The recent months have continued to see growing interest in the necessity
of building a just and sustainable food system. In June, we were
privileged to host a delegation of farmers from the largest civil society
organisation on the planet, the global peasant network La Via Campesina.
During their stay, Friends of the Earth facilitated meetings between the
delegation and a number of community and farming organisations and
farmers, as well as a successful public meeting. The speeches from the
public meeting will be available on From Plains to Plate
(http://futureoffoodsa.ning.com) shortly.

DECLARATION

We have been delighted to hear how the Plains to Plate Declaration
continues to be used by communities all over SA in their work for just and
sustainable food systems in their regions. One extension of this is the
presentation of the declaration to parliament for the consideration of the
South Australian Government by the Hon. Mark Parnell, MLC. With the
Federal Election now called, we invite you to contact your local MP and
election candidates to ask what their position is on food issues that are
important to you, and to urge them to consider how they might support the
implementation of the recommendations of the declaration.

CHAIN REACTION

All registered participants in From Plains to Plate (P2P, for short) will
shortly receive a special issue of Friends of the Earth’s national
magazine Chain Reaction that compiles some of the projects, presentations
and discussions that emerged at February’s convergence. If you were not a
registered participant, and would like a copy, please email
joel.catchlove[at]foe.org.au.

TEACHING RESOURCES

We’ve recently compiled a list of educational resources for teaching
issues around food and agriculture for use by educators from primary
school upwards. You can download the list from the Resources page of the
P2P website. We welcome any further suggestions of food, agriculture or
sustainability resources that you think should be included.

MT. BARKER DEVELOPMENT PLAN: CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Under the State Government’s Development Plan Amendment (DPA) for Mt
Barker, the town’s population could almost quadruple, increasing by over
30,000 in fifteen years. Over 1300 hectares of prime farmland, rural
character and scenic beauty will be lost. Mount Barker Coalition for
Sustainable Communities has developed an information kit on the
Development Plan and the submission process, and they invite you to
consider making a proposal outlining you concerns. You can read more and
download the kit from
http://futureoffoodsa.ning.com/profiles/blogs/call-for-submissions-mt-barker.

FEAST OF FILM

Friends of the Earth’s Feast of Film, a film festival about good food and
farming, is back! Over six weeks, the Feast of Film will offer fortnightly
screenings (on July 31, August 14 and 28) of some of the best
international films about good food, agriculture and community, as well as
the very special August 28 world premiere of An Urban Orchard, a
celebration of food gardening and sharing on the Adelaide Plains. Entry is
a sliding scale of $5-$15, and warming winter goodies will be available.
All funds raised support work for just and sustainable food and farming in
South Australia. The 2010 Feast of Film is supported by the City of Unley.
For more details, check out this, and other Events at the P2P website.

We thank you for your continued support for just and sustainable food in
SA. Don’t forget to contribute to the From Plains to Plate website by
uploading relevant news, views, events and ideas! If you haven’t joined
yet, we urge you to do so now, just visit http://futureoffoodsa.ning.com,
and click on “Sign Up”.

Cheers,

Joel Catchlove
Friends of the Earth Adelaide
c/- Conservation Council of SA
Level 1, 157 Franklin Street, Adelaide SA 5000
phone: +61 8 8211 6872
mobile: 0435 631 524
email: joel.catchlove9[at]foe.org.au
web: http://www.adelaide.foe.org.au
From Plains to Plate: http://futureoffoodsa.ning.com

It’s a celebration, a learning opportunity, a party, a reflection and a reunion… the time that comes around every two years when Permaculture educators, advocates, practitioners and all of the others involved in the Permaculture Design System come together… it’s a time not to be missed.

This year, it’s off to the tropics of North Queensland for APC10 — the tenth Australasian Permaculture Convergence — two days of Convergence two of the Festival of Permaculture.

Sounds too good to miss, doesn’t it? So, why not learn more.

http://www.apc10.org/node/1

TELEVISION GARDENING PROGRAM HOST, Costa from SBS’s Costa’s Garden Odyssey, will join Randwick City Council’s Team Eco, the Mayor of Randwick and guests for the Official Opening of Randwick City Council’s Water Wise Trail and the Sustainability Makeover retrofit of energy/water systems for the Randwick Community Centre. Costa will join us to talk about his ‘take on water’.

The opening is part of  Local Government Week 2010 activities.

Costa

“Council has been successful in receiving a grant from the NSW Government’s Climate Change Fund to retrofit the Community Centre for energy and water efficiency and to repurpose the Centre as a Sustainability Hub and venue for our Sustainable Gardening and Living Smart courses and other initiatives”, said Fiona Campbell, Randwick Council’s Sustainability Education officer and manager of the retrofit project.

Involving permaculture

Fiona has included a number of professional Permaculture practitioners in the community centre retrofit project and the community and schools education program now being designed around it. She wants to improve the reputation of the Permaculture Design System among decision makers and position it as an acceptable approach to community development.

On the Water Wise Trail project team have been:

illustrator Rob Allsop (who illustrated Rosemary Morrow’s Earth Users Guide to Permaculture); Rob has drawn the comic-style instructive panels that will be erected in the community centre and the adjacent Permaculture Interpretive Garden

• Archology architect, Terry Bails, who specialises in solar and energy efficient design
• landscape architect and CEO of Sydney Organic Gardens, Steve Batley
• sustainability education specialist, Mary Bell
• professional program evaluator, Phillip Booth, who has evaluated both the Sustainable Gardening and Living Smart courses for council
• community food systems consultant and member of the Permaculture International Ltd Board of directors, Russ Grayson.

“We will capture nearly all the roof water and store it in a range of tanks that will irrigate the Permaculture Interpretive Garden that is now under construction by Sydney Organic Gardens and that will feed into the toilets”, said Fiona.

“The building retrofit uses passive and active solar design solutions to make it more comfortable for winter and summer conditions. Terry has used simple, available solutions so that they can be easily adopted by householders.

“The Water Wise Trail, assisted by the NSW Government’s Water for Life Education Program, is an interactive educational trail that explains some of the water retrofitting elements of the Sustainable Makeover project.”

A photovoltaic array to produce energy from sunlight has already been installed on the roof. An outdoor classroom is to be constructed later.

“The community centre retrofit and Permaculture Interpretive Garden will enhance our annual Ecoliving Fair”, said Fiona. “Visitors will be able to interact with the water and energy efficient demonstration kitchen and take away ideas they could do at home”.

Last of the local bush

The Permaculture Interpretive Garden occupies the space between the community centre and an adjacent, remnant patch of Eastern Suburbs Banksia Scrub, a small portion of indigenous vegetation surviving in the region.

An elevated walkway was recently completed that will take people through the scrubland where they will be able to learn about the ecosystem that once occupied extensive areas of the coastal Eastern Suburbs. The scrubland is an ephemeral wetland that drains water into the aquifer, providing a valuable role in maintaining local environmental services as well as having habitat values. The walkway is not yet open to visitors.

Fiona said that she hopes to see local people as well as those associated with the Permaculture Design System and other sustainability initiatives at the Official Opening.

OFFICIAL OPENING

Date: Saturday 7 August.

Program

11.00am – arrive
11:15 – Mayor’s welcome
11:20 – ‘Costa’s Take on Water!’
11:40 – Mayor’s official opening of the our Water Wise Trail and the Sustainability Makeover retrofit
11:42 – Refreshments and planting of the native garden and vegie patch
12.00pm – Tour of the Water Wise Trail
12:30 – Finish.

Where to find it

Randwick Community Centre
27 Munda Street Randwick — off Hendy Avenue.
———————————
The Randwick Community Centre’s Sustainability Makeover project is supported by the NSW Governments Climate Change Fund.

