ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the drivers of the ‘circular conundrum’ and the cultural factors that hinder our learning. The many cropping stories reveal the interwoven characteristics and relationships of the circular conundrum. Cropping plays a minor role in Northern Australia and an even less of one in the wet-dry tropics, barely contributing to economic production. The slow journey by colonizing Australians to cultivate landscape literacy in northern Australia relies on cultural landscape literacy and climate literacy and dependent on all three is a complex systems literacy. Understanding the northern Australian landscape requires recognition that it is a cultural landscape; a result of tens of thousands of years of culture and law, with intricate, intimate land and sea management. Recognition of a cultural landscape is elemental for the health of northern Australian landscapes and a healthy future for its people.
