In the past 12 months Permaculture Australia has made an impact through a number of initiatives in liaison with the permaculture community. With the End of Financial Year approaching, this is the ideal time to consider making a financial contributionto support Permaculture Australia’s projects.
All donations, bequests and tithes are gratefully received and support the national movement by:
· backing national outreach events such as APC 2027,
· developing permaculture design education courses for schools and colleges plus resources for teachers
· supporting permaculture community regenerative projects restoring the environment and increasing biodiversity.
Among the outreach projects in the past year two self-funded Permafund circle members accompanied groups of young people from South Australia and the South Coast of NSW to attend the International Permayouth Convergence (IPYC) in Timor Leste in October, which was a great success.
Funds raised by ticketed Open Garden tours in Southern NSW & South Australia plus generous gifts from Permaculture Australia supporters were gratefully received
Over several months in 2025 the Permafund circle undertook its careful process of assessing grant applications from Australia, South East Asia and the Pacific Islands seeking support for permaculture education, environmental restoration and habitat protection projects. In total nine grants were successfully distributed - one in Australia, one in Timor Leste to support IPYC attendees. three to projects in the Philippines and one each to Bangladesh, Myanmar and the Solomon Islands ,
Expressions of gratitude have been received in reports from the recipients of the seed funding, For example, the Baetona Farmers’ Association, based in Mana’abu Village, Solomon Islands successfully applied for a 2025 Permaculture Australia Permafund grant to support training in climate smart agriculture and to raise awareness about the importance of producing nutrient rich local food for all of the members of the community. Training sessions in organic farming in 3 communities enabled women farmers to develop income generating activities to support their families’ basic needs.
The efforts of all contributors in support of Permaculture Australia’s projects through fund raising are warmly welcomed. For more details about how to become involved and to help please see the Permaculture Australia website or contact hello@permacultureaustralia.org.au
For decades, a gap has existed between what students learn about sustainability in the classroom and the practical skills needed to care for land, grow food, restore ecosystems, and design resilient local systems.
Students may study ecology, food systems, climate pressure, and environmental change, yet the hands-on skills needed to respond to those realities have often remained outside the formal curriculum - in garden clubs, weekend workshops, community projects, or informal electives.
That gap is now beginning to close.
The Certificate II in Permaculture (AHC21722) is now "on scope" for delivery in Australian secondary schools through ReadCloud. This means students can complete a nationally recognised vocational qualification in permaculture while gaining credit toward their secondary schooling.
For the Australian permaculture movement, this is a significant step. Permaculture is moving from the margins of education into the mainstream structures of secondary schooling.
Why "On Scope" Matters
In the Vocational Education and Training sector, being "on scope" means that a Registered Training Organisation has been approved to deliver a particular qualification.
Permaculture qualifications have existed on the national training register for some time, thanks to the substantial work of Ross Mars and many others who helped establish and defend permaculture within the formal training system. However, getting a qualification into high schools is a different challenge.
VET delivered to secondary students sits at the intersection of two highly regulated systems: school education and vocational training. A course must be credible to schools, acceptable to regulators, deliverable by teachers, and assessable under national competency standards.
That required serious groundwork.
The Permaculture Australia VET Circle developed a comprehensive 270-page Training and Assessment Strategy specifically designed for the high school context. This strategy provided the structure needed for ReadCloud, a school-focused RTO, to bring the Certificate II in Permaculture onto scope.
Because ReadCloud already works with secondary schools, the qualification is now positioned for wider adoption in Australian school-based VET programs.
The Role of the Permaculture Australia VET Circle
The Permaculture Australia VET Circle has been the driving force behind this work.
The Circle brings together permaculture practitioners, educators, and vocational training specialists who understand both the ethics of permaculture and the requirements of formal education. Their work has not simply been to promote permaculture, but to make it administratively possible for schools to deliver it with integrity.
That matters.
Without the regulatory architecture, permaculture remains vulnerable to being treated as an optional extra. With it, schools can offer permaculture as a recognised vocational pathway.
"If you are attacking a problem that you can fix in your lifetime, then you are thinking too small..."
Bringing permaculture into schools is exactly that kind of long-term work. It is not only about next year's subject offerings. It is about building a generation of students who can participate responsibly in food, fibre, ecological, and designed systems.
A Four-Year Pathway from Tools to Systems Thinking
The Certificate II in Permaculture has been structured into four clusters, designed to scaffold student learning from Year 9 through to Year 12.
The pathway begins with practical outdoor work and gradually builds toward research, agricultural science, system design, production, and industry awareness.
Year 9: Working in Ecological Services
The first cluster is designed to give students early success through practical action.
Students focus on tool safety, workplace health and safety, weather observation, hand tool maintenance, and basic ecological restoration. The reading and writing demands are deliberately kept low so that students can first build confidence through hands-on work.
This is an important design choice. Many students who may not initially see themselves as academic learners can experience success through competent practical work. They begin by doing real tasks with real tools in real environments.
Year 10: Know Your Bioregion
The second cluster shifts toward research, mapping, observation, communication, and local ecological knowledge.