The Water Wise Trail has been assisted by the NSW Government’s Water for Life Education Program.
——————————–

Rosemary Morrow

She had been at a course in something called ‘Appreciative Inquiry’, which is a process that has something to do with strategic planning for organisations and that is based on systems thinking. She told me that the process focuses on what is right with an organisation or its activities and builds on that, rather than focusing on what goes wrong.  ‘What we focus on grows’, says the course’s handout.

Maybe this is the way to think about Gary’s video, I thought. If so, then what is it that is right with the image it presents of Rosemary’s work, what aspects of it can we focus on to improve our own work? And if it is to be built upon by people involved in international development and in the permaculture design system of which Rosemary is a well-experienced practitioner, then what lessons does her experience as documented in the film offer us?

I was aware that having known Rosemary for quite some years my opinion might be a little biased. I was also aware that the setting for the film, Afghanistan, is the pointy end of what US writer, Samuel Huntington, describes as the ‘clash of civilisations’, the clash between cultures he said would emerge following the ending of the Cold War. I thought that using my own experience in international development, in the South Pacific and mainly the Solomon Islands might be a useful filter in defining learnings of use to those involved or planning to be involved in such work.

Permaculture and Rosemary

Rosemary and permaculture design are closely coupled. She teaches the skills of the design system and has done so in Vietnam, Cambodia and Africa as well as in Australia. She wrote The Earth Users Guide to Permaculture which I had the pleasure of launching in her home town of Katoomba.

“Permaculture offers people skills they can do”, Rosemary says in the film, explaining that if people can grow food then “ ..they can go on to do other things”. This truth was defined by Abraham Maslow in his well known heirarchy of needs when he put food and water as being among the basic survival requirements that people must have before they can go on to improve their lives. The others are personal security, health, appropriate clothing for the climate and shelter. It is these things that are conspicuously missing in Afghanistan.

Permaculture has its own code of ethics and so does Rosemary. Perhaps it’s not going too far to say that they coincide remarkably. According to Rosemary, both individuals and organisations need such a code to guide their work in the world.

Social permaculture — the key to self-help

So, this Appreciative Inquiry stuff about improving the work of our organisations and ourselves by building on what it is that we are doing right — what could I see in the film that Rosemary was doing that came across as positive, as ‘right’?

My own bias influenced the first thing that came across about her work. In my years as a permaculture educator, advocate and commentator I have noticed that the design system is good at doing physical things but less good at doing things involving working with people and the social side of design. I generalise, of course, and recognise the people/social skills work of people like Robina McCurdy and Robyn Clayfield.

So it was heartening to hear Rosemary talking about ‘social permaculture’, a topic we have discussed briefly in the past. She says that social permaculture is as relevant in Australia as it is in Afghanistan and I believe she is right.

Essentially, social permaculture is about social design, working with people to improve their ability to organise themselves to achieve their goals and to gain useful skills in the process of doing so.

In Afghanistan, Rosemary’s social permaculture was about building the capacity of the NGO (non-government development organisation) she was working for, Mahboba’s Promise, to carry out its work of supporting war widows and their families and working with internally displaced people, mainly children. Capacity building, as it’s known in international development-speak, or social permaculture in Rosemary’s words, is a means of assisting the NGO to do its people-care work more effectively so that people can manage their own future.

Another reason I found affinity with Rosemary’ approach to doing permaculture is that her social permaculture is not unlike my own work for local government in assisting new community food garden teams make a start. The lesson for me in this is that developing effective working relationships is essential to achieving other goals.

No cult-of-permaculture-hero

What else is there in Gary Caginoff’s film that is the sort of positive thing that could be used to improve the work of individuals within the permaculture design system?

I thought about this after watching the video and realised that there is something missing in Gary’s film just as there is something missing in Rosemary’ personality. It is something that from time to time creeps into permaculture when people go out to work in lesser-developed countries, especially when they do this solo, offering workshops here and there then moving on.

So what is it that is missing? It’s ego, or ego of the wrong type. Despite all her work in Australia and overseas, Rosemary does not come across as a ‘permaculture hero’, a saviour bringing ‘the knowledge’ to those less fortunate. Although not so common now in permaculture circles, the gung-ho ‘hero’ image harks back to the bad old days of international development when the ‘expert’ descended upon village communities to bless them with the knowledge of how to do things and then left them to work it out for themselves.

Rosemary might not be a gung-ho permaculture hero but over the years she has taken the ‘hero’s journey’ in the Jungian sense of the term by journeying out from her everyday life in Australia to modestly offer her skills where people might need them. In doing so, she has overcome fears and challenges and transformed herself through gaining insight into her own essence and that of other peoples, then sharing what she has learned with others on her return. It is in this sharing that Rosemary’s meeting with film producer Gary Caginoff has been fortuitous because the medium he is expert in has made Rosemary’ insights available to all with electricity and a video player or computer. If you were of superstitious frame of mind you might say that their meeting was synchronicity rather than accident.

While Rosemary has more than enough accomplishments to claim the status of permaculture hero, thankfully it is Rosemary’s modesty that is most impressive and refreshing.

Meet the producer

That’s Rosemary. What about producer Gary Caginoff?

Gary has Lysis Films, his own production house in Katoomba. It was he who produced A Good Home Forever, Rosemary’s story of how she retrofitted her house for energy efficiency.

The Garden at the End of the World is a far different film whose mood is set with the opening images of mountains and mist accompanied by singing in the traditional style. It continues in this steady, measured pace for its duration, without dramatic bursts of activity and energy.

You get the sense that Gary has a feeling for landscape as the venue in which life is carried out from the images where he slowly pans the camera across vistas of mountain and plain. Another sense you get is that he uses the video camera like a stills camera to capture portraits of people. Young and old, they appear though the film looking to camera as if gazing directly at the viewer. This adds to the film’s power.

All of this could lead to describing Gary’s production as a ‘visual’ film in which Rosemary’s pieces to camera and scenes of her sitting talking with children in the orphanage, intercut with reportage footage of conflict, provide counterpoint.

Return

Good stories often have return and reflection written into them. Rosemary’s time in Afghanistan was a return to her past.

We learn in the film that Rosemary had come this way — through Afghanistan  — in 1975. The few years around that period, from the late 1960s to the ill-fated Soviet invasion of the country in 1979, was a unique time when people made journeys that are no longer possible. Off they set from London in van, old bus, truck or on foot hitching to venture down through Turkey and across Asia to their fabled destination, Kathmandu.

It was an escape from Western civilistion as much as it was an escape into the world for a generation searching for something different to what industrial society could offer. The route is well described in Rory Maclean’s Magic Bus — on the hippie trail from Instanbul to India (2007, Penguin Books, UK), a documentary travelogue by the writer who traversed the trail 30 years later. It was heartening to know Rosemary had been somewhere on that trail in its heyday.

Now, that overland trail is no more. Borders have closed. Wars have intervened.

A undercurrent of dilemma

This is not a political film. It is critical of all protagonists that have brought war to this country these past 21 years — the Soviets, the Taliban and assorted warlords, the present intervention by NATO-led forces. All have left the country in ruins, in what Gary Caginoff describes as a “political, social and environmental nightmare”.

As a production about a remarkable woman and the NGO, Mahboba’s Promise, the film does not delve into the dilemma that is presented by Afganistan’s potential future although the scenes of ruined buildings that permeate the production are a constant reminder of this. Yet, watching the film, this dilemma resurfaces in mind and Gary, in describing the history of big power rivalry in the region, reminds us of it.

What is this dilemma with Afghanistan that runs as a constant anxiety in the background of today’s big powers? It is this. Were Afghanistan again to fall to the Taliban, Pakistan could be destabilised (given the complicity of that country’s intelligence service in past support for the Taliban and the presence of Taliban in the country) and, were an allied force to gain control, they would find themselves with nuclear capability. What would the US do in these circumstances? More pressing, what would nuclear armed India do given the history of Indian-Pakistani conflict? Would they seek negotiation? Stand by and watch? Or would they perceive a great danger and act? And would that acting be more than diplomacy? Would India act by taking out Pakistani nuclear weapon capability, presumably with conventional weapons, but could it go nuclear? If either of the latter, how would the Islamic world react?

