David Holmgren

IT WAS A BUSY FEW DAYS in Sydney for David Holmgren and his son, Oliver. First came David’s appearance at Randwick City Council’s annual Ecoliving Fair, followed next day with a full-day workshop and an appearance that evening at a TransitionSydney Cafe Conversation.

Many readers of this blog will know that David is a co-originator of the permaculture design system, which he and Bill Mollison unleashed on the world in 1978 through the pages of Permaculture One. David focused his efforts over successive years on the development of his Hepburn property, Melliodora, and marked his return to public prominence with the publication of Permaculture-Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability.

The writer of this report hosts Conversation With Authors, which is a regular event at the Ecoliving Fair, the intention of which is to introduce the authors and their ideas to the public and for the public to engage with the authors in conversation. It provided the opportunity for David to discuss his new book, Future Scenarios, however the discussion ranged far and wide around the general topic of sustainability.

Appearing with David was:

• Dr Mark Diesendorf from the Institute for Environmental Studies at UNSW; Mark has written the recently-released book, Climate Action
• Rosemary Morrow, the noted permaculture educator who lives in Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains, who recently produced A Good Home Forever and who  brought her unique variety of down-to-earth practical wisdom
• and Victorian permaculture designer and co-author of the Permaculture Diary and Permaculture Calendar, David Arnold.

Authors at the Ecoliving Fair, from left: David Holmgren; Rosemary Morrow; David Arnold; Russ Grayson (program host).

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Educating the educators

The one-day workshop attracted participants from councils, community organisations and others

Monday dawned much less windy than Sunday and, by 9am, a total of 35 people had gathered at Randwick Community Centre for a day-long workshop based on David’s Future Scenarios.

The day was organised by Randwick City Council’s Sustaining The City team through Council’s Sustainability Education Officer, Fiona Campbell. Attending were local government sustainability and environmental education staff, sustainability educators from community organisations, a leading, local climate change advocate associated with the local Green Church and a number of individuals engaged in sustainability education activities including consultants, two architects, two members of TransitionSydney, an engineer and small businesspeople.

The material was found challenging, but feedback on the day and over successive days indicates that it opened new avenues of thinking.

The day’s tasty food was supplied by no-waste caterers, O-Organics, with fruit from Sydney Food Connect.

Transition at the cafe

The day event complete, it was time to head over to Glebe for the TransitionSydney Cafe Conversation with David and Oliver.

Held at the Fair Trade Cafe, this was another of TransitionSydney’s successful Cafe Conversations which were set up so that local people involved in sustainability, permaculture and transition activities have the opportunity to meet innovators from out of town as well as those from the city. The Cafe Conversations are essentially networking events in which attendees have the opportunity to meet each other and to talk informally with innovators. Previous innovators appearing at TransitionSydney Cafe conversations include:

• Dick Copeman, education coordinator at Brisbane’s Northey Street City Farm
• Michael Shuman, US, economist and attorney, employee of the US Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, local economics advocate and author of the Smallmart Revolution
• Robert Pekin, coordinator of Brisbane’s Food Connect CSA (community supported agriculture).

Cafe Conversations are not presentations of the guest’s ideas, rather, they are informal events providing a chance to get to know the innovators. Consequently, David and Oliver spoke about how they became involved in permaculture and sustainability initiatives and, following this, attendees had the change to engage them in conversation.

It was good to get to know Oliver, who assisted David at the workshop with administrative matters. He is deliberately seeking the experiences that will inform his role in life and has a keen interest in photography, with which he and the writer of this report had more than a few conversations. No way will Oliver be overshadowed by his father’s reputation as the leading thinker in the permaculture design system.

New rational for permaculture design

David Arnold (left) discuuses his work with Conversations With Authors host, Russ Grayson, at the Randwick Ecoliving Fair.

David seems to be repositioning the permaculture design system as an applied response to the challenging global trends of peak oil and climate change, a response to be implemented at the community scale.

Into that mix, Rosemary Morrow threw the declining fresh water reserve on which food production and so much else depends. At the Conversation With Authors, Rosemary challenged David, saying that she thinks that water will be of equal importance to progressively declining and higher priced oil in the near future.

David’s approach to permaculture may represent a shift in the way it is focused because it takes the design system beyond many of its popular manifestations and applies it to developing local solutions to the major challenges. Were this to be further developed, it could provide a filter on relevant technologies, practices and ideas to emphasise those of greater social value while not ignoring individual and household initiatives in sustainable living.

His goal is what he describes as an ‘earth steward’ society, which may be eventually reached through the current trend towards a ‘green technology’ society. These concepts are explored in his book, Future Scenarios.

