Goshen is a Professional Member of PA and is fully immersed in the Permaculture way of living. He lives in the suburbs in Geelong, a city in the state of Victoria, southwest of Melbourne. He gives to his local community by being the editor of the Geelong Organic Gardeners newsletter, and secretary of the local Transition Group (Transition South Barwon). Organic gardening is often a route into Permaculture… especially when Permaculturalists invite their local group to come and see their way of gardening! In the photo below, Goshen on the far right is showing the group his backyard micro-market garden:
Goshen’s property is featured in RetroSuburbia (David Holmgren’s book released in 2018) as an example of a food producing polyculture of mixed species on a small urban backyard using Permaculture Design and Principles. Read the case study online. Below, Goshen talking about the importance of nutrient cycling and fertility:
To learn more about Goshen’s Permaculture life, see his website. I met Goshen and his family in November 2018 – article by Dylan Graves
Ostii lives in a sharehouse in Brunswick in Melbourne, Victoria. I have been privileged to stay in a spare room for 3 days in exchange for helping in the garden. Ostii is a sharewaste host i.e. he has compost systems and accepts others’ food waste. He has around 25 people who come and drop off their waste. He decided to hold a working bee to both get a heap of work done in the garden and to teach sharewasters how to grow food. They got to see a finished compost pile made with sharewaste food scraps: Once sieved on an old metal ironing board with a metal mesh, the result was a beautiful soil amendment we added liberally to the weeded, forked, and wetted garden beds. We mulched and then planted vegetable seedlings purchased from Ceres:In one bed we added dripper pipe on top of the mulch to help ensure adequate moisture through the hot summer: We had a lovely shared meal afterwards to cement new friendships. It’s great to see this sharewaste concept forging new community. Ostii has been into the Permaculture way of living for about 10 years and applies this to his own business. His passion is “Web and digital strategy mentoring for health, earth, and heart focussed entrepreneurs and enterprise.” He has been working with David Holmgren for the past 3 years or so. Check out his website for more info; https://www.flowji.com/ Ostii works mostly from home where he regularly dashes out into the garden for screen breaks.
Post by Dylan Graves
The Best Permie Project award is open to projects which are current, create positive change and demonstrate the permaculture ethics of earth care, people care and fair share. The Permie Of The Year award is for a permaculture practitioner working to create positive change in the world. They need to demonstrate the permaculture ethics of earth care, people care and fair share in their work.
The project will be awarded $250, with the permie of the year receiving a Pip Award Pack (which includes garden tools, books and other useful items from the Pip Shop), valued at $250.
Include a brief description about what they’re doing
how they demonstrate these ethics and
why you think they should win.
Let people know
Please share this award widely within your permaculture networks – Pip magazine people can’t wait to hear about all the amazing, inspiring projects and people out there, doing their permie thing!
My first introduction to Permaculture happened before I even knew there was such a system. As a teenager with a keen interest in horticulture, watching neighbours, friends and family removing trees from their property and loading them onto (often) several trailer loads and taking them to the tip. Then within days seeing a truck deliver a load of bark or woodchips to rejuvenate old or create new beds in the freshly trimmed landscape. Seeing these delivery trucks my thoughts went back to the loads of biomass that went to the tip only days earlier that could have easily been converted to woodchips.
Now, with an understanding of Permaculture and its ethics I recognise what I was observing to be the 3 ethics (Earth care, People Care and Return of Surplus / Fair Share) as well as several principles including – “Produce no waste”, “Catch and Store Energy”, “Obtain a Yield”, “Use and Value Renewable Resources and Services”, “Creatively use and Respond to Change”.
Sustainability through Permanent Landscapes and Food forests is a design process that copies the interaction and relationships found in nature. A systems approach to sustainability that can be utilised for all aspects of human survival from agriculture to ecological building, from utilising appropriate technology to economics, from education to energy production.
Permaculture takes the focus off us being consumers and puts the emphasis on us being producers. Its a system that can be applied to a property as small as a balcony garden through average quarter acre urban home sites to properties that are literally hundreds of acres.
Despite popular opinion among those who dabble in Permaculture it is not about Gardening – though gardening forms a large part of a productive system, it is not about Solar Panels and energy – though producing, storing and saving energy is a part of the system, It is not about Catching, storing and using water more efficiently – though the smart use, storage and flow of water forms part of the system. Rather it is a complete systems approach to sustainable thinking.
Although my first introduction to Permaculture was based on a similar mindset without knowing there was such a design system, I soon started to read about people like Bill Mollison – the Tasmanian who started the design system, David Holmgren who co-reated the system with Bill and other students of these originators – Geoff Lawton, Rosemary Morrow, et al.
It was a light globe moment discovering how all these people were thinking about the same methods, the same logic of sustainability that I was. I wasn’t going mad after all. My thoughts were already being put into practice by a group of awesome people – Permaculture was not only born – It was quietly in practice right around the globe.
Story by Russ Grayson, first appeared in Organic Gardener magazine, written 20 October 2016 for publication early 2017
Bill Mollison on a plant and seed collecting trip in northern Tasmania 1975. Photo by David Holmgren
He was an iconoclast, a provocateur, a visionary and a man whose considerable intellectual powers were balanced by a hands-in-the-dirt practicality. Gardener, author, educator, scientific researcher, university lecturer, one-time forester and fisherman, Bill Mollison, was a man of many parts.
Like the rest of us, Bill was a contradictory personality. He was a walking encyclopaedia, a database of good ideas on legs. Get him talking on some topic and a deluge of knowledge would pour from his mouth. Some of that came from his learning, much from experience because Bill was a practical man who would turn good ideas into physical reality. That became clear to anyone who visited the Permaculture Institute, in the nineties located on a farm in the rural backblocks of the Tweed Valley of northern NSW.