This is the potential nightmare both the US and India are well aware of, especially given the recent resurgence in Taliban activity. It is not explicit in the film, but if you have followed trends in the region, it might be implicit.

How to use this video

Gary’s story of Rosemary and Mahboba’s Promise would be useful as the centrepoint of a group discussion around international development and the role of the permaculture design system in it.

Focus questions in a discussion could be about what permaculture has to offer peoples in circumstances such as those found in Afghanistan; how social permaculture could be improved to increase its effectiveness; now that aid workers are targetted by combatants, how could their personal securty be improved; which of Rosemary’s experiences and insights could be of use in Australia?

This is a film that is both a documentary and a travelogue of a journey through a ruined land. It is stark in its contrasts of the impacts of war with the everyday lives of people trying to create new lives, of ruined city and the bare beauty of the mountains, of the conditions in the country and the efforts of one woman small of stature but big of goodness in doing her small part to put things right.

The film ends with one of Gary’s video-come-stills-images. Seen through a window, a young girl sits in a room. Outside stands a bicycle. It is raining. I think it was the rain that raised in me a sense of hope that something really will rise from the chaos of this unfortunate country, that just as the rain nourishes the soil and the plants that grow in it and the animals that graze upon them, so too will the work of Rosemary Morrow and Mahboba’s Promise create new lives for Afghanistan’s people. Is this too much to ask or hope for?

I asked at the start of this review what it was that was right, that was positive about the film that viewers could focus on to make their work in the world all that better. Now I have the answer. It is the example that, no matter where we are, we can take those small steps to make life better for those around us. These can be modest things like the capacity building that Rosemary describes as social permaculture… and other little things that we can do.

In writing this the words of TS Elliot, about how experience can change perceptions of the everyday, come to mind. His words, I realise now, are about that ‘hero’s journey’ I mentioned before, a journey we can undertake wherever we are simply by finding the courage to take that first step beyong the familiar and the comfortable. The words are something that The Garden at the End of the World, in bringing us the tale of Rosemary’s own journey, remind me strongly of. Let’s finish with TS:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Shall be to return to where we started
And know the place for the first time.

……………………………………………………………..

Purchase Garden at the End of the World

The Garden at the End of the World Facebook

Download the Garden at the End of the World study guide (pdf 1.1MB)

Find out  more about Mahboba’s Promise

Please help us to save the Liverpool Plains. We have our new petition available to sign online. Send the link around to get as many signatures as possible.

The Liverpool Plains is an extremely important foodbowl of Australia — reliably producing crops yielding 40 percent above the national average. It is also in the Namoi Catchment which is an important catchment area for the ailing Murray-Darling Basin. At the moment it is being explored for coal and coal seam gas.

If you care for your supplies of fresh local food and the health of the Murray-Darling Basin and subsequently the Great Artesian Basin please sign this petition. This is very important for all of us and particularly future generations.  Please pass it on to at least five of your friends and ask them to pass it on.  If you would like to know more, please look us up on www.ccag.org.au

http://www.petitiononline.com/CCAGNSW/petition.html

Thank you all so much.
Kind Regards
Rosemary Nankivell
Chairperson of Coal Seam Gas Committee
Caroona Coal Action Group
0428 643284

Take two families — both having fallen for the allure of the rural backblocks, both made up of men and women in their thirties… all intelligent, capable people. One family has two children, the other has none. Put them, without wealth, in the mid-1980s and trace the patterns of their lives.

^^^

Living with the joy of basic facilities... showertime at Mungay Creek.

a

“Down there is where we will start on the mudbrick house soon, just above the farm dam. It will happen as we have time. Meanwhile, we live in the tent”.

We look behind to where Robert points to see one of those big tents, a large orange thing, the type people take car camping. We walk over. It is high enough to stand up in and, entering, the first thing you notice is the lack of possessions. What there are are few, modest and utilitarian. There’s an enclosed sleeping area and an unfloored entrance part.

“We cook outside on the old iron fuelwood stove but we’ve got a gas campers stove in the tent for when it’s raining”, he explains, indicating a wood stove standing incongruously near a couple chairs a few metres from the tent. “Showers? There’s a garden hose for that”.

This is home, modest and temporary the couple say, although they have lived in the tent since they bought the property a couple years ago. It’s pitched on the edge of a eucalypt copse, an area several hundred square metres in size and cleared of undergrowth. Stringybarks project tall and straight from the bare soil.

The farm dam is small and has been recently excavated — it wasn’t here last time we passed through on another road journey northwards.

Robert’s comment about starting on the house reminds me that time here is something different to what it is in the city. There’s a flexibility to it and it is accompanied by a patience that must somehow come with rural life, an acceptance that things take time and that this is alright.

I imagine the house being built, bit by bit. First, the manufacture of the mud bricks — the digging, mixing and moulding — days covered in sticky red clay. Then come months during which the bricks are left to cure. Time passes, but the leveling of the land has been done and the footings started. More time passes. Other things get in the way or, perhaps, the summer is too hot to work out in the open during the day. In a few more months the roof trusses and galvanised iron go on and the first mudbrick infill walls go up. Now it is starting to look like a house. Not long after, the house is ready for occupation. All this will have to be done in the days when Robert is home; the rest of the week he is away, working in the nursery of a mining company a couple hours drive to the south. Now, at last, the couple are ready to start life in their own home.

This, anyway, is how it could have been.

“Oh, yes, I still have my clydesdales”, says Sarah, patting one of the enormous beast on its long snout. Monsters of the horse family, these massive but docile creatures are so tall they look down on humans as if they imagine that they are the superior lifeform. They are not working horses, though, for Sarah they are the equivalent of the domestic dog or cat of city families.

We walk into the eucalypt copse. “We planned to finish the dome and to use it to live in while we built something permanent”, says Sarah. “But we haven’t put on a permanent roof yet and the plastic sheeting that covers it makes it uncomfortable at times. So we sleep in the tent, which is more comfortable”.

It’s one of those classic geodesic domes familiar to anyone with an acquaintance with the ‘counterculture’ of the early 1970s. The dome can be traced back to Buckminster Fuller, the polymath and noted innovator. Not that Robert and Sarah are counterculture types. “It’s just that domes are cheap to build,” Robert says.

Sarah cooks on the wood stove while Fiona takes it easy. Behind is the geodesic dome, at that stage still clad in plastic. Later, a room was added to the right hand side of the structure, to the adjoining downstairs room under the dome that contained the kitchen, enclosed in log offcuts. A triangular panel of the dome can be seen propped open for ventilation.

a

Yet they display characteristics common among the counterculture — the ‘back to the land movement’ that got underway in the early 1970s. The difference is that their move to the land has been planned and deliberate and lacks much of the romanticised vagueness of that movement.

It’s not a large structure, this dome. It sits atop a hexagonal pole-construction base that is being made into a kitchen. In here, there’s a table, cupboard and a car radio and cassette player powered by a vehicle battery charged by a solar-electric panel. A few chairs stand adjacent to the large, floor to ceiling window. A small case of books is tucked away against the side wall. A rectangular extension is under construction. Sheathed in log offcuts, this will be used as a living room. The large sheet of clear plastic that has been loosely draped over the dome to keep out the weather will eventually be replaced by shingles.

