The crew... and the garden before starting its makeover, still infested with agapanthus.

The garden at the end of the day—free at last from agapanthus and ready to prepare the soil for vegetables and herbs at the next working bee.

Day 1

Steve Batley removes an agapanthus.

This was day one of two to repurpose Randwick Council’s footpath garden bed, at the end of the commercial strip on Frenchmans Road, from a low-biodiversity agapanthus plantation into a high-biodiversity herb, vegetable and fruit patch.

It didn’t take long for the energetic crew to remove the agapanthus outside Barrett House, the retrofitted, energy and water efficient building shared by Randwick, Woollahra and Waverley councils and used as a meeting place by community groups and for council workshops.

The day started as all such events should, sitting around the table, coffees in hand, discussing how to proceed. Day one—this cloudy and, later, rainy Thursday morning—was to bring the clearance of agapanthus from the garden bed in preparation for next Thursday’s installation of path, compost, mulch and edibles.

It was decided that the community compost bin, an Aerobin type, should be emptied but that the fruiting lemon tree planted at the opening of Barrett House by the three eastern suburbs mayors should be retained.

Agapanthus… we’ve probably all seen it because it’s quite common as a public place planting. It’s a perennial with long, dark green straplike leaves and clusters of colourful flowers on a long stalk, and it is favoured by councils for its ease of maintenance. Removing it is sometimes easy, sometimes more difficult, especially when it forms a large root mass and is quite heavy to free from the soil and lift.

The agapanthus removed, the question was what to do with them… they were offered to passers by but nobody seemed interested… so what about composting them?… that was a possibility but wouldn’t it be better to replant them somewhere? A call to council’s nursery solved the problem—they would take them all… which meant that creation of the new garden would be a zero waste operation.

Fiona Campbell cleans out the community compost bin. The Aerobin model was found to be infested with cockroaches and was removed in favour of the simpler Geddy bin which has fewer nooks and crannies where the creatures can breed and is easier to maintain and clean.

Community compost bin

The community compost bin situated in the footpath garden is used by people living nearby, and as as soon as the agapanthus was removed from around it Fiona set to work, removing its panels so as to empty it out.

As is found in other community composting systems there was a preponderance of kitchen and food scraps in it but not enough of the carbon materials that make for a balanced compost mix. Compost requires a mix of dry, brown carbon materials and moist green, nitrogen-rich material for effective breakdown.

Providing dry carbon materials has proven to be something of a challenge with community composting bins in some Sydney installations, with one group of community composters sourcing coffee husks from a nearby coffee roaster as carbon material.

The day after the gardening session, Richard and Fiona, from Randwick Council, installed a rubbish bin adjacent to the composter to hold a supply of dry leaf sweepings. It is planned that, when council maintenance staff sweep the fallen leaves from below the adjacent native fig trees in the park, they will put them into a bin from which community composters could scoop a handful to add to their kitchen wastes.

At the same time the two replaced the Aerobin with a couple of the domestic, black plastic Gedeye compost bins (also known as Dalek composters because their shape is reminiscent of the malevolent Daleks that appear in the BBC television series, Dr Who). These are easier to use that the Aerobin and compost is more easily removed.

The things you find in compost—a whole coconut would take quite some time to break down.

Community composting is a new idea presently being trailed by Randwick, Waverley and Leichhardt councils as well as by the Sustainable Chippendale team and, in Melbourne, by the City of Yarra. It’s a means of reducing household green waste for people living in apartments instead of consigning the stuff to landfill.

Footpath gardening, too, is something new, presently being done in the Randwick, Waverley, City of Sydney and Marrickville council areas.

The design and plant list for the revived footpath garden is being developed by Steve Batley from Sydney Organic Gardens, who provides garden design and education services to Randwick and other councils. The project is facilitated by Three-Council Ecofootprint Project Coordinator, Richard Wilson and by council’s sustainability education coordinator, Fiona Campbell. They were assisted this day by a Permaculture Sydney east member, Cecelia, and the author.

And next Thursday? We start on soil preparation, mulching and planting out… at the end of which the conversion of the agapanthus monoculture into a shiny and tasty new vegetable and herb garden will be complete.

The construction crew. Lower left is City of Sydney Community Worker, Urban Renewal, Cara Levinson, and behind her is the author.