Students investigate their local bioregion, record information about Country, and develop workplace communication skills. This cluster gives practical purpose to literacy, numeracy, geography, and environmental understanding.
Rather than learning about ecology in abstract terms only, students are asked to understand the place where they actually live.
Year 11: Basics of Food Production
In the third cluster, the science deepens.
Students work with integrated plant and animal systems, crop production, propagation, soil health, and plant nutrition. They begin to read whole-site permaculture plans, conduct soil pH testing, propagate seedlings, and run small agricultural trials.
This is where the common misconception that permaculture is "just gardening" begins to fall apart.
Students are not merely planting seeds. They are learning to observe relationships, manage living systems, collect evidence, and make decisions based on site conditions.
Year 12: Obtain a Yield
The final cluster functions as a capstone production season.
Students manage crops from planting through to harvest, use low-volume irrigation, collect and store seed, record yields, and investigate employment pathways in the permaculture industry.
By the end of the course, students should not only have completed a qualification. They should also have experienced the discipline of bringing a living system through a full cycle of production.
That is a serious form of learning.
High-Level Science with Mud on the Boots
One of the strengths of the Certificate II pathway is that it does not force students to choose between practical work and intellectual rigour.
The course begins with tools, restoration, and work-readiness. It then moves into mapping, bioregional research, soil health, plant nutrition, irrigation, seed saving, production, and industry investigation.
This is science with mud on the boots.
Students learn through participation in real systems. They encounter water, soil, weather, plants, animals, tools, and human decisions as connected realities. That kind of learning helps students see that sustainability is not just a set of values or opinions. It is a practical discipline requiring knowledge, judgement, skill, and responsibility.
Career Pathways and Further Study
The Certificate II in Permaculture can lead directly into entry-level roles such as:
Urban food growing assistant
Permaculture farm worker
Community nursery worker
School garden assistant
But its value is broader than those direct employment outcomes.
The qualification builds transferable skills relevant to horticulture, agriculture, nursery operations, landscaping, conservation and ecosystem management, sports turf management, community food systems, and on-Country land management.
Students develop outdoor work-readiness, communication skills, workplace safety awareness, environmental observation, tool use, and practical responsibility.
For students who want to continue studying, the Certificate II can also provide a foundation for Certificate III or IV in Permaculture, the Permaculture Design Certificate, or further study in sustainability, environmental science, agriculture, education, or community development.
It is not a ceiling. It is a foundation.
What Schools Need to Do Now
The timing of this announcement matters.
Most high schools begin finalising subject offerings for the following year around Term 3. Schools interested in offering Certificate II in Permaculture in 2027 need to begin conversations now.
The pathway is straightforward:
A teacher or school leader identifies interest in offering the course.
The school's VET Coordinator contacts ReadCloud about adding Certificate II in Permaculture to the school's 2027 offerings.
If a school works with another RTO, that RTO can contact Permaculture Australia about licensing the Training and Assessment Strategy.
Permaculture Australia holds the copyright for the strategy and is willing to support interested teachers, schools, and RTOs who want to make the qualification available.
One school in Western Australia has already added the course to its 2027 offerings. The opportunity now is for more schools to follow.
A Mainstream Pathway for Ecological Responsibility
The move into high schools does not reduce permaculture to another school subject. At its best, it gives permaculture a more secure public form.
It allows students to encounter ecological design, food production, soil care, water management, local bioregional knowledge, and practical responsibility as part of their formal education.
That is the real significance of this moment.
Permaculture is not only about growing food. It is about learning to participate wisely in the systems that sustain life.
If Australian schools are serious about preparing students for the future, then students need more than abstract awareness of environmental problems. They need practical skills, vocational pathways, ecological literacy, and the capacity to design for resilience.
The Certificate II in Permaculture offers one credible way to begin.
For further information, teachers and VET Coordinators can view the course outline in ReadCloud's 2027 Course Guide or contact Permaculture Australia at hello@permacultureaustralia.org.au.
On May the 4th, 32 members of Permaculture Australia gathered in a Zoom call for the 2026 Annual General Meeting. The week prior, we also enjoyed a pre-AGM Online Soiree event that gave all the attendees a chance to meet the nominees to the board, which was a fun and interesting event to get together and look to the future of Permaculture.
The office bearers of Secretary and Treasurer were then peer-elected at the Mission Circle meeting on 25th May, and the members of the Mission Circle (following the Sociocratic Election Process to elect the Operational Lead of their sub-circle) elected the Chair of the Board at that meeting.
We are now very pleased to introduce you to our new Board of Directors, who will serve a term of 2 years from 2026 until the AGM in 2028.
NEW TO THE BOARD IN 2026:
KATIE REID
With over 20 years of experience advising boards, C-suite executives, regulators, and community organisations, Katie's career has spanned multiple sectors across Australia, including small not-for-profit organisations, government, and some of the world’s largest companies. Across these contexts, her focus has remained consistent: helping people across systems collectively understand and navigate complexity with integrity, inclusion and new models of collaboration and contribution.