Looking at a photo I took (above image), the thought came as to how often scenes like this must have been played out in the bush in those days, a time when restless youth left the cities to seek a new and different future in the country. How many times did young hopefuls sit by the fire near their dome or other rustic, basic structure at the end of a hard day’s work? What did they talk about? The work they were engaged in? The friends they had made? How the new life was going? Whether they missed the comforts and conveniences they knew in the city? The young child nestled in the mother’s arms? The future? All of these things I am sure, because thoughts like these flow when the encumbrances of city life are far away and there are no distractions to reflective thinking. And could that have been so different to others who sought a future in the bush generations ago?

“Some Sunday afternoons are spend out the back of the hotel in the village a few kilometres west of here”, says Robert. “It’s self-made entertainment”.

This we find out the next day when we sit, cold beers in hand as a local country singer works his way through an old, popular country standard, accompanying himself on guitar. This is home-made entertainment and there’s something comforting about it.

We sleep in the dome that evening. Usually on these road trips the Kombi is our accommodation and in the evening we would lay on the mattress that covers the raised rear of the van above the engine. But tonight we have the luxury of a bed under a curved ceiling. It’s not late but here people go to bed early. Outside, the sound of wind in the eucalypts and a dark sky. We talk. “They seem so comfortable here. It seems that life revolves around work on the property, working for a living and travel to town and beyond”, I say, reflecting on the routine of the couple’s life together.

Fiona agrees, as I knew she would. She has lived in the country in a village not all that far from Bathurst, but that was years ago now. I am well aware of her affinity with rural life, however, and with the knowledge that she would gladly return to the country given half a chance.

Tired of urban living, Sarah and Robert had moved from Sydney to Mungay Creek. Both are well educated. Rupert is tall, his fair hair falling below his ears and his face framed by the type of wispy, blondish beard that gives you the impression that he had trouble growing it. Sarah is more solidly built… sturdy… with her long, dark hair tied back in a pony tail. She’s what you might call a matter-of-fact sort of woman. The couple have assumed a pace of speech and movement commensurate with the unhurriedness of rural life. They seem to have a satisfaction with things, an acceptance of their lives and a patience so far removed from our urban lives.

To get here and stand surrounded by tall eucalypts and gaze out on green fields we had followed the Pacific Highway into Kempsey. After it swings sharply to the left and crosses the bridge over the broad, muddy river, we had turned westward rather than follow the highway along the main street. Across the rail lines at the Railway Hotel, we continued along the winding blacktop until Fiona slowed to find the unmarked turnoff to the property. We followed the narrow dirt road that descends through a patch of forest, crosses a creek, then proceeds along the edge of an open field towards the copse of tall eucalypts.

Tonight, it is quiet at Mungay Creek.

Progress... by the time this photo was taken, the lower part of the dome had been enclosed in log offcuts, enclosing the kitchen. Through the rear windows the roof of the living room extension, then under construction, is seen.

^^^

A year or two go by and we follow another road. This one, like that leading westward from Kempsey, is a narrow band of grey asphalt that twists through forest and passes farmers’ fields devoid of crop or cattle. The motor of Fiona’s aging, once-white Kombi hums — if that is a proper term to describe the sound made by a Kombi engine — and we are accompanied by the hiss and bump of tyres on rough tarmac, a sound so familiar these past few days that we have long ceased to notice it.

It’s been a long journey north. We stopped off at Mungay Creek to find that Sarah and Robert had finished the living room extension to their dome but found them still occupying the tent although much of their living was now done in the building, its roof now shingled. As for their mudbrick house, there was no sign of it yet.

It had been good to catch up again but the far north called and we had stayed only a short time. Then it was north through Coffs Harbour, north along the Pacific Highway to Grafton and then off to Lismore. Here, a brief stop. Northward again and over the low range that spill travellers into the Tweed Valley. At the Murwillumbah turnoff we leave the highway and I feel that pull that comes from knowing that a further two hours along the Pacific Highway would land us in Brisbane, a city I feel an urge to visit. That city, however, must await a future journey when I have time to rediscover some of the places of my childhood.

This is spectacular country. Where the vistas of Mungay Creek are close and the undulations of the land offer no high point for the distant view, the road we travel affords occasional outlooks to hills more substantial. Through the hamlet of Chillingham — essentially a general store and small cluster of houses — and then the Kombi accelerates until the engine again assumes its hum and the wheels go clack! as they pass over irregularities in the road. Fiona sits behind the big steering wheel focusing on the road ahead as she has been all the way from Murwillumbah. “Shouldn’t be too far”, she says as if to reassure me.

“There!”, I exclaim, recognising the turnoff onto the gravel road along which we now drive, followed by a plume of dust raised by our passage. Looking back out the window I see that grand view of the high Border Range which dominates this area. Once again, here we are on Stoddards Creek Road where we have been several times these past few years.

Jim lives with wife Karen and two children — one in early primary school and the other soon to start — in a converted industrial garage of the type farmers keep tractors in. Made of iron panels sitting on a concrete slab, the building has been divided into rooms and a kitchen. It is basic but comfortable and sits on a shelf cut into the red soil of the slope about 10 metres below the road.

The property had been cleared of trees to the boundaries but, immediately below, the bush survives. Hidden in the bush is a waterfall that the family occasionally walks down to. Above and across the road, all the way to the top the hill, the land is occupied by a banana plantation — north-facing slopes are favoured by growers. A few metres from the house, on its western side, the land slips steeply into a gully. On the adjacent ridge sits another industrial garage-like structure, this one, too, occupied by a family. All around the western and northern quadrants the horizon is made up of the cobalt blue of mountain ranges. This is spectacular country… inspiring in its topography. There’s a sense of remoteness that comes with the view over bush and farm to the line of high mountains on the northern horizon.

Looking north over undulating farmland to not-so-distant ranges. The setting was idyllic. Construction of the verandah and awning was underway when this image was made. Poles harvested from the nearby forest have been placed in the ground ready for roofing. The house water supply relied on the rainfall stored in the water tank. This was rural living, basic, but enjoyable. Later, an extension with a bathroom and open area was built on the near side of the house

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Neither Jim nor Karen have jobs in town. It is not that Jim avoids working, it’s that jobs are scarce in this part of the country and hearing of them is difficult this far from Murwillumbah, the big town of the Tweed Valley. Anyway, searching for a job requires motivation that is sometimes a little scarce.

Sitting around the table in the cool of the evening, we get to talking about how life leads you to strange places and, sometimes, strange people.

“Back a few years ago I had an art gallery in Sydney. That was a good time but we decided to move north”, says Jim in his characteristically slow, drawling manner.

The move was typical of that made by thousands of young people at that time when rural living seemed to offer a positive alternative to urban life… it was a search for a better way of living that some discovered and many didn’t. Jim has made repeated returns to the city but just as frequently has abandoned it for the north country.

“We settled on the Tweed Valley. I like it better than the Nimbin area over the hills to the south. And… well… here we are, though there’s been a bit of coming and going”, he explained.

A bit of coming and going is right. Jim recently went to Sydney to work for a year to accumulate some capital to bring back. Unfortunately, the good life of the city led to his losing his way, in the financial sense, and he returned with little to show for his absence. The family does dream of making money, though. They are developing a board game that they hope to sell to a specialist publisher. This is a dream of more than a few years duration, though progress has been made. At every visit we are shown the latest iteration.

“My parents bought this property,” explains Karen after she described how they have moved around the region, living in rental properties in bush and town. Anyone meeting the parents, though, might get the idea that they were a little disappointed in the way their daughter’s life had turned out. The father, who thought Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper, The Australian, is the epitome of news publishing, comes across as a solid conservative who might have had more than a little time for the ‘Jo for PM’ campaign of the then-premier of Queensland, Jo Bjelke Petersen.

Karen knows they are disappointed though she seems to keep this unsaid, however it sometimes comes out in tone of voice or choice of words. She comes across as having ambition that circumstances have prevented her actualising. It’s as though the way the family lives forms some kind of barrier and that Karen is aware of this, though this is an assumption of mine derived from snatches of conversation. True or not, Karen seems happy. Maybe it’s this that matters rather than ’success’ in the world.

