Written and Photography by Rosemary Morrow Sundry thoughts about the cutting edge, or the unrecognised edges of permaculture.
No. 1. Decolonising designs for Zone 1 kitchen gardens Spending time with refugees in sub-standard crowded housing in camps woke me up to the idea that the classic design for Zone 1 – the kitchen garden – was not going to work here. The traditional Zone 1, with the lemon tree and circular path, was excellent for those who had land and resources but couldn’t be considered the ‘gold standard’ for kitchen gardens. Most of the world’s people did not have this possibility. Was permaculture too elite to apply globally? We, permaculturists, had already accepted that people in high density housing would probably have their kitchen garden some distance way – say at Community gardens, or, on a roof top. However the thought that they could pack in good quality food in windows, roofs, hang from barrier fences was not a thought in most permaculture minds. So did that mean that permaculture had nothing to offer where large numbers of people did not have land and access to resources? We at P4R – Permaculture for Refugees realised that Kitchen Gardens, Zone 1 in these places was an essential need and also possible but they wouldn’t look like the traditional Zone 1. We developed kitchen gardens that looked like the photo below where every and any space grows food whether on the ground, in a ditch of dirty water or on a roof.
And Wall Gardens – Zone 1 – like the newly planted one which within a few weeks would be prolific with kitchen vegetables. And we established that permaculture design for Kitchen Gardens was possible in tiny spaces and vertical spaces.
But that raised the question of First Nations ‘kitchen gardens’? From South East Asia I knew that most kitchen foods grew and were harvested on trees in forests and weren’t planted as annuals in beds. This is necessary where monsoon floods, torrid temperatures and pests destroy the conventional plants and beds. I knew that the people of Tenganan went to the forrest when the fruits and vegetables were ready and harvested them in place in their microclimates and ecosystems. However what about Australia, for example, and the First Nation’s agriculture? From my years in the Kimberleys and Alice Springs many years ago, and some reading, I realised that Kitchen Gardens are those created by ‘enrichment’ planting. Which means establishing plants where the microclimates are most suitable. For example, along river beds which tribes and clans would visit in drought or perhaps ceremony, many seeds would be planted and later visited and harvested appropriately. This required detailed knowledge of a plant in its ecosystem and increasing its number in place not modifying an ecosystem to suit a plant as it done with ‘colonial’ planting. The Australian attempts at bush tucker gardens tend to follow the colonial model. However close observation of plants and place reveals what flourishes. With implementing this design, harvesting means visiting the ppropriate microclimate which may be slightly inconvenient but also an opportunity for a rich engagement with Nature. When appraising the Planetary Health Initiative site in Katoomba; a place with many microclimates, there was discussion was about bush gardens design which tended to favour the ‘colonial’ placing vegetation together for easy harvesting and sometimes in ‘guilds’ but not logical and traditional enrichment planting in the appropriate microclimates. This would establish best practice for other bush tucker’ gardens. Such a planting design is more likely to endure and survive, droughts, floods, and fires because plants are in their natural ‘guilds’ and also good for disaster planning. It would also be a valuable model for other First Nations people in the region to restore their traditional practices.
By visiting and harvesting food where it grows best in microclimates, and the plants are mainly perennial, we again become food gathers in the sense of the past. It’s likely to be very rewarding.
Tackling our ongoing climate crisis means adjusting the behaviours, attitudes and relationships we hold with the environment and with each other. It’s not just tech solutions we require but deep cultural shifts. It won’t be a single action but the collection of many small and sweeping changes that sets us up for success or failure and culture is the bedrock of behaviour.
We’ll be exploring through a variety of speakers how shifting culture from mainstream society, whether ancient or modern, can help change our current climate path. With special emphasis on first nations ways of knowing and being, drawing from lands managed in sustainable and regenerative ways prior and post colonisation, we will explore what a new space of cultural emergence might look like. An emergence that is appropriate, equitable and listens to the needs of the land and the people.
What does it mean to be a custodial species in our environment?
What is culture? what is good culture and what does it mean to reclaim our cultural practices?
