The system was installed by Australian owned company, Solgen Energy, to connect to an array of existing solar electic panels to create a combined 48kW solar energy installation. The additional 36kW array of 216 photovoltaic modules generates up to 58 megawatts of electricity a year and reduces Council’s carbon emission by 58 tonnes of CO2 per year.

Randwick City Council has installed 20 kilowatts of solar panels at other Council sites and has undertaken other sustainability initiatives including large water conservation projects as well as introducing a community car share scheme that includes designated parking for both car share and hybrid vehicles at popular shopping and beachside locations.

Council makes use of an environmental levy to fund the Sustaining Our City program that incorporates a Local Greenhouse Action Plan and a range of community education initiatives such as the annual Eco Living Fair, Sustainable Gardening course and Living Smart course.

In 2010, Council’s Sustainability Education Officer, Fiona Campbell, will oversee a project to retrofit for energy efficiency, water efficiency and public education the Randwick Community Centre. The project will see the installation of simple technologies to reduce energy and water consumption and feature interpretive signage and education programs, including the PIG — the Permaculture Interpretive Garden — to offer visitors and participants in council courses ideas that they can implement in their homes and apartments.

Rating

INNOVATION/DESIGN THINKING: Medium.

A solution to carbon emission reduction.

SCALABILITY POTENTIAL: High if roof space and funding available.

REPLICABILITY: Can be copied easily with existing technology.

Although Rosemary Morrow’s video is the focus of a different article, it is pertinent to the book I want to write about. I had seen her garden in construction and looked curiously at what seemed to me to be a rather large hole that she had dug. As I watched her video, I came to understand the logic of that hole and its role in the curious earth-shaping exercise she had been undertaking when I visited. As it turns out, those backyard earthworks were all about harvesting, detaining and infiltrating into the soil the rainfall that comes onto and flows through her site.

It is this that Brad Lancaster’s book, ‘Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond’, is all about. The book arrived unexpectedly in my mailbox just before Rosemary arrived on my doorstep, and that was a fortunate coincidence. Like Rosemary, Brad is no stranger to the practice of permaculture design, and that shows through rather plainly in the 179, well-illustrated (illustrative drawings and black and white photographs) pages of his large-format softcover. Oh, and Brad’s book isn’t just for the permaculture demimonde; it’s relevant to virtually all Australian cities and towns below the Tropic of Capricorn, including the better watered but recently drought-affected big cities. It’s also for those comparatively few Australians who derive a living from our often-parched soils, a description that doesn’t really do justice to our farmers west of the Great Divide who are now into their tenth year of drought.

The swale, or infiltration trench, at Fairfield City Farm in south-western Sydney detains and infiltrates rainwater running downslope.

Let’s diverge. Australian governments, the whole three layers of them (whether that’s one too many is a different debate) have made great strides in encouraging individuals, companies and even government itself to take water-conserving measures. We now get rebates for installing water tanks and even bigger rebates is we have those roofwater tanks plumbed into our toilet flushing and other domestic systems.

The ban on urban watertanks that existed just 30 years ago definitely was in another country, another time, another mindset. Even the Manly Council Art Gallery down the road from me has a line of rainwater tanks the full length of its rear wall. And local government sustainability education programs feature water conservation… all about harvesting, storing and using the stuff carefully. The ‘Living Smart Action Guide, a 300 or so page manual I am writing for a local government sustainable living course, has an entire chapter on how urban people can make best use of water, and the topic is taught in the course by a water engineer knowledgeable in all aspects of water harvesting and use, including greywater. This indicates the seriousness of the local government interest in water conservation in our sometimes parched metropolis, and it suggests why Brad’s book is one for the times.

A mine of how-to

Back on topic again, and we find Brad’s book a literal mine of how-to information. Yes, I know he’s a North American and that the peculiar Imperial system of measurement survives in this country, however… good news… Brad has been thoughtful enough to supply critical figures in both Imperial and Metric. The plants he mentions, of course, are not relevant here, but I’m sure that readers will be smart enough to devise their own species list.