Evening comes. It is getting dark and the lights come on. They have town electricity out here along this narrow gravel road, but not town water. A couple big tanks store what falls on the roof.

A glimpse through the open door reveals the forested heights of the Border Ranges awash in a lavender light, the bush and farms between assuming the greyish pallor of early evening when its the shape of the land rather than the detail is visible. It’s a good time here. The heat of the day is starting to dissipate and the land assumes a quietness as if all of its wildlife has retired for the evening. Gone are the birds that swoop and overfly during the day, gone the scurrying lizards.

Some evenings we sit outside, beer in hand (one of the main purposes of the household refrigerator is to keep the beer chilled and one of the main purposes in the weekly visit to Murwillumbah is to keep the refrigerator stocked). We talk in that desultory, sporadic way of people comfortable in each others’ presence… sometimes about trivia, sometimes about our plans… their plans, mainly. For they do have plans of a very general sort though they might be classified as ‘good ideas that we should do’. The challenge is making that leap from idea to actuality. The occasional swish of the hand signals that the evening’s mosqiuito squadrons are assembling. Time to go inside.

Another evening, sitting out on the verandah made from polewood Jim and I cut from nearby bushland and roofed with sheets of galvanised iron, that timeless and functional Australian building material.

“Last year we made a large garden above the house so we wouldn’t have to go into town for vegetables. But it was the summer heat that defeated us… the plants just withered… you can see what’s left outside”, he says. This I had already done to find the barely recognisable shape of a garden producing nothing of culinary value.

There have been other, shall we say, agricultural experiments though these were only for personal use and were hidden from view in the middle of a lantana thicket. Those in the know say that frequent consumption of some of the local vegetation has a de-energising, debilitating effect. Having seen the results, I have to agree.

Dinner is finished and we sit around the table, the kids now in bed.

“Do you remember visiting us, in the 1980s, when we were living in that converted cow bails near Tyalgum?”, asks Jim.

“Sure do, I really liked going to that farm… I guess it was the mountains that rose so steeply outside the back door… rising sharply to the Tweed Range… and that fantastic view across the Tweed valley to Mt Warning as the morning light washed its sides yellow… there was something about that place and the landscape around it”, I recall.

There could be no complaint about the view from the cow bails that were home to Jim and his family. To the south east lies the prominent peak of Mt Warning, first place in Australia to catch the morning's light. It was worth waking up to watch the peak turn a rosy red as first light made contact with it and to watch the glow of morning move downwards to illuminate the slopes and valley below.

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I pause, recollecting memories of traveling in Fiona’s clunky old Kombi along the road that leaves Tyalgun to follow the creek, and of fording it to get to the bails. This brings a sensation of happiness and I wonder why it should. It was only a few years ago — I think we visited the family twice at the bails. I think also how life can seem to change but remain essentially the same, though in different places. For Karen and Jim, life at the bails was very much like life on Stoddards Creek Road.

“Yeah. It was good living there”, Jim responds. “Once, a brown snake came onto the grassy clearing in front of the house and I had to kill it. There were no walls to the building except that at the rear of the bails and the kitchen, just a wide iron roof that kept the weather out. And from our bed we would look out over the valley.. and, sometimes, it was filled with morning mist… that place had a great view to the south-east, all the way to Mt Warning. We would lie there and watch the light come onto the mountain. What a way to start the day!

Kitchen end of the cow bails with the water tank behind a 'wild tobacco' tree, a pioneer species found throughout Nothern NSW's coastal belt. Despite its name, I never knew anyone who attempted to smoke the stuff. The tree was also known as 'hippy toilet paper'.

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“In the 1930s a passenger aircraft called a Stinson — a three motor job — crashed up there after leaving Brisbane. A few survived and the crash was found by Bernard O’Reilly who explored the Border Ranges and lived at Binna Burra in the thirties”, explained Jeff. “I climbed up there one day and found the crash site”.

The bails was a home more modest that that that on Stoddards Creek Road. The only enclosed room served as the kitchen and in there was a large table and chairs, a few cupboards and a stove. “The basics”, I think silently. Outside, a large rainwater tank that was starting to rust. The rest of the bails was just a big undivided space, open, sheltered only by the rusty galvanised iron roof. The only hot water was that heated on the stove. The advantage was that the house was sited on top of a hill and, through the open sides, that grand vista opened all the way across the valley to Mt Warning.

Life in a converted cow bail is nothing unusual on the North Coast of NSW. There must have been many converted for this purpose. That once occupied by Hans Erken and family, before he moved to Crystal Waters village to start a commercial bamboo nursery, was perhaps one of the more comfortable. Visitors would be unaware they were in an old cow bails until they were told.

Converted cow bails were home to quite a few new settlers who left city for country in the 1970s.

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These were good memories for Karen and Jim, I thought, and recalling them might be a good thing. Yet, that bails on its little hummock of a rise below that steep range… it was only one waypoint that the couple had passed through on their way to the security of their home on Stoddards Creek Road.

Fiona takes a moment to herself at the cow bails. Rural life was conducive to sitting and thinking or just sitting and soaking up the sun. The bush-clad slope behind rises steeply to join the Tweed Range.

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A week passes and, one morning, we point the Kombi towards the hardtop at the end of the gravel road. Somewhere along the road I look back to see that metal shed-come-home and a feeling of gratitude for having spend time there infuses me with that warm, satisfied feeling that you get on departing some place you have enjoyed being, a feeling that tugs at you, saying ‘would you like to live here?’, ‘could you live here?’.

We turn eastward and the Kombi picks up its characteristic hum as we drive that curvy road

Jeff harvests a pawpaw.

that takes us into Murwillumbah. The town is still quiet at this time of morning and, if my recollection is correct, we stop, perhaps for a coffee, before heading south along the Pacific Highway, a road that has become familiar to us these past few years.

We do not take the turnoff towards Mungay Creek this time. We have to be back in the city. But as we pass through Kempsey I think of that couple with their plans for the mudbrick house by the farm dam. A feeling that combines completeness and envy comes over me, yet both of us know that the journeys of these two families is not our journey. The road southwards beckons and the Kombi’s engine hums as we move along it.

^^^
Two families — Robert and Sarah at Mungay Creek and Jim and Karen in the Tweed Valley. They have commonalities and they have substantial differences. Both have sought to make a home in the bush. Both have assumed the relaxed rhythm of country life. The difference is that one couple has marked their landscape with their intentions and vision. The other has given into the lure of the landscape and accepted the limitations of living within it as the norm.

Neither relationship has turned out as anticipated.

Within a couple years, Rupert and Sarah would go their separate ways. Sarah returned to college and later found work with a coastal council. She bought a house by the river in the holiday city where she works, and here she has settled into its rhythms.

Jim and Karen persisted in their easy-going lifestyle after we had visited them. But that visit was the last, it turned out. As told to me by an acquaintance, the relationship broke up when Jim took an interest in a woman in a nearby town.

Neither family survived intact.

For advocates of edible landscaping in our cities, this is good news but for local government the practice can be confusing. What has become apparent during the recent upsurge in the popularity of edible footpath planting is that a set of design and planting guidelines are desperately needed.

Most verge plantings to date have been created by gardeners who know what they are doing. The possibility emerging from the current boost in popularity is that those less knowledgeable will create gardens with inappropriate plants and without considering other footpath users.

This productive verge garden in a rural Victorian town features fruit trees and ground cover plants. Photo: Tamara Griffiths.

An established practice

Street verge gardening is the practice of growing ornamental, native or edible plants on the footpath. The rise in popularity of edible gardens has brought the planting of fruits, herbs and vegetables, sometimes mixed with flowers and native plants, to our footpaths. The practice has caught the popular imagination and is another means of returning food production to our cities.

