The legacy of Bill O’Kane
Bill O’Kane, who died on March 7 after a short illness, led natural resource management in our region for more than two decades.
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In the process, he became a national leader in the field and had a massive impact on the productivity and environmental health of our region.
How a rough-and-tumble young farm boy – and then a fierce, red-bearded footballer – ended up attracting the attention of CSIRO scientists and global corporate leaders with his ground-breaking work is a fascinating story.
Born and bred in Katamatite, Bill studied science at Melbourne University before joining the Country Education Project, then moved to the Salinity Pilot Program Advisory Council (SPPAC) in the mid-80s as the community education officer.
Alternately under Jeremy Gaylard’s and John Dainton’s leadership, he assumed the chief executive officer role at the Salinity Program Advisory Council (SPAC) from 1990-95.
Facing the salinity threat head-on
Tackling the threat to agriculture from salinity was Bill’s first great challenge: the devastation being caused by rising water tables following those four wet decades in the second half of the last century was obvious in northern parts of the state — and it was creeping southwards.
We forget how serious it was — people under 40 have never heard of it — and the massive amount of work entailed in first mapping and monitoring its impact, then building the vast network community drains and other mitigating works to tackle it.
It required a level of landholder liaison and co-operation never tried before. Being a cropper and grazier from an old farming family helped and it is hard to imagine a city-based bureaucrat getting away with one of Bill’s favoured quips at a landholder meeting: “When you’re in a room full of cockies, there’s always one galah.”
He was already skilled at explaining complex ideas in simple terms; his personal sporting and community networks and his experience in schools – perhaps allied with his local-boy instincts — enabled him to build a remarkable model of community engagement to attack a widespread problem.
‘Community engagement’ is often bandied about by politicians and academics as a desirable objective these days, usually with the expectation that someone else should be doing it.
Bill quickly recognised that salinity was too big a problem for solutions to be enforced or policed and it needed to be attacked from the ground up - he needed the landholders on board.
He would use his down-home humour to illustrate, as he used this story when encouraging farmers to get serious about salinity:
“It reminds me of the old fisherman from Rushworth who used to fish on the Waranga Basin – he was a bit of an old rogue. The young fisheries officer, straight out of university, set himself the task of catching him poaching. He used to wait up late at night, get up very early, but he couldn’t catch the poacher.
Eventually the old fisherman took pity on the young fisheries officer and invited him to come fishing with him the next morning. The fisherman cruised to his favourite spot, stopped the motor, dropped the anchor then reached into his tackle bag and produced a stick of gelignite. He nonchalantly lit the fuse and tossed it over the side. You wouldn’t believe the carnage – there were dead and stunned fish everywhere.
The old fisherman started to rake the fish in despite the fact that the fisheries officer was laying down the law and what would happen when he got him to dry land. The old fisherman took absolutely no notice and when he got the last fish in the boat, he casually reached into the tackle bag and produced another stick of gelignite, lit the fuse and handed it to the young fisheries officer and said “Are you going to sit there talking or are you going to fish?”
Bill reckoned the salinity problem was like the stick of gelignite – we could sit around talking or we could fish. SPPAC made it very clear it was their intention to fish.
Leading the way in catchment management
That experience in working with farmer and community groups and government agencies gave Bill —and our region — a head start when former Premier Joan Kirner’s Landcare initiative grew into the idea of community-driven catchment management.
Guided by the formidable partnership of Jeremy Gaylard and John Dainton, Bill spotted the opportunity. All were adept at adroitly managing relationships with premiers and ministers on both sides of the aisle. Gaylard and Dainton worked tirelessly and possessed the political astuteness to bring decision makers with them: Bill’s particular genius was bringing the affected communities with them as well.
It was no accident that the Goulburn Broken Catchment and Land Protection Board hit the ground running and, under Bill’s management and John Dainton’s guidance, the subsequent Goulburn Broken Catchment Management Authority became the pre-eminent CMA in the state. Its record of effective community and partner engagement, together with a responsiveness and willingness to adapt and re-form to meet the requirements of bureaucrats’ or ministers’ offices – made it easy to work with.
For academics and bureaucrats from afar, the Goulburn Broken provided the chance to tap into a ready-made and rich network of community leaders and agencies. The doors were already open to many people.
Bureaucrats were confident to invest here, knowing there was minimal risk of non-delivery and community backlash.
Academics enjoyed the stimulation and lessons from tapping into Bill’s and other regional minds who were dealing with the problem of translating global and local challenges into on-ground change.
Goulburn Broken became the “go-to” CMA and it quickly snared the lion’s share of Victorian catchment funding: Bill was always ready with detailed management plans and projects and took the staff from five to 55 with a $30 million budget.
Instrumental in the region’s good times
We saw in the Goulburn Valley this bountiful period with Bill O’Kane chief executive officer of the CMA, Denis Flett was chief executive officer of Goulburn-Murray Water, the late Laurie Gleeson the long-running boss of Goulburn Valley Water and Bill Jaboor was chief executive officer of Greater Shepparton City Council.
All spoke to government from the same page, talked and worked together and each had a store of shovel-ready projects to soak up any available funding, as can happen around elections or towards the end of a financial year. The region flourished.
Bill was also a master at eking out funding from federal sources. Former work colleague Carl Walters recalls being at an awards event at Darling Harbour when Bill secured a $17 million funding package for farm efficiency works over a few glasses of red. He was a consummate negotiator.
