BOOK REVIEW: Making Do: Conservation Ethics and Ecological Care in Australia (2026)
Title: Making Do: Conservation Ethics and Ecological Care in Australia
Author: Mardi Reardon-Smith (University of Monash)
Publisher: Stanford University Press (2026)
Reviewer: Aaron Gregory (University of California, Riverside) 4S Backchannels | Reviews
(Stanford University Press, 2026)
Mardi Reardon-Smith wrangles with complex ecologies of care in Making Do: Conservation Ethics and Ecological Care in Australia (Stanford University Press, 2026). Building upon prior scholarship and research embedded in the Cape York peninsula in the northern region of Australia, Reardon-Smith negotiates care as relational acts of intimacy, contingency, and complicity fraught with moments of brutality and tenderness. In a harsh region simultaneously known for its delicate biodiversity, Making Do examines forms of care that entangle a corresponding diversity of cattle grazers, park rangers, Aboriginal peoples, and more-than-human beings. The text invites the reader into a richly detailed and startlingly reflexive ethnography organized into three (3) parts: wrangling cattle and ducking through porous fences, managing the overgrowth of weeds seeping alongside the deep imprints of feral pig hooves, and engulfed by relations with fire and water. These actors, sites, practices and relations are deeply rooted in colonial legacies, Aboriginal histories, and contemporary struggles to define the ethics of conservation and ecological care.
‘Making do’ is described throughout the text with situated nuance, while maintaining its definitional clarity: these are the relationships and pragmatic practices that hold humans, non-humans, and landscapes of Cape York together through an ethic of enduring, persisting, labor and care. Through this organizing analytic, Reardon-Smith makes three (3) central claims: Environmental knowledge and ethics are co-produced relationally; conservation and land managing actors do not conform to plans and visions for the region as ‘wilderness’; and, introduced species proliferate in unexpected ways that continually redefine practices and understandings of care (p. 5). These claims are explored throughout the text in ethnographically rich and reflexive ways, and grounded in clear communications with foundational scholarship in Environmental Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS). This review includes vibrant photographs taken by Dr. Reardon-Smith during her ethnographic fieldwork. These are carefully composed and deeply expressive, complementing the ethnographic quality and care featured in Making Do. A select set of photographs will assist in organizing the review, introducing several themes that move the text.
(Stanford University Press, 2026)
Making do is often managed by what can be mustered. In Cape York, ‘mustering’ is the practice of gathering herds of cattle from open ranges and pastures into centralized locations including holding yards and processing facilities. The image of cattle gathered within a diffuse cloud of dust beneath melaleuca and acacia trees depicts laboring care required to negotiate their transit. Ears are tagged and akimbo, alert alongside watchful eyes cast toward graziers and Reardon-Smith. This is one moment captured within several weeks of efforts to muster brahman cattle breeds once brought to Australia from India centuries ago, now prepared for export to Indonesia. First introduced to hasten the British colonial enterprise and the transformation of Aboriginal land into productive lands and private properties, cattle are now integral to the identities of Aboriginal peoples and graziers alike, mediating relationships between peoples, ecologies, and temporalities. Making Do situates these cattle within the ‘still-present colonial history’ of Cape York while recognizing the ways in which they remain central to how people in the region conceive of themselves (pp. 3, 39). Cattle grazing is the primary source of economy, politics, ecology and identity in Cape York.
Reardon-Smith centers cattle in the photograph and throughout sections of the text, enlivened in their more-than-human multiplicity. They are recognized as indispensable to local livelihoods and global economies, and inextricably linked to lands witnessing the decline of the cattle industry spurred by the environmental consequences of grazing. The text follows cattle from pasture to holding yards called ‘the crush’, indicative of the branding, tagging, sanitizing, castration, spaying, and sterilizing practices that constitute this complicated site. Reardon-Smith places the reader alongside the cattle in their troubled journey, wallowing in the smell of burned hair, chemicals, blood, manure, and dust. These olfactory sensoria accompany graziers tending to cattle in the crush, engaged in human-animal intimacies and forms of care that include attunements to health and well-being, industrial practices of economization, and noninnocent moments of violence-as-care (44).