So, what’s in this book for we southern hemisphere dwellers? First, there’s the eight rainwater harvesting principles. The first might sound a little familiar to practitioners of permaculture design because it’s about beginning with long and thoughtful observation. It’s about understanding what goes on on our site, which is knowledge gained through the dual process of observing what happens and asking why it is so… why do those plants grow here? why is this soil moister than elsewhere? why does rainfall runoff flow this way and not the other? why is this area eroding?

Reading this, it reminded me of the Action Research process I have used in projects. That is based on the idea of look > think > act – look and observe to understand what is happening (more formally, this would be called baseline data collection in project management-speak), analyse it by thinking and learning about it, then act to design and develop the project. Call it what you will, observation reveals sometimes hidden processes and features in the landscape, whether that is of a farm, an urban garden or what is to become an community food garden in the suburbs. ‘Observe and contemplate’ is the rather nice way that Brad puts it.

His second point of advice – his second principle – is to start thinking about water flow and how you might interact with it at the highest elevation of your land. It is from here that we begin our interaction with rainfall and overland flow and channel it into detention structures such as bunds (raised ridges), detention ponds and infiltration trenches or contour ditches, also known in permaculture-speak as ‘swales’.

Brad’s third principle is to start small and simple, a suggestion that resonates with David Holmgren’s permaculture principle about small and slow solutions. Although I think there are situations when we need big and rapid interventions, the principle is one borne out in a development program I have had a long association with in the Solomons Islands. There, the principle was field rested and found to offer manageability and, as Brad suggests for water projects, reduced maintenance over time.

Domestic rainwater tanks come in a range of sizes, shapes and materials. This flatish, galvanised iron tank was installed at the home of Keelah Lam, from Manly Food Co-op.

The fourth principle is about infiltrating water into our soils, which is accomplished by slowing and detaining overland flow so that it has time to sink into the soil where the roots of our plants can get at it. This leads nicely to the next principle, that of planning an overflow route for the excess water that falls during prolonged rainy periods or storms. The cost of not doing this is erosion. Spillways should take water to a larger infiltration zone or, more likely in the city, to storm water drainage. While this might seem a waste, we are responsible for the downstream impacts of our earthworks and water harvesting installations on other properties, so we don’t want excessive water flows entering them. In the city, inattention to this could lead to a visit from your local council officer.

Overflow routes or spillways should be reinforced against erosion by planting them with a mat-rooted species, perhaps a variety of durable and drought-resistant grass, or by paving them with closely-packed stones, known as rip-rap. Brad talks about moving water from retention basin to basin in a stepped progression down our site, assuming we have the slope to start with.

He also talks about maximising planted groundcover because this, too, slows, detains and helps to infiltrate runoff. Plant roots also pump soil water towards the soil surface, and the leaf fall eventually forms a mulch that breaks down to add the organic matter that keeps our soils open and porous. Maximising groundcover is Brad’s sixth principle.

His seventh will be familiar to permaculture designers because it’s about stacking functions. This links with the principle of designing for multifunction, which appeared way back in Bill Mollison and David Holmgren’s ‘Permaculture One’. Brad talks about constructing contour bunds, which are earthern mounds made along the contour, so that they act as paths providing access through the garden. Bunds, of course, are a water harvesting technique. He discusses other strategies to increase productivity and make best use of limited space, and one of them I see if I look out of my window. It’s a trellis that makes use of the side of the rainwater tank and, currently, it supports a scrambling and largely unproductive pumpkin vine.

The final principle is an important one, that of monitoring your water works and continually assessing their performance. This discloses where improvements can be made and is a way of learning more about your landscape. It applies the philosophy of the continuous improvement of design to water systems.