How can we contribute to meaningful cultural emergence as ethical and responsible consumers?
These are a few of the questions we’ll be exploring in depths over the three days of this seminar, with many more exploring the themes of right relating, impacts of colonisation, moving beyond helplessness, cross-cultural dialogue and breaking the binaries we live within.
All profits raised from this event is going towards a specific land back fund for First Nations Aboriginal people.
Permaqueer are Professional members of Permaculture Australia, the national permaculture member organisation. Find out more including how to join here.
PA’s Kym chats with Terry Leahy, who has been involved in the permaculture movement for more than 40 years, about his new book. The Politics of Permaculture is one of the first books to unpack the theory and practice of this social movement that looks to challenge the status quo. Drawing upon publications as well as extensive interviews with permaculture practitioners and organisations from around the world, Terry Leahy explains the ways permaculture is understood and practiced in different contexts.
Tell us about yourself and how did you get involved in permaculture?
I was in a Child Care Cooperative in the early seventies. I joined with some other people in the collective to purchase a block up the back of Taree. I am pretty sure that I read Permaculture One as a guide to the kinds of things we might do on our block. I loved it. Later on, in Newcastle, we had a large block and I was keen to use permaculture so I went up to Tyalgum in Northern NSW to do the PDC with Liz Nicholson and Peter Wade. I think that was 1996. A year or so after that I went to my first Convergence in Nimbin at Djanbung Gardens. In 2003 as part of my job at University of Newcastle, we got ten students from South Africa who were working in the rural villages there as extension workers. That led to a whole interest in permaculture in the context of food security and development.
In 2009 I went to the international convergence in Malawi and met the people from the amazing Chikukwa permaculture project in Zimbabwe (pictured left). The following year my sister and I went there to make a documentary on that.
We often see comments online that permaculture is not political, and that politics has no place on a permaculture site. How would you respond to these comments?
Well, that’s a doozy, isn’t it? I’ve been very much influenced by the second wave feminist movement. In terms of their slogan, ‘the personal is political’. Their idea is that wherever there’s relationships between people, there can be conflicts and you can talk about the politics of these relationships. So, politics is a part of any social life, and my book takes a very broad view of politics.
If you narrow it down and talk about politics as related to government, to the political process, as it’s normally understood, I’d say this. There is the famous scene from ‘Global Gardener’. Mollison is walking across a misty paddock and talking about how he used to be involved in forestry protests in Tasmania. And he realized that protests were not ‘enough’. What we need to do is to build the permaculture alternative from the ground up.
“Permaculture is just as much about system change as more obviously ‘political’ movements. But the route to that is building up the alternative. My view is that permaculture has a lot to contribute as a grass roots strategy, but also a lot of permaculture people are not seeing that as the only thing to be doing at the moment.”
What I found talking to permaculture people is that there are different approaches. Some are massively happy that permaculture is not ‘political’. They don’t like the conflictual argy-bargy that’s associated with the political scene. They want to get on with doing things that are making a difference in the world, even if it’s just one backyard at a time, as one of my interviewees said. This is quite defensible, and I explain why.
At the same time, a lot of my interviewees are also talking about how permaculture needs to intervene in the political space. For example, the initiative in Britain called “Control Shift”. Which brings together various groups, including permaculture, to try and create a way forward through political alliance.
Tell us some more about some of the topics in your book.
There’s a lot covered in the book. Even though it’s only 50,000 words, it rattles along. The book begins with the definition of permaculture. Most of my interviewees define it as a design science for environmental sustainability. And I question that and talk about various options reflected in the practice of permaculture people. The next chapter is on permaculture as a social movement. So, how does the network of permaculture people hang together and what sort of things are they doing as permaculture?
The third chapter is partly on the anti-political strategy of permaculture and how people are responding to that. The second half is about visions. Like, so if you are in favour of system change what kind of system do you want? I look at different approaches that people are following. ‘Town and village market bioregionalism’ is close to what Mollison proposes. ‘Radical reformism’ hopes for a cultural change and a change in market behaviour along with some degree of state regulation. Ethical businesses and cooperatives with an interventionist state. I found that full on anarchists and democratic socialists are very much a minority in the permaculture movement.