Cattle are both domesticated and domesticating in Cape York, shaping lands and peoples throughout. They led the colonial domestication of Cape York that now takes different valence among elder Aboriginal peoples identifying as former stockmen and ringers, alongside younger folks working as rangers and still imbued with a ‘cattle identity’ (Baker 1999). Working with cattle allowed many Aboriginal peoples to maintain close connections with ancestral homelands. While tending to cattle, Lama Lama rangers now dedicate significant portions of time tending to fences and negotiating the porous and shifting boundaries of Aboriginal lands, grazing lands, private properties, national park lands, and contested understandings regarding land use and belonging. This is cattle work, and the work of cattle. Reardon-Smith reveals cattle work as boundary work for Aboriginal peoples—as a practice of making do given the asymmetries of colonial landscapes and legacies, and the possibilities of agency and cattle identities therein.
The building, maintaining, and mending of fences is a recurrent theme in Making Do, as porous and boundaries that place and displace human and more-than-human actors in the land. Previously known as the ‘devil’s rope’ uncoiled for colonial parsing and repurposing of land in Cape York, fences used to confine cattle to grazing lands are also used to keep them from harming lands marked for protection and conservation. For Reardon-Smith, fence work organizes the shifting sense of belonging for cattle and peoples alike, as an extension of land management practices.
Grasslands, savannahs, and the shifting classification of native plants emerge beneath the feet of domesticated and feral cattle in newly protected areas including national parks and Aboriginal Land Trusts. Cattle once allowed on these lands are now targets for removal. Making Do recognizes a corresponding transformation of graziers and the state through new cattle management programs. Particular focus is drawn toward graziers currently tasked with repurposing their skills to muster and remove cattle from newly protected lands, encountering the resistance of feral cattle and fences that ‘just do not stay up’ (73). Efforts to reduce the environmental impacts of cattle throughout Cape York further encounter the ire of graziers and Aboriginal rangers at risk of losing their livelihoods. Reardon-Smith marks these state projects as test cases for similar programs in Australia, implicating cattle as central to yet another transformational enterprise. New musterings of cattle anticipate new cattle identities.
Cattle were first introduced to Australia in January 1788 with the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove, following the journey around the Cape of Good Hope. Two bulls and five cows were brought from India, tasked with the labor of domesticating a continent of Aboriginal homelands. Today, cattle gather various forms of mustering in Cape York. Reardon-Smith recognizes the shifting relations of care enacted between cattle, peoples, lands and the state, embodying colonial legacies while enacting new intimacies and uncertainties for the region (p. 50). In the photograph that introduces this section of the text, the lowered and piercing gaze of cattle is unsettling—a provocation to consider the labor and consequences of care involved in mustering.
(Stanford University Press, 2026)
Weeds are endemic throughout Cape York lands and Making Do, rooted deeply into soils, overtaking pasture and scrublands, and woven through everyday practices and communities. They are a critical analytic to examine the ordering and disordering of the region, and the text. Reardon-Smith traces the relations between weeds, cattle, and communities entangled in the making—and making do—of Cape York. Discussing the management of non-native weeds including the Sicklepod brought from North America, practices of making do involve selective and often ineffective weeding. These measures are considered in relation to cattle and graziers encountered in the chapter. Whereas non-native gamba and grader grasses are selectively tolerated as feed for cattle, Sicklepod is weedy, and competes for land and water with native and non-native plants alike. Its seeds are spread by cattle and its growth demands labor from graziers. Making Do contends with the ways in which managing weedy encroachments is an everyday practice.
Weeds are a critical interlocutor to the ‘seeping’ of non-native agents through porous and shifting boundaries in the region, drawing upon the vegetal turn in social sciences and STS. Reardon-Smith draws upon these bodies of scholarship to situate how plants shape epistemic communities and the labor of care—where thinking with plants is a means to manage cattle, lands and livelihoods. Here again, weed control “entails a form of violence, a variation of killing as a form of care” (p. 102). Killing weeds is a means of tending to lands and livelihoods. Weeding practices are selective, unpredictable and increasingly limited in their capacity to quell the seeping. Chemicals, burning, and slashing often fail to stem the tide of weeds. Weeds also change the nature of labor as they reshape the land. Graziers are forced into a new calculus of caring, killing and making do with what cannot be controlled.
Reardon-Smith intervenes within these spaces of care and control, where weeds defy easy classification. Distinctions between native and non-native are managed in this liminal context. Reardon-Smith draws upon Cattelino (2017), Bubandt and Tsing (2018, 2019), and her prior scholarship (2025) to consider ‘weediness’ as the tendrils that trouble and articulate these distinctions, suggesting new hybridities and mutating classificary registers. Her ethnographic work does not disentangle herself from these considerations, offering reflexive moments that express a practice of care when moving through the generative functions of weediness and their impacts on land and communities. The labor and practice of making do is the ongoing and situational re-making of native and non-native distinctions, summoning practical and everyday decisions regarding forms of weedy invasiveness and ecological vulnerabilities that warrant forms of control and care.