Molly received the Yale Distinguished Alumna Award (2020) for her global work over more than 35 years to systematically re-design economic structures to ensure the protection of biodiversity, survival of humanity, and achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Sam has run for council, ran events, managed large aid and private projects and designed all over the world. He is a full time permaculture teacher, designer, farmer, project manager and landscaper, and actually hasn’t done anything else. He may not have been alive long, but he's certainly put the hours in.
Catherine has served for the past 12 months as the Chair of Permaculture Australia elected by her peers to steward the board of directors at a time of great transformation for Permaculture Australia and the Permaculture movement, demanded by the conditions of the world at large. Over the past year, the board has devoted much time to reaching out to listen and re-connect with the permaculture community and broader ecosystem, to align the organisation with the needs of our time.
Having served this past year has allowed John to witness a dramatic shift toward collective governance with the implementation of sociocracy as the model for collaboration and decision making.
He's been involved in Permaculture activism since completing his PDC in 1992 in many areas, but strategically in his local region of the Bega Valley, NSW receiving an APT Diploma in Permaculture Design through Recognised Prior Learning.
Having 20 years+ of professional experience in consulting and corporate in organisational and leadership development, Tim works internationally across numerous sectors, hundreds of organisations and his work directly impacts 1000s of people. This work includes many examples of strategic advisory work related to organisational design, development and culture generation for statutory boards including Charities and Peak bodies and Associations, as well as corporates, NGOs, government agencies and departments.
Bronwyn had had the honour of this role for the past year, and she feels that the work she has undertaken is only just beginning. Something that has deeply impressed her is the potential that she has seen within this organisation for making a real difference on a national scale. She has observed the obstacles we face, and also the opportunities. She has developed precious relationships with people right across the country that have so much to offer.
At this time, we wish to offer our sincere thanks to the 2025-2026 board members who will continue their Permaculture Australia journey in other areas of the organisation.
Departing Board Members:
Lauren O'Reilly (Left) stepped down from the board after helping the new board members transition into their current roles. She hopes to return in the near future to continue her contribution to the VET Circle
Fernando Moreno (Centre) continues on with Permaculture Australia filling a key role as our Operations Manager.
Felix Leibelt (Right) continues to be actively engaged in the Youth Circle as one of our Youth Ambassadors.
Congratulations to our new panel of Directors, and Thank You to all who have served in the past. We are excited to see the bright and promising future of this organisation and the broader permaculture movement unfold.
A Collabortive 12-month Project between Permaculture Australia and Savour Soil Permaculture.
WHAT IS IT? A year-long challenge to demonstrate what you can grow in your 90m2 space, documenting and sharing all along the way what you do, how you do it, and what you harvest.
WHO IS THIS FOR? Everyone who grows food! If you don't have 90m2 of garden in your own space, you can combine forces with neighbours, friends, your local community garden, and seek to find answers together. Get creative!
WHEN IS IT RUNNING? The challenge begins on International Permaculture Day - Sunday 3rd May 2026, and ends on International Permaculture Day - Sunday 2nd May 2027. Participants will submit monthly reports and check ins to share how the experience is going throughout the year, with results published regularly.
WHAT IS IT FOR? Gathering information about challenges, solutions, ideas and results. Being able to see how different climates, soil types, and other considerations affect the growing experience right across the country.
Across the country, people are growing food in wildly different ways. Different climates. Different soils. Different constraints. Different tools. And yet, we rarely get the chance to look at our systems side by side, with real numbers, real observations, and real honesty. This friendly 90 m2 challenge is an invitation to change that.
Rather than a competition focused on winning, this is a shared experiment in abundance, resilience, and good design. Each participant commits to observing and documenting up to 90 square metres of productive growing space over a 12-month period — including vertical spaces like trellises and fences, and sharing what they learn along the way.
The aim is simple but powerful: To grow as much good-quality food as possible, while also tracking diversity, pest and disease pressure, labour, and seasonal challenges. Weight alone doesn’t tell the whole story, so this challenge values polycultures, system health, and adaptability, not monocropped shortcuts.
Permaculture practitioners have access to an enormous toolkit, no-dig beds, food forests, biological inputs, ferments, wicking systems, living mulches, intensive annuals, perennial systems, and more. This challenge creates a space where all of those approaches are welcome, documented, and visible, so we can collectively see what works, where, and why.
By sharing methods and outcomes openly, we move beyond opinion and anecdote. We start building a body of lived evidence that helps all of us design better systems, systems that are productive, resilient, and appropriate to their place. This is not about proving who is “best.” It’s about learning together, improving together, and celebrating the many ways abundance shows up in different landscapes.
Throughout the year, participants will document their efforts, processes, and harvests. The results will be openly shared for all to see what works, and where, and how. A nation-wide collaboration of food growers everywhere to demonstrate how permaculture can impact your food growing efforts.
This project is a collaboration between Permaculture Australia and Savour Soil Permaculture.
Get in touch to register your expression of interest! You will be contacted with more information before the challenge begins on Sunday 3rd May 2026.
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]
[pic of mags 1,2,3 - they cost $1.60 at first!]
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.
**********************
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.
You must be logged in to post a comment.