Transition teams from as far afield as Newcastle, Epping, Parramatta and Bondi were represented, in additon to those from the mountains and from the metropolitan Transition Sydney organisation.

For a resilient city

Going round the table, it was revealing to learn of the range of local activity people were involved in:

• in inner-urban Darlinghurst, Transition 2010 (named for the postdode) reported their activity with Sydney Sustainable Markets, going now for more than a year
• Transition Epping are involved with a community garden, a solar scheme, and have had input into a council planning document; they have held successful Footprint Parties and recently did one for Ku-ring-kai Council staff, which stimulated a green office program.
• Transition Newcastle hold their Fair Share Festival next March, a conference on alternative economic models; they have a new website up reporting event notification, stories and projects and have Transition Streets, a local program with a sustainable living focus
• Gareth, a Sydneysider unattached to any Transition group, described how some of his initiatives would be of potential value to getting the Transition message out—the Live Local website and Social Cinemas, which makes use of shipping containers for public video showing
• Transition Bellevue Hill are guerrilla gardening a 1 x 7m strip of land below power lines and see the spontaneous project as a potential communal garden
• Transition Bondi continue with their Bondi Road Community Garden and their participatory gardening Saturdays there, with the nearby verge gardens as well as their Wednesday evening shared meal and video followed by a discussion, all of which happen after the Sydney Food Connect (a community supported agriculture enterprise delivering weekly boxes of fresh, in season and mainly organically grown local food) food box collections
• Transition Parramatta, which started recently with a forum that attracted 70 people, are currently working on a forward program and have scheduled a climate change despair and empowerment workshop with veteran sustainability advocate, John Seed
• Transition Blue Mountains members have been active with a community garden in Lawson and are discussing a potential city farm/sustainability centre idea for the disused land at Lawson golf course; one member reported on a new organisation, Transform  Australia, and on the Blue Mountains Sustainability Conversations Circles; food issues were reported to be a focus in the region and some members are developing street skits around sustainability.

Communicating better

A first round of discussion was around providing communication, especially between Transition groups.

How could the Transition Sydney website be better used, was asked. It already attracts around 70,000 page views a month and could be improved in useability, it was suggested.

Automatically linking website, Facebook and Twitter, so that postings flow from one onto the other, was seen as easing online maintenance demands on people and as being an effective way to aggregate information…

Both websites and social media need people to keep them up to date as this is critical to generating return visits. A web team had been set up at an earlier meeting in Sydney but this proved less viable on account of people’s busyness. Automatically linking website, Facebook and Twitter, so that postings flow from one onto the other, was seen as easing online maintenance demands on people and as being an effective way to aggregate information and improve its spread. Gareth said that his Live Local website, where people post their experiments in local living, could have potential for Transition groups by showing practical examples of what they do.

The Transition teams are fortunate to have a number of online communications mavens among their members. When someone suggested what what was needed was one single web presence it was pointed out that they seldom work because groups have their own needs best met with their own websites or social media. What could work was aggregating information from different groups.

Gareth spoke about how Twitter has become an effective means of notifying events and for news gathering. Twitter is a powerful way to get infomation out, he explained.

An ORID (a type of structured conversation around Objective, Reflective, Interpretive and Decisional questions) revealed how Transition teams are getting their messages out:

• Transition Sydney uses its website with its links to local groups as well as Twitter and Facebook
• Transition Bondi follows the marketing idea of needing six points of public contact with a group for effective communications, so makes use of SMS, Facebook, word of mouth, flyers, email, signage at venues and posts to websites and associated social media
• Transition Blue Mountains uses flyers, their email list, word of mouth, posters, notices in newspapers and neighbourhood centre newsletters
• Transition Epping has found community notices in the local newspaper important as not all in the area have computers; supplying the paper with copy plus a photo or press release creates a presence with the publisher but needs to be done consistently
• Transition Newcastle use an email list, website, networking with other groups that publish information, and flyers
• Transition Parramatta make use of the council calendar, notices in library, the council e-list, community radio and their own contact lists collated at events

According to Transition Sydney, it takes three to four to support online media effectively and to keep it up to date, but aggregating information through linking website, Facebook and Twitter can reduce this by automatically linking postings.

Planning to skill- up

Skilling-up with both intellectual and practical skills was the next item for the meeting. A list of possibilities was created:

• hands-on skills
• grant writing
• group relations/heart and soul
• facilitation/group leadership/connect/collaborate/cooperate
• council liaison
• research groups
• champions
• media
• economic transition
• outreach to mainstream
• city scale transition
• personal sustainability—values-based… heart and soul… emotional resilience.

Against these, people noted which they had skills in and which they would like to lear more about. This provided an indication of where training in skills as well as train-the-trainer education can be offered.

This November’s meeting of regional Transition groups will take the form of an upskilling day with training offered in:

• grant writing and sourcing
• games, energisers
• personal sustainability (values based)
• compost education
• home brew
• setting up a social enterprise.

Review reveals event was beneficial

At the end of the meeting, people went around to comment on the day. Comments included:

• interaction between groups was good
• the facilitators delivered
• got actions… plans to do stuff
• all were able to contribute and the meeting was not dominated by the few
• good to bring together people from different places
• good interaction
• good to realise connections
• leaving filled with hope and recognising the challenges…energised to do something on the lower North Shore
• Transition people eat well—a reverence to the plentiful supply of good food such as Claire’s home made pumpkin soup
• a sense of being less isolated
• the need to learn questioning techniques
• a chance to meet people from region talking about same thing
• stayed on task
• interaction, including socially
• good to get perspective on what’s going on elsewhere
• meeting people a good thing.

Credit goes to the Transition Blue Mountain crew for organising the venue, preparing the food and scheduling a fine, cool, late-winter day in the mountains.

This was the second National Permaculture Day to be called and was one of a number of events in the Eastern Suburbs. National Permaculture Day is an annual event at the start of May, a day when permaculture homes and centres across the country open to the public. Permaculture is a design system for sustainable living that can be applied in densely-packed urban areas, like Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs, as much as it can be in rural areas and on farms.

Transition Sydney's Peter Driscoll leads a permaculture workshop using the energy efficiency house model.

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New type of public open space

The Permaculture Interpretive Garden (PIG) is a component of the retrofitted Randwick Community Centre, the buildings and grounds of which have been refurbished for energy and water efficiency, including a grid-connected wind turbine and photvoltaic panels. The retrofit demonstrates simple design modifications and technologies that are commercially available. Having them accessible in a public place, and having guided tours and interpretive signage (designed by Rob Alsop who illustrated Rosemary Morrow’s book, Earth Users Guide to Permaculture) provides visitors with take-home ideas that they can implement. The Randwick Sustainability Education Hub encompasses the retrofitted building and grounds plus Randwick City Council’s Living Smart, Native Haven, Early Childhood Environmental Education and Sustainable Gardening courses, all free events that are held there.

The PIG itself is a new type of public open space that combined the functions of a public park and serves at the same time as an educational facility for council courses and as an activity centre for local community organisations whose focus is sustainability, food initiatives and community development. The Hub serves as a Sydney Food Connect City Cousin, where subscribers to the community-supported-agriculture scheme collect their weekly boxes of seasonal, affordable organic food.

Even though there remains work to be completed in the PIG, such as installing tables and benches, roofing the pergolas, establishing the orchard and building the balcony/courtyard demonstration, there was plenty on the day to inspire visitors. Transition Sydney’s Peter Driscoll provided an introductory workshop on permaculture design, Solarch’s Terry Bail, an architect specialising in solar design who designed the community centre energy retrofit, took visitors for a tour of his work and Russ Grayson, who was on the Waterwise Trail steering committee for the project and is affiliated with the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network to advocate the value of such enterprises, led a tour of the PIG and grounds. The Spots, presumably named for the cafe strip nearby, offered a harmonious accapella of environmental songs.

Announcing outreach

A significant event at National Permaculture Day was council sustainability educator, Fiona Campbell, announcing the Hub’s outreach program. This will see community organisations hold monthly events on a Sunday afternoons. Led by well known sustainability education planner and trainer, Graham Collier, a group of graduates from the council courses and others have been meeting over the past couple months to develop a program of activities based at the Hub. Significantly, some of those graduates were involved in the planning and management of the day, all part of Fiona’s idea to develop the ability of Eastern Suburbs people to skill-up to make things happen for themselves.

This was an auspicious day for the Sustainability Education Hub and just seeing all of those people milling around the raised planters in the PIG, clustered in tour groups inspecting the energy and water efficiency retrofit of the centre and engaged in convivial chatter around the food and coffee provided by council demonstrated that there exists a keen community interest in these sustainability initiatives. Thanks go to those who attended, to the Hub outreach volunteers, to Randwick Council and, especially, to National Permaculture Day for making it happen here under the blue skies and on the sandy soils of the urban east.

See photos: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150263696374175.379931.46128279174

THE INTERESTING and long-running conversation of what permaculture practitioners and educators should focus their efforts on has come up again, this time in a Facebook conversation.

Chris Watkins started it when he wrote that the suburban garden is the focus of most permaculture practitioners in the US. Had he added that the same is true of Australian permaculturists, he would have sprouted a truism. The conversation reminded me of a publication on city permaculture that I acquired not all that long ago. Sure, it was an interesting publication and it showed that there exists a diversity of innovation by permaculture practitioners in our cities, but—to reiterate Chris’ statement—it was all about suburban gardening and the household. Not much about any broader application of permaculture principles or ideas beyond the home garden gate.

That’s where Mitra Ardron came in. Mitra has long been an in-principle supporter of permaculture but sees the design system as being hamstrung by an inability to scale-up to achieve either greater numbers of practitioners or some larger, societal-scale impact. He wrote that permaculture will become “seriously relevant”  and have significant impact  when it becomes “either cost effective on decent size farms or can convince significant numbers of urban dwellers to spend a substantial portion of their free time in their gardens”.

This is not the first time Mitra has sounded off on the topic of scaling-up… and it’s not hot air because Mitra knows scaling-up quite well, having been the instigator of a solar energy bulk but program when he lived in Byron Bay. I guess you would call him a social entrepreneur, probably a small business entrepreneur too, so he knows how to make things happen. I first encountered Mitra’s constructive critique of permaculture a few years ago when he wrote on it on an online discussion.

On Facebook, Mitra suggested that it might be the mindset of permaculture practitioners that is the biggest barrier to the further penetration of their ideas into society. Few, he said, think on a scale beyond the suburban backyard; few think of scaling-up their work.

Scaling-up permaculture... permaculture designers working with a local government to create a new kind of public space—a combined community park and educational facility.

Exceptions

This is not entirely true and I’m sure Mitra would be the first to acknowledge the work of those practitioners who have attempted to take the ideas of the design system to a larger milieu.

An area where this is happening is in community gardening. Permaculture did not invent community gardening, as it did not invent most of the things it works with (this is no criticism-permaculture founders, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, have said that permaculture is a systhesis of ideas developed elsewhere; its mission is to bring them together so that their interactions produce an integrated design response). What permaculture has done is adopt community gardening although the majority of community gardeners would not identify as permaculture practitioners even though in practicing community gardening they enact the permaculture dictum of returning food production to the cities.. Interestingly, those behind the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network are for the most part permaculture practitioners and advocates, yet their involvement avoids any song and dance that would brand community gardens solely as permaculture initiatives.

Community gardening will not by itself feed our cities, yet it is at the critical crossover of home and community gardening and urban food security that the question of how we feed the growing urban populations that permacutlure becomes less visible. Why? Because urban food resilience is not only about growing food. It’s about educating and advocating about it. When you look at lobbies like the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance you find only one person openly identifying as being involved in permaculture though there is another on the organising team who has a long-established permaculture background, however her participation represents another organisations (not being a member of a permaculture association). This is how she practices her permaculture and it’s just as valid as those who find it necessary to be a member of an association.

I could say that it’s much the same in the leadership of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, however it’s not—there are even fewer actively identifying themselves with the ‘permaculture’ label. These instances can be seen as particular examples of permaculture’s non-engagement with initiatives that could scale-up its work, and it gets back to what Mitra says about permaculture’s focus.

Mitra’s assertion that permaculture’s future will be limited unless it can scale-up its application might be true, but let’s create a little perspective by pointing out that some with permaculture backgrounds are doing what is in their power to scale-up the work of the design system. For example, there’s the work of TerraCircle Inc in international development in the South Pacific, Steve Batley with his landscape design business—Sydney Organic Gardens, Julian Lee with Sydney Food Connect, sustainability educator Fiona Campbell with her Living Smart course and  the Sustainability Education Hub she is project managing for the council she works for. They’re all  in Sydney, but interstate there are people like Claire and Jeremy Nettle, in Adelaide, who have taken their involvement with permaculture and scaled it up to influence a greater number of people and institutions, for example through the Urban Orchard food swaps and the Plains to Plate Future of Food conference and wiki. Then, in Tasmania, there’s Hannah Moloney and her involvement with the combined food production garden/food co-operative centre known as The Source that she has had a leading hand in.

What se people have done is commensurate with permaculture having gone through the early adopter phase of ideas diffusion and entered the early mass adaption phase. Interestingly, none find it necessary to brand what they do as ‘permaculture’. What they do is apply the principles of the deign system to their work, not shout out the word as if on some corporate branding mission.

Not all of these are on the scale Mirta talks about, however I see the efforts of these people and organisations as being of a scale approximating where permaculture’s place on the ideas diffusion curve is at present. Where Mitra’s comments are relevant is over the design system’s coming phase as it moves further into early mass adoption—just how big will that ‘mass adoption’ be and how can permaculture reposition itself in the social marketplace for ideas so that it can be scaled-up as a mass adoption? As Mitra suggests, much rests upon how permaculture is framed by its practitioners and educators.

Scaling-up calls for a municipal focus

Whether the scaling-up called for comes through a business model, social enterprise or through community organisations partnering with local government does not matter all that much. If it is to come through working with local government on compatible initiatives, then permaculture had better get a move on.

Why I say this is because one of the projects I am involved with in my local government work is the Sustainable Streets-Sustainable Communities Demonstration Project in inner urban Chippendale. The project is developing a precinct to demonstrate sustainable urban solutions such as street verge gardens, rainwater harvesting and storage to irrigate a park, community composting, an energy and water efficient terrace house retrofit, the nearby Chippendale Fresh Food Co-op, street trees as urban canopy and to reduce the urban heat island effect, heat reflecting road surfaces and more. Sounds like the sort of project where you would find permaculture, doesn’t it? And permaculture people are conspicuous… by their absence. It’s local people with a keen interest in the urban environment and civic affairs who are leading the Sustainable Streets project.

Why aren’t permaculture people involved? Do none live locally? At the public launch event and the subsequent series of four workshops held to harvest the ideas of local people for the precinct (gardens and compost; water; transport; energy), I recall hearing the ‘P’ word—permaculture—uttered only once, and that was in passing. Yet, permaculture associations visit Michael Mobbs sustainable house (that is included in the project) and proclaim him a true follower of the permaculture way as if his work was somehow done in the name of permaculture. It is developing sustainable urban environments that motivates Michael.

Is this absense of permaculture in the project an example of Mitra’s allegation that permaculture is limited by the mindset of its practitioners? That permaculture is so mired in the home garden that it has become incapable of engaging in civic affairs on a larger scale? I don’t know, and I hope not. I know not, at least as far as some permaculture practitioners are concerned.

What I like about the Sustainable Sstreets project—and its similarity to what Transition Town folk talk about—is its municipal focus. I’ve long thought that many of the things that permaculture practitioners employ at the household level would be better deployed as neighbourhood or municipal strategies. This would offer economies of scale by scaling-up the household level, could well be less costly to implement and is potentially more manageable. Whatsmore, a municipal scale necessarily brings in local government and where this is supportive it potentially makes available skills and funds.

Mitra’s contribution

Mitra’s comments on the need to scale-up permaculture are a provocative, critical and positive contribution to the ongoing conversation around the future of the design system. While some permaculture folk get easily offended even by constructive criticism, it’s something that we should be thankful for as it gives us insight as to how people whose entrepreneurial mindset has been applied to making things happen see the design system.

Social enterprise, of course, offers a path to implementing permaculture’s social ethics in a way that is financially viable, as does the work of permaculture people engaged in small permaculture-inspired business. This—financial viability—is one of David Holmgren and Bill Molliso’s permaculture principles.

THE PERMACULTURE PAPERS is a recollection of people, places and events encountered during my time as participant-observer in permaculture design, education and community work.

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The Papers are not an objective accounting of a successful but poorly documented social movement. Rather, they are memoir—an attempt to recall a few of the diversity of events and trends that have constituted permaculture in Australia. The book has a Sydney focus for that is where I lived for most of the time that it covers except for a period living in Byron Bay in northern NSW.

Motivation to produce the Papers comes from my observation that a great deal of permaculture’s early history is at risk of being lost because it has been poorly documented. More than several are the occasions that some bright young permaculture newcomer has announced a ‘new idea’ only for me to respond ‘Oh, you mean like the (whatever it was) that (whoever it was) did back (whenever it was)’.

It was after this had happened a few times that I came to realise that this, permaculture, was a social movement, was at risk of losing its collective memory. I realised that the design system’s public record is now to be found only in the yellowing pages of Permaculture International Journal collections of long-time permaculture practitioners. Overseas, I knew, there are similar magazines that have documented their respective national permaculture scenes—the Permaculture Activist in the USA, Permaculture magazine in the UK. The difference is that those are still in publication while Permaculture International Journal (PIJ) ceased abruptly in June of the year 2000.

Permaculture International Ltd (PIL) was set up to publish PIJ, and its folding in the early winter of 2000 left the organisation bereft of purpose, but only temporarily—we’ll look at that later in the book. Within the pages of PIJ were to be found the people and ideas, the practices and projects that made up permaculture. The Journal, under its several names, was the repository of the movement’s knowledge and experience as well as its social history over the 20 years of permaculture’s adolescence.

No nationally distributed journal has risen to continue the documentation of permaculture. Nor has any Australian website I know of, apart from www.holmgren.com.au and this site, attempted to document the history of the design system although the number of websites, Facebooks and weblogs with a permaculture focus is growing. The movement, however, is old enough for people like Bill Mollison (Travels In Dreams) and Ian Lillington (Permaculture) to write their own stories of life in permaculture.

Apart from PIJ and books on permaculture, the historic record of the design system is scatty. Until late 2011, most permaculture people who have been  practitioners for a sufficiently long enough period had yet to record their own stories. Then, in the Spring of that year, Holmgren Design Services published Permaculture Pioneers, a compendium of the personal histories of those who had persevered long enough to be awarded the title of ‘pioneer’ of the permaculture design system. at last, it seemed, permaculture was recovering its collective memory.

A personal story

A memoir, of course, is not a comprehensive accounting of what has been an inspiring and innovative movement. Memoir is a type of oral history… it is the ideas of only a single person written from that individual’s point of view. What appears in print has passed through whatever mental filters and biases the writer has. Memoir is necessarily subjective and selective.

Memoir may be disputed because other participants may recall the same events and personalities differently, or recall incidents occurring at different times. This I have encountered in shared writing of memoir elsewhere. Despite the shortcomings and errors due to the vagaries of memory, personal stories remain valuable records.

Just how partial particular perceptions of permaculture can be, became apparent at one of the Australasian permaculture convergences, the biannual conferences of permaculture practitioners. A Powerpoint purporting to represent permaculture was shown, however it soon became apparent to a number of those attending that the presentation was notable as much for those left out of it as for those included in it. It was a partial history only, and it left gaps in the history of the design system by ommitting a number who had made a substantial contribution. The presentation demonstrated that particular perceptions of permaculture’s history are contingent on variables such as with which permaculture educator a person does their training and of which permaculture community association or network they are a member. This suggests that any attempt to document the permaculture design system will only be a partial documentation. It too will represent the values, assumptions, priorities and understandings of its authors.

The danger that arises for a movement that is inadequately documented is that partial knowledge will lead to a partial writing of its history… that people will pass on their partial knowledge and that this will become accepted as the sum total of the movement’s history.