The possibilities of techniques

The first swale I saw in action, actually working that is, was when I was a Landcare educator at Liverpool Council’s Fairfield City Farm in south-western Sydney. It was carved into the sticky clay soil of the urban permaculture demonstration garden and it held water well and separated the vegetable garden from the fruit and nut orchard planted immediately below its berm. As water infiltrates, swales (and, presumably, berms) form an area of moist soil immediately below and this slowly moves downslope under the influence of gravity. It is this that the roots of those fruit and nut trees accessed. The next swale I came across was the set at Habitat and Harmony Community Garden in the lower Hunter. These, too, worked well and were full of water when I first saw them.

Swales are something that long ago caught the imagination of perma-folk and now we find them from farm to suburban backyard, however they are only one of many water harvesting earthworks. We’ve already mentioned berms, which, unlike swales that are incised into the soil, stand mounded along the contour above it. There are mini-catchments, too, such as the ‘boomerang’ bunds Brad talks about — they are smaller, curved, low-raised berms made on gently sloping land. He also mentions basins, another excavation and one made around trees in dry climates. You can see some, well mulched and with their berm planted to banana, at the Yandina Community Garden on the Sunshine Coast.

Also mentioned in his book are terraces, which are really a means of turning a steep hillside into a stepped series of smaller, flat strips for cropping. I was introduced to them by Badri Dahal, now living in Sydney but then with the Institute for Sustainable Agriculture Nepal, when he gave me a copy of the book, ‘Sloping Land Agriculture’. I was impressed when, in the early 1990s, I encountered a low hillside of terraces at the Angel Street Community Garden. Brad suggests low-raised walls to boost their water harvesting capacity.

Swales don’t drain

Despite their popularity, there remains confusion about swales in permaculture circles. It is due to the misunderstanding of this fact: swales hold water, they do not drain it away; drainage ditches or channels move water from one place to another, such as to a dam. Drainage lines are excavated with a gentle grade, swales are flat along the contour — at the same height, that is — across the land.

Sometimes, but only where large enough and where the soil is deep enough, they have pits dug into them at intervals that act as cisterns to hold water and allow it to infiltrate. This is mentioned in Brad’s book, too.

And so much more

There’s an informative, illustrated chapter on site analysis for the home and garden. Site analysis, and its accompanying needs analysis of those who will live on-site or make use of it if it is something like a community garden is the staring point of design, as many reading this will know. There are also formula for calculating harvest capacity, boxes of interesting information and pages with scaled grids for doing your own design.

Brad Lancaster’s is the first of his three (so far) books on water. Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1, leads to Volume 2, which is all about earthworks. Volume 3 covers roof catchments and cisterns — water tanks to us. I’ve seen Volumes 1 and 2 in Sydney bookshops (Gleebooks and Kinokinoya stock them) but I’ve not yet come across Volume 3. They are distributed in Australia by Tower Books in Sydney, so would presumably be found around the country.

Ours, we know only too well, is a dry country likely to become drier as climate change makes itself increasingly felt, especially in the south east. That is why, even in the cities clinging to our coasts, Brad’s manuals are potentially useful. What they do is take the ‘enrich soil + mulch’ message of permaculture and local government sustainability educators a step further to shaping the ground to get the most from the rainwater that runs over it.

Now, a note of caution. Get advice in land shaping if you do not really understand what Brad is about or the hydraulics of your site. Consider your downstream neighbours and what happens to water leaving your land and entering theirs’. This is what Rosemary Morrow did before she reshaped her land to harvest water and, if she — one of this country’s most experienced permaculture educators and designers — does this, then it’s only common sense that we do too.

So, should you invest your scarce dollars in this book and, perhaps, in Brad’s other volumes? I suggest the answer is ‘yes’. You will just have to apply a little observation and reasoning to adapt them to Australian conditions. Again, if you don’t feel confident doing what he describes, get help from a competent and experienced permaculture or landscape designer. These are manuals for our parched times and gardens. They are easy to read, easy to understand and it is evident that they are written from the knowledge that comes of experience.