“Permaculture’s grass roots interventions are meant to prefigure what a permaculture system would be like if it was implemented through the whole society. I look at how this works out in practice and give a lot of examples — a lot of detail on what permaculture people are doing. And most people, including those in other movements for system change have got no concept of what permaculture is doing, in that sense.“
The final chapter is on gender and colonialism. This is about critiques of permaculture that come from within the movement — but also from outside. Some people are writing off permaculture because they think it’s patriarchal or colonialist. What is the substance of those critiques? How is permaculture responding? I hope people will find what I am saying about this helpful.
How do you see the current permaculture movement in Australia? What more could be progressing and how could this occur?
I think I am pretty happy with the diversity in the permaculture movement which probably comes through in the book. Go on with what we’re doing. David Holmgren’s recent book Retrosuburbia is just brilliant. And like heaps of what we are doing all around the world. Adding to that the first thing I’d be saying is to be realistic about what we can achieve and what we can’t. For example, what are the typical problems of trying to run an ethical business in the context of a capitalist economy? The second would be that there is a slight problem in defining permaculture as system design for sustainability. I tend to think that the definition Mollison gives in The Designers’ Manual is closer to what most permaculture people are actually doing – sustainable agriculture with a side salad of settlement design. And I think that the mismatch between the current definition and what people are doing can lead to certain problems. In terms of how permaculture relates to the broader environmentalist movement and how it relates to the left and the public. Because when people ask, “What is permaculture?” they get an answer that is hard to read.
You are a long-term member of PA (thank you!). Why are you a member & what do you see as the role of the national permaculture organisation?
I love PA. It’s great that we’ve got a permaculture organisation in Australia. Despite some difficult conflicts in the Australian movement, we have a peak body that works extremely well. The UK has got one, but the United States is still reaching for a consensus. I see PA’s role is to facilitate convergences and to promote people’s businesses and media and to help them to establish their permaculture careers. Yes, that’s what it is and it’s doing that already and I’m liking it! Obviously, I have a particular fondness for Permafund, for the permaculture in developing countries action. Which permaculture’s done very well so far and we have the scope to expand.
Anything else you’d like to share?
I’ve been sometimes worried about writing this book. You worry about a number of things. I worry about whether I’ve been faithful to my interviewees and whether they’ll see themselves in what I write about what they say. It’s an inevitable problem for a sociologist writing about interview data. You excerpt the particular piece of interview text and then you try and relate that to other interview data and put it into some sort of framework. It can seem very far removed from what the person felt at the time. I have also been a bit worried that some of what I say about permaculture is controversial within the permaculture movement. But quite a lot of positive response to the book so far has made me less worried about this. I think people are looking forward to a book that has a go at tackling some tricky issues for us.
More information:
You can purchase a copy of The Politics of Permaculture here.
Terry is a professional member of Permaculture Australia, the national permaculture organisation. You can find out more, including how to join up as a member, here.
“As we face what seem like insurmountable challenges, or what design theorist Horst Rittel described as ‘wicked problems’, it’s easy to sink into despair and anxiety about the future. Naomi Klein has said, ‘we’re f#*ked if we believe we’re f#*ked’. I’ve been so grateful to Rowe Morrow for introducing me to permaculture in 2006 – the year my twin boys turned five and I sank into despair about the future.”
This months guest post is written by PA professional member Lis Bastian in the Blue Mountains. Lis is involved a range of different projects including The Big Fix, Blue Mountains Permaculture Institute and the Blackheath Community Garden. She was also recently awarded a Community Service Award at the Australasian Permaculture Convergence for exemplary service to permaculture. Read more about her story below.
“Fifteen years later, the solutions-focused system design thinking approach of permaculture has enabled me to get a handle on tackling wicked problems and helped me focus on hope, not despair. Two of the three permaculture ethics are about People care and Fair share, so my main focus has been on the cultural change side of ‘perma – culture’. This has been a natural fit as permaculture designing has merged with the arts and cultural development work I’ve been doing for the last 40 years.