He had that rare ability to see the big picture and translate it into achievable action – even where the path ahead wasn’t clear, or faced resistance. This was particularly important when natural resource management was in its infancy in Australia and good intentions often resulted in fat, glossy reports with little to show for it.
Bill, his board and staff took a bottom-up approach and became renowned for grasping global and national challenges and applying them practically at a local level.
Hans Joehr, Nestle’s Global Head of Agriculture (world-wide) with a $10 billion annual budget, said this during an extended visit to the area:
“I have been to a lot of countries but I have not seen anything that compares with the way your community is working together to create a sustainable environment. Nestlé sources milk from dairy farms in this area and I am very impressed with the systems you are putting in place to ensure the sustainability of the environment and agriculture for generations to come and that creates wealth that is good for the whole community… You should tell the world about what you are doing here.”
Tough and underestimated operator
Bill was both smart and strategic — though an affable nature and a strong affection for story-telling and a good joke meant he was constantly under-estimated. Which he knew gave him a clear advantage — and he exploited it.
While he understood the levers of government and worked them well, he had no illusions about working with the bureaucracy. One of his droll observations was “When you have to choose between a conspiracy and a cock-up, always go for the cock-up.”
Occasionally, the same combative spirit that won him best on ground when Katamatite won the flag in 1979 would emerge when dealing with reluctant bureaucrats and both Gaylard and Dainton were ready to calm the waters while Bill pressed on impatiently.
In the meantime, the CMA was cleaning up the Goulburn River with measures including off-stream watering of stock by fencing streams, stopping the pollution from old goldfields run-off and negotiating the curtailment of the tank-driving range at Puckapunyal – giving us water clarity better than it was 60 years ago.
The cod and yellowbelly have now come back strongly and are well on top of the carp. Water trading and the Murray Darling Plan have created other problems but it’s been a massive improvement.
That’s not to mention the complex, ground-breaking work Bill and the CMA were leading in multiple areas like biodiversity, ecosystem services, weed control and native vegetation retention to provide wildlife corridors, all the while inventing new ways to effectively engage with the community and stakeholder groups.
On his retirement, CSIRO scientists presented Bill with an elaborate engraved silver shovel to acknowledge his contribution over many years to ecosystem services and resilience-thinking.
Foodbowl modernisation and beyond
By the mid-’90s the long wet was well and truly over and when the millennium drought gripped us, an even bigger challenge faced the region: John Dainton’s long-predicted “patchwork quilt” of irrigated and dry properties was spreading fast across the irrigation district, threatening the viability of the channel distribution system as retiring and distressed farmers sold their water and stock.
Easy solutions weren’t obvious but Melbourne was short of water and Bill was among those concerned about the likely impact of the Murray Darling Plan coming at us, as water buy-backs by the Commonwealth proceeded apace and alarming amounts of water were sold downriver.
With his close links to key people in the water industry and his deep understanding of agricultural and irrigator issues, he was pivotal in taking the idea of investing in water savings and helping to massage it into a project that made sense for our catchment – one that eventually secured $2 billion in funding.
Like the other prominent irrigators promoting the project, Bill weathered plenty of criticism and found neighbours not talking to him but he was philosophical.
“If you change nothing, nothing changes,” he would say at the time.
He was more concerned at the 700 GL of water disappearing from the district because of buy-backs and the Murray Darling Plan but indicated his satisfaction last year, at the end of the Connections project, when he saw irrigators receiving their promised one-third share of the water savings, now worth vastly more than it was in 2009.
Former head of the Victorian Office of Water, David Downie, said Bill was motivated by strong community interest. “After his family, community came first.”
Downie said Bill wasn’t interested in short-term political advantage but in securing long-term outcomes for his community.
“He worked hard to get the right balance in water for economic, consumptive and environmental users in a long term and sustainable way.
“He was a fearsome negotiator, but not a shouter. He was even tempered but strong. He had a knack of just keeping on going.
“Bill was respected by the public service and in fact was regarded as the go-to person in early days of the CMA.
“He was very successful in securing funding for the region through the CMA and applying it for maximum community benefit.”
Bushfire recovery and Foodshare
Bill’s last big job for the CMA was leading the recovery after the February, 2009 bushfires, which burned almost 10 per cent of the catchment and devastated some 190 km of streams and rivers.
He worked with affected communities and partners to rebuild, as well as employing a team to work on re-vegetation, weed control and fencing. He typically saw a disaster or a crisis as an opportunity for action and, along with then CMA chair Steve Mills, effectively set up the state-wide model for disaster employment programs.
After retiring, it came to his notice that a lot of local kids were turning up at school with nothing in their stomachs.
Bill went to work with brutal efficiency: He pulled together a group of committed people, did some community and agency consulting, swiftly put a business plan together, negotiated multiple partnerships and started raising money — to launch Shepparton Foodshare in 2012. It was the first such service in our region — and he served as its founding chair or board member for the next seven years.
In a post last week saluting his contribution, Foodshare noted it has now distributed some 3.2 million kg of food to vulnerable families. They added that, over recent months and despite his declining health, Bill was still in touch, offering his help in the search for new premises.
Bill O’Kane leaves his wife of 40 years, Marian Lawless and his twin daughters, Alannah (a business growth consultant) and Bridget (a lawyer) and three grandchildren. He was 66.