Weeds are complicated further by the labor of Aboriginal rangers in national parks, wrangling lion’s tail and other invasive species spreading throughout colonial legacies. Making Do demonstrates how Aboriginal practices evolve beyond care for native species to include complicated relations with colonial invasions of many kinds. Like many Indigenous peoples and practices, control means “trying to contain it, or at least slow[ing] the spread” (p. 105). Weeds seep in time recalling the vegetal temporalities of plants that exceed the timescales of graziers and land managers, newly entwined with Aboriginal peoples and their intimate relations to the land. Eradication is an impossible goal in Cape York. Containment is often futile, and care is continually navigated in terms of utility, appropriacy, and shifting notions of invasiveness. These attributes are prioritized over the categories of non-native and native in many instances, colonial and Aboriginal in others. They inform the management of weediness in its many guises.
However, Reardon-Smith does not rely upon metaphor to rupture the categories of invasive plants and settler colonial legacies, instead arguing that “weed control is ultimately an attempt to reorder landscapes in a way that encourages certain landscape attributes that are preferable to particular groups for certain reasons (p. 107). Graziers control weeds to maintain pasturelands for cattle. In national parks, conservation efforts manage weeds to ensure ecosystem biodiversity and new valuations of ‘natural landscapes’ while often excluding Aboriginal knowledges and participation. Killing weeds is now an Aboriginal practice of ‘caring for Country’ and ancestors therein (115). Weed control is therefore a practice of negotiating different valuations of land among different communities. Making Do is firmly grounded in the agential capacity of weeds to lay bare the ways in which new forms of care and control are generated by seeping.
(Stanford University Press, 2026)
Making Do continues its attunements to more-than-human actors by including those that often elude categorization as such: fire and water. These often evade inclusion through their unboundedness and lack of stable corporeality, despite the social and material consequentiality. They act through and upon ecologies of land management and care in Cape York. Following a chapter on fire as both feral and part of controlled land management practices now integral to the region, Reardon-Smith considers the ways in which water saturates lands and communities in cyclic relations to drought, monsoons and flooding.
Making Do examines monsoons and flooding through the lens of drought, noting the local techniques of waiting, watching, and speculating on the arrival of rainfall. Local connections to land are demonstrated by practices reliant upon the sensorial capacities and communicative cues from birds and lizards signalling precipitous events. All are immersed in a world of water that is ‘temporal and rhythmic’ (p. 182) throughout the ebb and flow of dry and wet seasons. The rains and floods extinguish fires and bring welcome relief from dry seasons and drought, bringing new concerns to the surface. These temporalities and rhythms are shifting, calling attention to new attunements and responses to unpredictable monsoons and uncontrollable flooding connected with diverse perspectives on climate change.
Monsoons are part of the rhythmic temporalities in the tropical region of Cape York, though arriving with greater intensities and frequencies amidst climate change. They are punctuating events that close national parks, pause pastoral work, confine communities to homes and shopping centres, while temporarily displacing Aboriginal peoples from homelands. The resulting floods offer important points of ethnographic inquiry for Reardon-Smith, holed up with interlocutors as they weather the storm on lands momentarily transformed into islands in a rising seasonal sea. Life in the region slows and stops during these floods. Communities are often confined for months due to impassable roads, on sites without internet or cell service. These are also moments of strange respite, when the incessant weeding, trapping and culling of wild pigs, and fire management practices are quieted in a welcome deluge. Park rangers are confined to stations and surrounding lands, temporarily relieved of their duties by government orders. Graziers attend to outstanding tasks on their lands and facilities. Aboriginal communities find time to connect with extended families, while also navigating the stressors of yet another displacing force. Pauses in governmental provisions return Lama Lama peoples to networks of kin during visits from ‘zombie cyclones’ arriving in patterns of difference and repetition. Reardon-Smith’s engagements with Aboriginal peoples reveal monsoons and floods that sometimes return rivers and lands to the ways they were in the past—flooding as a form of renewal (190).
