasmanian leaders such as I-LEAD graduate Jay McDonald and Philip McCulloch TLP19 bring another equally important perspective. Their leadership is grounded not only in professional expertise but in cultural continuity, community and identity. It reminds us that leadership is inseparable from belonging, and that caring for Country has always been inseparable from caring for people to continue the lines of custodianship. In this understanding, culture is not something preserved in the past of Western linear time, it is an active systems renewal of leading from the future into the present.
There is something profoundly hopeful when these perspectives meet. Agricultural knowledge refined through generations of working the land. Aboriginal knowledge refined through thousands of years of listening to it. Scientific understanding of climate futures. Community leadership grounded in place. Rather than competing, they become complementary ways of seeing the same living system and our place as part of it, rather than separate to it.
Tasmanian Leaders does not seek to create one way of leading. It creates opportunities for people carrying very different histories, identities and experiences to learn from one another. Leadership grows not by replacing one perspective with another, but by expanding our capacity to hold many perspectives at once.
The challenges ahead won’t be solved by looking only forward, sometimes the most innovative act of leadership is to remember. To recognise that the land beneath our feet has always been teaching those prepared to pay attention. That communities become stronger when wisdom is shared across generations. That every generation inherits both opportunity and obligation.
Leadership, in this sense, is never ours to own. It is ours to steward for a while, and to pass on in better condition to the generations who will walk this Country after us.
