Reading the Landscape: What Country Teaches Us About Leadership
There is a moment, if you spend enough time on Country, when the landscape begins to speak back.
Not in words. Not in metaphors. Not even in signs the way leadership books talk about signs.
No—what emerges is a quietening. A subtle re-orientation. A shift from looking at the land to being with it.
This shift is at the heart of place-based leadership. It is also the foundation of Country-led design—the approach that asks leaders and organisations not to simply consult communities, but to anchor decisions in the intelligence of place, relationships, climate, culture, and long-held patterns of survival.
For those of us working in social research, systems work, community development or environmental policy, this shift is more than philosophical. It is a practice. A discipline. A way of learning to see what has been in front of us all along.
And for me, it began—unexpectedly and irrevocably—with the Bunya.
Where Leadership Actually Begins
The Bunya pine (Araucaria bidwillii) is a towering, ancient presence across parts of southern Queensland. For countless generations, its seasonal fruit shaped some of the largest inter-tribal gatherings in the continent. Bunya time meant movement. It meant planning. It meant ceremony and diplomacy. It meant a place where decisions were made not in isolation, but in the context of shared relationships, shared Country, shared responsibility.
If you trace the scholarly record, you’ll see the Bunya feature in environmental anthropology, cultural landscape studies, and ecological histories. But if you sit beneath one, quietly and long enough, you realise why it mattered: it teaches patience, longevity, interdependence, and restraint.
The Bunya does not rush.
It does not act independently of the ecosystem around it.
It grows in relation.
It gives in cycles.
It hosts life in ways that exceed what we can measure.
Leadership, in this sense, is not about charisma, authority, or speed.
Leadership is about how deeply one is in relationship with place and people.
Country-led leadership begins with a simple question:
What is this place asking of me?
Not—
What do I want?
What is efficient?
What is politically convenient?
But—
What patterns already exist here?
What has already been tried?
What has thrived or failed in this landscape?
What story am I walking into?
This is why place-based approaches are not a trend. They are an older intelligence resurfacing.
Country as Teacher, Not Backdrop
Much of Western leadership thinking frames the land as scenery—beautiful, inspiring, or restorative, but ultimately separate from strategy and decision-making.
Country-led leaders understand something different:
Place is not a backdrop. It is a participant.
The landscape carries instructions.
The ecology carries memory.
The patterns of wind, water, fire, and soil carry the record of what sustains and what destroys.
In my research for my environmental anthropology thesis, I kept returning to one phrase: Country remembers.
It remembers feast cycles, burn cycles, political agreements, and cultural obligations.
It remembers disruption, extraction, and imbalance.
It also remembers regeneration, adaptation, and resilience.
To lead well is to recognise that we operate inside systems older than we can imagine.
When you approach leadership with this awareness—when you read the landscape the way you would read a complex system—you begin to see that:
Some problems are not new; they are recurring patterns.
Some tensions are not interpersonal; they are ecological.
Some solutions are not invented; they are remembered.
Leadership becomes less about control and more about alignment.
The Landscape Is Always Speaking—Most Leaders Are Moving Too Fast to Hear It
The modern leader is taught to be efficient, decisive, and always in motion. Meetings stack on meetings. Strategies shift quarterly. KPIs shorten time horizons to weeks, not seasons.
But Country does not speak in the tempo of quarterly reports.
Country speaks in rhythms of rainfall, species cycles, and the long arc of collective wellbeing.
One of the most profound lessons I’ve learned from working with Elders, Traditional Owners, and knowledge holders is this:
Decisions made too quickly tend to serve the short-term.
Decisions made with Country tend to serve the long-term.
When leaders slow down enough to read the landscape, they begin to notice:
The way power pools and where it gets stuck
The relationships that hold the real influence
The old patterns that keep repeating in organisations
The boundaries that are trying to form
The parts of the system that are already strained
These observations are not abstract. They have practical application in everything from community engagement to policy design to organisational culture.
But they require a shift in posture—from speed to stillness, from answers to listening.
Learning to Read the Landscape
Reading the landscape is not romantic. It is a form of intelligence.