Publishing details

Lancaster B; 2006/2008; Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volumes 1; Rainsource Press, Tuscon USA; ISBN 978 0 9772464 0 3.

The strap leaves of a crop of Russian garlic grow above the farmhouse on the hilltop high above the coast

The stiff, strap leaves of Russian garlic surround the visitors on the exposed slope. They stand, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched against the unexpected change of weather as the farmer explains how he grows and harvests the crop. He seems impervious to the cold wind. Occasionally, one or another of the visitors look out to the rolling countryside, a patchwork of bush and field that undulates towards a ridge to the west. They look up to the grey sky, probably wishing they could return to the shelter of the verandah. In fine weather it must be beautiful up here.

Russian garlic is a low-growing plant, grey-green in colour and in sufficient demand to make it worthwhile as a cash crop. Like the more familiar varieties of garlic, it is the underground part — the bulb or corm — that is eaten. Unlike the common garlic, Russian garlic has a much larger corm.

The plant covers the slope between the top of the knoll and the house and is one of a number of crops that Maria and Peter grow. In other seasons they plant chilli and stevia, an exceedingly sweet herb used as a sugar substitute.

“The market for Stevia is small but it is growing”, Peter tells his visitors. “It is being used in more and more products. We sell all we grow . The chilli goes to the herbal products market”.

It was not a comfortable environment to discuss the growing and marketing of herbal products, but perserverance prevails until a light rain starts to fall. The wind picks it up, slinging it against skin protected only by summer clothing. The group wastes no time in returning to the shelter of the verandah.

Like Maria and Peter’s speech, the compact, orange coloured house betrays a Germanic influence and seems to emerge from the red soil. Winter sunlight streams through second storey windows to warm the interior and, downstairs, the living area and kitchen take advantage of the northerly aspect for light and warmth. A wide, roofed patio provides shade and shelter from summer heat. The house is homely, comfortable, with a pleasant, lived-in ambience. The couple built it when they moved onto their land some years ago after deciding that the rolling country of the Byron Bay hinterland would be their home.

The small property straddles the top and sides of a hill that protrudes above the escarpment. This is open, exposed country in bad weather but in summer it can be just as hot and humid as anywhere on the North Coast.

“This is where we store and do initial processing on our crops”, Peter explains, ushering the group into a long, utilitarian building that occupies a cutting in the slope below the house and above the road.

“Some crops are processed elsewhere in the area before going to herbal processors for use in their products. There are other growers in the region but not too many producing stevia. It is a new product”.

Maria and Peter are a quiet couple who appear content with their life here on the hill in their little house, specialist herb farming business and with each other. Theirs is the simplicity of choice, not poverty.

Rural re-settlement brings changes

Bangalow, like other settlements in the area, was once a farming town. A waypoint between the landlocked city of Lismore and the delights of the Byron Bay coast, it is the sort of place where, in the 1960s, holidaying families might have stopped for a hamburger and then moved on. The main street of the town climbs a steep hill towards its Lismore extremity and is lined with old timber and brick buildings. Those holiday makers of the 1960s might have noticed that the buildings were in need of a coat of paint and a bit of repair.

Now, the buildings are renovated, the paint fresh. The town has become a destination in its own right, transformed by newcomers that have moved in over the past three decades. Today, those same buildings are craft shops, cafes and restaurants. The town has regular monthly craft and farmer’s markets, a sure sign of success in this region. Bangalow’s story is similar to other towns of that hilly, coastward salient east of Lismore.

The changes the newcomers brought should not be underestimated. In search of more relaxed ways of living free of the hyper lifestyles of the metropolitan cities, they infused moribund farming communities with new ideas, new attitudes, new lifestyles and, eventually, new businesses.