I do this via a charity I founded called The Big Fix, which incorporates the Blue Mountains Permaculture Institute. Our mission is to ‘change the story to grow a collaborative solutions-focused culture’.
The Big Fix has six areas of focus for redesigning our culture. They address how we collaborate, tell our stories, learn, work, connect and care for the living systems which support us.
Facilitate Collaboration. Tackle wicked problems like climate change & biodiversity loss by avoiding social monocultures and growing cross-sector collaborations and alliances
Change the Culture by Changing the Story. Recognize that our artists and storytellers are our nitrogen-fixing species to accelerate succession. Work with them to bring back media ownership to communities and for hyperlocal and bioregional solutions media to feed up into global solutions media – a bottom up approach.
Encourage Pluriversal Learning. Create community-owned and operated intergenerational and cross-cultural learning and research opportunities that meet the needs of young people and our communities.
Create New Economies. Provide training and support the development of social enterprises that put the needs of all living things ahead of profit.
Grow the Health of our Communities. Provide public spaces and regular events that focus on what we all have in common – helping us to meet our needs for food security, social connection, creativity, physical activity and time outdoors reconnecting to the natural (versus online) world.
Involve Everyone in Redesigning our Systems through an Ecological Lens. Ensure ‘fair share’, social equity, inclusiveness and accessibility by expanding opportunities for free and adaptive permaculture design training, knowledge sharing and participation in community decision making.
On a practical level, we’ve implemented the above six areas by:
Working with local cross-sector Alliances
Producing The Big Fix Media – Australia’s first solutions media service
Trialling Australia’s first Pluriversity
Providing social enterprise design, development and mentoring as a new thread in permaculture training
Coordinating Blackheath Community Farm and Landcare
The Permaculture Garden and Micro-forest for Headspace, Katoomba; and
A new micro-farm being planned for the Lithgow PCYC
Providing free permaculture for young people in a range of settings through the Blue Mountains Pluriversity and its Permaculture Institute.
THE JOURNEY: A HISTORY IN THE ARTS AND MAKING THE MOVE OUT OF SYDNEY TO ORANGE I trained and worked as an art teacher at a number of schools in Sydney and then, thirty-four years ago, left my job as an Education Officer at the Art Gallery of NSW to take up the role of curator at Orange Regional Gallery. I was a keen whitewater canoeist who escaped the city nearly every weekend to spend time in the bush. My former partner and I had the dream of buying a farm and leaving the city permanently. The job in Orange helped that dream become a reality. We purchased 80 acres and I began gardening and experimenting with cooking the seasonal food I grew myself. This eventually led to me opening one of Australia’s first bookshop cafes and becoming a food writer for a local paper. After 3 ½ years I left the Gallery, expanded my work as an exhibiting artist and writer, ran the Bookshop Café, taught Art at TAFE, and became the Regional Arts Promotion Officer for Arts OutWest – a regional cultural development organisation servicing 17 Local Government areas in Central NSW. This involved arts reporting for Prime TV, ABC Radio and a number of other commercial radio programs and newspapers. I eventually closed the Café, became CEO of Arts OutWest, started a magazine called ArtSpeak, launched the Central West Writers’ Centre and ran the Banjo Paterson Festival in Orange.
RELOCATING TO THE BLUE MOUNTAINS Just after our twin boys turned one, we moved to Blackheath in the Blue Mountains. We opened a gallery called Stop Laughing This Is Serious, which specialised in the best of Australia’s cartooning and illustration. At this stage a number of people who frequented the gallery, persuaded me of the seriousness of climate change. I subsequently applied to train as a climate ambassador with Al Gore, who’d produced ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. It changed the whole direction of my life. I went on to give over 120 presentations about climate change around Australia and worked with our local community to start a Climate Action Group in Blackheath.