That edible verge gardening is an established practice in Australian cities is revealed by a walk around those suburbs where the immigrants of the 1950s and 1960s made their homes, particularly those suburbs favoured by immigrants from the Mediterranean region. What do you find on the footpaths here? Olive trees, now mature and productive.

Unknowingly, some councils have made their own contribution to edible streetscapes. Take a walk along a certain street in Stanmore, in Sydney’s Inner West, and you encounter the Australian bush food tree, the Illawarra Plum (Podocarpus elatus). This strange, plum red fruit with its seed on the outside can be picked and eaten raw or made into a sauce by those with a little culinary savvy. Walk down a particular street in Windsor, Brisbane, and you encounter another Australian bushfood serving as a verge planting, the macadamia nut. Then there are numerous species of lillypilly, the Syzygiums, that have been established as street trees and that yield edible fruit.

These examples may not be in large number, however they have been noted by urban gleaners.

The cirtus trees on the street verge in Glandore, Adelaide, are shaded by the tall eucalypts.

Understanding council concerns

Street verge gardens are often spontaneous installations constructed without the approval of local government and often without the knowledge that councils might require notification of a proposal to plant the footpaths or that their approval may be needed.

Advocates of the edible planting of public space would do well to understand the concerns of councils, for whom it can come down to a question of public safety and council liability for accidents. Councils, after all, are responsible for plantings in public places and for footpaths.

To edge or not?

A difficulty for councils can arise where street verge gardeners erect a low edge around their gardens. Council staff might see this as a trip hazard and a potential source of injury claims against council, as it is local government which has responsibility for footpaths. There may also be the problem for council that a raised garden, even one raised a few centimetres above ground level by a low edge, constitutes a construction that requires permission.

Yet, without an edge around some verge gardens, mulch and soils can be washed into the gutter and down the stormwater system. This was the case with a bark-mulched verge garden in Coogee, NSW.

Problem woth verge gardens without edging — the rain had washed some of the mulch from the gardens onto the footpath and towards the stormwater drain.

If construction on footpaths, even when it is only a low barrier, is not permitted for reasons of trip hazard and local government liability, the solution might be not to raise street verge gardens and leave them without an edge. This, however, leaves them open to grass invasion and is perhaps less aesthetically pleasing.

A model of verge garden as construction on public land comes from a householder in Marrickville who has erected a raised garden bed to above knee height and cultivates vegetables in it. It’s less of a trip hazard due to the height of the garden and it is visually contained as a neat construction. Thoughtfully, access passages have been left around the sides of the garden so that people can reach the street and their parked vehicles.

The street verge along the frontage of the Glandore Community Centre in Adelaide has been planted to citrus trees.

Fruitfall

In discussion on the topic of verge planting, a council officer mentioned the potential issue of fruit falling from trees onto parked cars, or of pedestrians slipping on fruit left lying on the footpath and injuring themselves.

This, of course, is already a risk with the seed pods and heavy, seasonal leaf fall of some ornamental street trees. Think of the large, round seed pods of the London Plane trees that line some of our streets and their clusters of seed pods that cluster on footpaths and clog up gutters.

The question of maintaining and harvesting

Someone from the landscaping staff of a Western Sydney council said to me that he is not opposed to the plant

It’s true that most council grounds staff have no training in the maintenance of fruit and nut trees or skills such as pruning, pest management and harvesting. He though the idea might be more viable were a community group to take charge of maintaining and collecting the harvest so it doesn’t fall and rot on the ground. He suggested that councils would be better waiting for a community group to approach them about planting edible trees than council taking the initiative to plant them themself.

It is not only fruit and nut trees alone that are now being planted in street verge gardens. Vegetable gardens are making an appearance on our footpaths.

Abandoned gardens

The potential for gardeners to abandon their verge plantings is something that plays on council minds. What happens when the householder moves home, more than one council staffer has asked?

It’s a reasonable question because there is no guarantee that the new occupant will be interested in maintaining a verge garden. One solution would be for the departing resident to return the verge to lawn, and this is a solution favoured by some council staff.

Council attitude — helpful of not?

The City of Sydney approved verge planting in its policy on community gardening which it adopted in 2010. Other councils believe that a separate policy on verge planting is required. Sydney’s Waverley and Randwick councils, for example, already have policies on verge planting that require those planning to cultivate the footpath to submit details, including a planting plan, to council to gain approval.

It is doubtful that many verge gardeners are aware of such requirements and it only takes a walk around the streets to find numerous, spontaneous verge plantings the initiative of public spirited citizens who thought they would beautify the urban streetscape. Ornamentals, native plants and trees are what is commonly encountered but edible species have joined them in recent years.

Given the increasing popularity of verge planting, perhaps it is time for more councils to adopt policies that ensure the gardens meet minimum design and construction standards.

The realities of verge gardens

There are a few things the would-be verge cultivator might contemplate before turning the footpath turf. The items that follow are all drawn from experience and are worth thinking about.

Reality 1: Road verges are public land and produce might be taken.

A friend, who has long maintained a verge garden in the Inner West, had planted a dwarf orange tree which was showing great promise as its one and only piece of fruit turned from green to bright orange… and then disappeared. But this didn’t faze her — she had expected it.

What this demonstrates is the reality that the street verge cultivator has no control over people seeing the produce as public property and has no property rights to what is grown on the verge. The verge is accessible to anyone and nothing can be enforced to stop the public helping themselves to what is grown there. The verge might be thought of as an extension of the home garden in planting terms, however it is not an extension of the home garden in legal terms because it is on public land.

Most verge gardeners are happy to share what they grow and expect that people will take some. Perhaps a little sign suggesting people take edible leaves or fruit when ripe but not pick the entire plant would go some way to minimising damage.

Some street verge gardeners regard their plantings as ‘forage gardens’. In cases like this, the street verge garden could be regarded as edible landscaping.

Reality 2: Neighbours and passers-by may well complain

Not everyone will like your turning footpath lawn into footpath food. They may complain to council about the presence of the garden or parts of it.

One case I know of was a complaint about the clumping grass, Lomandra, overhanging a Sydney Inner West footpath. The householder was told by council to remove the plant. Yet, in Manly where I used to live, a householder had planted the verge to the native Malaleuca (tea tree) and some of the branches protruded at head height and blocked access to parked vehicles. It is a wonder that nobody complained about that. It would have been a proactive move to prune the offending branches.

Then there is the problem of the personal sense of aesthetics. What is a beautiful vergeside food garden to some is something ugly to others. Aesthetics, of course, is no basis for local government decisions on verge gardens because aesthetics allows no objective measure.

Reality 3: You verge garden may be vandalised

This I experienced while living down by Botany Bay in Sydney’s southern suburbs. We had planted the area around the malaleuca street tree — it was a planter that protruded into the roadway — with hardy herbs and a pineapple. Later rather than sooner, the pineapple started to fruit and this we watched as it got bigger and bigger… until, that is, a young boy with a cricket bat thought the pineapple fruit would make a fine cricket ball.

Fruit tree theft is already something that occurs in community gardens. There is no reason why young fruit trees will not disappear from verge gardens.

Other vandalism may be less sporting than the fate of the unripe pineapple mentioned above and may result from people who are just maliciously-minded. Uncommon it might be, the possibility of vandalism is something verge gardeners have to live with.

Reality 4: Streets are dangerous places

Managing a verge garden could involve stepping out onto the street to access your planting. There are clear dangers here, especially if you are working with traffic-unaware children.

This is the sort of thing that arouses the interest of council occupational health and safety officers and it is something that could discourage council from approving verge plantings.

Although the risk of being hit by a vehicle may be small (most adults are traffic-aware and take care crossing the street) it is none-the-less a low level risk that should be kept in mind.