I met with the City of Sydney’s Green Square Community Worker, Urban Renewal—Cara Levinson—who assists this group and another, Friends of Victoria Park who work n the social side of things there. Cara informed me about what the group had in mind and I took these ideas back to the City of Sydney at Town Hall House. My role? To facilitate what it was that Green Square Growers wanted by clearing the bureaucratic bumps so that the Growers could get on with building their first project. My other role was to ensure that materials for their project were on hand, at the right place at the right time.

It was my brief in working with the City to take this pro-community approach, to ease things through the decision making structure, source funding, materials, skills and training so that people could get on with that it was they wanted to do. In this, I was encourage by what Ernesto Sirrolli, the social entrepreneur from the US-based Sirrolli Institute, said about the role of people working with local government—that they, too, could take an entrepreneurial approach and facilitate communities taking action, a role describes as that of ‘civic entrepreneur’.

Small project, big achievement

Green Square Grower’ first project was the construction and installation of a raised garden bed in the plaza outside of The Tote, an old building repurposed as a library and community centre. It was to be of the wicking bed type, a self-watering garden consisting of a garden built over a rock-filled reservoir which is periodically topped up with water.

Adding an educational diagram is always a useful passive educational device for public place installations.

A commendable criteria for the project was that it be made of recycled and reused materials to that it could serve as a model for others. A visit to Reverse Garbage sourced the timber for the raised planter, which was assembled off-site and brought on-site in prefabricated form on the morning of construction.

The location of the planter had been worked out over the preceding day and this was confirmed when the group of 12 or so turned up.

First, the planter was installed then a layer of sand was spread over the brick paving. A double thickness of builders’ plastic was laid so that its it lapped up the sides of the planter box for about 30cm or so. This contains water in the reservoir which is connected to the soil surface, added later, by a perforated tube of agricultural pipe used to top up the water supply in the reservoir. A cap is placed on this to prevent the tube filling with leaf litter. Next, recycled concrete aggregate was tipped carefully (so as to avoid puncturing the plastic liner) onto the planter base—this stabilises the reservoir which holds the water that irrigates the garden above. The aggregate was covered by a geotextile layer, the purpose of which is to prevent soil particles moving into the aggregate-filled reservoir and blocking it. On top of that compost was lid to round 30cm sep, close to the maximum depth through which moisture will wick by osmosis. Straw mulch was laid and seedlings planted through tho into the soil below.

The wicking bed built and now in use, you can only wonder what Green Square Growers next project will be. Whatever it is,Victoria Park will steadily go from empty to edible.

A level is placed across the planter to ensure it is installed straight.	Shovelling concrete rubble into the base of the planter, on top of the plastic liner.
Sabena's (left) daughter fills the rubble-filled reservoir.	The worm tube is installed. The tube was populated with worms and food scraps added. The worm waste will fertilise the garden.
One of the gardener-children places a banana skin into the worm tube.	Construction almost complete, there's only watering the seedlings planted into the mulched garden.

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.

An edited version of their article appeared in the magazine.

This is the article supplied to New Internationalist…

1972-1976 — the formative years

THE STORY OF PERMACULTURE begins in the early 1970s in Tasmania, Australia.

There, it starts with two men – a teacher and student. But let’s go back before they got together, back to their formative years, for it is here that we find the influences that set those two on a course that would intersect… a course that would create something new from the social and political turmoil of that decade.

Origins – Bill Mollison

Bill Mollison was born in 1928 in the small fishing village of Stanley, on the Bass Strait coast of cool-temperate Tasmania.

Bill Mollison in 2008

He left school at 15 to help run his family’s bakery. Among the jobs that followed were mill worker, seaman, animal trapper and shark fisherman. A rough brew for someone who would become an environmentalist, they led him to nine years at the Wildlife Survey Section of the CSIRO (Australia’s government science research organisation) and then time with the Inland Fisheries Commission of Tasmania. What the two latter jobs provided were long stints in the wild forests and coasts of Tasmania, closely monitoring the life of those ecosystems. It was this time in nature that was formative to Mollison’s ideas on ecology and on how the provision of human needs, such as agriculture, could make use of those structures and processes he observed.

