Responsibility to country: Decolonizing agriculture with agroecology in Australia

White Australian agricultural history is a long trajectory of the conquest of nature. Historically, agriculture was the motivation for the expansion of the European empire and the justification for the seizure of land from Aboriginal people, defined as ‘unoccupied’ by virtue of erasing their history of cultivation and premised on exclusion and forgetting. In the context of the impact of colonial agriculture on the land and Indigenous people and increasing understanding of the deep time of Aboriginal history, we argue for a new paradigm that foregrounds the knowledge of Traditional Owners in the movement towards sustainable agriculture in Australia. Our intention is to relate the past to practice to reimagine a future that takes responsibility to Country seriously and recognizes shared histories of land and the role of farming.