2013 NSW Landcare and Catchment Management Forum and Annual Landcare Muster

Landcarers from around the state converged on Newcastle last week for the biennial NSW Landcare and Catchment Forum.

The Forum began with the NSW Landcare Muster with well over the anticipated 160 people attending. The muster is a chance for Landcarers around the state to hear from the state representative body, Landcare NSW, about what they have been up to over the past year and for Landcarers to help set the direction of Landcare NSW for the coming year.

Landcare NSW Chairperson, Rob Delahunty, opened the forum and the executive committee and staff including Chris Cummins, Sonia Williams and Tim Beshara gave an outline of Landcare NSW activity at the advocacy level and in developing the business package and toolkits.

Some achievements:

Seat on the Local Land Service reforms reference panel (LLS) working very hard to keep focus in NRM
Going in to bat for the Regional Landcare Facilitators – keeping the positions housed by Landcare communities
ensured dollars kept flowing to the Catchment Action NSW Fund
development of business package and other member services support packages, including insurance; sharing our successes, snapshot, prospectus and Gateway website.

Rob and crew were given a huge round of applause at the achievements of the representative body over the past year. There was a general consensus that Landcare NSW was delivering.

Landcare NSW council member and Landcare muster veteran Bill Piggott then led the Muster. After reflecting on the information gained at the last muster landcarers were asked to select 15 topics that they would like to discuss in depth. Each topic had a leader and groups formed around the leader.

Other highlights included Costa Georgiadis who gave an extremely entertaining keynote speech which was exhausting to watch as he energetically jumped up and down from the stage and around the room. The best thing was that he really ‘got’ Landcare and in amongst the humour he had some pretty important messages about our role as Landcarers and getting “our story” into the wider community.

There were about 260 delegates at the conference and it was wonderful to meet new people and catch up with old friends. It is such a great opportunity to learn, share and connect.

We were selected to present our Tussock Tamers campaign at the conference which was a great opportunity to showcase what we are doing here in the Upper Lachlan. Its a great campaign and I hope I did it justice. We did get a lot of positive feedback and new connections from that.

Of course for us the highlight was Eric winning the Individual Landcare Award at the awards dinner you can read more about his here: Roslyn Landcare’s Eric Hurn wins NSW Individual Landcare Award

I look forward to sharing with you more about this event from Landcare NSW in the coming weeks.