Home Country with Tarsha Finney

I caught up with Tarsha Finney outside her house at Slape Manor in August 2025, amongst the buzz of insects from their recently rewilded front meadow. We discussed her role as both a Trustee of West Dorset Wilding and a partner on the Brit Valley Project. Her background growing up and working in Australia provides many cross-cultural connections that inform her own understanding of landscape recovery and adds unique perspectives to the project’s development. These ideas feed into an evolving practical application for Tarsha and her partner Paul Mulholland, as they manage and monitor the land and its more-than-human inhabitants – especially their fledgling beaver population.

Although brought up in a city and working in urban architecture and planning, when she was 21 Tarsha’s mother remarried someone who farmed 35,000 acres of land north-west of Sydney. He was one of the first people that took up Alan Savory's ideas of mob grazing: whereby livestock are held on smaller parcels of land for short intense periods, then the land is subsequently allowed to recover and regrow for longer than normal. This has benefits for both the health and well-being for the animals and in terms of biodiversity, as native wild plants are allowed to flourish and flower. It is now becoming an important element of regenerative farming methods in the UK. Here in the Brit Valley all the farms are much smaller, but the same principles still apply.

When Tarsha and Paul took over their farmland around Slape Manor five years ago, much of the grassland was turned into large silage bales wrapped in black plastic, that she calls “dinosaur eggs”. These didn’t make much money and the practice was contributing to a loss of biodiversity – a net negative overall. Firstly, they allowed the field directly in front of the house to grow out naturally, just to see what was in the seed bed, as a project in miniature. “And the first year, it was like being in Africa on safari, the number of insects that were coming up.” Butterfly Conservation got involved through running monitoring transects. “And after the first year we had 10 times the butterfly count, and in the second year 20 times. And for Paul, as a city lawyer that just wants data, that was all the data he needed...”. Subsequently, they allowed another four of their fields, 40 acres in total, to revert to wildflower meadows – enhancing the natural diversity by sowing a local-provenance wildflower seed-mix, as well as plug-planting. The bugs were booming, and Tarsha and Paul were being bitten by the ‘bug’ of restoring nature…

Tarsha introduced to me the innovative idea of ‘intelligent distribution’, which she first came across at her step-father’s ranch in Australia. With a property crossing a whole lot of different ecologies, with a flux between wet and dry, it's really important to have this kind of intelligent distribution so that you are growing in the rain shadows, always stockpiling for the next drought. Here in Britain, drought is not much of a landscape issue, but it is not hard to see how this way of thinking can positively influence the opposite end of the climatic spectrum: in managing floodplains and river catchments. There may well be other applications, such as: how hedgerows could, and should, be managed at the landscape level through intelligent distribution. Rather than every landowner’s hedge reaching a certain structural threshold, the aim would then be to work together in a long-term management regime that best benefits biodiversity within the whole hedgerow network.

Tarsha highlights that coping with extremes of climate in Australia has also lead to ways of thinking around positive cooperation that is already emerging within the interplay of partners in the Brit Valley project.

“I mean the only way that you can work in rural Australia is if you trust your neighbours and everyone trusts you – because inevitably at some point in any year there will be a flood or a fire. And I just remember that was such a massive lesson in how, when things go wrong, you need to collaborate. How you need to have solidarity with everyone.” She recognises that all of the partners in this project have fairly big differences in backgrounds and attitudes, and each is doing things a bit differently, but that: “certain priorities supersede other things. If we're not on fire now [in terms of global heating], then what are we? The only thing that matters is that we find the points of collaboration and points of interest and that we trust each other to [accomplish things] together.”

Finally, Tarsha talks passionately about the term ‘Country’, as used and understood within Aboriginal cultures: “Country is both the landscape and all the human and non-human elements, all set in a relationship of kinship. But there's also the fact that country can't exist without culture animating it, [bringing it to life]. Which I think starts to become really interesting in the context [of this project] – that this landscape is sentient.”

This sense of the landscape having animacy and agency – that it is a living entity that can “think” for itself and we should treat it as such – naturally leads towards a sense of deeper listening. It is something that resonates strongly in me, as a storyteller. One of the ways we can engage in cultural listening is through myths and traditional stories, that can hold complex, holistic ideas and allow deep and meaningful connections. “We've been there for such a short amount of time compared to our indigenous family members, that we haven't developed a nuance in the way we describe language and landscape.”

“But, you know, the river is the thing that holds this particular landscape.” Tarsha’s words are echoed by many others – partners and practitioners – that I’ve heard. So, our conversation leads to the topic of the Rights of Rivers that is having a strong influence now in conservation across the UK, including the nearby River Char. The prevailing attitude imposed upon rivers is either one of extractable resource or drainage system for waste products. Yet it is becoming more and more evident that this disastrous for the wellbeing of the rivers, their wildlife and the wider natural landscape. Although a Rights of the River Brit is not currently part of the project. “I think it's too radical, and I think it's distracting at the moment, but I think that that will come, almost as a natural progression of the project, I hope.”

At a discussion after the local showing of the Beaver Trust film ‘Balancing the Scales’, Tarsha makes another useful cross-cultural comment: that in Australia everything is ecologically geared towards dry and hot conditions, and how nature works with that environmental pressure. By contrast, here in the Brit Valley (and much of Britain) wetness is the main defining characteristic – “As soon as you – or a creature – makes a scrape in the ground, then water fills it, and wildlife starts to colonise.” After 3 years of living alongside introduced beavers at Slape Manor, watching their daily rituals and observing their evolving behaviours, Tarsha is witnessing first-hand how wildlife-friendly waterscapes are formed. As a once-native species, beavers still carry the DNA for survival as they co-evolved with the landscapes of this region. But she is also admiring of their way they seem to undertake a constant pattern of action and reaction, allowing the river system to change and settle before the next phase of habitat creation. It is both a physical process, and an inspiring metaphor, that is playing out within the project as a whole.