Bill Mollison with Russ Grayson at the 1997 Australasian Permaculture Convergence at Djangbung Gardens, Nimbin.
A woman permaculture designer of the time, a landscape architect who worked with Bill at the Institute, described him as a genius. I don’t know if that was true, however I do know that as well as being all of those other things I mention, Bill was also a man of thoughtful compassion.
I don’t recall when I first met Bill. I do recall when I first heard of him, though. That was in Tasmania. I was living there during the late-seventies and I would occasionally hear of this character who was associated with the University of Tasmania, and who had some rather unorthodox ideas. Bill lectured in environmental psychology there.
It was during those years that Bill met David Holmgren. David was doing the environmental design elective of his landscape design course at Hobart’s College of Advanced Education. He got together with Bill in a house on Strickland Avenue, on the lower slopes on Kunanyi-Mt Wellington. I understand the place became known as the Republic of Strickland Avenue. What came out of this Mollisonian-Holmgrenian collaboration was the first book on permaculture, Permaculture One. It was 1977.
Permaculture One was followed by Permaculture Two a year later. This built on permaculture as a synthesis, a bringing together into a single, cohesive system of ideas drawn from sources as diverse as the traditional knowledge of cultures around the world, disciplines like landscape design, horticulture, architecture, ecology and anthropology, and the sciences.
From these beginnings in Tasmania, permaculture started to spread around the world. It was adapted to regional conditions and to both rural and urban environments. It worked out how to maintain and increase natural systems while they continued to provide environmental services like clean water, fresh air, humidity, good soils, wildlife habitat and food as well as energy from sunlight, moving air and running water. Doing this enacted permaculture’s first ethic of care of the Earth.
Bill with his crew exploring the bush in Tasmania. Bill is busy with his camera. Photo courtesy Craig Worsley.
Originally envisioned as an approach to agriculture based on perennial plants, permaculture has evolved into a comprehensive design system that includes an alternative economics, energy and water efficient building design and, more recently, what has become known as ‘social permaculture’. Add the sharing of surplus resources and information that enacts the design system’s inherent open source approach, and we have the application of permaculture’s two other ethics — care of people and share what’s spare.
Bill came to mainstream notoriety first with the ABC TV production, In Grave Danger of Falling Food, and later with the four-part TV series, Global Gardener, which was broadcast nationally on the ABC in the nineties. The series showed permaculture in different parts of the world and became a major recruitment tool for the design system. The author of a number of books, Bill’s best-known work was the substantial and scholarly volume, Permaculture — A Designers’ Manual.
The last time I saw Bill was in 2008 at the Australasian Permaculture Convergence in Sydney. Bill and I walked across a field at that convergence, making our way to a building on the other side. We came to a shallow ditch and Bill took my arm to steady himself. I realised then that he had become frail.
It was Ian Lillington, the permaculture educator from Castlemaine, who phoned Fiona Campbell and I early one morning in late September 2016 to tell us of Bill’s passing. I didn’t articulate it then but I sensed that a time, an era, had gone. A few of us across the continent emailed and skyped and made the decision to set up the In Memory of Bill Mollison facebook group. Here, people could post their recollections, their photos of Bill and his life.
Many have contributed to Bill’s memory. At Australasian Permaculture Convergence 13 in Perth, in early October 2016, there was a slide show on Bill and a memorial table was set up. On it, an image of Bill produced by Mt Kembla artist, musician and permaculture educator, April Sampson-Kelly, was placed. We remembered Bill, without whom all of us assembled there and probably others reading this story would have remained strangers in life.
On returning to Tasmania when the Permaculture Institute moved from the Tweed Valley, Bill and wife, Lisa, settled on a smallholding at Sisters Creek on the Bass Strait coast. There, Bill lived the latter part of his life only a short distance from where he began it in the small town of Stanley.
It was Bill’s wish that on his passing we plant a tree for him. That’s being done around the world. Now, there are many more trees than there were just a short time ago.
Farewell and thanks, Bill Mollison.
Lessons Learnt Report — Permaculture, Livelihood and Nutrition Project, Sri Lanka
Supported by World Vision 2008-2012.
Report prepared for International Permaculture Conference Cuba 2013 by John McKenzie & Sarah Gorman Here is a very good read on how permaculture improved livelihood and nutrition of rural householders in Sri Lanka…
Summary
The aim of the Permaculture Project was to improve farm yields for small-holder farmers in rural districts of Sri Lanka. The project promoted mixed crop food gardens and animal raising to improve household nutrition and offer micro-enterprise opportunities. The project was funded for four years and targeted a selected 1156 smallholder households in six different districts.
Participating households received training using adult education techniques such as farm visits, farmer group meetings, training workshops and leader farmer mentoring. Direct benefits were provided; seed, chickens, fruit trees and cement for building sanitation improvements. A small number of cows and goats were supplied to each community as a start-up grant to establish Animal Banks. Each household decided for themselves how they’d implement their improvements and how they’d use the crop yield either for home consumption or for sale.
Findings
The participating households were keen supporters of the project. Near 87 % of households surveyed reported the project had assisted them and they would be continuing the techniques. Many households reported their food gardens were producing all the vegetables they needed plus surplus to share or sell.
In all six project communities the farmers had begun organising themselves and groups were forming around seed saving, animal banks and leader farmers. They spoke about networking with each other to share and increase their effectiveness, about forming local registered organisations and the possibility of forming a national organisation to promote seed saving and food gardens. The training was nominated by the participants as the project’s most useful element.
The evaluation posed the question; “Were they ready for the project to move to another community?” In each of the community meetings held the response was positively that they had the knowledge and enough organisation to continue the work themselves and project staff could move to another district and teach them there.
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