A verge garden beside a carpark, Clovelly, NSW.

Design considerations for verge gardens

We can gain an overview of the design considerations involved in planning verge gardens through a needs/functions/yields analysis. The purpose of this exercise is to build a picture of what is involved in verge gardening then asking if we can supply the garden’s needs, make use of its functions and use its yields.

Needs

Let’s consider needs first. The critical question we ask ourselves is this: What are the needs of  verge gardening and how can I provide those needs?

Here’s a list that you can add to…

Need 1: Access to and from vehicles and the street

A verge garden that abuts the gutter may impede people getting into and out of their vehicles.

The need here is for sufficient space so that people:

• can open their car door
• can easily get into and out of their car.

This is even more of an important consideration where those are aged people who cannot nimbly step around plantings or who use a walking aid.

Leave a sufficiently wide strip unplanted or left to lawn between the gutter and the outer edge of your verge garden.

Need 2: Access from footpath to street

Do not occupy the entire width of your property alignment with a verge garden. Leave access to the street at either side of your verge planting and/or a path through it.

A width of 1.2 metres would be minimum. The space should be wide enough for people to manouvre a wheelchair, pram or walking aid between the paved footpath and the road edge.

Need 3: Thoughtful species selection

Herbs, vegetables and shrub fruits (such as berry fruits) are not the species in question here because of their low growth form and smaller root systems. Rather, it is trees that must be thoughtfully selected for kerbside planting, such as fruit and nut trees.

As well as horticultural considerations such as planting species that are suited to climate, the selection of edible fruit or nut trees should avoid those that:

• are known to have vigourous root systems that could could lift up paved footpath and road surfaces and create irregularities that could pose a hazard
• are likely to grow tall enough to contact and damage overhead cables
• have vigourous root systems that could damage buried services, such as water, gas and sewer pipes.

Find out the location of buried services before you make a verge garden.

Need 4: Prune plants so that their foliage does not overhang the footpath

Here, I am suggesting the selection of appropriate plants and the pruning of your plants so that their branches and foliage so not protrude over the footpath at head height or below. Trees branching higher overhead may be useful for casting shade onto the walkway in the heat of summer.

As the trees grow, gardeners can prune the lower branches that could intrude over the footpath or road. This is done while the trees are young so as to ‘lift’ the canopy and encourage branching higher above the ground.

Remember that parents push strollers carrying young children along the footpath and children ride scooters and bicycles along it. The last thing they want, quite reasonably, is for their children to by brushed in the face by overhanging foliage.

Overhanging and protruding foliage may also be a deterrent to aged people, especially those using walking aids.

Need 5: The need for care and maintenance

Planters of public land such as street verges have a duty of care in maintaining their plantings so that they are safe, look good and do not become vectors for the spread of fruit, vegetable and other plant pests. They must maintain their plantings.
Herbs and vegetables, fruits and nuts planted on the kerbside need as much care as those grown in a home gardens.
Care for kerbside planting includes:

• regular watering
• mulching, to reduce evaporative water loss from the soil and to reduce water consumption
• the application of compost or other organic fertiliser to stimulate healthy growth
• monitoring and treatment of insect pest or plant disease infestation
• pruning of trees and shrubs to prevent their encroaching on pedestrian access.

Need 6: Aesthetics

Verge gardens have to look good, irrespective of the gardener’s attitude to aesthetics because gardens thought to look bad will likely result in complaints to council.

Concern about neatness and appearance, perhaps over-concern in some cases, is a social reality. It’s true that people project onto others their personal values about aesthetics, however this is something we have to live with. What is riskier is the likelyhood that council, if it intervenes, will have no objective criteria to assess aesthetics.

What does all of this mean for the verge gardener?

First, it means that, where you have a large area of verge, do not attempt to plant the entire area unless you are confident you can keep the entire garden planted and maintained. Start small, consolidate the area you start with then move on in small steps, consolidating as you go. This way, through consolidating what you do in your small steps, you reduce maintenance needs because things have been done properly.

I came across an example of what appears to be people taking on more than they can maintain on a Coogee street verge. A wide verge beside an apartment block had been mulched with bark chip but was occupied by a paucity of vegetables. Most of the garden was bare, suggesting neglect.

Functions

Let’s turn now to the functions of kerbside gardens. Functions describe the indirect benefits of the plantings and the processes that take place within them and their immediate environment. They do not refer to their direct value of the plantings to people, something we will consider later.

The critical question here is this: How can I maintain and increase, if appropriate, the beneficial functions of my verge planting?

Function 1: Provision of environmental services

Like any ecosystem, that of an edible plant association established in a verge garden provides the environmental services commonly associated with plants:

• filtration of air
• slowing of rainfall runoff and assisting it infiltrate as soil water
• provision of habitat for insects, birds and small reptiles
• carbon sequestration in organically-rich soils.

This requires establishing a diversity of plant types.

Funciton 2: The productive use of urban land

Kerbside gardening makes productive use of land in the city. It puts to practical use small patches of land that are otherwise neglected or planted to simplified plant communities — such as lawn — that are unproductive or that may consume excessive water and fossil fuels in their maintenance, as do unproductive verges.

Edible kerbside plantings value urban land more than most other uses.

Function 3: Boosting biodiversity

As mixed edible plantings, our verge gardens attract insects and other small animal species that interact through food webs. This is the basis of their biodiversity value. Flowering species attract bees, providing habitat for pollinators in the city.

Biodiversity functions can be enhanced where open pollinated, non-hybrid vegetable and herb species are established. These can become a seed source for distribution to other gardeners, spreading the availability of species that make up our agricultural biodiversity, a type of biodiversity as threatened as that of native species, if not more so.

Function 4: New ways to engage with public space

A further function of kerbside plantings is less to do with plants and more to do with people. It is this: taking responsibility for a kerbside garden provides a new means for people to engage with public space. It is a means of assuming greater responsibility for a neighbourhood and encourages the role of ‘engaged citizen’.

Public space is often viewed as the sole responsibility of local government. Citizens make minimal use of the space and often feel no responsibility for its care even though some councils expect people to mow the verge on their property boundary. Thus, local government adopts a managerial attitude as a service provider and sees little potential for a public role in open space management.

The rapid spread of community food gardens on public open space is changing this attitude, slowly. So, too, could verge gardening because it requires people to take responsibility for them.

It is in this sense that the gardens enhance public engagement with public lands. Local government might choose to see this as developing the capacity of communities to take a more proactive role in public space management.

Function 5: Enhancing urban amenity

Urban amenity is the deriving of some often intangible benefit from the built environment.

Kerbside food production increases the amenity of urban areas through the provision of:

• foods to supplement a household’s diet
• habitat and environmental services
• urban revegetation and the development of the urban tree canopy and understorey
• improved visual aesthetics of streetscapes
• improved food security for households and, if adopted on a larger scale, of the city.

Yields

A yield is anything that is directly used by people.

The main yield of kerbside gardening are the foods that are grown and eaten by the gardeners or picked by passers-by.

A secondary yield is the knowledge and physical exercise that comes with the experience of kerbside gardening.

Already a reality

Kerbside gardens are already a reality although their number is small at present.

If present signs are correct and there is a growing interest in taking over the footpath nature strip to grow food, then the time may come when local government and community associations publish design and planting guidelines.

The sooner this happens, the better.

Growcom wants one. So does the Public Health Association of Australia and sustainable agriculture expert at the University of Sydney, Bill Billotti. A national food policy, it seems, is something of a catchy idea. But what kind of policy are we talking about?

Growcom’s proposal focuses mainly on big agribusiness and food exports and it is the likely form of any food policy that would come from our national capital-amid-the-sheep-farms. For small business and the rural smallholder, and for the growing number of community groups gathered around food, where would their voice be in a national policy on food?