The Permaculture Papers too, as a personal history of the movement, is partial. It contains observation, interpretation and opinion with all the misconceptions and errors that memory brings. Some comments may be controversial, however comments about people should not be taken as criticism.

Beginnings

Bill Mollison and David Holmgren created the permaculture design system in the late 1970s while living in Hobart, Tasmania. Bill was instrumental in setting up Tagari pubications, which produced books on permaculture and established the Permaculture Institute, originally in Tasmania, then at Tyalgum in northern NSW. The Institute returned to Tasmania in the 1990s.

David left Tasmania after completing his studies at the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education, eventually settling at Hepburn, Victoria, where he established a rural smallholding and permaculture education centre, Melliodora. David continues to live at Melliodora and to travel extensively to teach permaculture design and permaculture solutions to the global and local challenges we face.

The Permaculture design system

Permaculture is a design system for the creation of socially, economically and ecologically sustainable settlements, whether in rural areas or metropolitan cities.

There are many definitions. The US magazine, Permaculture Activist, once described permaculture as ‘recombinant ecologies’. In this, we could include human ecologies as much as natural ecological systems as permaculture regards humanity as an integral part of natural systems. In permaculture, there is no humanity standing outside of nature as comes across in some environmental literature where the human influence on our world is regarded as something imposed on nature from without. If anything, permaculture is an integrative system of design.

Perhaps it is simpler to regard permaculture as a system of nature-assisted design that takes biogeographic knowledge as its starting point.

Permaculture developed as a do-it-yourself approach to making households into energy efficient, food producing and resource conserving places. At the same time permaculture proposes that moving beyond the household is a good idea… that community involvement is a means to self-help and improved quality of life. If we are to meet our sustainability challenges, then working within the community is mandatory. Even households making the most thorough changes cannot achieve the scale of change that contemporary challenges demand.

As a design system and approach to living, permaculture has inspired people to take action wherever they live. Its creators, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, say that this is exactly where we need to make a start.

The ethics of Permaculture:

Care of people
Care of the earth
Distribution of surplus to assist others.

David Holmgren offers us these words on Permaculture:

In a world of constantly rising energy and resultant affluence, permaculture is always going to be restricted to a small number of people who are committed to those ideals which have some sort of ethical or moral pursuit. It’s always going to be a fringe thing.

In a world of decreasing energy, permaculture provides, I believe, the best available framework for redesigning the whole way we think, the way we act and the way we design new strategies.

The author

Russ Grayson has been a teacher of the Permaculure Design Certificate and of the permaculture elective of the TAFE horticulture certificate. He was a member of Permaculture Sydney (second iteration). In 2000 – 2001 Russ served on the Board of Directors of Permaculture International Limited, assisting in the establishment of organisation’s website and editing its newsletter. He returned to the Board of Directors in 2008 and remained on it until 2011.

Russ is a community food system consultant, developing community garden policies for local government and assisting community garden groups get started. He is media liaison and consultant for the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network and works with international development agency, TerraCircle, in the South Pacific.

In 2010, he was urban agriculture adviser to the Callum Park lands masterplanning assessment. Russ produced the Living Smart manual for the NSW Living Smart course in personal and community sustainable living. He is currently affilated with the advocacy and educational organisation, the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, and works for the City of Sydney as coordinator of the City’s community garden and Landcare programs.

He is silent for a moment as he looks out at the audience as if sizing them up. Then he starts to speak, projecting his gruffy but commanding voice over the tiers of seats in the lecture hall. He launches into an anecdote about the movement he started eighteen years earlier.

Co-founder of the permaculture design system, Bill Mollison, taken at the 1997 Australian Permaculture Convergence at Djanbung Gardens, Nimbin. Photo: Russ Grayson.

The scene was the University of Technology, Sydney. The time, the 1990s. But it could have been anywhere, anytime, for Bill Mollison was in his element, he was in front of an audience. Then in late middle age, Bill was the storyteller supreme, the man of a thousand tales, the speaker guaranteed to inspire and provoke at the same time.

His presentation that evening to the packed lecture theatre was about the design system of which he was one of the instigators. It was an idea then starting to find its place in the world, but its story started some years before in a place far distant.

In the beginning

Hobart. It is mid-afternoon on a mild summer’s day in 1978. I am in a friend’s living room in unremarkable Moonah, one of those modest suburbs that make up Hobart’s spread along the western bank of the Derwent River.

“Have you seen this?”, Denis asks, reaching out to offer me a large format book.

“It’s a new book I picked up in town. Looks interesting”.

“What’s it about?”, I ask.

I flick through its pages. The cover carries a colourful illustration and inside are blocks of dark text interspersed with line drawings. The authors were clearly trying to explain an idea to people who have never before encountered it. And for the ideas in this book, that is almost everyone.

Co-founder of the permaculture design system, David Holmgren, in Victoria in the mid-1990s. Photo: Russ Grayson.

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The names of the two authors are unknown to us. Yet, curiously, they come from this very same city. Something interesting has been going on around us and we have been oblivious to it… but maybe not quite, for there have been stories about someone doing public talks, someone with rather unusual ideas.

“It’s about something called permaculture”, says Denis. The name means nothing to me and much the same to Denis. It is simply a word we—and the world—have never encountered before.

The next week I went out and bought my own copy of this perplexing volume. As yet, I wasn’t quite sure what Permaculture One–A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements (1978: Mollison B, Holmgren D; Transworld Publishers) was all about. I was not alone in this.

My partner of the time and I were living in Hobart and I was working in the adventure equipment industry. We associated with a different coterie than those few-and it was just a few-around the ideas in this new book. Our weekends were spent in the mountainous interior of this rugged island, scrambling up steep slopes of dark brown dolerite, skidding over its white landscapes on touring skis, trekking through cool temperate rainforest with its dripping branches and its leaches that would latch on and suck your blood, and setting up camp beside mountain lakes known to the locals as ‘tarns’. Sometimes, I would be out in those same mountains with the search and rescue unit looking for people too-long overdue.

It seemed a such a different life to that hinted at by the authors of that unusual book yet there seemed to be compatibilities and we felt a high degree of affinity with the ideas in it. One of those affinities lay immediately outside Denis’ back door. Out there, Denis Elwell and his wife Pam had made a large, organic food garden. Like others at the time, they had been inspired by the idea of growing food organically and the couple had transformed their Moonah backyard from uninteresting lawn into a diverse and edible garden. The idea of organic gardening was only then becoming popular, evidence of which appeared in the form of a wholefoods shop selling organic goods near the Elizabeth-Warwick intersection on the city edge, that opened around that time.

Another affinity with the ideas in Permaculture One was that the book spoke to one of our intentions in coming to Tasmania—to find cheap rural land. Like others from the mainland, we had been attracted to the island state to start a new life and we began something of a desultory search for land to buy, build a house and settle into that rural idyll described so picturesquely in the pages of Earth Garden magazine. Our intention was to live on the land rather than work it as farmers, much like our mainland contemporaries who moved to places like Nimbin, Maleny and the Taree hinterland. That, however was a life direction not taken.

The influence of a subculture

Within the covers of Permaculture One were ideas and concepts that, over coming years, would influence many, confuse some, motivate others and divert more than a few onto new and unanticipated trajectories in life. In today’s digital culture, Permaculture One was what we would call a ‘disruptive technology’, an idea that threatened to disrupt business as usual, to change the way we thought and did things. For those who felt the intellectual pull of permaculture’s ideas over the years following the books release, it certainly did disrupt their way of thinking about the world and its possibilities.

To understand permaculture’s origins it might help if we explore the social movement that influenced it during its formative years.

At the time of the appearance of Bill and David’s book, something of a social revolution had been going on in Australia for the previous seven years and more. Over that time the restive, creative edge of the youth demographic had been searching for a different way of living that incorporated emerging ideas on the natural environment, food, technology, lifestyle and human purpose.

Part of the mythology that accompanied that revolution was the idea that rural life was not only virtuous but offered a new and desirable path into the future, and as a consequence the ‘back to the land’ movement—it was to later become known as ‘rural resettlement’ following an academic study—was born. Earth Garden magazine, the product of a couple living on Sydney’s North Shore—both articulated this neo-rural philosophy and reported its development. The movement became an interesting blend of pre-industrial technology and sentiment, traditional rural skills such as building, food preserving and gardening juxtaposed onto the technological models of Buckminster Fuller, with his geodesic domes and whole systems design, and emerging, modern ideas around ‘spaceship Earth’ an similar notions. Unconsciously, it attempted to blend rural traditionalism and technological and ideological modernity.

Many of those who made up this amorphous, diverse social movement were the post-World War Two baby boomers, that population explosion that swelled the number of youth and gave it an unprecedented presence and influence.

Why they should go out and seek a new way of life so different to that of their often-perplexed parents has troubled academics and researchers for some time. Some say it was a reaction to the threat of the Cold War that accompanied them from childhood into adult life… many will recall how the nuclear threat hung over everything. Australian social researcher and author of popular books on Australian society, Hugh Mackay, attributes much in the mindset of this generation to the constant presence of the Cold War and its threat. Others say it was a reaction to the ordinariness of everyday life with its increasing affluence and materialism that led to the search for alternatives and deeper meaning in life.

But not all those touched by this new ideology, these new ideas, deserted city for countryside. Many stayed in the cities and explored what would later become known as ‘sustainable living’. More than a few permaculture people were in that number and, despite the design system’s later identification with rural living and farming, they created permaculture’s early school of urban thinkers.

As that convulsive, chaotic and innovative decade of the 1970s drew to a close, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren’s book promised to crystallise that amorphous set of uncoordinated practices and to combine them with their own ideas into a coherent system for living in city and country.

In the pre-permaculture years, the back to the land movement was part of the constructive cohort pursuing ‘alternative lifestyles’ (to differentiate them from the spiritually inclined who set up ashrams and organisations to explore mainly Eastern philosophical and spiritual thinking, and the other explorers of self who became known as ‘hippies’, though even by then the term was becoming dated) were exploring renewable technologies such as solar and wind energy, and were trialing new forms of building, a popular type being mudbrick because it made affordable housing possible. These were the years around the 1973 oil crisis when the Middle Eastern oil-producing states, organised as OPEC (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries) shut off the oil supply to the West because of its support of Israel during the Yom Kippur war of the same year.

It was the oil crisis that launched the first wave of research into renewble energy as the West learned the hard way that the supply of its economic lifeblood, a thick, black, viscous liquid, was highly vulnerable. But by the end of the decade the oil taps were again fully open and oil was once again cheap. Who, then, needed to bother with renewable energy? It would remain in the social background until the end of the century.

All of this was in the future when the ‘alternatives’ started to develop as a social trend as the 1960s morphed into the new decade. Developing into a self-conscious social movement, it would flower to fulness over the coming decade. Thanks to it, many discovered organic gardening, owner-building, recycling and environmentalism among other things, and perhaps those spiritually inclined even found themselves and realised their true nature. And thanks to the alternatives, the best of their ideas and the innovative thinkers among then flowed into the emerging permaculture movement.

As that convulsive, chaotic and innovative decade of the 1970s drew to a close, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren’s book promised to crystallise that amorphous set of uncoordinated practices and to combine with them their own ideas into a coherent system for living in city and country. If the alternative, the ‘back to the land’ movement did anything, it was to feed permaculture’s early adopters.

Residents outside their owner-built house at Tuntable Falls, one of Australia's first intentional communities started in the early 1970s. Settlements like this appeared all over the county and attracted what must have numbered thousands, perhaps more, to the idea of a more communal, cooperative way of living. Some of the early intentional communities continue to exist.

Permaculture One-where to now?

Organic growing and the appearance of intentional communities in the US had first come to my attention through the pages of the American magazine, Mother Earth News and through Stewart Brand’s compendium of tools and ideas, the Whole Earth Catalog. Mother Earth was available in Australia if you knew where to look for it, and the stories it carried sparked ideas in the imagination of many who read it. So did the Whole Earth Catalog, which was a series of publications under the same or similar names. Add to these publications Earth Garden magazine and you had the start of an alternative literature that supplemented books that appeared around the time, such as Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for spaceship Earth. It seemed all-so-visionary and promising, like a new world lying in wait if only we could somehow invoke it. For that band of youthful adventurers out there in the backblocks and back here in the cities who wanted to bring this new society into being, Permaculture One, it seemed, would have a lot of appeal.

The book had much to do with food, though less about cooking it and more about the bigger picture of how we obtain it. So it was that there developed an early nexus between farming systems, organic gardening and permaculture. This has persisted and at times has come to dominate popular perceptions of what the permaculture design system actually is. The gardening focus can be partly understood as stemming from food growing as an easy place to start practicing permaculture, but it has somewhat stymied the development of permaculture’s ‘invisible systems’ such as an alternative economics and its potential contribution to urban planning. This, in later years, may offer an explanation of why community economics evolved as an initiative in its own right rather than maintaining the close connection with permaculture that it started with.

A book, however, does not make a revolution by itself and for those who bought Permaculture One there seemed nowhere to go with the ideas unless you had land beyond the city fringe.

As a recipe for a new way of living, that first permaculture book hinted at a broader philosophy that was not yet in a completely coherent state. That it was more a work in progress became clear with the publication of Permaculture Two–Practical Design for Town and Country in Permanent Agriculture (Tagari Publications, Tasmania), around a year later.

The books took ideas from many areas—farming systems, traditonal agriculture, building design and construction, water supply, ecology, anthropology, ethnobotany, technology and more—and synthesised them into something seemingly complete and achievable. A few of the ideas on technologies I had recently become familiar with, having discovered the work of Fritz Schumacher in his book, Small is Beautiful, and on hearing his colleague from the Intermediate Technology Development Group i the UK, George McRobie, speak at the college of advanced education in Hobart.  Permaculture One and Two though, ware an integration, a systematisation of diverse ideas. It was no accident that Bill and David described permaculture as a synthesis.

Interesting stuff, I thought, as I flicked through the pages of that first of the permaculture books that warm summer afternoon in Denis’ living room. When I went out and bought my own copy, I was still unsure what to make of it and I had no inkling of the part that permaculture would come to play in my life, nor the byways, side trips and places it would take me.

Sitting, listening

The man sits, listening with increasing excitement. There’s a voice on the radio… a gruffy but commanding voice.

The listener lives in an industrial town in rural Victoria and he’s more than a little intrigued. There’s common sense being spoken and there is something compelling about that voice and what it says. He feels compelled to listen because the voice seems to articulate what he feels but what he can’t quite put into words. What that man is saying comes across as both revelation and motivation.

The place: Maryborough, Victoria.

The year: 1978.

The program: Terry Lane on ABC radio.

Terry White was an early adopted of permaculture.

The interview Terry White listens to that fateful day was with someone he has never heard of. His name, Terry discovers, is Bill Mollison. And the book under discussion? It will go on to become the foundation of something new, something called the permaculture design system.

“I found it galvanising,” says Terry. “Bill’s interview kindled my imagination in a profound way”.

The impact of that interview was so profound, Terry says, that he and his associates invite Bill to visit Maryborough for a public meeting.

“We did this in a local context of concern about youth unemployment and land degradation. This provided a responsive setting for the discussion of permanent culture (perma-culture) and an emphasis on positive, practical, whole-system solutions.”

A town ready for new ideas

In an attempt to address these issues, Maryborough had started two employment cooperatives, one making clothing and the other making bicycle trailers. An alternative technology foundation was planning a technology demonstration centre and there was considerable concern over dryland salinity, which was attributed to the removal of trees and the subsequent rise in saline groundwater in the area.

“SALT, which became Project Branchout, received $850,000 of government funding to employ local people to revegetate. They planted 300,000 trees through 33 municipalities,” explained Terry.

“It was the largest project of its type in Australia at the time. It was inspired by Rooseveldt’s Conservation Corps of the ‘thirties, which provided cultural stimulation, collected local histories, local music”.

A burst of innovative thinking

The initiatives then underway in Maryborough were allied to ideas around local self-reliance and local development then current among the innovative fringe of the seventies and early eightees. Those ideas supported notions like local economy, local employment and viable towns and cities. They came as part of a burst of innovative thinking born of the social change of the late 1960s and its maturation over the following decade.

Good ideas give birth to positive spin-offs and those around local self-reliance fed into the idea of LEIs—local employment initiatives or local economic initiatives. Melbourne man, Geoff Lacey, issued a thin little book on the subject in 1983 (Lacey G; Community Self Reliance; Pax Christi, Carlton, Australia. ISBN 0 9592551 1 7) that neatly and concisely explored and summarised the idea. Around the same time, the federal government started to publish a free magazine, Work Matters, which reported new economy ideas and innovative livelihood development and which remained in publication for several years.

What is interesting is how this intellectual territory—local economy, low and intermediate technology solutions and renewable energy—is today being revisited by the Transition Towns movement. It’s as if the intellectual ferment and experimentation with appropriate technology (originally called ‘intermediate technology’ on account of it being situated between traditional and high technology), organic growing and alternative ways of living was a trial run for models that would gain currency decades later. Is it the case of ideas whose time has finally come?

In Maryborough at that time there was more than a little social ferment, it seems. “There were animated conversations about issues”, Terry says, which produced “good ideas for a local employment column in the local newspaper”.

The Maryborough public meeting organised by Terry was well attended and resulted in the formation of one of the first permaculture groups in Australia, the National Permaculture Association.

Not the first appearance

Terry Lane’s interview with Bill Mollison brought the emerging idea of permaculture before its first mass audience. It was not, however, its first public appearance.

“Permaculture made its first appearance on the world stage in 1976 in an article in Tasmania’s Organic Farmer and Gardener magazine which was pubished by the Tasmanian Organic Gardening and Farming Society”, said Steve Payne, now editor of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s magazine, Organic Gardener, and past editor of Permaculture International Journal.

“The article was titled A Permaculture System for Southern Australian Conditions—Part One. It was written by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren”.

Sad to report is the demise of the Tasmanian Organic Gardening and Farming Society. ABC radio’s Bush Telegraph program reported it this way in June 2009: “The pioneers of organic food production in this country were considered dangerous radicals not so long ago.

“Back in 1972 a group of passionate supporters of organic farming based in Tasmania, formed a group called the Organic Gardening and Farming Society of Tasmania.

“After 37 years the group has decided to disband and held its final meeting last weekend”.

The innovators

From the highway it appears as a flat-topped bluff projecting into Bass Strait from pale yellow beaches scalloped by sea and wind.

Take the walking track that climbs The Nut and look back to see the town of Stanley arrayed below. Immediately you notice that this is a small town that clings to a narrow isthmus joining the mainland of north west Tasmania to this imposing block of rock.

Look around further and notice that the near-vertical sides of The Nut fall into the frequently stormy waters of Bass Strait. Look around a little closer as I did one summer day and you might notice the glossy black glint of a deadly Tasmanian tiger snake absorbing the morning’s warmth on a rock.

With its old buildings it is a picturesque town and it is easy to see why Stanley has become a stopover on the tourist trail. Once known for its commercial fishing, it hardly seems the sort of place to give birth to someone notable. But that is just what it did when, in 1928, Bill Mollison was born here.

Mollison left school at 15 to help run his family’s bakery. Among the jobs that followed were mill worker, forester, seaman, animal trapper and shark fisherman.

Bill Mollison at Permaculture Convergence, Nimbin, NSW, 1997. Photo: Russ Grayson.

Describe by Steve Payne as a ‘rough brew’ for someone who would become an environmentalist, those jobs led him to nine years at the Wildlife Survey Section of the CSIRO (Australia’s leading science research body) and then time with the Inland Fisheries Commission of Tasmania.

“In this intellectual hothouse I met Bill Mollison, whose life and ideas epitomised a creative bridge between nature and civilisation and between tradition and modernity,”

“What the two latter jobs provided were long stints in the forests and on the coasts of Tasmania where he closely monitored the life of those ecosystems”, write Steve in a jointly-authored article he and I produced for New Internationalist magazine.