Water is a fluid agent swirling throughout the rhythms of Cape York. It is absent and indifferent in dry seasons, longed for during droughts, appreciated when replenishing lands and rivers, welcomed as a form of fire suppression, threatening during monsoons and floods, and overflowing with possibility. It is a more-than-human actor that subsumes life in the region to its fluidities. Reardon-Smith joins Strang (2014) and Hastrup and Hastrup (2014) to consider water as a ‘theory machine’ (p. 189), thinking with water as it reorders lands and communities. It is an actor that reveals the ways in which care is differently practiced and conceived during flooding events among communities, and a river demarcating what constitutes ‘disaster’ by government authorities in Cape York. Relieved duties for rangers and a return to tasks for graziers also coincides with paused or denied disaster relief for Aboriginal peoples. Climate change is a new rhythmic temporality that changes the nature and categorical definition of ‘natural disasters’ and the new norms of weather events defined and experienced differently by different communities. Here, ‘ambiguity is reinscribed in the paradox’, as climate change is recognized as a zombie of colonial pasts that simultaneously inform new environmental narratives (p. 193, 195). For Aboriginal peoples, graziers, land managers and governmental agencies, climate change is an opportunity to consider the cultural, institutional and everyday understandings of land environmental ethics and ecological care. These are possibilities that emerge like trees in the flooded forests of Rinyirru National park, pictured in the photograph captured by Reardon-Smith in the final chapter of the text.
Making Do is a vibrant and reflexive work and valuable contribution to Environmental Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Reardon-Smith’s ethnographic, photographic, and critical contributions are rooted in the relationships forged with diverse stakeholders and interlocutors in Cape York, with applications for scholarly engagements with care beyond the boundaries and complexities of this region. Her work is a well-crafted expression of care that honors and listens to voices of human and more-than-humans, using relational entanglements as grounded points of translation.
Interview with the Author
This book review maintains another practice of care established by 4S Backchannels, featuring a short interview with Mardi Reardon-Smith in conversation with Aaron Gregory (UC Riverside).
AG: You describe Making Do as a labor of love that has radically changed how you think about the world and yourself. The ‘red dirt’ of Cape York seeped into your veins. What were some of the radical changes that shifted your ways of thinking during your fieldwork? How did the red dirt change you as a scholar and person?
MR-S: It’s a good moment for me to be reflecting on this, as I’ve just spent a week driving around Cape York hand delivering the book to the people it’s about. It wasn’t my first return visit to the Cape, but this one felt particularly meaningful because I could share this physical artefact from that time. Both personally and professionally, my relationship to Cape York has been constitutive for me. I had just turned 25 when I started my fieldwork in Cape York, and in the time that I spent there I learned about what it means for me to be an anthropologist – I developed a practice and praxis that is grounded in relationships, to people and to place. I learned a lot about what it is to be accountable to the people we work with and, since then, how to navigate relationships across distance and time. And as the work has evolved, and I have rewritten and retheorised what I think is going on in Cape York, it has become clear to me how the gift of time is key to the process of doing good ethnography. Not just the time spent in a place, but the time between visits and drafts. In a more personal sense, Australia is a big and diverse place, and I have always been interested in grappling with what it means to be a White, settler-descended person here who feels a deep connection to the land itself. In some ways, working in Cape York was a way to think through and feel out these tensions – that exist across the whole continent but feel very close to the surface in a place like the Cape, where racial and environmental politics are part of the everyday fabric of life.
AG: Care is a critical analytic woven throughout your research and text. You note the distinctions between ‘caring about’ and ‘caring for’ as matters of perspective and praxis (p. 216). Did you locate and inhabit critical distinctions between these forms of caring throughout the course of your fieldwork? Were there moments that required one form more than the other as a researcher? How did you navigate the praxis of care required to ‘make do’, while setting aside what you cared about, particularly in the instances of killing?
MR-S: When I was doing the fieldwork and writing the first version of this work as my doctoral thesis, I wasn’t using care as a framework to understand what was going on. However, as my relationship to the material developed, I realised the different valences of care that Maria Puig de la Bellacasa sets out – that distinction between ‘caring about’ and ‘caring for’ – was exactly what I had been trying to articulate. It was a way to get at the kind of productive contradictions I was seeing among my research participants – patterns of speaking, the reflex to occupy a particular political position – that came apart under scrutiny when their practices, and particularly their labour practices, are considered. It was also a way for me to understand some of the discomfort and endurance required by long-term ethnographic fieldwork. There were many times in my fieldwork that I was challenged by the politics or positions taken by my research participants, and by the brutal aspects of some of the work (I think this becomes particularly clear when I recount observing cattle being spayed). I think there are some things about me and how I was raised that made this more possible for me – I grew up on a farm, my mother is an ecologist and my father is an agronomist, and so an ethic of environmental responsibility and the difficult decisions that come with that was instilled in me early on. The killing to care I encountered in Cape York was not wholly unfamiliar to me.
