The Roots of Private Property: Native Vegetation Laws and Murder in The Winter Road

Abstract

This article explores the conflict between private property rights and environmentalism through Kate Holden’s true-crime narrative The Winter Road, which recounts the murder of environmental officer Glen Turner by farmer Ian Turnbull. Framing this tragedy within Australia’s colonial history of land ownership and conservation, the article examines how Lockean narratives of land as absolute private property continue to shape tensions over native vegetation laws. It argues that these clashes reveal deeper tensions within Australian settler culture: between entrenched beliefs in property rights and environmentalism on one hand, and the persistent marginalisation of First Nations systems of land stewardship and native vegetation on the other. The murder case is read against global patterns of settler-colonial property regimes, where dispossession and the ordering of land through settler environmental ideals remain structuring forces.