In 1968, Mollison became a tutor at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, and, later, senior lecturer in Environmental Psychology. It was in that role that he met a student at the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education, David Holmgren, and the seeds of permaculture were sown.

David Holmgren was born in 1955, growing up on the other side of the Australian continent in Fremantle, Western Australia. His parents were political activists and this may have contributed to his enquiring mindset.

“After matriculating from John Curtin Senior High School in 1972 he spent a year hitchhiking around Australia before moving to Tasmania in 1974 to study environmental design, where he gravitated towards landscape design, ecology and agriculture”, wrote Steve.

David Holmgren, 2009.

David was attracted to the natural and intellectual environment of Tasmania and was lured by Tasmania’s School of Environmental Design which was led by architect and educator, Barry McNeil. This, David says, was “the most radical experiment in tertiary education in Australia.

“In this intellectual hothouse I met Bill Mollison, whose life and ideas epitomised a creative bridge between nature and civilisation and between tradition and modernity,” David wrote.

Tasmania

Today, Tasmania is an island isolated physically,  though not intellectually, and permaculture is perhaps one of its major intellectual products.

“It’s a place where modernity and nature collide, both destructively and creatively.”

Located in the cool temperate zone around 42 degrees south latitude and separated from the Australian mainland by the 200km width of Bass Strait, the island is a roughly triangular land mass with a mountainous, uplifted core known as the Central Plateau. The physical isolation of Tasmania in these windy and frequently wild, oceanic latitudes has engendered a sense of difference to the mainland best summed up by Tasmanian writer, Christopher Koch:

“Tugging at its moorings under the giant clouds of the Roaring Forties, Tasmania is different: we are no longer in Australia. All the colours have the glassy intensity of a cold climate: the greens greener, the dark blue of the numberless hills and mountains appearing almost black… “. (Return to Hobart Town in Crossing the Gap; 1987; Koch C: Vintage Books, Sydney. Koch wrote the classic political novel, The Year of Living Dangerously [1978] and the fictional Highways To a War [1985]).

That might explain the island state’s uniqueness but it does not answer why Tasmania was the location of an innovative idea like permaculture. David Holmgren hints at it this way: “It’s a place where modernity and nature collide, both destructively and creatively.”

Perhaps David was referring to the early environmental battles over Lake Pedder and the Franklin River, battles that later gained iconic status in the history of Australian environmentalism and that opened an entirely new arena for community-based political intervention. But, equally, he might have had in mind the state government’s policy of hydro-electrification that attracted energy-hungry heavy industry to the state from the 1950s onwards.

A state of notables

Let’s put the emergence of permaculture into its Tasmanian context. Why a state, the population of which today barely reaches 400,000 should throw up so many luminaries remains a bit of a mystery. Well before Mollison and Holmgren, Tasmania gave the world the popular 1930s film actor, Errol Flynn. It was also the birthplace of Australian prime minister, Joseph Lyons.

Tasmania is homeland to a seemingly disporportionate number of war correspondents such as Neil Davis whose coverage of the Vietnam war was documented in Tim Bowden’s book, One Crowded Hour–Neil Davis, Combat Cameraman (1987; Collins ISBN 0002174960); David Brill whose story is documented in John Little’s 2003 biography, The Man Who saw Too Much (Hodder; ISBN-10: 0733614655); and Harry Burton, the Australian television news cameraman killed in Nothern Iraq by a suicide bomber.

Others populate Tasmania’s annals of the noted. The late wilderness photographer, Peter Dombrovskis migrated to Tasmania where he was influenced by conservationist and photographer, Olegas Truchanas, an earlier immigrant from Europe. Dombrovskis’ images played a significant role in the campaign save the Franklin River and in revealing the rugged beauty of the state’s wilderness areas to the Australian public. For those who could not be there to see those often remote places, his images brought their grandeur and colour into their lives in the form of books and posters. Those same wild rivers had earlier taken Olegas’ life on one of his solo journeys of exploration.

Another immigrant came from the NSW town of Oberon. Dr Bob Brown started his political career in the Tasmanian Parliament as a Greens politician before moving to the Senate in Canberra.

With such antecedents, it is perhaps not surpirising that someone as unorthodox as Bill Mollison has his origin in the state and that David Holmgren was attracted to study there.

Significant in other ways

Let’s explore this intruiging influence of Tasmania to better gain insight into the creators of permaculture and the influences that led them to it.

Once described by David Holmgren as being “… on the far edge of the industrial world”, Tasmania is significant in other ways.

The Tasmanian Organic Farming and Gardening Society was founded in 1972 and was probably the first organic gardening and agriculture society in Australia. It was in the pages of its newsletter that permaculture was first described.

Australia’s influential wilderness conservation movement originated in the state and conducted the unsuccessful campaign to save Lake Pedder in the South-West wilderness, the successful campaign to save the Franklin River from hydro-electric development and led the fight to save the state’s old growth forests. From Tasmania the Wilderness Society, a product of those struggles, spread nationally.

During the early-1970s, public sentiment for an alternative politics to that offered by the major parties saw the formation of Australia and the world’s first ‘green’ political party, the United Tasmania Group (UTG). Formed in 1972, the UTG was inspired by New Zealand’s Values Party which had a policy platform that included environmental issues. Values Party support peaked at six per cent in 1978 [Christine Dann, Green Party of Aetearoa/New Zealand, from her PhD thesis From Earth's Last Islands. The global origins of Green Politics; Lincoln University, NZ, 1999).

The loss of Lake Pedder motivated the UTG to contest the 1972 state election in which it won 3.9 percent of the overall vote and almost seven percent of the vote in the Hobart urban electorates of Denison and Franklin. The UTG went on to contest the 1972 federal House of Representatives election, winning four percent of the vote in its constituencies.

The Values Party and the UTG were the first forays into electoral politics anywhere in the world by the nascent green movement.

The island state might have given birth and been home to a notable bunch of people and might have had a formative role in the organics and green political movements in Australia, but just how much this fed the emerging permaculture concept is uncertain. However, the UTG formed the innovative element of the state political milieu at the time. In his home on the lower slopes of Hobart’s Mt Wellington, Bill Mollison was surely aware of it and the environment movement’s gathering strength.

“an upwelling of intellectual and creative action at the edge of civilisation.”

Really, it was hard to be unaware. As someone influenced by the ideas on technology, economics and environment that came out of the social movements of the early 1970s, by the ideas of the British economist, EF Schumacher and the writings of Buckminster Fuller who developed the concept of 'whole systems design', I was probably typical of my cohort in being attracted to these edgy notions that seemed to offer so much by way of solutions to the vague search for alternatives that had been going on for the best part of a decade or more. I believe I can safely say that those ideas and the emergence of the UTG came as a breath of fresh air to many of us in Tasmania at the time, like the sharp winter wind that blows over Hobart from the sub-Antarctic.

As well as UTG, David acknowledges that the Australian organic farming movement sprouted first in Tasmania as part of “an upwelling of intellectual and creative action at the edge of civilisation.” That upwelling was not a Tasmanian property alone. During the seventies it was found in most Australian cities and in some rural centres as well as overseas. If anything, the decade was one of exploration for new ideas and solutions for a world widely perceived to be going awry, thanks in part to the 1973 oil crisis.

Bill was a founding member of the Tasmanian Organic Gardening and Farming Society, the first of its kind in the country. It was the same organisation from which Peter Cundall emerged. Decades later, Cundall would host ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) television’s Gardening Australia, a program that was to give permaculture a fair share of air time and that would help popularise it in the new century. Peter was to become a vociferous opponent of the proposal to build a pulp mill on the banks of northern Tasmania's Tamar River.

While these developments might not have been a direct trigger in the birth of permaculture, they formed the intellectual, social and political matrix from which it emerged and in which it found its first adherents. In this sense, and like other social movements, permaculture grew out of the social, economic and political context of its time.

A world ready

According to David Holmgren, it wasn’t just Maryborough that was ready for the permaculture message by the end of the seventies.

“At the time there was an upheaval in new, positive environmental solutions as a response to a sense of crisis, especially the energy crisis”, he said.

“Before that”, says permaculture early adopter-now-educator, Robyn Francis, “Bill Mollison spent 1976 and 1977 overseas, collecting ideas that would find a place in the still-developing permaculture idea”.

While in Maryborough, Bill was invited to visit the sewage settling ponds and the town tip. His suggestions for the productive use of wastes from the two sites were taken seriously by the council, and the noted irrigation designer, Ken Yoemans, was brought in to consult on the reuse of treated sewage water. Bill’s plan for the productive use of sewage waste was published in the first edition of the National Permaculture Association’s quarterly journal, Permaculture, which was published by Terry White in the summer of 1978.

Time can erase memory, and although it seldom rates a mention today, the significance of Permaculture magazine to the movement should not be underestimated. The magazine went on to play an important part in spreading knowledge of the permaculture design system during its formative years and was the direct forerunner of the Permaculture International Journal.

Approachability the key to acceptance

Bill’s visit to Maryborough was successful, Terry said, because he could relate to local people.

“He stood for something rather than against things. He created a ‘positive space’ for addressing local issues and their permaculture solutions. Bill had positive, practical solutions to problems… to real problems.

“He came across as a doer, not a talker. He proposed that instead of waiting for government or for funding, we just go and do whatever it was that was necessary. This approach people found empowering… it released energy. Bill trusted others to carry the permaculture message.

“Permaculture might have been a bit fringe but it was hands-on. The population of Maryborough at that time was conservative, not hippy or radical. Conservative people can be turned around if the solutions are pragmatic and fit local needs.”

Northwards the message spreads

Bill Mollison with wife, Lisa, at the 2009 permaculture convergence in Sydney. Photo: Russ Grayson

Nambour is far from Maryborough in both distance and climate. Yet, here in this town in the hinterland of Queensland’s subtropical Sunshine Coast, there was a mind ready for the permaculture message just as there had been in Maryborough.

The mind was that of a Swiss man, and within it Mollison’s ideas sparked a line of thinking that would culminate in a new type of settlement in the Australian landscape. It would be well over a decade, however, before Max Lindegger set up Australia’s first ecovillage at Crystal Waters.

It was an electrifying time, said Max, even though he lived thousands of kilometres from Tasmania. In a 2007 interview for Steve Payne’s and my article in New Internationalist magazine, Max said that permaculture “was exactly the way I felt but had been unable to put into words”.

“This was a common sentiment of people then and even now”, said Steve. It suggested that the social change over the previous decade had prepared people for life-changing new ideas and that, for some, the alternative movement fulfilled that need. Others, though, had to wait until the publication of Permaculture One for that life-changing influence to tip them into change.

Just as Terry had invited Bill to speak in Maryborough, Max invited him to come north for a speaking tour. In 1979, Max formed what may have been the second permaculture organisation to come into existence, Permaculture Nambour.

Max Lindegger, an early adopter of permaculture from Nambour. Photo: Russ Grayson.

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Inspired individuals have been important to the development of permaculture, as Terry and Max show. Somehow, they were at the right place at the right time to hear the right message. Somehow, their life experiences and present situations made them susceptible to innovative ideas. Somehow, they had the right abilities to act on those messages. They possessed the imagination that is such a key resource in permaculture.

From the publication of Permaculture One and that iconic radio interview with Terry Lane, permaculture had started to spread. It spread slowly but with a quickening tempo as the years went on. To use the term devised by Malcolm Gladwell in his book, The Tipping Point (2000; Abacus books, UK. ISBN 0 349 11346 7), the idea had ‘stickiness’. That is, it had the property of being the right idea at the right time encountered by the right people and in a form that stimulated their imaginations.

At first slowly but with a quickening tempo, news of permaculture started to spread, bypassing many but adhering to the minds of the curious and innovative few. By the opening years of the 1980s, those attracted to the idea had started to get together. Slowly, but with a quickening tempo, a network of would-be permaculture practitioners started to coalesce. The network would become the dominant form of permaculture structure.

Army of field workers

That Tasmania is a place in which nature and modernity collide, as David Holmgren suggests, can be seen where the suburbs of Hobart collides with the tall eucalypt forest that clothes Mt Wellington’s lower slopes.

The sight of nature is never far away in Tasmania and the mountain, with its precipituous dolerite cliffs known as the Organ Pipes, is snow capped when it catches the moist, cold, south-westerly winds of winter known of the Roaring Forties. It’s massive hulk dominates the town, a presence both physical and psychological, and it makes this city of 200,000 one of the most physically beautiful urban centres in the country.

To many of us who experienced the ferment of the late 1960s, there seemed to be no positive direction forward, although almost everybody could define those aspects of the global society that they rejected.

From the summit, a few kilometres in one direction is the city centre; to the east, beyond the wide brown Derwent, farmland and forest cover undulating country until it reaches the sea; in the other direction lies the great, cool temperate wilderness of South West Tasmania, a vast area of jagged mountain and button grass plain devoid of permanent inhabitants. And beyond that in these latitudes lies the misty vastness of the Southern Ocean, a seaway of stormy reputation among mariners that rings the world. Small a city it might be, it is these things that give Hobart its dramatic and invigorating character.

What conversations went on there on those lower slopes between David Holmgren and Bill Mollison in Bill’s living room there on Strickland Avenue below the olive green of the euclaypt forest? Whatever ideas were turned over there in that formative dialogue , in what at one point became known as the ‘Republic of Strickland Avenue,’  would form the backbone of the permaculture concept.

In describing the origin of permaculture, Bill writes of those times: “To many of us who experienced the ferment of the late 1960s, there seemed to be no positive direction forward, although almost everybody could define those aspects of the global society that they rejected.

“From 1972 to 1974 I spent time, latterly with David Holmgren, in developing an interdisciplinary earth science—permaculture—with a potential for positivistic, integrated and global outreach.”

Bill also told another creation story, but whether apocryphal or factual I don’t know.

It went like tnis: It was set perhaps in the late-1960s or early the following decade—just where it sits within his diverse career remains unclear.

Irrespective of when it happened, Bill went into the Tasmanian bush and built a small cabin. That done, he planted a vegetable garden. Then, sitting back one day presumably reflecting on his work, it occurred to Bill that what he had done would do little to make the world a better place. So, as he told it to so many of those eager listeners, he locked the door and walked out, back into society.

The moral of Bill’s story was that you have to live within society to change it. Change is something you cannot do as a recluse. What is needed is action in society and that means living in the world, not in isolation on a backblock retreat in the hills. It means living in a deliberate manner and creating new ways of doing things, ways that will provide all that people need to live without overwhelming the natural systems we all depend upon.

More recently, Bill has said that by the late 1970s, and following the Club of Rome’s report, Limits of Growth, there was increasing concern about the world running out of resources.

“But no one had any long-term ideas and it was obvious to me what had to be done,” he said. “That was to build an army of permaculture field workers to go out and teach the ideas of sustainable food production.”

That army never quite eventuated the way Bill describes it and the first coterie of educators trained by Bill was more a squad in number than an army. By the 1980s, however, their number was more a that of a platoon.

Redefing permaculture

First ideas are intuitive ideas. They may also be good ideas but they are rarely ready to roll out. So it was with the first expression of the permaculture design system.

Rather than an approach to ‘permanent agriculture’ as first envisoned, Bill and David realised that a more comprehensive description was needed. So it was that permaculture became reinterpreted as ‘permanent culture’. This acknowledged the fact that the different elements that make up a culture are linked in an interactive social and economic matrix and a systems thinking approach such as permaculture does not allow the separation of any single one, such as agriculture, from its context.

The focus was now on the more comprehensive process of designing human habitation that catered for people and the social infrastructure that supported them, as well as for natural systems.

In 2004, David Holmgren expanded on permaculture’s origins and affiliations: “Permaculture is a design system for sustainable living and landuse. It came out of awareness about the limits of resources, especially the energy crisis of the 1970s.

“The work started between myself and Bill Mollison when I was a student in environmental design in Tasmania. Since then, permaculture has spread around the world as a grassroots movement of activists and designers, teachers, land managers—both gardeners and farmers.

“It’s also connected to a very broad church of alternatives in sustainable building, alternative currency, ideas, ecovillages—many diverse areas” (June 8, 1994: Energy Bulletin, Global Public Media, USA; online interview with Adam Fenderson).

Bill explained that permaculture was not new in its elements but was new as a synthesis of those elements, such as farming, building design, community economics and local economies, landuse design and all the rest that make up the design system. It is a way of thinking, he asserted, an approach to design that brings the separate elements into interaction as a cooperative, mutually supportive system.

A way of thinking

This—permaculture as a way of thinking—is a critical concept and in part explains why permaculture has persisted as a diversified practice rather than as a unitary movement.

Rather than propound a theory, a political or other type of programme as would a centralised movement, permaculture encourages its participants to take the approach of applying its ethics and principles to the diverse range of activities they are involved in. Permaculture, as a way of thinking, as an approach, offers a design system for decentralised application where its adherents live and work.

Permaculture had much in common with systems thinking, an approach that became systematised and popularised durung the 1990s. Systems thinking treats problems and their potential solutions within the larger social, economic, environmental or other contexts in which they are embedded so as to produce a more effective solution rather than a superficial and short lived quick fix. The nexus between permaculture and systems thinking is further reinforced by the systems ecology work of Howard Odum that David Holmgren introduced into the design system.

Bringing it together—synthesis

What is it that gives permaculture uniqueness when it is made up of ideas gleaned from many bodies of knowledge?

This is a question that hasn’t come up much over the years but is one that should be asked. I think it  important to establish a point of difference for the design system and its approach so that people get to understand it better.

The two originators were quick to answer this question. Sure, permaculture absorbed into itself ideas and practices taken from different fields, but what gave it its claim to credibility was that the design system synthesised these into a coherent, interrelated approach to building sustsinsble systems. Unlike disciplines such as architecture, landscape design and agriculture that often work in their separate intellectual and practical silos, permaculture seeks to make cobstructive, productive connections between its components. Thus, architecture is combined with landscape design so as to improve the internal climate of buildings and increase urban biomass, agriculture is combined with economic and business practices to develop the product required by innovative new markets, such as linking city fringe farming to urban, community supported agriculture enterprises (CSA).

To paraphrase science fiction author Neal Stephenson, permaculture evolved because ” …he or she put together disperate ideas into a coherent vision that could be used as a road map… ” (Neal Stephenson Rewrites History; Wired magazine, September 2003).

A road map leading from present to future, but that also reaches back into the past to harvest good ideas, is a fitting metaphor for the permaculture deign system. And for many that is what permaculture became—a road map through the vortices of a confusing world—a way of thinking and a path of action.

As the 1970s came to an end, the roadmap would take its early adoptors in new life directions, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. At its destination lay a socially and environmentally sustainable society, that being the vision, and on the highway between destination and starting point lay a sometimes bewildering network of roadways. Diverse and convoluted some might be, the important thing was that they all took the traveller in the same direction.

The 1970s had seen permaculture’s gestation and birth. Following the publication of Permaculture One and Permaculture Two, the slowly expanding group of early adoptors remained small in number but their role would be to put Bill and David’s ideas into action, to refine them in the light of experience and to spread the word through training courses and publications.

New decade heralds change

The period from the publication of the first permaculture book in 1978 until around 1983 can be regarded as the movement’s formative years. This was the time when permaculture was first described, when readers were inspired by Bill and David’s books and talks to become the first of the early adopters. It was a time when the design system was immature, when there was much to explore. It was a time when permaculture had to establish an identity and to differentiate itself from other social trends.

At the time, Bill sought to differentiate permaculture from concurrent social movements by portraying it as an applied practice, as a means of taking action. It was more than protest and focusing on what was wrong, he said. Permaculture concentrated on what was right and on how that could be expanded.

This differentiation figured strongly in permaculture’s early period.

“It’s a grassroots, international movement of practitioners, designers and organisations—networks”

Bill and permaculture’s early adopters painted the system as a ‘positive’ philosophy, as desirably different from the ‘negativism’ of protest. Bill made it clear sometimes that he was referring to the environment movement and in doing so was describing the difference between campaign-based organisations and a social movement. Permaculture might be this, but the criticism of protest was a little unfair at times because it did not acknowledge the achievements of the campaigning approach or recognise that it arose as a reaction to the initiatives of others when trying some other approach might be too little too late. It also led to a noticeable absence of permaculture from the big environmental issues of the day.