POLITICAL ACTION AND PERMACULTURE AS A RESPONSE TO THE CLIMATE CRISIS In my search for solutions to the climate crisis I heard about permaculture and enrolled in a PDC with Rowe Morrow. She subsequently invited me to start teaching with her and we set up the Blue Mountains Permaculture Institute in 2007. I was attracted to permaculture because it was about redesigning systems and looking at everything we do through an ecological lens. I loved the focus on People care and Fair share (as well as Earth care), and the concept of the problem being the solution. At the same time I was working closely with Catherine Fitzpatrick, an inspiring climate strategist from Greenpeace (who went on to work for Greenpeace in China). She kept reminding me that our current situation is so urgent that individual action alone will never produce the change we need in time to avert catastrophic climate change. We need political change as well.
Our Climate Action Group began exploring how we could build fair share and resilience into our local community. Our projects included starting a community market with a Kids Toy Swap Table (run by kids), and a local produce co-op with our own seed company: Crazy Climate Seeds (if they could grow in Blackheath they could grow anywhere). We did bulk buys of solar panels and hazelnut trees, selling over 400 of each and creating a distributed hazelnut orchard through the Blue Mountains; and my husband and I produced a booklet: 101 Cool and Green Things to do in Blackheath, financed by the Blackheath Chamber of Commerce and Blue Mountains City Council.
LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND BIOREGIONAL SOLUTIONS
I became one of Australia’s first Climate Adaptation Officers at Centroc (the Central West Regional Organisation of Councils). After being briefed by the Department of Agriculture and others about future climate predictions for Central NSW, I wrote a speculative fiction story about living in Central NSW in 20 years’ time, imagining we’d ‘permacultured’ the region. I then worked my way back from the story to identify the steps that needed to be taken to get there. These steps became the basis of a 103-page Regional Resilience Strategy Options Paper for Central NSW. It was very well received by all the Mayors and General Managers because it took a practical win/win approach to meeting their communities’ needs.
THE GENESIS OF THE BIG FIX: RECOGNISING STORYTELLERS AS THE NITROGEN FIXING SPECIES THAT CAN ACCELERATE SUCCESSION The most important observation I made during this time was that there was a huge gap between what the media said government believed, and what local governments were actually doing to address climate change – which was a lot! I realised that the reason we weren’t making the progress we should be making, was that mainstream, top-down, for-profit media was controlling the story. I realised that the problem needed to be the solution, so I moved on to take on the challenge of redesigning the way media could operate in our world.
Our Blackheath Climate Action Group morphed into the charity The Big Fix. Our mission became to ‘change the story to grow a collaborative, solutions-focused culture’. We started The Big Fix Solutions Media in 2007 (Australia’s first Solutions Media service), sharing solutions stories from every sector around the world. We wanted to inspire people to action, to keep hope alive, to grow collaboration and to accelerate change by sharing knowledge and thereby reducing the need to reinvent the wheel.
In 2017, Muhamad Yunus identified that the eight richest people in the world owned as much as four billion of the world’s poorest. They also controlled most of the world’s media. To regenerate our social desert, hyperlocal storytellers can give us the nutrients we need to grow bigger and stronger – they can ‘fix nitrogen’ and inspire collaboration between the many grassroots movements to create a mycelial network. This then can generate a healthier and more biodiverse forest from the bottom up.
THE BIG FIX: MEDIA
In 2016, informed by the knowledge and experience I’d gained working in all sectors, I began to work full time on The Big Fix. I started a ‘Youth Café’ weekly drop-in space for young people in Blackheath and we ran a campaign against single-use plastic that resulted in Blackheath becoming the first town in the world where all the businesses agreed to phase out plastic straws. This became the lead story of our first Solutions Magazine which was distributed to every household in the upper Blue Mountains. We partnered with the Blackheath Area Neighbourhood Centre to ensure their voice, and the voice of the community, continued to be heard, despite funding cuts. We now also run a monthly hyperlocal print news service for Blackheath which is funded by a different individual, community group, organisation or business every month.