And still they come, though those arriving today are more likely to be middle-aged and in search of life change, or retired folk in search of somewhere friendly and warm to settle. Some, perhaps, lived here temporarily at the start of the rural re-settlement of the 1970s and are now returning permanently. Others are those who wished they had come but did not. Now they have, their presence adding to the change that has reshaped the region and pushed up the price of real estate.

At first, the simple lifestyle sought by the re-settlers was a simplicity forced by poverty, not choice, even though many came from middle class families in the cities. They eschewed the trappings of materialism… they were a restless cohort in search of something vague even to themselves. Many moved on, their restlessness unsatisfied, but others stayed.

Over that thirty years they grew a little older. Some found jobs, even those who were at first happy to live off unemployment benefits. They acquired partners and families and settled in the folds of this undulating landscape, buying the old farmhouses or moving into the towns.

From the Nimbin valley in the west to the tourist town of Byron Bay in the east and south to Alstoneville, thirty years of re-settlement have brought social and economic transformation.

Home in the hills – Peta’s garden

Peta and her husband moved from the city to the Bangalow area

Two bright-coloured sea kayaks hang from the rafters below the renovated house, a weatherboard building sporting a fresh, rusty red paint job and typical of rural structures in the region. Timber stumps lift the building well clear of the earth to facilitate cooling and space for car parking and sitting out hot summer days.

This is the home of Peta and her husband, a couple who followed the path from city to country and found a new life in an old farmhouse in the hills not far from Bangalow.

Peta is a quietly spoken woman, in her early forties perhaps, short blonde hair, oval, wire rimmed glasses and a ready smile. A community-minded woman, she was once a volunteer with the Seed Savers Network down on the coast.

Unlike other new locals, Peta has not simply let the bush grow back on what was cleared land once used to graze beef or dairy cattle. She has transformed it to produce a variety of fruit trees and bush foods. On the eastern side of the house is a large vegetable garden that supplies the couple with much of their food. It is a geometric arrangement of raised garden beds made of concrete blocks.

Like Peter and Maria, Peta and husband have made a home for themselves amid the farms and forests of the hinterland.

Option no more?

Although the number of young people who want to live this way may have declined, the type of life pioneered by the re-settlers of the Byron hinterland in the 1970s continues to attract newcomers. This is in part due to the ‘downshifting’ identified by social researcher, Clive Hamilton, of the Australia Institute.

Downshifting is the practice of exchanging higher-paying and higher-status city jobs and lifestyles for a less-stressful existence in the country or on the coast. The trend was popularised by ABC television’s comedy-drama, Seachange, a series that may have accelerated the trend. As this is largely a phenomenon of the over-35 year age group, what of young people, those of the age group that pioneered the coastal lifestyle some 30 years ago?

Times are different. Young people today start their life with a substantial debt accrued in getting a university education. This might not stop them leaving the cities, but it may be a barrier. Then there are the social and economic pressures pushing them into a career. Earning power and status in the workforce are values that were far less prominent 30 years ago. Except for an all-too-brief year spent traveling after completing high school or university, the opportunity for living an open-ended life today, even for a short period, often fails to eventuate.

On the high ridges

Tania on her ridgetop property

The suggestion is straightforward: “Just step over it”. The hesitation comes when we see what we have been instructed to step over — a black snake so long it straddles the path. The black snake, familiar to Australians who venture into the bush, is a venomous species but it is not aggressive unless provoked. A shiny black animal, it can reach two metres in length.

“It’s a resident in the garden. I’ve got used to seeing it about”, Tania says, as if that would make it any easier for the hesitant visitors who are relieved to watch the serpent slither into the undergrowth.

Finding Tania’s place had been a bit of a challenge. Only very general directions had been provided, the following of which had led to the unintended discovery of some of the hinterland’s winding back roads.

Once found, the view from her property was extensive. Ridges cut across the landscape to the north, their sides a grey-green smudge of Eucalypt and rainforest… corrugated hill country formed by the forces of geology and time and nature’s persistence in covering everything with a layer of living vegetation. Their home, a large, renovated weatherboard farm house situated where the ridge spills to the valley below, occupies a superb position from where the land around lay revealed.