Tiring they might have been for those organising them, these two days with David and Oliver were inspiring for those in attendance.

Read a review of Future Scenarios.

The booklet carries the rather intriguing title of A Good Home Forever. It proposes that we respond to economic downturn and the crisis in sustainability by taking control of our lives and by examining what it is that we want in a home.

Rosemary describes conventional homes as ‘consumer junkies’ gulping down resources and producing only wastes. Yet, Rosemary’s solution isn’t to go out and commission an architect to design a state of the art energy efficient house such as we see in those ‘green’ magazines aimed at the well-off. Not all that many can afford to do that.

Rosemary suggests converting — retrofitting, in the jargon — an existing house to make it energy, water and materials efficient. It is the reality that it is the retrofitting of existing housing stock that will make our cities energy and resource efficient.

Rosemary Morrow

A book based on personal experience

This is the theme of her booklet — the retrofitting of a brick veneer, suburban house. Brick (and alumimium window frames and galvanised iron roof), because it is a low-maintenance material. Brick veneer so that Rosemary could easily remove interior walls to open up the place and so that her slow combustion wood stove could warm the interior during Katoomba’s chilly (let’s be honest here and say freezing) winters. Reading this, I was reminded of something that Jude Fanton from the Seed Savers Network said about buying a house in Byron Bay. Brick veneer, she told me, is the best buy because such houses work well in the subtropical climate. This leads to the question as to whether the much-derided brick veneer is the housing style for all climates.

Rosemary’s booklet is not simply about a retrofit to adapt her home to the seasonal variability of climate in Katoomba, high in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. Embedded in it is a philosophy of life, such as assessing whether you move to more affordable premises or stay where you are, and making choices and setting criteria.

Not all that many years ago, Rosemary moved from a larger property at Blackheath, further up the mountains, to her present home in nearby Katoomba. In doing so she made the choices about the criteria for sustainable urban living that her book focuses on:

• solar access (the house faces the north, to sunward, affording access to solar energy)
• energy autonomy
• water sustainability
• proximity to services — Rosemary can walk to the train station, and she is close to amenities.

There was also the criteria of financial sustainability because she didn’t want her money tied up in a mortgage. As Rosemary says, by moving to a lower priced home you might be able to free yourself from financial anxiety in these economically troubled times, or at least set yourself on the path to doing that.

There’s a lot to learn about site analysis in her booklet and there are several site design plans. She covers the permaculture concept of designing by zones according to the frequency of access needed, energy principles derived from the permaculture design system and harvesting and storing rainwater. She even lists costs and offers a checklist to think about your home.

May I suggest that this would be useful reading for people reconsidering how they live?

It is, in essence, an ideas book and it carries that critical, analytical and self-assessing attitude that is embedded in the permaculture design system, of which Rosemary is a noted educator and exponent.

A site design plans showing the zoning of landuse areas.

CD useful to educators

The book has an accompanying CD with a 20 minute or so video of Rosemary’s retrofit, produced by the local Lysis Films in Katoomba. It also has segments, potentially of use to educators, about particular elements of the retrofit. These run only a few minutes each and are sufficiently short to be of use by sustainability educators in workshops and courses.

The full 20 minute video would provide an informative case study as a leader to start a conversation on home energy and water efficiency. Educators would show it, then use the content as the basis for an ORID format (objective, reflective, interpretive, decisional) or other guided conversation.

In this way, the video works in the same way as Morag Gamble and Evan Raymond’s 15 minute production on local foods does as a leader for discussions about food systems. We have a number of longer video programs, but too few of this length that is suited to public events and sustainability education workshops and courses and that are also available on DVD for public showing.

Having said good things about the video, do I have any suggestions for improvement? Well. yes I do. I found that the video had too much footage of talking heads. You do need some of this, however more video of the works Rosemary has carried out and footage of some of them in action would have been useful.

Really a book outline

Putting on my editor’s hat, my impression after reading A Good Home Forever was that this is the outline of a more detailed book. The bulleted points in it — and Rosemary makes extensive use of these — could in many cases be expanded. Although she might have covered what a more ambitious book might contain in her The Earth Users Guide to Permaculture, an expanded A Good Home Forever would apply that to the specifics of her Katoomba retrofit.

But would there be a market for such a book? I think so, and the reissuing by David Holmgren of his case study, The Flywire House, is evidence for this. Looking at the environmental/sustainability shelves of good bookshops, I see a variety of personal experience titles about people trying a 100-mile diet, moving the Mullumbimby to avoid a peak oil crisis or moving to the countryside. And while there are also plenty of titles dealing with resource efficient home design, there are too few case studies.

