Memories of Bill

8 Feb, 2017 | Charlie's Music, People in Permaculture

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.

More…


 

Farewell Bill Mollison

25 Sep, 2016 | Permaculture Stories

bill-mollison-607x250

MEDIA RELEASE — date of release: 25 September 2016 — Permaculture Australia

…an Australian educator, author, co-inventor of Permaculture

Australia and the world have lost one of its most influential thinkers on community-led approaches to sustainable development. Author, educator, academic, researcher and innovative thinker, Bill Mollison, died peacefully in Hobart, Tasmania, on 24 September.
Mollison has been described as one of Tasmania’s leading intellectual exports. Born in 1928 in the Bass Strait fishing village of Stanley, he leaves behind a worldwide movement of remarkable resilience.  From its humble beginnings in Hobart, Tasmania, the permaculture design system, which Bill co-created with David Holmgren, spread world-wide, inspiring individuals and communities to take initiatives in fields as diverse and food production, building design, community economics and community development.

A diverse background

Bill Mollison left school at fifteen to help run the family bakery. In the years following he worked as shark fisherman and seaman, forester, mill-worker, trapper, tractor-driver and naturalist. His lack of formal education gave him many learning opportunities in how the world works.
Bill joined the CSIRO Wildlife Survey Section in 1954 and gained extensive research knowledge. His time in Tasmania’s rainforests and natural systems gave him the founding structure for what became his life’s major innovation — the Permaculture Design System: the idea that we can design sustainable systems that enable us to live within our economic and ecological means and enjoy a modest prosperity. Later, he taught at the University of Tasmania.
In 1974, in Hobart, he and David Holmgren began to develop the permaculture concept, leading to the publication of Permaculture One in 1978. He traveled the world in the 1980s and 1990’s, teaching thousands of students. Bill contributed articles, curricula, reports, and recommendations for farm projects, urban clusters and influenced local governments. In 1981 he received the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’.
Bill later featured in the documentary series, ‘In Grave Danger of Falling Food’, which was broadcast nationally and, following repeated requests, rebroadcast twice. He authored a number of books on the permaculture design system, the best known being The Permaculture Designers’ Manual, published in 1988.
After establishing the Permaculture Institute in the Tweed valley of northern NSW, Bill returned to his Tasmanian homeland to spend his final years at Sisters Creek on the Bass Strait coast.
The final words represent Bill in his true classical way: “If you hear that I am dead tell them they lie.”
Next week, Bill Mollison will be honoured at the Australasian Permaculture Convergence in Perth, WA. This afternoon an old friend of Bill’s imagined him saying: “In view of the Australasian Convergence coming up, I thought I’d go a bit early – just to keep you on your toes”.

Find out more

For comment:

  • Virginia Solomon P: 0438 437 919
  • Ian Lillington P: 0478 297 057
  • Russ Grayson P: 0414 065 203
  • Permaculture Australia  E: hello@permacultureaustralia.org.au
[button_link url=”http://permacultureaustralia.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/MR-PA-Farewell-Bill-Mollison-25sept16.pdf” target=”blank” style=”blue” title=”” class=”” id=”” onclick=””]Download media release [pdf 280MB][/button_link]