The differentiation has persisted in permaculture folklore. The design system continues to be promoted as a means of doing positive things rather than as simply trying to stop something happening. At the same time, many permaculturists recognise the need to confront what they see as wrongdoing and to participate in actions to stop it. This, perhaps, has led to the distinction being heard less these days and perhaps signifies that the world has changed sufficiently that, rather than a simple black/white, positive/negative differentiation between permaculture practice and campaigning, the two approaches occupy different positions on a continuum.

Binding a network

The publication of the first edition of Permaculture magazine was one of the most important events in the history of the design system. Like its eventual successor, the magazine would bind together a geographically dispersed network of emerging permaculture practitioners.

That publication, like the courses that started to be offered after the first coterie of Bill’s students returned home enthused, built permaculture’s following. David Holmgren believes permaculture’s popularity to be at least partly due to its comprehensive nature as “ …a design system for sustainable living and landuse that’s concerned both with the consumption and production side, and that’s based on universal ethics and design principles which can be applied in any context.

“It’s a grassroots, international movement of practitioners, designers and organisations—networks”, he concluded.

With the turn of the decade, news of the permaculture design system was spreading. According to Terry White, the ten permaculture groups in Australia in 1978 would grow to around 80 worldwide, all within seven years. Permaculture, it seemed, was the right idea for the times and news of it was carried in the pages of Permaculture magazine.

By the early 1980s the national structure of latter day permaculture practice was visible in microcosm—a network of local associations formal and informal, adhering to the ethics of the design system and at the time linked by the communication services of Permaculture (Permaculture International Journal by mid-decade) magazine and by personal contact, the formal entry to which was through a permaculture design course.

As the new decade opened, Permaculture lay quietly below the surface of mainstream society. That was about to change.

PERMACULTURE entered its childhood in the 1980s, slowly at first but with a gaining momentum as the decade progressed.

Word that there was something new and unusual in the world seeped from its home in Stanley across Bass Strait to the Australian mainland. Here, it caught the attention and imagination of its first batch of early adopters and, as early adopters do, they turned the ideas of permaculture’s instigators into something understandable to everyone who had an ear to listed to its message. Those who had attended one of Bill’s first courses now started to teach the Permaculture Design Course themselves and, like some newborn moving into its childhood, the design system started its journey in life.

On to Pappinbarra

To get to Pappinbarra we follow the Pacific Highway north from Sydney. Reaching the mid-north coast, we turn off the highway and traverse a winding road through farming country.

It hadn’t been a rapid journey as my new friend’s old white Kombi van wasn’t the fastest nor the most comfortable vehicle on the road. It would be understatement to describe it as basic but it served as home-on-the-road for our forays up the coast. We had spun out the journey with a stayover with friends, Judy and Rupert, who were living in a geodesic dome among the tall, straight eucalypts on their rural patch about 30 minutes west of Kempsey, a large town about six or so hours drive north of Sydney. Like many others, they sought a rural life and had plans to build a mud brick house up the slope from their farm dam. But, like many others, that dream was destined not to materialise.

The route narrows after we leave the highway and loses its asphalt surface as it starts its climb into the hills. Soon, the way is through patches of forest and open fields. Up into the hills we bump until we crest a hill to see the Pappinbarra Field Studies Centre there where the road ends. Here, two old timber structures occupy the centre of a grassy clearing. Here, the feeling is bucolic and the bush is the dominant presence. A small creek flows out of the forested hills that form the backdrop to the Centre and bubbles its way through the property.

“There were all these people doing interesting things. I had to be part of it”

We show our press pass at the gate and a harassed young man directed us across the creek to a camping area. Here we parked the Kombi and stepp into a milieu that would occupy us for many years to come.

Attending the first International Permaculture Convergence in Pappinbarra, Fiona Campbell was so impressed with what people were doing she was immediately recruited to the permaculture design system.

There had already been a Permaculture gathering in New Zealand and a friend of ours, Steve Ward—who would later introduce the idea of bioregionalism and bioregional organisation to Sydney—had attended. But Steve wasn’t at the Pappinbarra gathering.

Those modest, rustic timber buildings in their grassy clearing was about to host the first of the international convergences that would punctuate permaculture’s years. Absent were the people from developing countries (money would later be set aside to sponsor them) but present were one or two from the USA.

As the first of its kind the gathering was a big information exchange and inspiration factory. As in others to come, people left the Pappinbarra convergence motivated, full of ideas and the desire to do something.

Fiona Campbell, who accompanied me to Pappinbarra and who was new to permaculture, summed up the ambience at that first convergence when she said: “There were all these people doing interesting things. I had to be part of it”.

The next convergence took place in the village of Otford, just south of Sydney, and was organised by Robyn Francis and Permaculture Sydney.

Convergences were inspirational events because they brought together for a few days the far flung community of interest that is permaculture. At their peak, they would be held every second year with the international convergences taking place in different countries. Convergences became a part of the permaculture calendar and were instrumental in knitting together the geographically-dispersed body of practitioners.

Inspired, but nowhere to go

As the 70s became the 80s the question that troubled early discoverers of permaculture was this: now that we have read the two books, where do we go to learn more?

The answer was that there was nowhere to go in the years immediately after the books were published. The books and the occasional appearances of Bill Mollison were the sum total of permaculture.

But that was for the moment. Many of those asking that question were soon to become permaculture’s first wave of early adoptors. They numbered a few still influential in permaculture—Max Lindegger, co-designer of Crystal Waters Permaculture Village; Robyn Francis, now teaching permaculture at Djanbung Gardens; Terry White, now active in land management—and others who have since moved on, their names forgotten or recalled only by those with a history in the movement.

It would be premature to call permaculture a movement during the late 1970s and into the first years of the following decade. Even the concept of being a movement was one that came to be challenged at permaculture conferences. It was as if being a movement was not quite permaculture, but for want of a better term to describe the following that Permaculture would soon to gain, there was nothing. There can be no denying the reality—as the new decade opened, permaculture’s early adoptors came to constitute a movement that would grow as the design system became more widely known through courses, media coverage, word of mouth and a slowly growing library of books.

During this formative period and for some time after, Mollison was the dominant intellectual force in permaculture. He set the design system’s world view and his wisdom became the de facto philosophical basis of permaculture. It was he who offered the first courses, who fronted seminars and meetings, who travelled to spread the word. In matters permaculture, Bill’s word became law. He was the ‘authority’.

David Holmgren, in contrast, didn’t rush out and start teaching permaculture. After the formative years in Tasmania, he had his own journey to continue and set out to develop his own permaculture system on land at Hepburn, in central Victoria. Even though he made public appearances, David seemed to have cultivated so low a profile that people would ask: “What has happened to David Holmgren?”.

The importance of Maryborough

Maryborough, with its band of early permaculture mavens, was an important place in the design system’s early years. Those initial initiatives—Terry White bringing Bill Mollison to Maryborough, the publishing of Permaculture magazine—set the direction for the development of the design system.

The town remained a significant hub for the permaculture movement over its first decade, hosting two permaculture conferences, one in 1977, the other in 1978. It also hosted two of the first, ten day permaculture consultancy courses as they were called then. Given time, these would transmute into the Permaculture Design Course based on the model developed by Bill. The Permaculture Institute was established in 1979 to teach the permaculture consultancy courses.

In its early years, Permaculture had no national organisation, no means of propagating itself and no centres of activity apart from Bill’s modest home garden in Stanley, Tasmania. Yet, as early as 1981, the design system was attracting attention for it was in that year that Bill received international recognition with a Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the ‘alternative Nobel Prize’. It seems extraordinary that this should happen so soon after the design system’s birth.

In his acceptance speech, Bill said: “All my life we’ve been at war with nature. I just pray that we lose that war. There are no winners in that war…”

Times change

After discovering permaculture in the pages of Permaculture One and Permaculture Two in the late 1970s, I didn’t do anything about it for a few years. It was always there in mind as something with potential, but the trigger to push me from idea to action was not. Having moved from Tasmania to Sydney a couple years prior, I had left permaculture’s birthplace, the state that played an all-too-brief role in its early development.

Leaving too, it seemed, was the shared image of a new society that had formed the glue of the alternative movement. It continued, of course, and towns like Nimbin and Maleny still attracted the restless and the searchers in life. But soon, as locals would later say, a new type started to arrive on Cullen Street, Nimbin, and the town began to change. A resident permaculture practitioner told me of this new presence on the streets, saying that mental health workers in the cities recommended their patients move to Nimbin’s ‘more caring’ social environment. The change was later noted by a friend who lived in the nearby enclave of Mountaintop just before his family moved elsewhere in the region, having become disappointed with the town.

This new decade was profoundly different to the innovative 1970s. It brought with it a markedly different ambience. The search for alternatives that has preoccupied the creative mind for the previous ten years waned on a global glut of cheap oil as memory of the 1973 oil crisis rapidly receded. Renewable energy systems would wait a full 20 years before they would once again be considered as an alternative.

…contradictorily, it was also a period that brought significant gains for the environment movement…

In retrospect, the eightees and the opening years of the nineties can be seen as time when mainstream values reasserted themselves, consolidated by economies that grew and grew and unleashed a flood of cheap consumer goods. Yet, contradictorily, it was also a period that brought significant gains for the environment movement in the form of saving Tasmania’s Franklin River from hydroelectric development and Cape York’s Daintree rainforests from clear cutting, plus a plethora of minor victories.

Perhaps this signified that the cohort of the 1970s was maturing and entering mainstream working life and bringing their values, formed a decade earlier and as far back of the late 1960s, with them. This was the time in which the environment movement itself slid noisely into the social mainstream and became institutionalised. The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) and the Wilderness Society, at the time Australia’s two major conservation organisations, can be seen as coming of age in this decade. Greenpeace, too, started to rise in prominence as did Friends of the Earth, though they would never achieve the level of prominence and influence as did the ACF.

Big campaigns required a level of organisational structure that was well beyond the informal arrangements many of the environment groups had started with. Formal and often specialist roles started to be established and the organisations began their journey towards professionalisation that we see today. This has taken them far into the social mainstream and normalised their key messages such that they are accepted wisdom for many. It has also led, commentators say, to a more limited role for members.

The decade of the eightees, then, can be seen as a time of contradictory social trends, and the growth of permaculture as it entered its childhood was part of that contradiction. The reasons for growth are obscure. Maybe permaculture had started to attract people from the alternative movement who found in it a structured way to approach positive change. Maybe people became disenchanted with society’s money-making focus during the decade of ‘greed is good’, to cite the statement from the movie. Such disenchantment has always fed alternative strands of thought and action.

Woman with a good idea

Robyn Francis in the 1990s.

Permaculture re-entered my life one weekday in 1984. I was doing news and current affairs at a Sydney radio station and, one afternoon, I was preparing material for the drivetime programme. This was a busy time for the team as we went to air at 3pm. Everything had to be on the program’s running sheet before that and tapes edited and ready to go…  scheduling completed… music selected… the news teletype monitored as it spat out the planet’s notable events on an seemingly endless stream of paper.

Interruptions were viewed as a bit of a nuisance, but it was the bad habit of the gnomes in the newsroom to send anyone they considered strange or who had unusual ideas — ie. ideas that they could not understand — down the passageway to find me. It was here, as I sat in front of an editing machine, that a woman with a good idea knocked at the door.

She was living in a rented house in Petersham, she explained, to where she had moved from her property near Taree. Here in Sydney, she was trying to stimulate interest in something new, something called a permaculture association. She asked me if I had heard of permaculture and I replied that, yes, I had come across it in Tasmania and had read the two books.

Over the following months Robyn Francis and I recorded material about permaculture for broadcast and I visited her rented house, out the back of which she had made a small food garden that included a banana tree growing in a plastic garbage can.

Permaculture Sydney was about to be born, again.

Born again

Robyn, with her ideas and energy, was what permaculture needed to give it a presence in Sydney. She was one of permaculture’s early adoptors, one of that first wave of people to emerge from the early permaculture design courses. It was their mission, had they known it, to take the design system from its innovators and small band of very early adopters to that second band of early adoptors, their students. This is what was about to happen in Sydney.

Thanks to the freak chance of those newsroom mavens sending her down the hall to track me down in the editing suite, I became one of that second wave of permaculture design students. In 1985, with Fiona Campbell, I did Robyn’s first ever Permaculture Design Course.

It turned out that this was not the first iteration of Permaculture Sydney. An entity using that name had earlier existed but had not achieved prominence. I understand that one or two of its members had a hand in setting up one of the country’s early multiple occucancy intentional communities-Penrose Rural Co-op, a couple hours drive south of the city on the Southern Highlands.

Permaculture Sydney grew under Robyn’s leadership and acquired a shopfront and residence at 113 Enmore Road, later the premises of Alfalfa House Food Co-op. This was the Permaculture Epicentre and it became the location of parties, workshops and a garden construction project that turned a negected and very small backyard into a food producing ecoystem. Here we produced the Permaculture Sydney newsletter and the International Permaculture Journal, as the PIJ was known in those days.

Robyn Francis feeds her sometimes savage geese at hre Djanbung Gardens permaculture education centre in Nimbin, Northern NSW. Photo: Russ Grayson, late 1990s.

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I had met up with Robyn in Melbourne on her visit to bring back what Terry White had called Permaculture magazine because Terry wanted to move on to new projects. We stayed with a Melbourne associate of Robyn’s by the name, I think, of Lecki Ord, and visited Terry to ‘collect’ the publication. Later, we went to a fledgling environmental project that went by the name of CERES, then just a small cluster of buildings on an old landfill site in Brunswick East.

As if to illustrate the importance of motivated individuals in making permaculture happen, Permaculture Sydney went into a slow decline when Robyn left to travel and teach permaculture overseas and when she moved to the NSW North Coast soon after her return. Phillip Booth was one of those who was arond the Epicentre while Robyn was traveling. He later moved to Byron Bay and it was well after his return to Sydney, when he was working as a project evaluator associated with UNSW, that I encountered him. That was when Fiona Campbell, then a Sustainability Education Officer with Randwick City Council, hired him to evaluate her new Living Smart and orher courses. Phillip’s specialty was evaluating sustaiability and similar courses.

It wasn’t only the loss of Robyn’s drive that led to the slow demise of Permaculture Sydney. Max Lindegger would periodically turn up at the Permaculture Epicentre to promote his project to create a new version of intentional community which he called an ‘ecovillage’. Promote it he did, perhaps a little too well for his message fell onto the ears of Epicentre resident, Denise Sawyer, and those of Frances Lang and her partner, Jeff Michaels. Frances and Jeff were then living in Balmain and were members of Permaculture Sydney. When the three packed their bags and followed Max north to become founding members of the new ecovillage, Permaculture Sydney was the loser. At some time around this period, Fiona Campbell, too, left town to take up work in Albury where she designed irrigation systems for broadacre farmers.

Frances, a horticulturist, and Jeff went on to establish Green Harvest, their mail order garden supply company. From small beginnings in their garage at Crystal Waters, the business grew to such an extent that they had to eventually move it to premises in Maleny where it was more accessible to the couriers who delivered the orders from all over Australia.

On returning from her overseas adventures in permaculture, Robyn Francis, too, left for the north, eventually moving to Lismore. In 1994 she would move again—she had found her place in the green fields on the edge of Nimbin and there set about the long and sometimes trying work of establishing her Djanbung Gardens permaculture education centre.

The opening of Crystal Waters, Australia's first ecovillage, created a lot of excitement in Permaculture circles in the 1980s.

Why not count business in our successes?

Green Harvest, which is still in business, is a frequently overlooked permaculture success story. And this brings me to a peculiarity I find with permaculture.

Much prominence is given to the numbers that permaculture associations attract and to their successes. This is as it should be. But there is seldom any similar championing of those small businesses and social enterprises inspired by permaculture ideas and started by permaculture people.

This is not as it should be. And why is this? It is because Bill and David were aware that relying on grant funds and donations offered only a limited future to permaculture projects, if it offered any long term future at all. They said that permaculture work should be self-supporting and produce a yield. While the yield they talked about would necessarily include the product, it would also have to include the financial means to keep producing that product. And that implies either a for-profit social business or a not-for-profit social enterprise.

Some successful permaculture businesses are conspicuous. Robyn Francis’ permaculture education and consulting takes her all over the world. So does the work of Geoff Lawton at the Permaculture Research Institute and that of other permaculture educators, not forgetting those newer to permaculture such as Darren Doherty with his broadacre land management work that utilises permaculture ideas and creatively combines them with others. And then there’s Holmgren Design Services.

What is seldom acknowledged are other permaculture-inspired small businesses such as Green Harvest, Sydney Organic Gardens, August Investments and others. It is time to count their success, too. I believe the reason why they are less conspicuous is because they devote less effort to self-promotion.

Always blunt

Always blunt, sometimes confrontational but always straight to the point, Bill Mollison could perplex people as much as he could inspire them. His manner of delivery at his courses was designed to shake students from their established beliefs and attitudes. He would confront them with facts and figures about how bad things were getting then lift them out of the gloom of despair by describing how they could take action. This resulted in the belief that things could be put right with the application of a little permaculture design.

When Mollison stood up to talk in public, everyone listened. He was the unofficial and unelected leader, an attribute that fell to him naturally as permaculture’s early, sole authority. His was a
leadership that could have been shared by David Holmgren at the time had he been interested. He wasn’t. But he would be.

Mollison became known as the permaculture ‘guru’. When used by permaculturists the word was applied lightly, even jokingly. Yet when it came from those outside the movement the term carried a more serious intonation. Mollison rejected the notion. It was said that, at talks, he would pick his nose to convince the audience that he was anything but a guru.

Birth, decline, rebirth

That was how it went with Permaculture Sydney through the 80s. Version 1 of the organisation closely followed the emergence of the design system, probably some time very early in the decade. Permaculture Sydney version 2 was the creation of Robyn Francis when she moved to the city.

The pattern would be repeated, with version 3 appearing in the 1990s and version 4 having to wait a decade or more before appearing as the rebranding of a previous attempt at a metropolitan permaculture entity in 2011.

This evolution is typical of community associations. They grow, reach a peak, then wane. Sometimes they disappear completely… sometimes, like Permaculture Sydney, the name is resumed by new people and the entity is recreated in new form.

If we are to understand this dynamic, then we must digress and cross into the territory of ideas diffusion theory.

How ideas travel

The diffusion of new ideas and innovations into society is an orderly process.

It starts with the publication of a book or the promulgation of an idea by its originator, the innovator. For permaculture, those innovators were Bill Mollison and David Holmgren.

Soon, a small group of early adoptors gathers around the originator. Their role, though it is seldom so blatantly stated, is to develop quick-prototypes of the innovator’s ideas and refine them into workable models. This is a ‘proof of technology’ phase. Early adoptors build models of the idea and get it to work, and in so doing they make changes to the original concept to make it workable, scalable and replicable.

The early adoptors spread the word about the innovation; they start publications and websites and offer courses and convince the later adoptors that the innovation is useful and is of value.

Permaculture’s first bunch of early adopters include Max Lindegger, Terry White and Robyn Francis in their number. They and others of that first cohort did their PDC with Bill Mollison then went on to teach their own courses. Returning to where they lived, they started to offer their own courses. This group includes Rosemary Morrow and the Fantons, who established the Seed Savers Network during their time at Tuntable Falls community then continued to develop it after moving to Byron Bay. Their students, a second wave of early adopters, included Fiona Campbell and myself when we enrolled in Robyn Francis’ first ever permaculture design course.

If the the early adopters are successful in stimulating interest, and if the idea looks like it might be viable, it has a good chance of flowing on into early mass adoption. This involves a larger number of possibly more cautious people who prefer to wait to see whether the innovation is practicable before adopting it. This is why access to working models at demonstration centres is so important to the acceptance of something new. It is the beginning of the mainstreaming process that, with some innovations, may foster the development of commercial models and markets.