Tania and her partner have been here only a couple years. Her husband is fortunate enough to have the skills to work from home and her intention is to teach permaculture design courses here. Before they moved from the Gosford region an hour north of Sydney, Tania taught at their rural smallholding. That ended when their house burned down, an event that triggered their move.

In the steep ridge country between Byron and Lismore, two WWOOFERS learn about organic growing by doing

Tania’s is an extroverted personality with a light, easy-going character that overlays a quiet energy. Sharp and at the same time welcoming and down-to-earth, Tania’s lack of affectation is somehow reinforced by her stature and her long, straight, dark hair that falls loosely over her back and a slim, almost thin body gives the impression of robust, outdoor health. Tania is dark of complexion and moves easily through her garden as if she belongs on this remote hilltop, almost as if she was a manifestation of the landscape itself.

Having negotiated the black snake, we emergs into an extensive vegetable and herb garden, a free-form arrangement of curved edges and unusual shapes that extends along the ridge. Just below, the ridge topples into the steep, forested valley.

Two WOOFERS — the acronym stands for Willing Workers on Organic Farms — an agency that places people on organic farms where they work in return for accommodation and food — are in the garden. The blonde-haired and bearded young man is in his mid-twenties and of English origin; his German co-worker, blue-eyed and blonde, hair twisted into a long tail, is around the same age. They are spending time on Tania’s property, they explain, and do not know where they will go for their next WOOFing assignment. They, at least, have found the means to an open-ended life.

Farmlet on the urban edge

It is a different world on the coastal strip. Gone are the ridges and narrow backroads of the hinterland and the encroaching forest, all replaced by the throb and pulse of Byron Bay, premier holiday city of the North Coast.

Yet even within the town there are pockets of quietness. One lies off Old Bangalow Road where it winds its way up the escarpment. Adjacent to the entrance the land rises steeply and has been planted to a variety of trees.

On the edge of Byron Bay, swales have been cut into a steep slope to infltrate water into the soil for the fruit trees growing along them

It is what has been done under the trees that is of interest. A close inspection reveals a slope cut across by long ditches. When it rains and runoff moves down the slope to be detained in these ditches from where it feeds the trees that have been planted along their edges. Upon realising that many are fruit trees, it becomes apparent that this is a cultivated system. Known as contour ditches because they have been excavated along the contour of the land so that water does not drain away, the owners of the property refer to them as swales.

In the swaled area the clay soil is moist and muddy and we watch our step, but not closely enough as someone takes a long, slow slide. Above the slope and past a row of banana trees is an enclosure holding a dozen or so chickens, mainly the large, black Australorp variety. Spices are grown in a terraced garden above.

“We grow chilli and other spices for restaurants in town”, explains the owner, a woman of middle age who moved from the city with her husband some years ago. “There are a variety of herbs and vegetables, and pawpaw trees and bananas for fruit.

A vegetable garden above the chook pen on the edge of Byron Bay

“This is not the main vegetable garden”, she says, gesturing towards a large, two-level white house with a roof reminescent of a Chinese pagoda. “The main garden is over there, down by the trees at the bottom of the slope.”

As we stand at the terraced garden of spices, herbs and vegetables that they have built on the slope above the banana trees, I realise that these are people who have negotiated the compromise between farm and suburb to live a country life on the edge of town.

A future in change

The North Coast, the region between Nimbin in the west and Byron Bay in the east, has been changed by the influx of new people since the 1970s. That influx continues and, in the towns, it is bringing unanticipated challenges as the newcomers put more and more pressure on infrastructure.

Most of the urban development, with the exception of patches around Bangalow and Alstoneville, has been below the escarpment atop which Maria and Peter’s small house stands. It follows the coast, leaving the hinterland to farm and bushland. The steep ridges visible from Tania’s house remain free.