AG: Making Do is something of a field guide to working ethnographically with more-than-human actors. Cattle, weeds, pigs, fire, water and parrots emerge as interlocutors throughout the text, giving voice to the lands of Cape York. What did these more-than-human actors tell you about conservation ethics and ecological care? What did they express in ways that your human interlocutors could not? And how did you cultivate practices of careful listening and observing?
MR-S:It’s interesting, because I don’t really think of myself as a multispecies anthropologist and I’m never sure if I’m doing multispecies ethnography. For me, these more-than-human elements are material foci that are a way into understanding how people relate to place, work, and each other. One of my thesis examiners urged me to take the science more seriously, and I think that is something that has guided how I have shaped this iteration of the work. I have been interested to attending to the materiality of these more-than-humans, and this interest grew in step with my introduction to STS scholarship. However, that said, I think part of a respectful relationship with the more-than-human world, in life and in scholarship, involves an effort to observe things on their own terms. I think my natural disposition towards trying to pay attention and notice animals, plants, and elements was further honed through the process of doing this research and seeing how my (human) interlocutors related to the more-than-humans around them. I think slowing down and noticing is all part of a process of consciously deepening relationships. Part of this happens when you learn how to distinguish a particular woody weed from a similar-looking native plant, or when you sit in wait for minutes or hours for the emergence of a parrot and try to remember the distinctive cadence of its call, or when you putter along on a quad bike in the swirl of dust kicked up by cows. Similarly to many anthropologists who think about the environment, I learned a lot about how my interlocutors understand the world by trying to emulate in an embodied way how they relate to the more-than-humans they care about.
AG: Although you note that care is not rooted in a romanticized return to pre-colonial ways or a ‘sense of a utopic future’ (p. 7), your text does suggest its generative nature. How does Making Do reconcile the pragmatics of care as a situational praxis with the complex accumulation of caring relations that embed themselves within an ecology in the making? How do the pragmatic and everyday practices of ‘making do’ also make an evolving ecology?
MR-S: I see making do as a way of enduring or persisting at the edges. People in Cape York know that there is little they can do about the sweeping changes affecting their region – the spread of weeds, the ever-increasing proliferation of pigs, the later, longer, and more intense wet seasons, the influx of tourists, the contraction of conservation funding. However, in framing how people work as ‘making do’, I have tried to draw attention to how people’s relationships to land, work, and each other are animated by hope. I actually do think of the book as quite a hopeful book, even though the scale of environmental decline and damage can feel insurmountable. There is a school of thought that says, because transitions to novel ecologies are likely inevitable, that we should do away with conservation work that is focused on species, or on trying to preserve and return ecosystems. Admittedly, I don’t have a strong enough grasp of the science to really have an opinion on this, but from what I have learned from my interlocutors in Cape York is that the cultural values that particular places, ecologies, and species are imbued with are things that people care about protecting in whatever small ways they can.
AG: And lastly, were there any moments, sections, or reflections that were weeded out during the editorial process? How did you navigate the ‘killing of darlings’, and are there any that you’d like to share as a parting thought?
MR-S: I think I could have written several different versions of the book with very different analyses based on my ethnographic material. The one big omission from this book, as I see it, is a more critical engagement with the politics of joint management. I have written elsewhere about the tensions generated by different ontological approaches to what joint management is, from the perspective of Aboriginal traditional owners and the State and how this emerges in both the day-to-day management of the program and in how planning and meetings are conducted. I still think this is a big part of the story of Cape York, but this analysis felt like it was doing something quite different to what I was trying to do in the book. This writing is out in the world, in articles in Geoforum (Reardon-Smith 2024) and the Journal of Political Ecology (Reardon-Smith 2025), and I felt that I didn’t need to retrace those arguments in the book, in part because it would have taken me away from the focus on place and the more-than-human.
Mardi Reardon-Smith is a postdoctoral researcher in the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Her research sits within environmental anthropology and science and technology studies (STS) and investigates the social dimensions of environmental management in intercultural and settler-colonial contexts. She has published on topics including the joint management of protected areas, the co-creation of environmental knowledges, regulation of traditional medicine plants, and human relationships to invasive plant (weed) species and their control. Her research process includes making photographs and film, and her work has been shown domestically and internationally at gallery spaces and film festivals. Mardi is currently researching how new and emerging technologies articulate with existing forms of knowledge, expertise, and practice in feral cat management.