It can be argued that permaculture has now entered the early mass adoption phase, though there is also the argument that it is in a phase of later early adoption. The change from one phase to another can take time and the change may happen in some places well before others. This appears to be the case with permaculture.

Ideas diffusion is a way of understanding how innovations move into societies. I believe that students of the PDC would benefit from an understanding of it brcause it places the evolotion of an idea on a timeline and offers a description of the different stages of development. This would allow permaculture practitioners and sustainablity educators to adapt their work to the phase they are passing through.  An understanding would also avoid the frustration that comes when good ideas are rejected because people are not yet ready for them.

Add to this understanding the ‘readiness for change’ categories developed first by Protrashka in the health field (stages include: uninterested in change; preparing for change by finding information; on the verge of change; having made change and seeking further learning and support) and more recently repurposed by Bob Doppelt for sustainability education, and you have a model from which interventions and targeted education programs can be developed. It is by the adoption of such work coming from outside of permaculture rather than reiterating accepted internal knowledge and techniques that the design system will evolve.

It was Everett Rodgers who described the ideas diffusion model, but what happens has also been explained by English author and organisational educator, Charles Handy. His Sigmoid Curve describes the lifecycle of the innovation as it is accepted and takes off, following an ascending curve as it is adopted by a greater number of people. Then it peaks and starts to descend the curve into decline.

According to Handy, the curve plots the lifecycle of ideas, products and organisations. If these are to endure, he says, then a new phase must be launched as the curve starts its decline. All going well, a new ascent is then started. Waiting until it moves too far down the curve of decline can be to wait too long.

A characteristic of entities that endure, that leave the Sigmoid Curve at the right time and head towards renewal, is that their new phase may be under a new leadership, one with fresh ideas and with a fresh interpretation of the work of the innovator that is adapted to contemporary conditions.

Setting the scene for growth–the first courses

Permaculture in its first decade… small bands of people meeting in each other’s homes and occasionally blossoming into community associations, while down on Tasmania’s Bass Srait coast Bill Mollison was educating those who would start to spread the design system nationally.

Education has high profile in permaculture. It’s not uncommon to hear permaculturists at a convergence or other gathering ask the question, “Who did you do your PDC with?”. The answer suggests that there are ‘lineages’ within the design system based upon PDC teacher. It can be something like a meeting of martial artists discussing the lineage of their style as passed down by their master. It’s probably going too far to say these are tribes but I have observed that the permaculture teacher and their networks sometimes becomes a major determinant of the particular networks within permaculrure that students affiliate with.

One of the effects of being part of a permaculture lineage passed on through teachers is that a partial appreciation of the history of the design system is perpetuated. I have observed this and listened as permaculture graduates have described a version of permaculture history that is notable for who and what is missing from the story.

Training in permaculture

With Tasmania the birthplace of permaculture it was only fitting that the first design courses were offered there.

But first, a word about education in permaculture. The Permaculture Design Course-the PDC-is accepted as the basic training necessary to teach permaculture or to practice it in any quasi-professional way. This has evolved as accepted practice although the arrangment has no legal basis. It became consolidated as practice in the 1980s largely because the number of permaculture educators was small and because the design system was still new.

There existed a set of brief notes on the content of the course altbough I am unsure whether these were drawn up by individual educators or whether they were produced by the Permaculture Institute that Bill Mollison set up. The early idea of franchising teachers of the design system was superceded by the acceptance of the PDC structure.

The original 72 hours duration of the PDC was based on a lecture style of delivery.Over the years it has been extended by teachers as the time was found too short if experiential learning was to be included. Permaculture teachers with an educational background found the lecture style to be educationally unsound because it didn’t cater to different learning styles. The PDC Fiona Campbell and I developed, for example, was 110 hours in duration.

A heirarchy of permaculture education has evolved. This starts with short courses, the duration and content of which is quite variable, as is the quality of teaching. Short or introductory courses provide a limited knowledge of the design system and over the years have been valuable for stimulating further involvement in permaculture.

The enthusiastic student’s next step is to find a PDC that meets their needs. Until recentlty, the Permaculture Institute maintained a register of teachers who signed on to its curriculum that followed the chapters of Bill Mollison’s book, Permaculture-A Desigeners Manual, published by Tagari in 1988. The Institute issued certificates awarded to people completing its PDC. In 2010, this ceased because the costs of maintaining the register exceeded the perceived benefits, however before the Instutute ended the system a number of educators had deviated from it to develop their own PDC structure although their courses retained the core teachings. That would happen in the following decade and it would not be without controversy. Today, there remains a constructive dialogue around whether there is only one ‘classical’ PDC, that prescribed by the Institute, or whether the PDC is a more flexible entity sharing as-yet-undefined core content over all iterations. This is is similar to tensions that have developed in other community-based organisations when people trybto take them in new directions and ‘traditional or ‘conservative’ versus ‘progressive’ strands of thought emerge.

For those wanting more in their permaculture education, there was a diploma level in which students focused on a core area of application.

It’s sometimes been controversial too, but the development of a nationally accredited series of certificate courses and the diploma is now reality. Accredited Permaculture Training-APT-was accepted by the national vocational training authorities several years ago. This did not supercede the PDC as some feared. Obtaining a PDC during the three or four years it takes to do the TAFE-equivalent APT is a necessity.

First courses

Bill Mollison, 2007 Permaculture Convergence, Djanbung Gardens, Nimbin NSW. Photo: Russ Grayson 2007.

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You can imagine those first courses at the dawn of the permaculture design system. The fortunate few who chance had acted upon to stimulate their interest making their way from the mainland, then along Tasmamia’s Bass Strait coast to the village of Stanley.

There, in the garden of the Mollison household they would be regaled with stories of Bill’s life, his observations of natural systems, the damaging trends then visible and ideas for a new beginning that kept the best of the old and discarded the rest.

These people gathered around Bill in that village below The Nut were permaculture’s first coterie of practitioners. Some would go home to teach their own courses and put into action a string of effects that, within a decade, would create a network of practitioners that had spread to distant countries. This was permaculture’s start in the world and it was a seed that would take root, grow into a strong tree and then speciate into new ecological niches.

Bill offered the first Permaculture Design Course at his home in Stanley, Tasmania, in 1979, around one year after the second of the books on permaculture had beem published and two years after Permaculture One had interested and puzzled me in my friend’s home in Hobart. According to Max Lindegger (now working with the Global Ecovillage Movement), the course was attended by 18 people, including himself. After that, the demand for training grew.

The agents trained in the course will be fully franchised when they submit ten designs for Tagari’s approval.

Other courses followed at Tagari community in Tasmania. One was reported in SE Queensland Permaculture’s Permaculture: A newsletter of the subtropics.

“Seventeen people from most corners of Australia gathered for a 2-week course in Permaculture Design at the Tagari Community in Stanley on the north-west coast of Tasmania.

“Bill Mollison lectured about the two Permaculture books and shared his experiences.

“The course is coordinated by Earl Saxon who gave a generalised talk on ecological principles. Bill encouraged the participants to become expert in design but to link up with other people, eg. unemployed groups and trained implementers.

“The emphasis is on sharing with the existing alternative movement for labour and expertise. Paying jobs would come from governments, councils and other institutions and some private urban and farm properties.

“Design aims to maximise energy gains on site. Emphasis is on efficient use of all features (multiuse wherever possible). Design is suited to different needs. Costs vary depending on client abilities to pay—‘cheap’ or ‘in kind’ for the alternative movement—normal landscape fees for institutions, etc, eg. $300 for average urban situations. The amount saved is far in excess of this even in the first few months of living on site.

“The agents trained in the course will be fully franchised when they submit ten designs for Tagari’s approval.

“Designers in Queensland from Brisbane River north are Max Lindegger and Bill Peak at Nambour and Cooroy. From Brisbane River south into NSW to the Bellingen River are John Palmer and Bob Roe from Tomewin and Uki”.

An addendum adds: “One of the 1980 Permaculture design workshops, lectured by Bill Mollison, was held in the Coolangatta region from 27th April to 3rd May, at Tomewin”.

The item speaks of the hopes of the nascent permaculture movement:

• that permaculture would operate as a franchise; the notion of franchising “agents trained in the course” never came to pass; some have said that franchising would have avoided later conflict over the attempt to trademark common terms in permaculture and the registration of permaculture teachers
• the references to “alternatives” hints at the commonality that early permaculture practitioners percieved with the alternative movement and indicates the relevance of that social movement to permaculture’s early development as many early permaculturists came from that movement; it recognises the alternative movement as a constructive thing rather than as some permacultirists of the 90s framed it when they asserted that permaculture had to dissasociate itself from its ‘hippy’ image
• the reference to unemployed groups shows that the design system’s originators saw disadvantaged groups as potential beneficiaries and that permaculture would have social as well as an ecological dividends.

As to the designers mentioned, with the exception of Max Lindegger they were lost to permaculture after its formative years. It revisits the sometimes-heard question (though heard less these days) about why so many of the design system’s early adopters have moved on from permaculture.

The idea that paying jobs would come from government and rural and urban landholders would take years before it even started to gain some veracity. Even today, with a few notable exceptions, local government is not an employer of individuals with permaculture qualifications, those working in it and making use of permaculture ideas having gained their employment through other qualifications. As far as is known, the first local government to include the PDC as a preferred qualification was Randwick City Council, when Fiona Campbell (council’s sustainability educator) specified it for preferred suppliers in architecture, landscape architecture and associated educational work.

Some paid work has come through rural landuse design and home garden design and construction, however permaculture has yet to find a firm niche in its own right in the world of work. The training offered by tne Colemens, in rural Victoria, to potential franchisees of the Jim’s Mowing enterprise in an attempt to establish Jim’s Permaculture didn’t result in a new segment for the business.

Those offering the Accredited Permaculture training through Permaculture International, which owns the training, hope that this will boost the income earning prospect of the design system with the qualification becoming attractive to local government and other employers.

Interestingly, SE Queensland Permaculture, the association that published the newsletter from which the above information has been quoted and which appears to have been distributed shortly after 1980, established a seed bank and seed exchange in the Tweed region.

“The Hindmarsh City Farm project was as early attempt to make use of the then-new idea of permaculture to stimulate a community development and an urban food development project”.

Another early adoptor and graduate of the early Permaculture design courses was Colin Ball from South Australia. He wrote that: ”I attended a permacutlure design course taught by Bill Mollison in 1982.

“After that, I was pretty active in Adelaide for about six years and then moved to the Clare Valley to establish ourselves and get our ‘house in order’”.

Colin was a founding member of the Permaculture Association of South Australia, one of the country’s longest running permaculture organisations.

He contined: ”In the 1980’s I was a community activist and development worker in the Town of Hindmarsh, Adelaide, and instigator of the Urban Permaculture Consultants (UPC, the ‘Urban Trouble Makers’).

“I was also a founding member of Hindmarsh City Farm and co-authoured Sustainable Urban Renewal: Urban Permaculture in Bowden, Brompton and Ridleyton. (Ball; 1985) with the UPC.

“I have been an owner-builder, homesteader and a youth worker and am currently working on relocalisation projects in the Clare Valley, and on writing history.

“The Hindmarsh City Farm project was as early attempt to make use of the then-new idea of permaculture to stimulate a community development and an urban food development project”.

Australia’s first community garden had been established in Nunuwading, Melbourne in 1977, making Hindmarsh one of the first of its type and, with the permaculture influence, probably the first of that particular type.

There had been permaculture people involved in the Nunuwading Community Garden during its early years, but their methods must have caused a little consternation. Years later, a man involved in the garden at the time publicly criticised permaculture people for laying unsightly old carpet on the ground. He was referring to a common technique for smothering weeds, but he came away with a highly critical appreciation of the design system.

The storyteller

Based on the 72-hour duration of the university semester, Bill presented the Permaculture Design Course as an entertaining storyteller. Storytelling was a skill he excelled at and through which he blended fact and anecdote. Somehow, he distilled a lifetime’s learning into a continuous verbal download that was as enthralling as it was exhausting for those trying to take it in.

Others tried to copy his style but none equalled it. The verbal presentation of information, hour after hour, can become stultifying if the teacher does not have the skills of the storyteller. Few do. Curiously, this lecture style remained the model for teaching permaculture until new teachers arrived on the scene in the 1990s and offered a quiety-stated critique of it as less than educationally sound. Mollison could do it, but when others tried the result was not nearly as entertaining or enlightening.

The result was the offering of courses structured around other learning styles. Robin Clayfield and Skye, her partner of the time now living in Brazil, developed a self-structuring, participatory course at their Crystal Waters teaching centre. In Sydney, Fiona Campbell and I developed a part-time, practice-based and urban-oriented course at Randwick Community Centre. In New Zealand in the late-1990s, Robina McCurdy offered a year-long permaculture and organics training course through Planet Organic.

This, at least, brought variety to permaculture education and catered to different learning styles. Yet, students continue to report that even newer teachers continue to offer the chalk-and-talk teaching style, perhaps assuming their students to be empty vessels into which they pour their knowledge. It’s likely that those using this approach are merely mimicing the way they were taught. Even so, the world and teaching has changed considerably since the early days of permaculture, and lecturing university or TAFE teacher style is simply out of date. Students today, often ecucated and working in interactive environments, expect better.

Ready to surface

For the first couple years of the new decade permaculture was quiet. There were things going on under the surface where those-in-the-know gathered-the first design courses had created the first batch of practitioners, Permaculture One and Two were still in print and Permaculture magazine was the design system’s voice in the world. This, though, was all below the perceptual horizon of the wider society.

It would not stay that way for long.

Here and there a critical word

Hippies—they were a bit of a target for Bill. At public talks during the 1980s and into the following decade, he would frequent criticise them, accusing them of indolence and other transgressions.

His comments were something of an anochranism, though, for hippydom had by this time been large
relegated to the annals of social history and why he should mention then at all was a bit of a mystery. My guess is thst he needed a group to compare those involved in permaculture with, just as he would go on to do make the distinction between permaculture and the environment movement.

If you assume that the authentic hippies were self-indulgent layabouts, then there is some basis to separating them from what was called the alternative movement of the 1970s with its interest in creating new ways of living, of affordable building and appropriate technologies, new economic systems and the like. The division, however, could be far from clear cut.

In his attitude to the mainstream environment movement, it seemed Bill was trying to create the perception that permaculture was a solutions-oriented and practice-based social movement whereas the environment movement was focused solely on campaigning. Thus began the permaculture critique of campaigning, although the reality was that many in permaculture supported the aims of those campaigning organisations and participated in their campaigns.

Bill’s message was not unlike that of the late left-wing Sydney bookshop proprieter, Bob Gould. Gould had been a leader of the anti-Vietnam war movement in the late 1960s and was a leading Sydney figure in the New Left. In the years of its rise to influence, like other leftists of the time Bob viewed the environment movement as essentially a middle class phenomena. This was a criticism which, in Marxist circles, carried connotations of undesirability. Despite this, so many of the youth that Gould had led turned to the environment movement just as permaculturists participated in the campaigns of the environmental organisations that Bill critised.

The argument about whether education and demonstrating alternatives leads to social change, or whether more concerted political action is required has surfaced in permaculture from time to time. For Mollison, the social revolution was to be a quiet one of aggregation through attraction, of gaining supporters by demonstrating the common sense and desirability of the permaculture way. Permaculture systems were to be made so attractive and bountiful that it would be difficult not to adopt them and doing this would lead to social change of the right kind. So went the theory.

Twenty years after this discussion in permaculture circles, the Transition movement in the UK had to respond to explain its reasons for taking a non-campaigning line on social change. In an analogous situation to that of permaculture in the 1980s, Transition movement leader, Rob Hopkins, issued an explanation in response to the accusation that it was doing nothing to support the campaign in response to the UK government’s funding cuts and the impact they were having on civil society.

Community-based growth

Jeff Michaels, who with partner Francis Lang left Sydney to move to Crystal Waters ecovillage soon after it was opening in the 1980s. The couple started the successful Green Harvest mail order horticultural supplies business. In the photo, Jeff has just harvested his first crop of yacon.

Jeff Michaels, who with partner Francis Lang left Sydney to move to Crystal Waters ecovillage soon after it was opening in the 1980s. The couple started the successful Green Harvest mail order horticultural supplies business.

By the late-eighties people had invested money in courses and were gaining experience in applying permaculture, mainly in home gardens but increasingly in community initiatives as the work of community-based permaculture associations.

The associations proved a valuable tool in the spread of permaculture and brought people together for learning, socialising and action. Their growth continued well into the 1990s and did not start to decline until late in the decade.

By that time, a number of the early-established associations had ceased or were in a weakened state. The reason why this happened remains unknown. Some say that modern work and home life do not permit participation in community associations as they once did because of time poverty, and that new models of voluntary activity have reduced the need for community associations. An alternative explanation of the decline of Permcaulture associations may be that the design system’s growth crested at that time.

Permaculture territoriality

In popularising the design system the role of community-based associations should not be underestimated, yet sometimes they generated a sense of territoriality, the belief that a particular organisation had ‘rights’ to a particular area.

“There are no territories in Permaculture”, Bill Mollison once said in reference to teaching. He might as well have said the same about community associations. When Permaculture North established itself on Sydney’s northside, the reaction of some in Permaculture Sydney, was why did they not join Permaculture Sydney and strengthen it?

Something analogous happened years later when Permaculture 2000 was started in the Ryde area by graduates of the Permaculture Design Course then offered by Ryde TAFE. Their small numbers proved unsustainable and they joined Permaculture North.

The most extreme incidence of territoriality I have come across occurred in the late-1990s when a Rotary Club in Western Sydney organised an address by Bill Mollison. This proved so successful that it was repeated for the next three or so years.

To my surprise, I received a call from the organiser who was upset about a woman, reportedly from a new permaculture association based in north-western Sydney-Permaculture Hills to Hawkesbury. This woman, she said, had been disruptive at Bill’s talk. The inference seemed to be that the woman felt some ownership of permaculture in the region and was resentful of the organiser in taking the initiative to invite Bill to speak.

Investment of the ethical kind

When Bill haraigned his UK audience about their money, he was motivated by the experience of August Investments, Australia’s first ethical investment start-up.

Set up in 1984 by ethical investment pioneer Damien Lynch—he prefers the term ‘social investment’—August Investments placed investor’s funds into companies that had a beneficial or neutral environmental and social impact. August was the first company to put potential investments through positive and negative-impact filter to assess their social and environmental effects. This weeded out the armament manufacturers, miners and tobacco hawkers.

Ethical investment pioneer, Damien Lynch, who started August Investments, Australia's first ethical investment business in the 1980s. Photo: Rus Grayson 2008.

Damien was inspired by permaculture and later went on to assist in starting Australian Ethical Investments, a Canberra-based company that now trades on the stock market and offers ethical superannuation investment. In the 1990s, he set up EcoForest Ltd, a company accepting investment funds in sustainable timber production. EcoForest had a mixed-species plantation of eucalypt and rainforest timbers in the northern Hunter Valley of NSW but in late-2004 experienced difficulty in attracting investment and went into voluntary receivership.

Not long after August Investments made its start, a Blue Mountains lawyer, Hal Gingis, started Southern Cross Capital Exchange, an organisation that put those with funds into contact with ethical enterprises seeking capital. Southern Cross was forced to close with the introduction of new financial legislation.

In Sydney, the biodynamic Demeter bakery business started by people influenced by the ideas of Austrian philosopher, Rudolf Steiner, gained the attention of those with an interest in ethical investment by raising start-up funds from supporters. Rather than observe the award system set up by the industrial courts to determine the pay levels of its workforce, the bakery was said to negotiate individual pay directly with workers in an approach that presaged the individual working contracts later proposed by the right-wing Howard government.

The allegation about the bakery’s novel wage fixing arrangement is derived from discussions I was privy to at the time with someone who worked there. The bakery is long gone so it is not possible to get their version of the arrangement, however I report it here because, if true as told to me, it raises questions and may contradict permaculture’s second ethic of care of people and its third ethic of fair shares.