Some might argue that a national policy should consider only macroeconomic issues and that consideration of food policy questions around urban food security, access to good, affordable food and the sustainable production of food are really matters for state and local government policy. A counter-argument says that national policy should set the broad agenda on these questions that would be implemented through state and local government policy.

The recent spate of proposals for a national food policies have seemingly come out of nowhere in a very short space of time. All of those mentioned appeared within a period of three months in 2010. Yet, it is to local – not state or national – government that we must look for the genesis of food policy in this country. That was 1997 and it was the work of South Sydney Council.

Still a good model

Passed by Council, the policy – called What’s Eating South Sydney – proposed support for greater access to local retail sources of fresh foods and to self-help, community food initiatives such as food co-operatives and community food gardens. In these gardens, it was thought, people could grow some of their own perishable foods, primarily the vegetables and herbs and perhaps some fruits, that supply the nutrients needed to maintain health.

In the few years between the formulation of the policy and South Sydney Council being absorbed into the City of Sydney, the policy encouraged no food co-ops but did enable Council support to flow to community gardens in the area including those on Housing NSW’s Waterloo Estate, the first of their kind. Seeking to tap into community-based expertise, the policy enabled Council to enlist the co-operation of the Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network.

South Sydney was closely followed by a food policy adopted by Penrith Council, these being, as far as is known, the first in Australia and a sign that as far back as the late 1990s people were starting to think differently about Sydney’s continued access to fresh foods. Now, local government in other states, as well as in NSW, has decided not to await federal or state food polices and to initiate their own.

Food summit

After the initial flurry of innovation in the late 1990s, the idea of food policy as a means of enacting local and state food security and food access initiatives went into hiatus until it was resurrected by the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance (SFFA) in 2009. The Alliance organised an ambitious event – a food summit – spanning the months between its launch in NSW Parliament House in May to the Food Summit – known as Hungry For Change – in October.

Lead-up events were held through the Greater Sydney region to identify regional food issues and to pass action items on to the Food Summit. The lead-up event in the Illawarra, south of Sydney, was organised by Food Fairness Illawarra, an organisation that came into existence around the same time as the SFFA. Lead-ups also took place in the Blue Mountains and in the Macarthur district south-west of the city. They were supplemented by those on the Central Coast to the north and the inner urban/city east area.

Well known nutritionist, chef and author, Rosemary Stanton, was a keynote speaker at the Illawarra lead-up and Michael Shuman, visiting US economist and attorney, working for the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, was keynote speaker for the inner urban/city east event at Circular Quay. That event was organised by a team from organisations active in SFFA including Leichhardt, City of Sydney, Randwick and Waverley councils, Transition Sydney and the Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network. Participating in the event were representatives from the Local Food Futures Alliance on the mid-north coast around Coffs Harbour/Bellingen.

Keynote speaker at the two-day Food Summit was Jeanette Longfield from UK food education and advocacy organisation, Sustain, an effective organisation seen as something of a model by the SFFA. Sydney’s Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, also appeared in her role of local food system advocate.

Food as a focus for sustainability

Just as the rise of the environment movement in the 1980s saw the blossoming of a multitude of community organisations, so is the blooming of food as a social, environmental and policy issue creating a forest of organisations to take action on it.

With food choices instrumental in a household’s energy and water footprint as well as contributing to the incredible volume of food waste produced by both households and industry, the growing social milieu around food is something the established environmental lobbies seem slow to recognise, though there are exceptions such as Friends of the Earth. These new food groups are in some ways starting to supplant the earlier focus on the natural environment.

The growing social food agenda takes two forms. One is made up of the educational and advocacy groups like SFFA. The other is formed of the organisations actually going out and creating an alternative food production and distribution chain in our cities. This includes a still-small but somewhat bewildering array of initiatives as diverse as food co-ops, community supported agriculture (CSA) schemes and community gardens. In terms of legal structure, these range through incorporated associations, co-operatives and social enterprise. The latter are essentially small businesses trading as not-for-profits as well as for-profit ’social business’. Both have primarily social goals, any operating surplus (the non-profit equivalent of profit) being poured back into the organisation rather than being distributed to shareholders or owners.

Whereas the suspicion of business by environmentalists has in some cases held back the development of the social or ethical investment movement in Australia, the business model is being embraced and repurposed towards achieving social goals around food by the small, community food system start-ups such as some food co-ops and Food Connect, an adaptation of the CSA model that makes it more resilient and viable. Making its start in Brisbane’s warm and sticky subtropics, Food Connect replications are now underway in Sydney, Adelaide and at Melbourne’s CERES centre.

The value of policy

Policy enables government at all of its levels to act on something. It enables funds, resources and staff time to be allocated and for resources to be distributed to other organisatons. This is what makes developing food policies something that is worthwhile despite the possibility of their hijacking by government and industry to serve the agendas of those groups. In this regard it will be interesting to watch the Tasmanian Food Security Council, recently formed within the Social Inclusion Unit of the Department of Premier and Cabinet and chaired by Social Inclusion Commissioner, Professor David Adams, to see how it goes about developing a food security policy for the state.

There is a suspicion among community-based food advocates that policy would simply support existing food producers and distributors, leaving little or no room for communities to help themselves or for small business, social enterprise or the rural smallholder to find a niche. Nonetheless, if the emerging community and small business/social enterprise food formations are to truly influence policy, they will have to seek creative and positive avenues to do this. And if government chooses not to listen and to open space for their participation, then those groups can make this known in their advocacy.

Wait … or go it alone?

A current discussion among the community food milieu is whether to wait for government to decide to develop a policy and seek participation in it or, alternatively, to take the proactive approach and start the process themselves in conjunction with other community, small business/social enterprise, farming and professional bodies and ask government and industry to join them.

At least, if government and industry choose not to participate, the outcome might be the development of a citizen’s food charter that puts the community/small enterprise agenda before the public and that may provide balance to any future government policy. This could become a major collaborative effort for the community/small enterprise sector were it to take it on the road and elicit public input through various approaches from the deliberative democracy toolkit.

We already have the genesis of this in the form of the SFFA’s declaration on food stemming from the October 2009 Food Summit, which the organisation presented to state parliamentarians, and the declaration that emerged from Adelaide’s Plains To Plate food convergence.

Creating a role for community food interests in government policy will require collaboration between organisations and influential individuals, but that is something that can be done if there is the will to make it happen.

Resources:

* Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network, http://communitygarden.org.au

* Sydney Food Fairness Alliance, http://sydneyfoodfairness.org.au

* Food Fairness Illawarra, http://www.healthycitiesill.org.au/foodfairness.htm

* Plains To Plate Food for the Future, http://futureoffoodsa.ning.com/

* Sustain UK, www.sustainweb.org

REBECCA MORGAN is the “hands and heart” behind Courmand du Morgan, a company that prepares gourmet locally-sourced meals and delivers them to your door step. What a fantastic alternative to take-out!

Read more at Permacultured. ]]> http://pacific-edge.info/how-to-feed-3-adults-for-20-dollars-and-help-local-farms/feed/ 0 http://pacific-edge.info/rcc_wind/ http://pacific-edge.info/rcc_wind/#comments Tue, 01 Jun 2010 00:58:01 +0000 admin http://pacific-edge.info/?p=2171 RANDWICK CITY COUNCIL will trial renewable wind turbine technology in a bid to find fresh ways of reducing the amount of greenhouse gases emitted from Council sites.

Council is aiming to trial small-scale wind powered turbines at sites across the City.

Once the trial is complete, Randwick Council will be better informed and equipped to decide how to best use wind-powered energy at a local level.

Trialling the effectiveness of wind power technology is just one initiative under Randwick Council’s Sustaining our City program, which is designed to improve Randwick City’s air quality and reduce greenhouse gas emissions as outlined in the 20-year Randwick City Plan