The review and reorganisation of long-established settler land-use practices is going to be one of the more urgent and positive outcomes of the current Australian drought and the wider climatic changes of which it is a significant part. While it has taken not just an agricultural crisis but a societal one to bring the situation about, even the short to mid-term prospects of intensive farming in marginal locations are already under review from agricultural organisations, governmental bodies, environmental agencies and related policy-oriented institutions. Inasmuch as the sheer sustainability of settler agriculture in marginal areas is the subject of review and debate, a range of future land-use practices will increasingly become the focus of regional and national political discourse.

The proposal of this chapter is that anthropology’s contribution to this debate is to spell out to decision makers and, more importantly, to those who have decisions imposed on them what are the likely difficulties and hazards of embarking on certain types of rural reform by detailing relevant case studies of recent provenance. I argue that anthropology can provide salutary warnings about rural reforms that appear, at first sight, to be heading in the right kind of environmental direction, but, in the event, encounter a number of hidden and substantial obstacles that are best explored through the tightly focused ethnographic work that still characterises the discipline. In this regard, a major initiative in the past five years to reintroduce an extinct wallaby subspecies to a national park in South Australia becomes an instructive case study.

As settler agriculture in marginal rural areas becomes increasingly non-viable, so the prospect of private land being bought up by the State and transformed or incorporated into national parks and wilderness areas is increasingly mooted, not least because there are many wholesale and piecemeal precedents for doing so in most Australian states. From a diversity of policy-oriented institutions and agencies, the idea that such areas be allowed to ‘revert to nature’, to ‘let nature take its course’ or to ‘become wilderness once again’, seems by many to be an attractive prospect. It is variously argued that it will lead to reduced pressure on scarce water resources, greater landscape diversity, a stay on excessive fertiliser usage and new employment opportunities through tourism. Above all, the strategy can be sold on the strength of preserving and enhancing regional biodiversity since the reintroduction of original flora and fauna is always integral to this kind of rural reform. Bringing back trees and shrubs to places where they once were and restoring mammals and birds to localities from which they have long been extinct become appealing prospects to politicians and public servants, to conservation scientists and environmental advisors, who are variously able to acquire political kudos and cultural capital from their public implementation.

In Australia, we can expect a proliferation of proposals on these lines in the near future. The mantra of biodiversification alone will ensure this to be the case as formal reactions to climate change are promulgated by the political elite before elections, by industrial managers as they spruce up their environmental credentials and by state-based environmental agencies as they consolidate their command over official environmental discourse. It is the response from below that promises to be more unpredictable, for local populations weigh up a wide range of economic and social factors when specific proposals for the rural future are imposed on them from above. It is this array of folk considerations—by no means all of them specifically about land use—that can be detailed by ethnographic inquiry. This is the prospect in principle that is open to anthropological research. In practice, how local farmers and their families respond to a conservation initiative to restore an extinct wallaby species to their rural area is what we are immediately concerned with.