It was claimed that bakery management asked would-be workers how much they needed to live and to pay them that amount. That is, staff set their own wages. This might have been a novel idea, however what was not discussed was the potential for workers to undervalue their time and to ask for less so they could have the opportunity of working at the bakery. Working at the bakery was attractive to some seeking more meaningful work, but undiscussed was the potential for workers to bargain themselves down to a low income were competition to develop for places in the workforce… in effect, a race to tne bottom.

The industrial relations and moral arguments around the practice were not addressed by those who supported the bakery and bought its products. The model raised questions of the ‘fair trade’ kind associated with fairness of economic return to producers in developing countries but gives it an Australian focus. This was unfortunate because no matter how good the business, its products or motivation, the potential for exploitation is something that could work against innovative businesses and the social investment industry. The bakery later went out of business.

A difficult path

Robert Rosen in 2009.

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“The Earthbank Society was an initiative of Bill Mollison, founder of the permaculture movement”

Ethical investments was never an easy path to walk. There were claims of lower than average returns on investment and many socially and environmentally aware people, the natural clientele for ethical investment, lacked the financial reserves to invest. Servicing small investments cost a disproportionate amount, a fact that led some ethical organisations to seek only larger deposits from people with greater wealth.

Even when those with a green outlook had adequate funds they proved reluctant to support ethical investment. According to Damien, people with an environmental and social conscience can be reluctant to move away from conventional investment even though the uses investment funds might make of their capital could compromise their environmental ethics. Damien said there was a free-floating suspicion of business and investment among the green-minded that worked against the ethical funds.
Damien had graduated from one of the early permaculture design courses, as did northern NSW resident Robert Rosen, and both did much to popularise social investment. They were involved in Earthbank, an early permaculture initiative set up by the Permaculture Institute to stimulate the sector.

“The Earthbank Society was an initiative of Bill Mollison, founder of the permaculture movement”, explained Robert.

“In 1982 an Alternate Economic Summit, initiated by Mollison, was held in Tasmania. Although only a dozen or so people attended, two major initiatives emerged out of that conference. Oone was the Maleny Credit Union which Jill Jordan took on the task of helping set up. The other was the Earthbank Society.

“A year earlier after attending a permaculture design conference run by Bill Mollison, Damien Lynch had set August Investment Pty Ltd, Australia’s first ethical investment company. Damien went on to establish August Investment Management Ltd (now Australian Ethical Investment Management Ltd), the first ethical investment funds manager in Australia.

“Earthbank was set up by architect and permaculture designer, Geoff Young, and provided the financial and economic philosophy to go hand in hand with permaculture’s permanent agricultural systems. Its original objectives were:

• to increase awareness of the steps required to create a sustainable economic future
• to assist in the economic revitalisation of local communities
• to promote the concepts of social, ethical and community based investment
• to provide assistance and support to financial organizations which adopt social, ethical and environmental investment criteria.

“In practice, much of its work was devoted to the last two of its objectives. Geoff Young helped bring ethical investment to the attention of the media in Australia with early major stories featuring Earthbank and ethical investment appearing in the financial press, radio and TV.

“He produced the Earthbank Ethical Investment Guide. Geoff also contributed a regularly to the International Permaculture Quarterly (Terry White’s Permaculture magazine) on a wide variety issues associated with community economics and ethical investment”.

The Association closed in 1987.

Robert reported that in 1986, Geoff Young convened the successful, and first, National Earthbank Conference in Sydney and later that year he moved from to Queensland to help set up Crystal Waters, the rural village development based on permaculture principles.

Working from the NSW North Coast, Robert took over from Geoff as secretary of the Society.

“In late 1986 the Earthbank Society prepared the feasibility study for the Bellingen District Loan Fund Ltd, a community based socially and environmentally responsible loan fund which was established in the following year”, he explained.

In 1987 the Earthbank Society started receiving an increasing number of enquiries from prospective ethical investors and was regularly fielding media enquiries that had been stimulated by the establishment of the first two ethical managed funds in Australia in 1986-87.

“In 1987, a second very successful Earthbank Conference was held in Sydney, with Roger Pritchard from the United States, an authority on community-based economics and investment as its keynote speaker. Also in that year Earthbank Society of WA was formed.

“Coinciding with growing community awareness in environmental issues, interest in ethical investment increased dramatically in late 1988 and the Earthbank Society began began receiving enquiries not only from the media and interested investors but also from investment advisers, fund managers, banks, insurance companies and stock brokers. After one radio interview on Carolyn Jones’ In Search for Meaning on the ABC, the Society received over 250 letters.

“In 1986 Simply Living magazine ran an article on ethical investment which elicited more letters from readers than any other article since the magazine had started. Following the article, the editor, Verna Simpson, and Geoff Young appeared on Ray Martin’s Midday Show and talked about ethical investment. As a result, Simply Living received 500 more letters asking for information about this new form of investment”.

Simply Living was a glossy magazine produced in Sydney that blended stories on the emerging green movement with lifestyle reporting. In a way it mainstreamed those green causes. It made its own contribution to popularising them and the green movement of that time. In many ways it presaged the ‘green’ magazines that appeared with the new century when what passes for ‘green lifestyles’ had achieved a more solid foundation. Simply Living seems to have been largely forgotten now though it deserves recognition for taking what were in some cases still fringe green ideas to a mainstream audience.

Robert said that early in 1989 Edwin Macpherson, an experienced investment consultant, contacted him about what could be done to help ethical investment really get off the ground in Australia. The outcome was to set up an Australia-wide network of specialist ethical investment planners in the form of Money Matters Financial Group Pty Ltd, a licensed security dealer specialising in socially and environmentally responsible investment. Money Matters started operations in February 1989.

“One of the other major impediments to the growth of ethical investment in Australia was seen as a lack of people’s confidence in the security and returns that ethical investments can give as well as a lack of trust in the investment industry generally”.

Like Damien Lynch’s Ecoforest Pty Ltd 20 years later, it seems that Money Matters was still a little ahead of its time and it eventually went out of business. Maleny Credit Union, however, contunues as a unique financial institution.

Tucked away behind its garden of palms and ferns on Maleny’s main street, the credit union offers loans for approved and ethical investment as well as a deposits service. The credit union has prided itself on making loans available to people considered uncreditworthy by conventional institutions. In the 1990s, a permaculture credit union opened its doors in the USA.

Most ethical financial services have been small businesses, however the community-based LETS (Local Employment Trading System or Local Energy Transfer System) that emerged in the 1990s was community based. LETS was an idea that found a ready market and took off and the West Australian government even publishing a manual to assist local LETSystems get started. Blue Mountain LETS successfully negotiated with the Department of Social Security so that LETS credits would not be counted as income for beneficiaries.

Introduced into Australia by a Canadian who sometimes worked from an office at Randwick Community Centre in Sydney where Sydney LETS, which failed to get started, and Permaculture Sydney was based, the system fostered trading between individuals who agreed on the exchange rates for transactions. Credits and debits were recorded on a computer database. No direct exchange between transactors was necessary as in bartering. Participants provided and obtained goods and services as needed, without the exchange of currency. North LETS, operating in Northern NSW, issued its own banknote-like currency in the mid-1990s.

Alternative financial structures formed part of most permaculture design courses. At the Randwick Community Centre courses, Sue Doust took students back to the community economic systems of the 1930s and on to more recent examples in the USA. It was inclusion in courses that stimulated the interest within permaculture in community trading and banking systems, yet, although there was a great deal of interest, community economics remained a minor part of permaculture application. This may have somethng to do with the probability that most students were interested primarily in horticulture.

Permaculture could rightly claim early ‘ownership’ of the idea of ethical investment and LETS for it was often permaculture people who started LETS systems in its early days, before LETS built up its own momentum and went independent in the late-1980s and 1990s.

These economic initiatives of people inspired by permaculture demonstrate that in its early phase the design system had a breadth of focus and a seriousness that later gave way to a focus on gardening. This itself was a product of the design system’s success, when television gardening programs picked up on that partucular and popular aspect of its practice. As observers of the media, and as those who have worked within it know, when this happens the element docused on gets blown out of proportion.

When the economic focus is considered along with the earlier social focus of pemaculture’s early adopters, you get the idea that the design system was once envisioned somewhat differently than it turned out.

Rewriting the past

“We’ve got to get away from the hippy image”, the man told the meeting. “We’ve got to be more mainstream”.

This was a familiar assertion to those who had been around permaculture for a few years. When the speaker restated them to the 1997 Permaculture Convergence in Nimbin he was parroting earlier concerns about the public image of the design system.

The perception that permaculture still occupied the social fringe led, in the late-1980s, to some new to permaculture to urge what would have amounted to a rewriting of the early history of the movement to distance it from its earlier appeal to the alternative subculture. They believed permaculture carried the stigma of a ‘hippy’ – ‘hippy farming, – and that this image reflected poorly on the design system and put people off.

There was a little truth to the allegation. The design system’s early association with the alternative movement would take time to start to fade from memory, however it’s another thing to write the critical nexus of permaculture and the alternative movement out of existence. Permaculture is a product of that movement as much as that movement was a product of the social churn that characterised the 1970s.

It has proven an amazingly durable perception. It could still be heard, thought with decreasing frequency, well into the 1990s. But by that time, the only places hippies were likely to be found were as stuffed specimens in museums of social history. Such utterings came mainly from younger people coming into permaculture and reflected the biases of those making the claim. Mollison, too, had criticised ‘hippies’ but had described permaculture as a positive practice at odds with the popular image of that subculture.

To deny permaculture’s past is to deny the social context of its formative years. Like all movements, permaculture was a product of its times, and its formative times were the late-1970s in all their social flux and difference.

The journal moves north

Robyn has travelled down separately and I met up with her in Melbourne. The year was 1986 and Terry White was about to hand over production of Permaculture magazine. Terry had kept Permaculture in publication despite starting it when the design system was in its infancy and when practitioners were few.

The publication was brought back to Sydney where it was renamed the International Permaculture Journal (later renamed the Permaculture International Journal). It was put together by a small volunteer crew in the backroom of the Permaculture Sydney EpiCentre at 113 Enmore Road. The centre had been opened by Bill Mollison on a Saturday afternoon not long before. There, we laboriously typed, cut and pasted the editions together. Those were the days before desktop publishing software.

A legal entity was established to publish the magazine—Permaculture International Limited. The journal stayed in Sydney until Robyn returned from an overseas teaching assignment. It then went with her to the NSW north coast where it remained, the editorship passing from Robyn to Steve Payne (now editor of the ABC Organic Gardening magazine) who saw the PIJ through to its final edition in the year 2000.

A decade of growth

That permaculture was a presence at some level in Australia is attested to by a passing mention in a statement that introduces Byron Bay on the Lonely Planet website: “The [town's] focus changed from primary production to ecotourism, permaculture, alternative medicine, bush tucker farming, music and the arts. Surfing culture flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, while the Aquarius Festival in Nimbin in 1973 put the area on the map as a mecca for hippies”.

Permaculture in the 1980s grew from a nascent design system towards the maturity it would achieve in later years. This was the decade when the system went public, when it left its Tasmanian homeland to infect first Australia, then the world.

In the big picture permaculture was still largely unknown. But in Australia, attention from the mainstream media was propelling it into the public awareness. There, it would bloom in the coming decade.

Our basic transport to the first International Permaculture Convergence, which was held at Pappinbarra.

Permaculture peaks — the 1990s…

…Live Smart. Think for Yourself. Transform the Future

IT WAS THE 1990s and permaculture was on a roll. The hard work of the 1980s was paying off. There was greater public awareness of permaculture, more courses came on offer and were attracting a greater number of participants. The path ahead seemed clear and the movement was permeated with optimism.

You would see and hear this optimism at the permaculture convergences—the biannual gathering of the far-flung permaculture tribe. Unlike convergences that would come with the new century, those of this period continued to focus primarily on the development of Permaculture skills and ideas. They were mainly a means of educating those who had done a Permaculture Design Certificate. An example was the workshop presented by veteran New Zealand permaculture educator, Robina McCurdy, and Joanna Tebbitt from the UK. This took participants through a process based on PLA—the Participatory Learning and Action process (then known by the acronym PRA—Participatory Rural Appraisal) in use by international development agencies and adapted by the two women for use in the planning of permaculture projects.

The optimism among permaculture’s practitioners of the time was based on real achievements—permaculture was riding high on a wave of increasing popularity. The decade brought an expansion into new areas of activity such as community food gardening, permaculture in schools and overseas aid.

Bill and women

It was another of Bill’s talks at the University of Technology, Sydney. The time, the mid-1990s. He had just finished his talk and questions were now coming from the audience. Not many questions; perhaps what he had said would have to sink in a bit before thoughts could arise around it. Many there would not have questioned Bill Mollison anyway, as they were aleady favourably disposed towards his message.

One questioner, though, was a woman sitting in the middle rows of the lecture hall. I don’t recall what she asked but I do recall it was harmless enough and didn’t challenge Bill. It was more a question of clarification or explanation but Bill’s response to that unfortunate woman was such that she must have squirmed in her seat a little.

Whether or not this response occurred more frequently with women remains conjecture, however more than one female Permaculture activist has said that Bill was tougher in his attitude to females. Some said he was a misogynist, though other women said that it was just his traditional Australian male attitude to women.

An example of Bill’s propensity to give the unexpected is the anecdote about his being invited to address a UK assembly of Permaculture people. The audience came anticipating a talk on organic gardening but what they got was a talk about economics and the need for their organisation to withdraw its funds from the Bank of England and invest in something more ethical.

In later years, Bill would wander from the subject while giving addresses though this could still be entertaining. Some said that it produced a reluctance for event organisers to invite him to speak.

Bill was an accomplished public speaker who could draw on anecdotes amusing and tragic to illustrate his point. He was a storyteller and his public addresses during the early years of Permaculture were critical to the popularisation of the design system. They are remembered fondly by those who experienced them.

Gardening with the community

It was a flat field of lawn when the gardeners arrived early on a Saturday morning. A chainlink fence surrounded the patch on three sides and a slope with a sandstone shelf projecting from it formed its northern boundary. The sole item of vegetation, apart from the lawn, was a Camphor Laurel tree growing from the embankment.

The council trucks arrived precisely on nine. The larger disgorged a tray load of organic matter while the smaller unhitched a Bobcat. By three in the afternoon a circular garden and six allotments had been constructed. Randwick Community Organic Garden was a reality.

The garden was the design project of the urban Permaculture Design Course Fiona Campbell and I were running at Randwick Community Centre, a course we offered for the best part of a decade. The students, having completed the design, had become so enthusiastic that they had to make the garden.

This was not the first of Sydney’s community gardens. That honour goes to Glovers Community Organic Garden in Rozelle. It was operating in 1986, a full nine years before the Randwick garden. There have been reports of earlier gardens but none of these have been confirmed and recollections seem to be hearsay rather than first hand knowledge.

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Sydney's first community garden Glovers Community Garden, made its start in 1985 and has served as a place to visit for Permaculture courses.

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Others followed Glovers. Sydney-based permaculture designer, Bronwyn Rice, designed and oversaw the construction of Eveleight Street Community Garden, a project with the Redfern Aboriginal community. The Angel Street Permaculture Garden in inner-urban Newtown was built by a team whom South Sydney City Council had refused land in Sydney Park for a city farm. More would follow as community gardening picked up momentum through the 1990s.

Community food gardening had long been practiced in Europe and the US, but it did not get underway in Australia until the first, Nunuwading Community Garden, made a start in Melbourne in October 1977. It was here that permaculture was to play a part, but this was not the part it would have desired. I learned about it from someone who was a member of Nunuwading when it started and who later worked with Rockdale Council in southern Sydney.

“They created a mess”, he told those at the meeting to explore the possibility of community gardens of the permaculturists who joined the Nunuwading garden. “They brought in bits of old carpet and covered the soil with this. It was an eyesore”. Clearly, here was a difference over process and aesthetics. It would not be the last time such differences surfaced in regard to the work of permaculture.

Creating a network

Permaculture continued to play a role in community garden development in Sydney but in a more constructive way especially after the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network was set up by Dr Darren Phillips in 1995.

Morag Gamble and Evan Raymond in Queensland, then associated with Brisbane’s successful Northey Street City Farm, and Fiona and I became state contacts for the network. Later, Fiona and I set up the community gardens network website.

Although Darren was not associated with permaculture, the Network was populated by permaculture people from its start and it continues to be so although many community gardeners have no association with the design system. For those managing the Network who are associated with permaculture (not all people in that role are), educating, avocating and assisting the practice of community gardening is how they enact their permaculture.

Some of the community gardens set up with the assistance of South Sydney City Council (now absorbed into the City of Sydney) had notice boards that attempted to explain permaculture and its role. Most of these have now disappeared from the gardens, however most alluded to permaculture as a method of sustainable agriculture or gardening, reinforcing the message that the design system is all about organic gardening. That may change. The 2004 community garden network weekend at Bendigo, Victoria, organised by Melbourne’s Cultivating Community, attracted participants involved in both community garden development and permaculture design, raising hopes for a broader interpretation of the design system.

Permaculture had a design role at Bendigo’s Gravel Hill Community Garden. The garden is different to others in that it produces organic products for the local food market, grows food for a CSA (a Community Supported Agriculture or subscription farm scheme that operates from the community garden) and trained people through the federal government’s Work for the Dole programme. Given permaculture’s association with social programs early in its history, its role at Gravel Hill and at Northey Street City Farm suggested a return to those times when social design was as important as landscape and garden design.

That, however, was not the conception of permaculture that emerged in the nineties. Social design is today a concept sometimes mentioned by designers and permaculture people but is largely neglected. This I attribute at least in part to what is offered in permaculture courses and to the low numbers of active permaculture people with a background or training in community work. Its partial disappearance has been a loss to permaculture as a social and sustainability technology. The nexus of community gardening and permaculture, however, offers the potential for a type of garden-based training and social centre serving the real needs of society.

Permaculture is something of a latecomer to community gardening. Although there were some permaculture-associated people active in it when the Network was created and even before that (Sydney permaculture designer, Bronwyn Rice, designed and trained people in the Eveleigh Street Community Garden in Redfern), it is only in comparatively more recent years that permaculture people have become involve in any substantial way.

Enthusiasm or poor advice

An interesting product of this involvement has been that a few permaculture trained people, with no experience as community gardeners, no association with the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network and no substantial knowledge, gained from involvement, of the needs and practices of community gardening have recently started to offer advice to people wanting to set up community gardens.

Somewhat astounding was a claim made publicly that it was those community gardens in which permaculture had played no part that ran into difficulties or failed. This was a blatant untruth and contrary to evidence. One of the most dysfunctional community gardens I knew of was, in fact, a ‘permaculture’ community garden. This was not due to horticultural reasons but to attitudinal causes which degraded the relationship with both landholder and council. In part, this and similar episodes can be put down to ignorance of council processes and needs within the permaculture movement. Councils are sometimes criticised for being tardy or obstructionist but, leaving aside the cases where that may be true, some in permaculture do not recognise the legitimate opinions of people who have other ideas on what should happen on public land and of council need to take those into account. There have been other cases where the permaculture trained have engendered poor relations with local government and cases where people with no experience of developing a patch of public land or of managing a community green have offered advice. Among professional and local government planner and decision makers, this lack of experience soon becomes obvious and can lead to a poor impression of the design system and its practitioners.

The assumption behind that claim that a lack of permaculture presence leads to community garden failure, apparently, was that possession of a Permaculture Design Certificate somehow provided all the insight into community gardening that was needed to lead their design and construction process. The evidence is that this is a false assumtion, many design courses being deficient in the group and social skills and knowledge that is core to effective community garden design and management.

The problem with this presumption that someone can assist people design and manage something they have never participated in is that poor advice made without direct experience in community gardening (which is substantially different to home gardening) can discredit the design system. Interestingly, in one instance it was a local government officer who alerted me to this.