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

Origins – David Holmgren

David Holmgren was born in 1955, growing up on the other side of the Australian continent in Fremantle, Western Australia, with political activist parents.

David Holmgren makes a point.

After matriculating from John Curtin Senior High School in 1972 he spent a year hitchhiking around Australia before moving to Tasmania in 1974 to study environmental design (but gravitating towards landscape design, ecology and agriculture). It was during the brief but intense association between Mollison and Holmgren, thrashing out ideas in Mollison’s lounge room on the lower slopes of Mt Wellington — what became known as ‘the republic of Strickland Avenue’ —  that the backbone of the permaculture concept was formed.

Not all that long after devising the original concept of the permaculture design system, David started the work of setting up his rural smallholding – Melliodora — at Hepburn, a small town in Victoria.

No positive direction forward

Mollison wrote of those times: “To many of us who experienced the ferment of the late 1960s, there seemed to be no positive direction forward, although almost everybody could define those aspects of the global society that they rejected. These included military adventurism, the [nuclear] bomb, ruthless land exploitation, the arrogance of polluters and a general insensitivity to human needs. An unethical world could waste more on killing people than on earthcare or on helping people.

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

build an army of permaculture field workers to go out and teach the ideas of sustainable food production

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

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

Nature and the intellect

For his part, Holmgren was attracted to the natural and intellectual environment of Tasmania. He was also lured by Tasmania’s Environmental Design School that was led by Hobart architect and educator, Barry McNeil. This, Holmgren says, at that time was “the most radical experiment in tertiary education in Australia”, attracting design students from around Australia and the world.

Tasmania… it is a place where modernity and nature collide, both destructively and creatively

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

Holmgren says he is sometimes asked why permaculture emerged from somewhere like Tasmania. His answer: “It is a place where modernity and nature collide, both destructively and creatively.”

That can be seen along the edge, the zone, where the city of Hobart collides with the tall eucalypt forests that clothe the lower slopes of Mt Wellington. The mountain, with its precipituous dolerite cliffs known as the Organ Pipes. is occasionally snow capped in winter where it catches the moist, cold winds known as the Roaring Forties. It dominates the city, a presence both physical and in the minds of locals who intinctively look up to the summit for some indication of the weather or, perhaps, to remind themselves that they inhabit one of the most geographically beautiful cities in Australia. On its lower slopes, below the olive green of those euclaypt forests, is the property where the permaculture concept was born. A few kilometres in one direction is the city centre. In the other, well beyond the horizon, the great cool temperate wilderness of South West Tasmania.

Wilderness the South West might be, it was not inviolable and the politically powerful Hydro-Electric Commission was looking enviously – at the time that permaculture was being hatched – at its wild rivers and thinking about damming them. The Hydro had already inundated Lake Pedder below the grey, wind-whipped surface of a dam’s empoundment, an action that lay almost forgotten behind the emergence of green politics in Australia.

This gave rise to a growing environmental consciousness that developed in Tasmania at that time, but it was a consciousness seemingly unaware of permaculture ideas, being oriented towards wilderness preservation and nature conservation. When that consciousness became self-conscious and formed the early Tasmanian environment movement, it moved into oppositional politics, the threats to the environment perceived to be so great. This was the start of a mass movement that would culminate in the victory on the Franklin River.

Just how much the early environment movement fed the emerging permaculture concept is unknown, but it surely prepared the field for it in a conceptual and ideological way. On the lower slopes of Mt wellington, Bill Mollison was surely aware of that movement’s gathering strength.

Holmgren acknowledges this, saying that “the physical and cultural environment that gave rise to permaculture also produced the world’s first green political party.” In 1972 the United Tasmania Group (UTG), which evolved to become the Tasmanian Greens, was formed.

UTG was the first authentic green party in as much as it had environmental politics at its core. But whether it should be regarded as the first political party with an environmental policy remains open to dispute.

“I was living in Tasmania at the time”, permaculture educator and writer Russ Grayson says, “and figured among my friends and associates some who would later gain prominence in environmental politics in the state.

“I remember conversations with a UTG member, Des Shields, originally a Queenslander, who told me about the earlier work of the New Zealand Values Party which, while not ostensively a green party, had an ecological element to their platform. Des, I think, may have regarded this party as the first green party in history.”

