Victoria’s Landcare groups have 60,000 volunteers – but will there be funds to support them?

Landcare facilitator and long-time volunteer Lyn Heenan on her property in Stoneleigh, Victoria. She says the organisation is needed more now than ever. Photograph: Steve Womersley/The Guardian

Lyn Heenan’s involvement with Landcare began almost 40 years ago, when her late father, Paul, joined the new movement in the 1980s to get rid of rabbits that had been eating their way through the Pyrenees region in western Victoria.

It was shortly after then conservation minister Joan Kirner had launched the initiative alongside the Victorian Farmers Federation at the tiny locality of Winjallock in 1986.