The difference with Rosemary is that she moved into a small city rather than escape to the countryside, in doing so emphasising the reality that urban living can be the catalyst for sustainable living.

The book, which is printed on recycled paper, is illustrated by Rob Allsop, who did the drawings in The Earth Users Guide to Permaculture. To reduce paper wastage, Rosemary made use of the inside of the cover for acknowledgements and some text. These are usually blank pages in publishing and I like it that way. There’s something odd about reading text on the insides of the cover and I don’t think it works well.

Rosemary sells the book alone for around $5, but for a mere $20 you get book + video CD. This is a complementary, useful package. And if you think that’s a lot for a CD and a 24 page booklet, think of its value this way — the cost is equivalent to only six cappuccinos, and its effects are likely to last a great deal longer.

Order from: www.RetrofittingYourHome.com

Morrow R, 2009; A Good Home Forever: Mountain Wildfire Press, Katoomba NSW.

Postscript: Following the launch of Rosemary’s book, Transition Blue Mountains held a seminar of home retrofitting for resource efficiency in Katoomba, attracting more then 100 people. Rosemary’s CD was shown at the event.

First published ABC Organic Gardener 2006.

WHAT CAN YOU SAY about a book by someone who wears pearls while gardening and who talks about being a ‘WWEW’ – a Wild Wise Elderly Woman? Nothing that would surprise her, that’s for sure… just good things.

Rosemary Morrow is a Blue Mountains, NSW, woman who thinks globally and acts the same way. She was already thinking and acting like that when, in 1993, she wrote The Earthkeepers Guide to Permaculture. This new edition changes ‘Earthkeepers’ in the title to ‘Earth Users’, but it retains much of the original content and updates it. The original book proved popular, especially among Permaculture educators some of whom recommended it as a key text for students.  They did that because Rosemary’s focus was on the implementation of Permaculture rather than on the theory alone – that had already been taken care of in Bill Mollison’s Permaculture -  A Designer’s Manual and Mollison and Reny Slay’s Introduction to Permaculture. Rosemary’s book made Permaculture accessible.

Rosemary Morrow

New times, new edition

Books need updating if they are to address current circumstances.

The world of the 1993, when the first edition appeared, was in many ways a different place than it is today. Changes to the text in this new edition include Rosemary’s ideas on ‘social permaculture’ and designing for disaster. This is essentially a community-based approach to security in the face of natural and human-caused disasters. It is timely, especially now that global warming and peak oil may challenge the way we live. The new edition draws on Rosemary’s food security and community development work in Cambodia and Vietnam, countries she has returned to repeatedly. In between those extended journeys Rosemary has taught Permaculture design courses in her home town of Katoomba.

The Earth Users Guide is a practical book. The language is plain English and the illustrations are clear. A folio of colour prints illustrate the themes. There’s all that you would expect in a permaculture manual – garden design, community economics and Rosemary’s own iteration of permaculture’s design principles. This, too, is welcome as principles have to be adapted to changing circumstances and reinterpreted to suit new times. Rosemary lists attitudinal principles, with outcomes, as well as strategic principles of design.

Anything missing?

So, what’s missing? Very little, I think. As a local food systems advocate I would have liked more on those systems – food cooperatives, farmers’ markets and the like – though Rosemary briefly covers community gardens and community supported agriculture. More Australian references to community food gardens would have been helpful. I would also have liked something on how to make medium density city living more sustainable, however little work has been applied to this even by planners, architects or local government, let alone permaculture designers, so I can’t complain that it doesn’t get a lot of  space in Rosemary’s book.

Illustrating Rosemary’s ideas are the line drawings of Rob Allsop. Rob is ‘The Quite Permaculturist’. Where some shout their accomplishments out loud and others, like me, prattle on about permaculture in text and image -  Rob just does it and says little. Thus I feel compelled to highlight the work of this accomplished illustrator and photographer. Rob is an old associate of Rosemary and has traveled to Cambodia to participate in food security and other projects.

Rosemary Morrow’s contribution to permaculture has garnered support through a practical, humane and dogma-free approach to sustainability at the local level. And the book? Yes, even if you have the first edition there’s more in this new one that justifies the investment.

Read it and learn, think, plan, make and do. And in doing know that you are basing your actions on the knowledge and experience of one of permaculture’s true ‘elders’, an unpretentious, all-too-modest woman who through straightforward, common sense ideas and personal example, is transforming the lives of those that come into contact with her.

Morrow R, 2006; The Earth Users Guide to Permaculture; Kangaroo Press, Sydney. ISBN 0 7318 1271 9

Rosemary Morrow wrote the teaching notes to the first edition of her book in the 1990s.