Also disappointing is the lack of networking by those people with the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network, lending credence to the idea held by some working in sustainability and social milieus that permaculture is a world to itself, that groups exist within their own little bubble rather than taking a collaborative approach.

Permaculture goes to school

It was 1995, the week before the national Permaculture Convergence in Adelaide, South Australia, and forty or so people had gathered in the suburb of Black Forest for a three-day intensive course with Robina McCurdy, an energetic New Zealander who had developed an approach to introducing permaculture to schools and to working with children in general.

Robina would later go on to aid work in the South African drylands and, after that, in the Capetown squatter settlement. She then returned to New Zealand to set up the year-long Planet Organic Permaculture and organics training course, the first major initiative in permaculture training since the PDC was first offered.

Robina’s Adelaide course signalled the start of permaculture involvement with schools in Australia, although there had been isolated initiatives before. Some, like the impressive garden at Black Forest primary in Adelaide, with its curriculum and in-service training for teachers, had been developed without permaculture input and is now in its thirtieth year, managed by a local Black Forest permaculture activist and community garden network leader, Kate Hubmeyer.

Permaculture Goes to School was the title of a publication Fiona and I produced following the course. It contained a bibliography drawn up by participants as well as articles.

There was excitement around this new avenue of permaculture activism and Robina’s presence stimulated it. One of her early proteges, Sally Ramsden, was soon offering training workshops around the country. Projects were started in schools.

Fiona and I assisted a primary school in Hurstville establish a food garden. Later, we were involved with Lewisham primary in inner-urban Sydney where we were funded as part of a school grounds redesign team.

Apart from Robina, the most durable and authoritative product on permaculture in schools came not from Sydney but from Brisbane where teacher Carolyn Nuttall developed an edible garden with students at Seville Road State School in Holland Park. Her 1995 book, A Children’s Food Forest, is based on her experience and remains the reference for people interested in the area. Years later, Carolyn co-wrote another book about applying permaculture in schools with Queensland permaculture practitioner and ex-teacher, Janet Millington. It was called Outdoor Classrooms.

Permaculture in schools remained a growth area until early in the new century, but then interest started to dissipate. This was puzzling given the energy evident following Robina’s 1995 courses. The pertinent question is: what led to decline? I have no answer, just a few ideas:

• New practices require the presence and stimulus of a trainer to provide follow-up and keep the momentum going for some time after it is introduced. With Robina going into international development work in South Africa and Sally Ramsden eventually moving on, the main reference people were gone.
• Market saturation—there are only so many permaculture people in Australia and only so many of those are interested in permaculture in schools. Perhaps, after Robina’s initial flurry of workshops had caught the permaculture imagination and the follow-up that Sally and others provided, all those who were interested had received training.
• Permaculture in schools can only be carried out during school hours. If the times allocated by the school do not coincide with the times available to the Permaculture designer, then the activity will not happen. As well, there were only so many schools intersted in the idea.
• Permaculture in schools is mainly a voluntary activity. The lack of income is a brake on long-term involvement and sustainability.
• Successful permaculture in school projects rely on integrating training with school curricula to make school kitchen gardens and landscape design more relevant to core school activity rather than being an add-on or hobby activity. This requires the production of training resources such as manuals, a time consuming process for which there is little prospect of financial return unless a grant can be obtained. Without integration, teachers are less likely to welcome something that takes the focus from an already-crowded curriculum.
• Lack of a media to publicise and sustain the activity. The Permaculture International Journal (PIJ) was the avenue through which people learned of permaculture in schools. The journal carried a number of pages dedicated to working with children in permaculture and Carolyn Nuttall produced a instructive column in every edition. The loss of the PIJ deprived readers of that information.
• One of permaculture’s weak spots has been a lack of evaluation of its activities. Permaculture in schools is no exception. The absence of evaluation deprives the movement of learning because projects are not documented and, therefore, are not repeatable. Weaknesses and strengths go unidentified; information is lost, the record is bare and permaculture’s ‘corporate memory’ is weakened.

As well as the public record of permaculture in schools, the practice has faded although a small number of permaculture-trained people continue to receive grants for the work and those like Leonie Shanahan in Queensland continue to do innovative work. There are now signs that a conjunction of community gardens and schools may provide the stimulus the field needs for its revival. How that eventuates remains to be seen but servicing schools is proving a successful field of activity at Northey Street City Farm and other community gardens which are becoming involved.

Local government in Sydney, in a few cases, is investigating working in schools on permaculture-like projects although there is no reference to the design system in their work and those responsible for the activity often have no knowlege of permaculture in schools as it was developed in the 1990s. The work is the responsibility of new local government positions such as that of Sustainability Education Officer, a role that also entails working with local institutions, business and the public.

The importance of mainstream media

Bill Mollison stands amid the mulch and shrubs of his garden… the image cuts from one showing the bare grounds when he moved in to an image of the garden in full bloom… the camera pans… the bearded figure crouches… he places a sheet of newspaper as a weed barrier and mulch layer on the soil then addresses the camera: “This is the best use for advertising… for bad news”, he says. Surveying his garden, he turns to face the camera: “I would like to run this all the way into Murwillumbah”.

This was Mollison at his best, the entertaining teacher who used humour to make an important point. His face, with its trim grey beard and suntanned and wrinkled skin appears that of a knowledgable father figure passing on wisdom. It is how Mollison appeared on ABC TV in a video production entitled In Grave Danger of Falling Food. Like the broadcast of Heartlands a few years before, the production, by Julian Russell and Tony Gailey, attracted wide attention. It proved very important in bringing permaculture before an audience larger than it could ever have achieved by itself. No media organisation has been more important to permaculture than the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). Through television and radio, the national broadcaster brought permaculture to a broad, national audience. Max Lindegger, Robyn Francis, myself and others have received coverage on a number of ABC radio and television networks.

For television, Bill was the iconoclast, the boldly outspoken elder unafraid of ruffling egos… good talent in front of the camera. Yet, despite this outspokeness, Bill could get a point across quite successfully. David Holmgren at this time was still developing Melliodora, his central Victorian property, and although he did appear in public with increasing frequency it was Bill who attracted the cameras and who retained his prominence as the unofficial, unelected ‘leader’ of the permaculture movement.  David’s time would come, but not for a few years.

In Grave Danger of Falling Food was a one-off programme that attracted the public’s attention but had less impact than the later four-part production, The Global Gardener, a series that looked at permaculture overseas and in Australia. Consisting of four, 30 minute segments: tropical, arid land, cool climate and urban permaculture and filmed in Australia, the US, Europe, Africa and India, Global Gardener was the most successful of all the video productions about permaculture. Destined to be rerun twice on the ABC, community-based permaculture associations and teachers—most likely in breach of copyright—have made use of the videotape as an educational tool.

This last point bears some reflection because it highlights a dichotomy in permaculture education. Teachers—and I am generalising here—would often not hesitate to make use of copyright materials in courses, yet within permaculture there was a strand of thought that was protective of intellectual property. I recall one case in which the use of a permaculture educator’s photographs was denied to another educator as she planned to use them some time later in her own publication. There was an early emphasis in a few cases of asserting copyright of permaculture designs for properties. The reality was that under the Copyright Act those designs were already protected, suggesting a lack of understanding of copyright that was to surface some years later. The assertion of legal rights regarding private intellectual property could appear contradictory for a system that sought to push the thinking envelope when it came to design for sustainability.

Global Gardener pushed permaculture before prime time audiences and can be credited with filling permaculture courses after it was first broadcast. This we experienced in our Permaculture introductory and design courses in Sydney and the phenomenon was experienced by educators elsewhere, too.  If anything boosted the prospects of the design system during the decade, it was this production. Unfortunately, as the transition was made from videotape to DVD, Global Gardener missed out. Apart from pirated copies transferred to DVD, the series is all but lost to permaculture educators.

Over the longer term however, it was permaculture’s own media, the Permaculture International Journal, that deepened understanding of the design system. The journal brought people together in a community of interest and engendered a common identity. The PIJ, first under the editorship of Robin Francis and later Steve Payne (at the time of writing, editor of ABC Organic Gardener magazine), continued to fulfil its valuable role as networker, news source and educator through the decade of the 1990s. Originally available only through subscription, the magazine later became a mass market journal available through newsagencies and it was one of permaculture’s success stories through the design systems’ growth spurt through the 1990s. Little could those eagerly awaiting the arrival of their subscription in their letter box or scanning the magazine racks in the newsagent in search of the latest edition imagine that this was the PIJ’s final decade.

Spreading the message by type and print

Bill Mollison and Reny Slay released their 1991 book, Introduction to Permaculture, just in time for what was to become a growing interest in permaculture. Bill’s Permaculture—A Designer’s Manual had appeared in 1988 and was more a product for the trained permaculture designer. Introduction to Permaculture was a basic text aimed at the general reader.

Like the Designer’s Manual, the publication of Introduction to Permaculture was timely. There had been no popular exposition of permaculture since Permaculture One and Permaculture Two back at the end of the 1970s. Now, with public interest increasing, a new introductory book was just what was needed. Introduction to Permaculture would go into reprint by the end of the decade and it remains in print today.

Unlike books, video productions are ephemeral and are soon lost unless distributed on videotape or DVD. Fortunately, the ABC had the good sense to sell the videotape of In Grave Danger of Falling Food. This made the production available to a wider audience and to those not near a television set when it was broadcast. The ABC also marketed copies of The Global Gardener, the 1991production by the team which had made In Grave Danger of Falling Food.

There were other productions by permaculture videographers in the ’90s but these were not made for broadcast. A series of short productions came out of Crystal Waters ecovillage as a means of explaining the place. In 1995, a videotape was released about the work of Carolyn Nuttall’s permaculture in school project. Entitled A Children’s Food Forest as was her book, the tape was less useful than the book released the following year.

As for permaculture magazines, Permaculture Edge, started by Permaculture Nambour Association, had by the mid-90s gone to Permaculture Western Australia for continued publication. For years troubled by an erratic publishing schedule, the magazine made its final appearance at the 1996 international convergence. While it may have been possible to revive the publication it would have required a substantial investment in design, content development and marketing. Nobody had the energy for that.

Meanwhile, PIJ had become available from newsagents, a move that took it to a wider readership and placed permaculture further into the public eye. Financial viability had always been a challenge and now, to pay for national distribution, advertising took on greater importance.

In Victoria, in the rural town of Castlemaine, a quietly determined redhead named Joy Finch was about to launch a new magazine, Green Connections. More modern in presentation than PIJ, the magazine would compete with PIJ on the newsstands. It reported permaculture and a mix of associated material but, despite the appeal of Green Connections, PIJ maintained its loyal readership and the two were to coexist for a time.

Other permaculture titles released in the 1990s include:

• a book on permaculture design by West Australian Ross Marrs, The Basics of Permaculture Design
• You Can have Your Permaculture and Eat It Too, a combination permaculture garden design manual and recipe book launched at the 1997 Perth Permculture Convergence by Maleny (Queensland) based permaculture educator, Robin Clayfield.

A new teaching manual

In 1993, Blue Mountains permaulture teacher and international development worker, Rosemary Morrow, set down her approach to permaculture design in the Earth User’s Guide to Permaculture. Like Mollison’s Introduction to Permaculture, her’s was a book aimed at newcomers.

Some preferred Rosemary’s book to Bill Mollison’s Introduction to Permaculture, but despite its popularity among teachers it did not displace Bill’s book from its pre-eminent place—Mollison’s name had cachet when it came to credibility though Rosemary had more than enough of that too.

After Rosemary’s book went on sale the story circulated that Bill had objected to it because some of the content was similar to his own work. This was due to a misunderstanding by Bill and the Permaculture Institute that copyright protected ideas as well as content. Bill later admitted this when he moved to trademark the terms ‘permaculture design’ and ‘permaculture course’. Copyright protects only a particular expression of an idea, not the idea itself. Bill could not stop others writing about permaculture and elements of it that he had developed.

To make Earth User’s Guide to Permaculture more useful to permaculture teachers, in 1997 Rosemary released the Earth User’s Guide to Permaculture Teacher’s Notes. This was something Fiona Campbell, Sydney permaculture educator Sue Doust and I worked on.

The 1990s were a bumper year for permaculture publishing and Australian titles were complemented with other from the UK. It was the publishing glut that preceded the drought.

The attrition of teachers

By the late-1980s teaching had become a growing area of permaculture activity, not least because there were few other outlets for the skills picked up in permaculture training—no employers were advertising for permaculture designers.

Teaching was, and continues to be seen by new PDC graduates as an opportunity to develop a livelihood. This is seldom the reality. Setting up as a teacher of permaculture demands a lot of commitment and expense in developing a set of teaching resources and acquiring teaching equipment. With the new accredited permaculture training, becoming a teacher involves the expense of acquiring a certificate in workplace training and in meeting other costs. This is a barrier to all but those very serious about their teaching and serves as a filter of those less committed.

At times, existing teachers have been reluctant to assist those who aspire to teach. Teachers jealously hold on to the instructional materials they develop and newcomers are soon disabused of the notion that existing teachers will be happy to share their resources. A number of trainers have been asked for assistance by would-be teachers, usually in the sharing of teaching resources, but this has—privately at least—been met with a firm negative response.

The teaching of permaculture has been a boom and bust phenomenon. By the end of the 1980s a number of teachers had established themselves along the eastern seaboard and were offering the PDC and associated courses on a regular basis. It was a good start and was to be reinforced by greater student numbers whose interest had been stimulated by mainstream media coverage and, to some extent, by the distribution of PIJ through news agencies. But within a decade permaculture teaching would run into its own limits to growth. With the exception of Robyn Francis in Nimbin and Jeff Lawton of the Permaculture Research Institute, most of those offering PDCs in the 1980s and the 1990s have now left teaching:

• Lea Harrison ceased to offer the PDC in the early 1990s
• Jude and Michel Fanton stopped offering permaculture education and instead developed specialised courses in seed saving from their Seed Savers Network premises in Byron Bay
• the Gravenstein’s offered farming-oriented permaculture design courses in southern NSW and Victoria but dropped out of teaching
• Southern Highlands Permaculture in NSW used to offer the PDC on a part-time basis
• Action for World Development, a Sydney-based development education organisation, offered a part-time design course in the late-1990s led by permaculture activist Jill Finnane, as well as short introductory courses; that ceased with the closure of the organisation
• Bronwyn Rice was a horticulturist and landscape designer who offered a part-time PDC in Sydney in the early 1990s and who taught in courses organised by Pacific Edge; she has since dropped out of the permaculture scene
• the van Raders, who live on tropical North Queensland’s Atherton Tableland, ceased offering the PDC in the late-1990s and withdrew from their national presence within the permaculture milieu
• Pacific Edge offered a longer, part-time, urban-oriented PDC through the 1990s after starting in teaching with Rosemary Morrow and in the permaculture elective of the TAFE horticulture course in Sydney; they continue to offer shorter, urban-oriented permaculture workshops and courses through local government.

There are many reasons why people move into and out of permaculture teaching. For some, teaching is only a part-time activity and the demands of their regular employment take precedence. Others try it the way children dip their toes into a swimming pool to see how cold the water is, then withdraw when they realise that there is little financial reward for a lot of work. Some fade away in the face of competition from established teachers. All learn that organising quality courses is very time demanding and is something they do not have the knowledge or skills to teach all by themselves. Often, it’s the simple application of the concept of time, financial and energy return on investment that leads to people first trying teaching, then dropping out.

Few seem to develop a realistic business model and base their decision to offer teaching on assumptions and guesswork. Some simply offer courses because they have been motivated by their own training.  Most of those offer only a few courses before they drop out of regular teaching. Then there’s the all-important question of the level of demand for permaculture design education, something that has proven variable with only the established teachers riding through the periods of low demand.

By the late-1990s the market for permaculture education had reached saturation and too few students were leading to teacher dropout. At one stage there were four teaching venues between Nimbin and Crystal Waters; too many, it turned out.

A new cohort of permaculture teachers emerged in the 1990s:

• Morag Gamble and partner Evan Raymond started teaching after they moved from Brisbane to Crystal Waters ecovillage where they expanded their offerings through their organisation, SEED International (Sustainable Education and Environmental Design)
• Naomi and Rick Coleman started to offer the PDC through their organisation, Southern Cross Permaculture Institute, from their rural property in Gippsland, southern Victoria
• the PDC was offered by Dick Copeman who was then based at Northey Street City Farm in Brisbane.

Training appears to still be available at times through the Permaculture Association of South Australia and in Perth, Western Australia.

Permaculture Melbourne seems to have opted out of teaching although an association of permaculture teachers has emerged from the organisation. Rosemary Morrow, in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, offered a course in the late-1990s and continue to do so.

David Holmgren started to offer permaculture courses in the 1990s after he set up his smallholding in rural Victoria. Bill Mollison still teaches on a occasional basis, sometimes in Tasmania and occasionally as a guest teacher in the USA.

Reaching the natural limit

In Sydney, Fiona and I first taught the PDC with Rosemary Morrow, initially in the Pittwater region then on the Central Coast. After that, Rosemary left to work on projects in Vietnam and Cambodia. People would call, asking if we were planning to teach more courses. No, we were not, we would tell them. But why not, we thought?

Rather than the 14-day intensive format in which most PDCs were offered, we followed Rosemary’s example by offering a part-time course on weekends. The course grew to more than 100 hours because we found the 72-hour format developed by Bill Mollison too short for practical, participatory learning. We also added a segment on people skills, group skills and planning skills because we had found them conspicuously lacking in permaculture training.

Earlier, we had taught introductory courses for a community college and managed to fill them, thanks to The Global Gardener. Permaculture education was enjoying boom times but we eventually passed the introductory courses over to one of our students who had expressed an interest in teaching.

Courses were now offered in most states but by late in the decade competition had left only the Crystal Waters crew, the Permaculture Research Institute and Robyn Francis’ Permaculture Education as training providers in the Northern Rivers district. The market in the region ‘rationalised’ to the maximum number of providers it can sustain. Teaching reached a point of statis the boundaries of which, by 2003, were defined by a market no longer expanding sufficiently (if at all) for newcomers to set up. Now, with accredited training, there is again the chance to expand the numbers in training and to financially sustain the sometimes shaky incomes of the teachers.

It was only last year that someone emailed me, asking advice on moving to the NSW country where they hoped to earn a livelihood teaching permaculture. I suggested, as delicately as I could, that they consider other livelihood options. Then, in 2011, a woman who had completed her permaculture training said that she was going to set up an enterprise offering edible landscaping and a commercialisation of the Permablitz model. I ticked off in my mind how many businesses I have encountered offering edible landscaping over the yeard, recalled that a friend who is a professional landscape architect and who has integrated permaculture design into his work still does not attract sufficient business from that area, and wondered how the voluntary Permablitz participants would take to an attempt to commercialise their activity. I said nothing of this because I want to encourage entrepreneurialism in permaculture design.

New beginnings, new endings

I remember that morning. It was sunny and warm as the four of us climb into Julia de Brosses’ ageing green Kombi, her sometime home on wheels, and motor out onto Showground Road past the tall clumping bamboo that marks the entrance to Djanbung Gardens. A right turn takes us down Cullen Street through the still-quiet town of Nimbin—is this a town of late risers or are we just setting off early? Here, the murals on the shopfronts are somewhat faded, much like the memories of those seemingly-far-off days of 1973 when the Aquarius Festival resurrected from its rural backwater slumber this one-time dairy town on the decline.

A couple minutes is all it takes to traverse the town and descend towards the bridge that crosses the stream on whose bank stands the old building now serving as town cinema and home to a recording studio. Then its down into second gear to wind up the hill and follow the hardtop through a picturesque farming landscape backed by steep ridges clad in the dark green of subtropical rainforest, all the way to Uki.

I had spent time in Nimbin before, sometimes attending Robyn Francis’ post-PDC specialist, week long courses or visiting friends who used to live at nearby Mountaintop, a district of scattered farms atop the ridges to the immediate south of the town. I say ‘used to live’ because, like others who were attracted to Nimbin’s alternativeness, they grew unhappy with the changing culture as it evolved over the years and set off for the coast. There they’ve lived ever since, in three locations all up in what appears to me as a type of nomadic home owner existence. I think they’re happy now, living in a hamlet of the Pacific Highway to the north of Byron Bay and some distance inland of Brunswick Heads, or at last I think they should be.