THE BIG FIX: BLACKHEATH COMMUNITY FARMAND BLUE MOUNTAINS BLURIVERSITY In 2017 we started Blackheath Community Farm to create a public space to grow community and food, and to build a bank of locally acclimatised seed. We meet every Sunday and whoever works at the Farm takes a share of the produce. We’ve also created a Landcare group to regenerate the Zone V bushland around the Farm. In 2018 we launched the Blue Mountains Pluriversity, providing community-owned and generated learning opportunities for young people to meet their needs and the needs of their communities. We began teaching a new type of PDC – free Permaculture and Social Enterprise Design Courses in which young people worked on designing and implementing land-based projects as well as designing and implementing social enterprises that could provide them with an income as well as meeting the needs of their communities.
We’ve just finished a free course at Headspace in Katoomba which resulted in the design and construction of a Permaculture Garden at the site. It’s providing a safe outdoor, nature based gathering and event space for young people where Headspace practitioners can provide ‘incidental counselling’. It features a micro-forest of nearly 200 natives that emerged after the fires at Mount Tomah (these were donated to us by the Botanic Garden). The wider community rallied around and donated the other materials needed to help young people build this space in the heart of the CBD.
THE BIG FIX: THE LITHGOW SPRINT In 2019, Western Sydney University invited us to be part of a community consultation to help reimagine Lithgow to enact the Sustainable Development Goals in a regional city. The WSU campus in Lithgow will now become Maldhan Ngurr Ngurra (Wiradjuri for ‘Workmanship Together, Side by Side’) – The Lithgow Transformation Hub. To support a ‘just transition’ in Lithgow we launched a solutions storytelling site called The Lithgow Sprint, in honour of Marjorie Jackson the Olympic runner who lived in Lithgow. Our goal is to change the story for Lithgow quickly. In April 2021, the Pluriversity will teach the first course on the campus – a free Permaculture and Social Enterprise Design Course. We’ll work with young people to design and build a micro-farm around the PCYC in Lithgow and mentor them to design social enterprises.
THROW THE BEST PARTY! Perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learnt over the last 40 years is that the best way to influence opinion and encourage change is not to nag and pressure, but to throw the best party so that people want to join you!
“The Adelaide Edible Garden Trail celebrates the many ways Kaurna Land residents are creating food sovereignty while saving money and the environment — and enjoying the health benefits of homegrown fruit and veggies.”
On Saturday, April 24 2021, six urban food gardens will open to the public during the very first Adelaide Edible Garden Trail – aimed at inspiring more South Aussies to get growing at their place.
Growers large and small from across Adelaide will share their knowledge via informative video garden tours, which will be released online and are accessible to all by donation.
The tours showcase sustainable garden practices for South Australia’s local growing conditions, including water conservation, composting, increasing soil fertility, planting to encourage beneficial insects, home food production and organic growing techniques.
Event Coordinator and PA member Jacqui Garcia, one of nine volunteers organising the first-time event, said growing even just a little food at home can have a positive impact on our environment, health and local food sovereignty.
“We’re all passionate about urban food growing and all into permaculture. We call ourselves the Growers’ Collective. The idea came about when we were discussing ways we could celebrate Urban Agriculture Month, which is about raising awareness about urban agriculture”
Several of the organising team are PA members, and permaculture ethics are incorporated into the event including:
‘Fair Share’: This is a volunteer-run event. We are very thankful for receiving a micro-grant to get this project going from our local chapter of the Awesome Foundation, which has volunteer-run local chapters funding awesome local projects.
Event proceeds will be reinvested into local community food growing projects through grants to schools, community gardens & community groups.
‘Earth Care’: the featured gardeners are all sharing sustainable and organic gardening practices and tips for our local growing conditions.
‘People Care’: price for a ticket is ‘pay what you can’ to ensure our videos are accessible to all.
“I’m looking forward to sharing the videos of our featured gardeners with growers – and hope to see garden trails hosted by other South Australian communities, in places like the Adelaide Hills, Fleurieu peninsula, Barossa, regional and remote towns too,” Jacqui Garcia.
Let’s never stop thinking about the future: The connections between permaculture, Japanese design and homesteading in a frugal future.
The world has changed immeasurably over the last thirty years, with ‘more, bigger, better’ being the common mantra. But in the midst of this constantly evolving world, there is a growing community of people who are looking at our history, searching for answers to issues that are faced everywhere, such as energy, water, materials, food and population crisis.