Holmgren says the Australian organic agriculture movement also sprouted in Tasmania, part of, “An upwelling of intellectual and creative action at the edge of civilisation.” In fact Mollison was a founding member of the Tasmanian Organic Gardening and Farming Society, the same organisation from which Peter Cundall, who decades later was to host ABC television’s Gardening Australia emerged.

The island state, it seems, may have been instrumental in giving birth to more than one innovative social movement.

1976 – 1981 – spreading the word

Permaculture made its first appearance on the world stage in 1976 in an article in Tasmania’s Organic Farmer and Gardener newsletter published by the Tasmanian Organic Gardening and Farming Society. It was titled A Permaculture System for Southern Australian Conditions – Part One and was written by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren.

Max Lindegger in 2008. Max was one of the team that established Crystal Waters Permaculture Village in SE Queensland and was instrumental is spreading permaculture in Australia in its early years.

On the mainland, Mollison was interviewed on national radio by Terry Lane. What followed was an avalanche of interest and controversy.

A key permaculture pioneer in Australia, Max Lindegger, who went on to design the world’s first permaculture eco-village, Crystal Waters, said it was an electrifying time. Max, living thousands of kilometres to the north in Queensland, read that first article and realised that ” …it was exactly the way I felt but had been unable to put into words” – a common sentiment of people then and even now. He invited Mollison to come north for a speaking tour.

In 1976 Max formed what may have been the second permaculture group in existence, Permaculture Nambour. Meetings were at his home, and, interestingly, he still gets mail there for the organisation.

The permacultural concept has caught the imagination of hundreds of people in Australia… it may well have a wider impact…

Permaculture was starting to attract attention, but it took another two years for this rich ferment to produce the first book on permaculture – Permaculture One – a Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements. It was published in 1978 by Transworld, with joint authorship to Mollison and Holmgren.

In the book’s introduction the authors comment: “The permacultural concept has caught the imagination of hundreds of people in Australia where we have given verbal descriptions and short resumes of the system. It may well have a wider impact, as the time seems ripe for such a synthesis in a world of famine, poisons, erosion and fast-depleting energy.”

The year 1978 is a significant one for the permaculture design system. As well as Permaculture One, also appearing in that year was the first permaculture magazine – initially called, simply, Permaculture. Its editor was Terry White, a resident of the Victorian town of Maryborough, on Australia’s mainland.

Of the Mollison-Lane radio interview, White says: “I found it galvanising. Bill’s interview kindled my imagination in a profound way.” So much so that White invited Bill to visit Maryborough for a public meeting

“At that time”, says Terry, “there was a lot of concern about youth unemployment. In an attempt to address this, Maryborough had started two employment cooperatives, one making clothing and the other making bicycle trailers. An alternate technology foundation was planning the establishment of a technology demonstration centre and there was considerable concern over dryland salinity, which was attributed to the removal of trees and the subsequent rise in saline groundwater in the area.

Maryborough… a significant hub for the permaculture movement for its first ten years

“It was this context of concern about youth unemployment and land degradation that provided a responsive setting for the discussion of permanent culture – permaculture – and an emphasis on positive, practical whole-system solutions.

“Permaculture One was printed in Maryborough”, said Terry White, “ …and Maryborough remained a significant hub for the permaculture movement for its first ten years. The town hosted two permaculture conferences and two of the first ten day permaculture consultancy courses”. The first permaculture course had been held in Tasmania in 1978.

More than Maryborough

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

“At the time there was an upheaval in new, positive environmental solutions as a response to a sense of crisis, especially the energy crisis”, he says. Concern over the energy supply was the outgrowth of the OPEC-led reduction in the supply that triggered the oil crisis of 1973, and which led to rationing in some Western countries.

The work of Terry White was critical to permaculture's early development.

White says that people were receptive to Mollison because, ” …he stood for something rather than against things.

“Bill had positive, practical solutions to problems… to real problems. He came across as a doer, not a talker. He proposed that instead of waiting for government or for funding, we just go and do whatever it was that was necessary. People found this approach empowering… it released energy. Permaculture might have been seen as a bit fringe but it was hands-on.

“While in Maryborough, Bill was invited to visit the tip and the sewage settling ponds. His suggestions for the productive use of wastes from these two sites were taken seriously by the council and a plan for the productive use of sewage waste was published in the first edition of the Permaculture quarterly journal of the national permaculture association.

