When Kelly O’Shanassy reflects on more than a decade leading the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), she doesn’t begin with the wins. Instead, she starts with the complete antithesis: with the decision to leave.
In the debut episode of There Will Be Dancing, a podcast produced by Women’s Environmental Leadership Australia (WELA) in collaboration with Women’s Agenda, O’Shanassy reflects on her tenure at ACF and the leadership decisions that shaped it.
“I didn’t want to wake up in the morning and not want to go to work,” she says on the podcast. “It’s a very demanding job. I wanted to leave before I was injured.”
After 11 years as CEO, and only the second woman to hold the role, O’Shanassy stepped down in December 2025, handing over to a new leader at a moment of rare policy progress. It was, in many ways, a neat exit, arriving just as long-fought national nature protection laws finally passed. In late 2025, Labor and the Greens set aside their differences to strike a deal delivering significant reforms.
For the first time, Australia’s forests will be protected under national nature laws, closing deforestation loopholes that have enabled destruction for more than a quarter of a century and ending carve-outs for native forest logging.
The conversation itself ranges widely. In a free-ranging and intimate exchange with hosts Victoria McKenzie-McHarg, Odette Barry and Sanaya Khisty, discussion moves between the big questions of structural reform, from environmental laws and the renewable energy transition to confronting Australia’s role as a major fossil fuel exporter.
For McKenzie-McHarg, the discussion is also deeply personal. She first worked with O’Shanassy early in her career and the two have remained connected for more than a decade, sharing many moments across Australia’s environmental movement. “We have had dances. We have had cries. We have danced on rooftops and cried on rooftops.”
Those celebrations and tears are part of the rhythm of the work. Leadership itself is rarely tidy. O’Shanassy reflects on the tensions that come with leading major advocacy campaigns, including the difficult question of knowing when something has run its course.
Even successful campaigns, she suggests, eventually reach a moment where leaders must decide whether to keep pushing or redirect energy elsewhere, a decision that is rarely simple when teams and supporters are deeply invested.
O’Shanassy believes leaders need a clear strategic anchor, particularly when internal pressures, legacy projects or competing priorities threaten to pull an organisation off course. She calls this guiding principle the “Southern Cross”, her Australian reframing of the ‘North Star’. “What I’m really talking about here is what I call your Southern Cross. What’s your big, audacious goal?”
In the episode, O’Shanassy reflects on what her own “Southern Cross” looked like in practice and how that guiding principle shaped some of the toughest strategic decisions she faced while leading ACF.
And no leadership conversation would be complete without examining the additional challenges women often navigate in decision-making environments that remain heavily male-dominated.
Kelly’s quotes:
“Joy doesn’t betray activism, it sustains activism. It keeps it going.”
“Hope inspires and fear paralyses… we’ve always got to have hope and joy.”
The full conversation with Kelly O’Shanassy explores the art of ending campaigns, the tension between compromise and principle and the role of joy in sustaining long-term change.
There Will Be Dancing is available now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all major podcast platforms.