In “Just Enough, ” author Azby Brown turned to the history of Japan, where he finds several lessons on living in a sustainable society that translate beyond place and time. This book presents a compelling argument around how to forge a society that is conservation-minded, waste-free, well-housed, well-fed and economically robust, including what Edo Period life has to offer us in the global battle to reverse environmental degradation.
In contrast, Retrosuburbia, by David Holmgren shows how the Australian suburbs can be transformed to become productive and resilience in an energy descent future. It focuses on what can be done by an individual at the household level with examples from ‘Aussie Street’ story and real life case studies to support and enhance the main content.
Su Dennett and Virginia Solomon have been living and promoting a sustainable households at their respective Melliodora and Eco resilience households and wider community activities including the Hepburn Relocalisation Network, Permaculture Australia,Holmgren Design & permaculture education to name a few. Virginia has also travelled multiple times to Japan, including meeting Azby and connecting all of the interview members here today on behalf of Permaculture Australia.
Video 1: Introduction and welcome from Virginia Solomon, Permaculture Australia
Video 2: Full video interview Azby Brown, Su Dennett, David Holmgren & Virginia Solomon
For more information:
Azby Brown is a native of New Orleans, and has lived in Japan since 1985. He is a leading authority on Japanese architecture, design, and environmentalism, and the author of many influential books and articles, including The Very Small Home (2005), Just Enough: Lessons in living green from traditional Japan (2010), and The Genius of Japanese Carpentry (2014). He majored in fine art and architecture at Yale University, graduating in 1980. In 1985 he was named a National Foreign Scholar by the Japanese Ministry of Education, which supported his graduate studies in architecture at the University of Tokyo. His creative work has been widely exhibited at galleries and museums internationally and he is a sought after speaker on Japanese culture.
Su Dennett is David Holmgren’s partner in life and livelihood. After many years managing the business, Su is now focusing more of her prodigious energy and passion in the kitchen and community than in the office. The vegie box scheme she initiated with local organic farmer Rod May, and her own innovative approach to bulk food purchase and distribution supports regional producers. While she remains active in the Holmgren Design (HD) office and business management she now spends as much time in community events and organising mainly through Hepburn Relocalisation Network (HRN), a transition initiative that she started in 2006 with Maureen Corbett. In 2013 she was one of two women added to Hepburn Shire Council’s Women’s Honour Role for her community work and leadership in pursuing a low impact, simple lifestyle. At Melliodora, Su’s morning and evening hour with her milking goats is her “time out.”
David Holmgren is best known as the co-originator with Bill Mollison of the permaculture concept following the publication of Permaculture One in 1978. Since then he has developed three properties, consulted and supervised in urban and rural projects and presented in Australia and around the world. His writings over those three decades span a diversity of subjects and issues, including his recent book Retrosuburbia: The Downshifters Guide to a resilient future. At home (Melliodora in Hepburn, Central Victoria), David is the vegetable gardener, silviculturalist and builder. David is respected for his commitment to presenting permaculture ideas through practical projects and teaching by personal example, that a sustainable lifestyle is a realistic, attractive and powerful alternative to dependent consumerism. David is a life member of Permaculture Australia and is about to release Our Street, a children’s permaculture book co-authored with Beck Lowe.
VirginiaSolomon has been involved with permaculture since the early 1990s. Since 2003 she has been worked on the Accredited Permaculture Training (APT), is a founding member of the Permaculture Educators’ Guild and passionate advocate for quality permaculture education. She has been a previous Board member and President of Permaculture Melbourne (now Permaculture Victoria), convenor of the Australasian Permaculture Convergence in 2005, and is the current Chair of the PA Board of Directors. She lives in NE Melbourne and has a large, productive garden and a rambling friendly house where visitors and guests are always welcome. She is a patchworker, a cheesemaker, an eco-dying enthusiast, a shoemaker (only for herself) and a dressmaker.
Additional texts and resouces referred to in the interview:
Azby Brown, Just Enough: Lessons in living green from traditional Japan
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