Ian Lillington, Castlemaine, Djaara country, Central Victoria.
March 2026
Permaculture first hit the headlines with a splash in 1977, when Bill Mollison and David Holmgren were interviewed on Terry Lane’s show on ABC Radio National. Radio was bigger than TV in those days, and the phones were hot with people wanting to know more. The book, Permaculture One, was already in draft form, and the publicity from that interview led to a contract with a global publisher {Corgi/Transworld}. Permaculture One was printed in Maryborough Vic, and published in 1978.
Permaculture emerged in time of ferment in the mid 70s. The Limits to Growth report in 1972 and the Oil Crisis of 1973 brought sustainability issues to the fore. The peace movement, the anti-war campaign, the Cold War and multiple liberation movements were in full swing.
When David met Bill in late 1974, Mollison was immersed in the radical edge between his University lecturing, campaigning to save the Franklin river and work with palawa people of Lutruwita, the island state known as Tasmania. David was a student of Environmental Design {ED} at the Tasmania College of Adult Education. Originally from West Australia, David was a young traveler, looking for a course that suited his dissident outlook. ED was a radical experiment in Tertiary education – set up by Hobart architect, Barry McNeil. There was no fixed curriculum, timetable, and a large budget devoted to visiting or residential guest tutors.
[see David’s personal history here – https://holmgren.com.au/writing/personal-histories/ and also the book Permaculture Pioneers – 2011 – https://au.permacultureprinciples.com/product/permaculture-pioneers-ebook/]
Bill was one of those visiting tutors and became an informal mentor for David’s thesis, which was to become Permaculture. In 1975, permaculture got a mention in print, in the WA Nut Growers journal. Bill mentioned a student, David Holmgren and his permaculture thesis.
The first widely read article was in the Tasmanian Organic Grower magazine in 1976. David says: “in ‘76 we co-authored an article about permaculture, which was jointly published in the Tasmanian Organic Gardening and Farming Society magazine and in the student newspaper of the TCAE, which was called The Feral Gazette !”
[ref A Chance Meeting – https://holmgren.com.au/writing/a-chance-meeting/ ]
During 1977, David’s thesis was gradually being tweaked for publication. David supervised Janet Mollison who was redoing his illustrations that would become the graphics for Permaculture One. A spiral bound version was sent to publishers after interest generated by the ABC radio interview. One interview that Bill referred to when he gave a talk in October 1977, where he said
“Fortunately, the first talk I gave on permaculture was on Radio 3LO (ABC Melbourne) after a 13-day petrol strike. [probably 14-27 April 1977 — see https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/110735031] – I think I got 30,000 converts! The whole point about it is, when you look around you and realise that you have a 40-mile walk to the nearest useful plant, you begin to realise the ridiculous situation you’ve evolved into. You’ve done that because you’ve put it on somebody else at a distance to do your food producing, when you don’t have to do that.”
Through 1977 Bill was promoting the idea of permaculture, travelling and giving talks around Australia and on radio. The talks excited people because Bill linked growing food and fibre in permanent forests, with the energy crisis and with human survival. {Remember petrol had quadrupled in price in the mid 70s following the oil war of 1973}. He also talked about design that was an essential part of sustainable living. In a talk to Organic Gardens, in October 1977 Mollison said:
“Humans have done some remarkable things with plants over the thousands of years that we’ve interacted with them. So in the Mediterranean region we get the carob and the olive and the chestnut, which in their original forms were almost useless to us, but have been evolved to be extremely useful species. And techniques evolved with them.
We can now (and it’s only in very, very modern times that we could do so) assemble plants from all over the world that were so evolved over thousands of years by people residing in very small tribal areas.
We can do this and it works. We put them in fairly quickly and they evolve and they close up and there’s very little maintenance in those systems, and yet the yields continue to come out. Basically, you’re instituting a forest in which you leave the forest intact but take the products.
But there’s a lot more to the total design system than that, in that what faces us is a certain decline in energy, a possible hiatus in certain energy systems and, very certainly, an extraordinary over-use of energy in food production.
As an example, Australia probably achieves about six per cent efficiency in food production, that is for every 100 gallons of petrol we put through the farm gate, we get the equivalent of six gallons of petrol back.”
And
“Cities are energy sinks. Energy comes in, but very little comes out. Mostly things to consume energy come out – things like tractors come out, things like artificial fertilizers come out. Cities can very quickly alter the energy picture. By going over to permaculture, we can reverse that.”
Bill was connecting with Terry White, Max Lindegger, Phil Gall and others who were to become early practitioners. Recently graduated, David stayed closer to his new home in Tasmania and focused on gaining practical self-sufficiency skills. Pic of Terry White, hands on head, and Max Lindegger [far left] at the first International Permaculture Convergence at Pappinbara, NSW, 1984.
Counter culture and communications.
There were interviews on radio from late 76. Bruce Hedge at 3CR [Melbourne Community Radio] – interviewed Bill a few times. Bruce later wrote many articles about permaculture in Earth Garden magazine. Probably the first interview of David and Bill (in Hobart ABC studio) was in late ‘76 by Robin Ravlich – a young and innovative radio journalist who joined ABC in 1975.
Newsletters of organisations were an important way of communicating. Terry White who heard about permaculture on the radio invited Bill to Maryborough in 1976, and went on to edit and publish the first Permaculture magazine in 1978. Co-incidentally in the same town that Permaculture One was printed. [pic of Terry handing over the archive of early magazines to Ian Lillington]
Permaculture concept presented at Festivals
The Counter-culture generated festivals that later became Confest, which is still running every year. In 1977 there was a big build up to the Down to Earth festival planned for Bredbo near Canberra. https://confest.org.au/index.php/about/history David had not seen Bill for much of 1977. David visited Melbourne from Tasmania and stayed with Venie, his mum, who was in Melbourne in autumn/winter 1977. After David’s father died, Venie had started on a round Australia [radical for that time] and by mid 1977, she was volunteering at the Down To Earth festival office in Collingwood. [see Pic of her autobiography A Sense of Direction, 2008 ].
International travel was expensive in those days, but Ina May Gaskin, who had helped found the self-sustaining community, The Farm, with her husband Stephen Gaskin in 1971 were VIP speakers from the USA. Ina May is an American midwife who has been described as “the mother of authentic midwifery.”[1]
Bill and David co-presented a permaculture workshop was under a peppercorn tree at Bredbo. They were happy to have 100+ people attend. David presented other workshops too. He had arrived ahead of the opening – volunteering his practical skills to help set up infrastructure – with 20,00 people expected, but there were limited resources, and a risk the event might be cancelled due to the chaos. But David and others provided leadership and skills. He was concerned about how much this ‘alternative’ festival relied on resources from the mainstream and that led to a home-grown festival for Jackey’s March in Tasmania.
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So, before the book, Permaculture was already a big thing, at least in alternative circles. Workshops on earth building, building biology, tools and technology, intentional communities, finance and land ownership, and spiritual practice went on to influence the seven ‘petals’ of Holmgren’s Permaculture Flower – see https://permacultureprinciples.com/flower/ .
Permaculture was influenced by and had on-going influence on many of the domains discussed at these festivals. Permaculture was avidly studied by those seeking to live more sustainably and homesteads and urban communities became testing grounds for permaculture living.
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