It combines observation, relational awareness, pattern recognition, ecological knowledge, and deep listening. It is the opposite of leadership approaches that treat complexity as something to be conquered.
Here are the kinds of things Country teaches when you pay attention:
1. Everything Is Connected
A Bunya pine is not a single tree.
It is a node in a network—soil biomes, water systems, animals, people, exchange routes, ceremony, governance.
Organisations are the same.
Teams are not siloed units—they are interdependent ecologies.
2. Pressure Builds Slowly, Then All at Once
Landscapes reveal how small imbalances become large disruptions over time.
Organisations do too.
People rarely burn out suddenly; systems rarely collapse out of the blue.
There were always early signals.
3. Resilience Comes From Diversity
Monocultures—whether in ecosystems or leadership teams—collapse under stress.
Country teaches the value of multiplicity, not uniformity.
4. Memory Is Stored in Place
This is one of the most profound lessons.
Places hold memory—of stories, decisions, conflict, and care.
So do communities.
So do teams.
Leadership that ignores this ends up repeating history instead of resolving it.
5. Nothing Healthy Grows Without the Right Conditions
Many leaders try to force cultural change like forcing growth in the wrong soil.
Country teaches that the most important decisions are about conditions, not control.
Country-Led Design: A New (Old) Model of Leadership
Country-led design is gaining traction in Australia because it reframes leadership away from extraction and towards reciprocity.
Instead of asking:
“How do we get communities to accept this solution?”
It asks:
“How do we understand what this Country, these people, and this history require for balance?”
Place-based approaches are not only ethical—they create better outcomes because they are grounded in the logic of the ecosystem itself.
A Country-led leader learns to:
Walk slowly enough to see patterns
Listen deeply enough to understand context
Spend time with people who carry memory
Make decisions that honour relationships
Think in cycles rather than deadlines
These are not soft skills.
They are strategic capacities.
In complex environments—health, environment, social wellbeing, justice, community development—precision comes from humility. Not from authority.
The Leaders Country Produces
When I think about leaders shaped by Country, I think about:
The Elder who waits an extra hour in silence because they know the right story needs the right time to emerge
The ranger who reads the ground and understands a season’s predictions before any meteorological model does
The community leader who knows when not to act because taking time will bring the right people into the conversation
The women who lead through relational strength, not positional power
The young people who read the cultural signals others overlook
These leaders do not overpower.
They orient.
They gather.
They create coherence.
They understand that leadership is not about the person—it is about the pattern being held.
Why This Matters for Today’s Organisations
Modern organisations are overwhelmed by complexity—climate, workforce shortages, cultural expectations, political tension, rapid change, and systemic inequities.
The instinct is often to tighten control.
Country-led leadership suggests the opposite:
Slow down.
Observe more.
Act with alignment, not urgency.
Make decisions that honour the long arc, not the quarterly cycle.
When leaders learn to read the landscape, they:
Make fewer mistakes
Build more trust
Avoid unnecessary conflict
Recognise leverage points earlier
Design solutions that last
Strengthen community partnerships
Improve cultural safety
Reduce system fragmentation
Because they are no longer solving symptoms—they are working with the system, not against it.
A Return to the Quiet Skills
The most powerful leadership lessons I’ve learned from Country are not grand or dramatic.
They are quiet:
Patience
Presence
Deep listening
Understanding what’s not being said
Knowing when to pause
Knowing when the system needs space
Recognising what the land teaches through repetition
Quiet does not mean passive.
Quiet means attuned.
When leaders stop performing leadership and start listening to place, people, and pattern, they become more effective—not less.
Leadership as Relationship, Not Role
The landscape is always teaching us:
about balance, about seasons, about timing, about generosity, about restraint.
The question is not whether leaders can learn from Country.
The question is whether they will slow down long enough to.
For me, leadership is no longer something I define as an identity. Leadership is a relationship—with the system, with the people, and with the place.
Country has taught me that.
The Bunya has reminded me of that.
The communities I’ve worked with across Australia have reinforced it.
We are part of landscapes we cannot control, but we can learn from.
And if leaders in 2025 and beyond are willing to do this—truly do it—we may yet create systems that can hold us all.
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