There’s not much to Uki where it nestled below the dominating volcanic plug known as Mt Warning so we drive on in the direction of Murwillumbah. Where the Uki road meets that traversing the Tweed Valley we turn left—inland—forsaking the sparse flights of the town for the town of Tyalgum. Here, if its a hot summer day and you have the inclination, you enjoy a cold beer below the sheltering awning of the hotel. Once, I had come over the road that comes into town here from further out in the Tweed after spending the with friends living in their large house-ified farm shed on their small rural parcel below a banana plantation. They had a fine outlook, their northern horizon the grey-green forested ramparts of the Border Range. This was inspiring country in its ruggedness and juxtaposition of farm and forest, hill and mountain… the sort of place that might have inspired poets of the Romantic era.

It was into just this sort or country that Julia took the Kombi, turning in the opposite direction at the intersection and following a short section of hardtop that narrowed into an all-weather gravel surface.

We approached the low, timber building through a garden whose soil was covered by a sprawling green mass of sweet potato and whose canopy was the foliage of low-growing legumes and fruit trees. Emerging from this, we entered a large teaching room. Here, we knew, students would gather to learn permaculture from the man who started it. As one explained, sitting here listening to Bill’s anecdotes was wearying in the heat of the subtropical afternoon but it was what he said that kept you awake.

We were on our first visit to the farm that was the Permaculture Institute. The setting was spectacular… rolling terrain set against the steep, jagged slopes of forest-clad mountains which formed a rampart along the edge of the ancient volcanic caldera . Set amid the cleared terrain at their foot was the Institute.

The place was a scattering of buildings across the landscape, one an old timber farmhouse of the architectural style developed in this climate which housed those staying on site. There was the teaching centre, a low timber structure with a little guest room above, a large farm dam whose closest edge had been shelved as a flooded garden for water crops, a hillside carved with the curve of swales to intercept and infiltrate runoff and along whose lower lip young mango trees battled for their survival amid the rank, tall grasses that thrive in this moist, hot climate, a banana circle microcatchment, an large kitchen garden complete with a squadron of chooks and, downslope, the structures of the Commonworks. It seemed impressive although a little on the sprawling side in its coverage of the landscape. The kitchen garden was perhaps the best maintained component of the Institute’s lands. It was prepared for planting by chickens kept in polypipe and wire mesh domes that were moved from garden bed to garden bed.

This was permaculture’s big brave experiment of the time. Here, promoted by the display ads in the Permaculture International Journal, permaculture design courses would attract students. I expect some were by the mythology that had accumulated around Bill Mollison. It would be difficult to argue that this mystique did not exist, but it was less a creation of Bill than that of his admirers. Occasionally the term ‘guru’ would unthinkingly be applied to him, however that was an appellation that Bill resisted and, thankfully, it never caught on except by some outside of the movement, mainly journalists writing about permaculture for whom the term was a general one used to identify any leader figure and which signified, if anything, journalistic laziness in researching the role and attitudes of leader figures. Bill was a natural teacher who had become a de-facto leader due to the force of his experience, insight and knowledge, not a guru.

Here, 20 or 30 minutes along the dusty road from Tyalgum. Bill made the upland farm his home when he left Tasmania in the late-1980. He brought the Permaculture Institute with him, wrenching it from its natural homeland far away on the windswept grasslands outside Stanley. On his 2.5 hectare subtropical block he built a house for himself and an office for Tagari Publishers, the business that published and marketed his books. Bill lived in the large brick house and two others lived on site, one of whom I knew if my memory serves  me well, as Marylin. She managed Tagari but I don’t recall what her partner did there. Later, they moved into a farmhouse when the Institute purchased the adjoining farm, the one where the Permaculture Research Institute was founded. I don’t know why they left—someone said there might have been a falling out—nor do I know why Bill quit stanley for this place that would be home to him and the Permaculture Institute for the next decade or so.

When he returned to Tasmania at the end of his subtropical soujourn, Bill took the Permaculture Institute back to its homeland and set up at Sisters Creek, back again on the Bass Strait coast not all that far from Stanley. Now under the control of Geoff Lawton, the farm housed the Permaculture Research Institute which set out to aggressively promote its permaculture design course and attract a small voluntary workforce of changing make-up. Doing this was not simple altruism so that people could learn about permaculture farm life. It was critical to the continuance of the place.

The Commonworks—a good idea ahead of its time

Once settled on the land, Bill set about planting the 2.5ha to a mix of food-producing and native plants. This is the garden seen in the video production, In Grave Danger of Falling Food, as it was soon after Bill moved in. It quickly grew into a food forest and the garden developed into a large plantation of coffee trees, understorey to a forest of tall leguminous trees that formed a shading canopy high overhead and cast the understory not a cooling gloom. Visiting the Institute one day, we walked into the dim light of the coffee forest to be set upon and stung by squadrons of voracious, aggressive mosquitos that were more aggressive than their malaria-carrying brethren I was to encounter in a cocoa plantation in the Solomon Islands. We stayed in the dim confines of that shaded coffee patch until we could cope no longer.

When the adjoining farm went on the market Bill’s wife of the time provided the funds to buy it. Here, he set up a new organisation, the Permaculture Research Institute (PRI). The PRI was to attract students and interns through the decade or so of its existence there below the ridges of that ancient shield volcano. It seems that the place garnered something of an international reputation for some of those making their way along the hot, dusty road from Tyalgum were not Australian. The place became a node on the international permaculture circuit, if such a thing existed.

One of the PRI’s innovative moves was the attempt to set up a ‘Commonworks’, an imaginative scheme that would use the new property as the venue for livelihood projects. Individuals would set up their own projects and pay an amount to PRI for management services such as water supply and roads. The idea was reminiscent of the microenterprises that international development practitioners set up in developing country villages.

A large dam was excavated for a fish farm, a slope terraced for a tropical fruit orchard, bamboo planted for the food and cane market, a large free range chicken yard fenced, an extensive vegetable garden established on the river flats and a ‘chinampa’ system, a series of flooded ditches separated by agricultural strips, was excavated. Modelled on the ancient Aztec chinampas of Mexico City, fish could be farmed in the flooded trenches and crops grown on the soil strips between them. When I saw the chinampas in use, guinea pigs were being kept on one strip (they are eaten in parts of South America; I didn’t find out of they were on the menu at the PRI) and flowers were planted in another, presumably for the cut flower market though the quantity growing at that time seemed to be far too low to provide a regular supply to the market and there was no indication of successional planting to provide a constant flow of production.

Over the visits I made to the place I never learned that the flooded chinampa trenches had been stocked with freshwater table fish, nor did I see the agricultural mounds fully planted to a crop. It was as if a good, innovative project had been stated then partially abandoned for some reason. Maybe I simply was not there when it was in higher production, however I never came across any news of its full use. Maybe there was insufficient labour to operate the system or maybe no ne had taken it on as a commercial enterprise.

The next time I next visited PRI, I found the system undergoing an algal bloom. The last time I visited, the chinampas had fallen into disuse.

There’s no doubting the innovative thinking behind Commonworks and credit must be given to the Institute for its boldness in attempting the enterprise. The Commonworks project appealed to the permaculture imagination, including mine, not that I saw myself taking up one of the agricultural opportuities there. The knowledge that such a thing was being tried I found inspirational enough and I am fortunate to have visited the Institute when the experiment was in progress, for it was a truly inspirational thing.

Those leaseholders engaged in the land-based enterprises did not live on-site but travelled from their homes to tend them. Standing there by the big, edible-fish pond and looking out over bamboo aboretum and market garden I wondered about how often they would make the journey… two, three times a week?  I wondered too about the cost of doing this in terms of time and fuel, though petrol then was a lot cheaper than it is now. At best, I realised, these small farming enterprises could be only a part time income stream when they got going, assuming markets existed. I have no idea if a financial feasibility study or a business plan was ever developed.

Commonworks got off to a good start. Vegetables were planted, terraces were carved on a sunward, north-facing slope and a tropical fruit tree orchard established. Edible fish were introduced to the big pond and an Asian-style, pivoted scoop net constructed to harvest them. It seemed that there was optimism around his new adventure in livelihood creation. Still… I did wonder about scale… was the market garden on the creek banks large enough to produce a reasonable financial return… would the big pond yield enough fish… were there enough tropical fruit trees being established to generate the level of income that would make the enterprise worthwhile? Somehow, as I stood there and looked, the enterprises seemed a little too small.

Stimulated by reports in PIJ, there was a lot of interest from the permaculture community but for reasons unknown to me the initial enthusiasm for this pioneering venture faltered and it later collapsed. The stated intention of identifying the most appropriate bamboo species for shoot and cane went unfulfilled. In the city I was distant from the realities of the enterprise but news of its closure came as a disappointment. I think this had something to do with my long time interest in how livelihoods could be spun from something like permaculture whose major success at the time seemed to be as a hobby or part time activity based on food production in home gardens.

I visited the PRI site, or Tagari Farm as it was known, a number of times. After speaking with residents and interns I formed the opinion that even when they numbered as many as 15 they were still too few to effectively manage what was a large site and to implement new works. Apart from a tractor, little farm mechanisation was in evidence to make up for the labour shortfall.

Most interns seem to have found their time at PRI to be rewarding. There was, however, an undercurrent of complaint that they were  merely free labour. A one-time resident told me that this was the perception of some. The size of the property and lack of mechanisation was motivation enough, I realised, for having an intern labour force simply to keep the place maintained even if not to expand its works. What was suggested to me was there was not the return in the form of learning for the amount of work done and that the arrangement may have been a little exploitative.

Whatever the circumstances might have been, change came in 1997 when Bill decided to return to Tasmania and take the Permaculture Institute with him. According to a past resident of Tagari, he left Tagari Farm, now headed by Jeff Lawton, to pay the $2000 monthly rent. If this is as reported, it’s likely behind the aggressive advertising of permaculture design courses and internships that appeared in the page of PIJ. A high throughput of paying students and the labour of interns would have been critical to meeting costs. The impact of this intensified program on other training providers in the region is unknown, but it could not have helped them greatly.

Later, I learned that local government was making tenure at Tagari Farm difficult by insisting that the farm contribute to roadworks. Eventually it became too much and, in a move that surprised and disappointed many in permaculture, Tagari Farm was put on the market. Suddenly, something iconic was gone and permaculture, somehow, seemed the lesser for it.

In 2001, the PRI acquired land near the village of The Channon, twenty minutes drive from Lismore and just over the range from Djanbung Gardens. The first design courses were offered there in 2002.

Like so much in permaculture, no evaluation of the Commonworks project was made public and no evaluation may ever have been made. Project monitoring and evaluation are not permaculture’s strong points. There is no accessible record for the permaculture community, no learnings drawn from experience.

The future of Commonworks was in the future as we turned Julia’s Kombi onto the dusty road to Tyalgum and retraced our journey back to Djanbung gardens in the fading light of that warm summer’s day. Little did we know we would not visit the Institute again.

A grand experiment

How do you judge the success or failure of an enterprise like the farm and the Commonworks? I won’t attempt to judge, partly because my visits to the farm were few, partly out of respect for those who tried to make a go of the place and partly out of respect for Bill’s vision for the place. All I have with which to make sense of the experiment are my own observations and what people, some of whom stayed and worked there, have told me.

My take is that the farm and the Commonworks were one of permaculture’s boldest experiments. They were an experiment of a type and scale that has not been attempted since. Had the Commonworks succeeded it would have scaled-up permaculture, thus answering a criticism that would later be levelled at the design system.

I wonder if there was suffcient research into markets and distribution for their products by those taking up the Commonworks leases? These were sometimes new crops, like bamboo, which would have justified time spent in market research. Walking around the site the thought occurred to me that the scale of the enterprises might be rather small for commercial success. An additional factor might have been at play here—that of proximity to markets and workforce, both basic considerations in the establishment of businesses. Commonworks microenterprise owners did not live on site and Murwillumbah, the region’s major urban centre, was the good part of an hour’s drive eastwards, maybe more. Factor in time spent developing and maintaining the microenterprise, plus time spent in travel and you have something of a disincentive. At best, the Commonworks could offer only a labour intensive, part-time source of income.

There was also the scale of the Institute’s farm property and the fact that labour or farm mechanisation might have been in too short a supply to both develop the site and to carry out the necessary maintenance.

Like much of Permaculture’s history, knowledge of the Commonworks and the farm has faded and is probably unknown to many of those joining the movement in recent times. Without documentation of the enterprise being easily available, any sense of the continuity of permaculture as a phenomenon extending through 35 or so years of contemporary history, and of Tagari Farm and the Commonworks being part of it, is at risk of being lost. It remains only in the fading memories of those who participated in the venture or who visited it.

The handing over

We were sitting in the morning sun that Sunday, the low hill the small crowd occupied sloping gently downward a stage. It was a quiet morning as most of those around the town of Nimbin probably are. On this, the last day of the 1997 Permaculture Convergence at Djanbung Gardens, we were about to hear something unexpected.

Bill appeared and was surrounded by well-wishers. I approached and shot off a series of images on my Nikon, one of which was of Bill in a classic ‘hero’ pose that I took from below head height. Bill, grey beard, blue shirt and wide-brimmed hat gazes off into the distance as if looking for some elusive promise just over the horizon… as if waiting for permaculture to rise above that horizon to illuminate a world hungry for change. This image has been used by a number of permaculture organisations, without permission of course, though that doesn’t bother me. It was an unplanned shot, one of those opportunities that present themselves for a fraction of a second and without any planning by the subject or photographer. It remains my favourite image of Bill, seeming to epitomise his quality of character and his focus on the future.

Bill chatted awhile, posing for photographs with different people and I shot off another frame as he laughed. Then, he climbed onto the stage. Standing there, he was quiet for a minute or so, looking out at those gathered on the slope. He started to talk about permaculture, what it had been, what it was… and then the unexpected happened. Bill announced his retirement. He was returning to Tasmania and would withdraw from teaching.

I was unsure whether others assembled on than hill realised what he was saying, but I guess they did. Was what seemed momentus to me not that to them? Did they realise that this was a point of change in permaculture, an inflection point, a departure from what had gone before?

This, I realised with some amazement, was a farewell speech. Bill explained that he was handing over permaculture to those assembled there, to its participants. It was a transition point, a moment of significant change and, in its own way, a moment that moved us emotionally.

Later that day, someone commented that they would believe Bill had retired when they saw it. As it turned out Bill’s retirement was not quite what it seemed and he went on to offer the occasional PDC at the Permaculture Institute’s new property at Jacky’s Marsh, Tasmania, and to teach an annual PDC at a Melbourne University with Geoff Lawton.

A decade fades

And so the 1990s played out. Permaculture initiatives rose, some to persist, others to fade.

After more than 20 years of growth, permaculture had surged to a peak of participation and public interest only to experience something of a decline of sorts in the decade’s later years. Reduced media attention contributed to this, but there must have been other factors at work as well. There is little information about just how widespread this decline was or whether it was just down to a faulty impression that it was occurring. In some places participation in permaculture remained high… whatever decline there was must have been regional.

Overall, the nineties turned out a growth period for permaculture. The positive achievements of the times included the:

• establishment of education and demonstration centres such as Djanbung Gardens
• growth of Crystal Waters ecovillage and the teaching of permaculture and other courses there
• establishment of the Coleman’s teaching centre in Victoria and their business, Southern Cross Permaculture Institute
• the rise and decline of Tagari Farm and the Commonworks
• the establishment of permaculture teaching as a livelihood
• the Seed Savers’ Network, that went from strength to strength
• the start of a continuing growth period for community gardens and the birth of the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network.

During this time, permaculturists became involved in schools, community garden development and overseas development assistance, a practice stimulated by the Permaculture Global Assistance Network (PGAN) set up in Melbourne by Adam Tiller and others.

Moves into the international development sector include:

• a permaculture presence in Kosovo, thanks to the Permaculture Research Institute, after the conflagration in the Balkans
• Amy Glastonberry from the Seed Savers Network spending time working in East Timor following that country’s bloody battle for independence from Indonesia, and Lawrence Machkenzie’s time there later with a local permaculture NGO being established and LAwrence producing a permaculture manual for East Timor
• Tony Jansen being given an award by Permaculture International for his work with the Kastom Garden Program in the Solomon Islands; the program had made a start in 1995 and was to continue as one of the longest-running, perhaps the longest-running project involving unbroken input from people trained in permaculture
• PGAN and its work with an urban agriculture training project in Havana
• the publication of Getting Ready, a book for aspiring overseas aid workers produced by a number of us associated withAction For World development, an educational organisation that faded with the decade and with which prominent Sydney permaculture educator and author , Jill Finnane, (Jill later wrote From Lawns To Lunch, an exploration of home garden food production in Sydney) was closely associated.

Like so much else permacultural, PGAN, too, was gone by the end of the decade. Permaculture activity in international development, however, has been sustained on an individual basis through the efforts of people like Rick Coleman and Tony Jansen with his work in the Solomon Islands/PNG. Fiona and I continued—and still continue— our sporadic work with TerraCircle Inc that only and I set up after APACE abandoned agricultural work in the Solomons. No Australian permaculture NGO  (Non-Government Organisation) like PGAN has emerged to further its potential.

As for the permaculture press, the PIJ struggled through successive financial crises and by decade’s end was approaching its final edition. So too was Green Connections, Joy Finch’s magazine that she produced in Castlemaine, Victoria. Permaculture would soon be a movement without a voice.

Postscript

As I sit writing these lines so many years after the events I describe, I look down at the book I am using as a mouse pad and see there, emblazoned across its back cover, the statement:

“Live Smart. Think for Yourself. Transform the Future”.  

I move the mouse aside and pick up the book to look up its publication date, and there it is: The Whole Earth Catalog, 1994.

This large volume was a product of the same decade as permaculture’s expansion and its experimentation with more ambitious projects. In it are are the ideas, the tools, the technologies that empowered people in their new ventures, in their search for new ways of doing things that would make better neighbourhoods, better regions, a better world.

I flick to the contents pages in search of a word, a P-word, an entry on permaculture but I find none. There are the components of permaculture, but not the term itself. My disappointment at not finding an entry on the design system is offset by finding numerous entries on all of those things that make up permaculture as an approach to whole systems design.

Then, out of curiosity I turn to the index pages. I scan down… entries starting with ‘pa’… then down to the ‘pe’s'… an there, occupying just a single line, is the word I seek—’permaculture’. I flick through to page 97 and at the top of column one is the entry: “Permaculture. This is the book everyone was looking for 20 years ago… the one that explains how to grow food, fix broken land and devise a better society… and this is followed by a couple Mollisonian principles and a photo of the Designers’ Manual. I stop and reflect… let’s see… the Catalog was published in 1994 and it says they this is the book we needed 20 years before that… back in 1974…

1974—the time of intentional communities, the birth of the organic gardening movement, the popularisation of Frtitz Schumacher’s concept of Intermediate Technology, the peak of the ‘alternative’ movement, one year after the Aquirius Festival in Nimbin, two years after Australia quit the war in Vietnam, three years before the publication of Permaculture One. Have we really been looking for solutions all of that time, I ask myself? And have we found them? Then I recall how different today’s world is from that of those times, how the solutions we need now include those we sought then but include so many more, so many novel and new challenges to meet. I wonder if permaculture can help us in this most important of quests, that for our common future and the future of our children and grandchildren and I think, yes, the design system still has much to offer, especially if we tweak it here and there, discard what is outdated and integrate new ideas, new tools. We adapt ideas that appear at one time and adopt them to fit new circumstances… ideas like permaculture, we can make them new again.

Making things new again… I put the book on the table and notice below that statement about living smart, at the bottom of the page, the Whole Earth Catalog’s last words…

“It’s all new again, because the world is all new again”… Harold Rheingold.