“I was attracted to Bill’s idea of seeing problems as solutions, of reframing questions as positive solutions. There was also permaculture’s systems approach – it’s holistic way of looking at things.

“Permaculture, to me, is a community development model… a grassroots approach”.

Impetus from the Maryborough meeting led to another of the earliest permaculture groups in Australia, and then the National Permaculture Association.

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

Wit, provocation and charisma

Mollison is renowned for his wit, provocative style and charisma, and all were in full force at the time. Lindegger remembers the first permaculture design course, taught by Mollison over three weeks in 1979, with 18 participants ‘invited’ from all parts of the country. The venue was an old hotel in Stanley.

He says the impact on those involved was life-changing and many became a driving force for the movement. Tens of thousands of people have since taken design and introductory courses, going on to work on projects or in their communities around the world.

In 1979, Mollison published Permaculture Two, focussing on design. In 1981, still in the early days of permaculture, he received international recognition with a Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the ‘alternative Nobel Prize’. In his acceptance speech, he said: “All my life we’ve been at war with nature. I just pray that we lose that war. There are no winners in that war…”

The 1980s – binding a growing network

The publication of Permaculture magazine was pivotal to the history and spread of the design system. Like its eventual successor, the Permaculture International Journal (PIJ), it bound together a geographically dispersed network of emerging permaculture practitioners. Permaculture was the first publication to highlight the important role of the media in the spread of the design system. That would be more than amply demonstrated over 15 years later with the broadcast of the Global Gardener television series.

When White handed Permaculture over to Robyn Francis in 1987, the magazine moved to Sydney. At the Permaculture Epicentre in inner-urban Enmore (now Alfalfa House Food Coop), in a building shared with a small permaculture shop and Australia’s first ethical investment company, Damien Lynch’s August Investments, a team of media volunteers typed, cut and pasted articles and images into pages of what soon became the International Permaculture Journal.

Robyn Francis, one of the design system's early adopters, has made a career of permaculture education.

Soon, Permaculture Edge appeared, produced by a Permaculture Nambour in south-east Queensland. After a few years of increasingly sporadic publication, Permaculture Edge disappeared after its last edition went on sale at the 1997 International Permaculture Convergence in Western Australia.

The Permaculture International Journal (PIJ), as it became known after Robyn Francis assumed editorship and, later, handed that role to Steve Payne – now editor of ABC Organic Gardener magazine – remained the mouthpiece of the design system although, in the 1990s, Green Connections, which also reported on permaculture, came on the scene. That magazine ceased publication in December 2000, six months after PIJ.

Significantly, PIJ became the first permaculture publication to go mainstream, quite some time before Green Connections. “That was when it became available on the news stands”, says Robyn Francis.

With the turn of the decade, news of the permaculture design system was spreading and, according to White, by the mid-eighties the ten permaculture groups in Australia had grown to around 80 worldwide. In 1987, with key input from Robyn Francis, Permaculture International Ltd was incorporated to expand the distribution of Permaculture International Journal and to support the growing global network.

Permaculture also continued to be advanced through books, in particular, Mollison’s 1988, 576-page cornucopia of ideas, Permaculture – A Designers’ Manual, self-published by his own company, Tagari.

Soon, permaculture’s early adopters were teaching the design system. There was Max Lindegger, and Robin Francis, today based at the Djanbung Gardens training centre in northern NSW, who taught her first Permaculture Design Course in Sydney. She was instrumental in having an elective subject in permaculture accepted in the TAFE horticulture course at Ryde College.

Enter Rosemary

“Janice Haworth said there was going to be a permaculture course with Robyn Frances at Newtown and that I might like it,” she says. “I was suspicious at first but soon realised that it was the approach that enchanted me… it was interactive and overlaid with interconnection of disciplines.”

The different Permaculture Design Courses were often quite erratic.

The Blue Mountains are less that two hours from Sydney by train but they might as well be on the other side of the continent, they are so different. Lifted above the lowlands to their east and west, the mountains are an ancient sandstone plateau dissested by deep river valleys and clad in the olive green of eucalypt forest. Rainforest inhabits the darker, wetter gullies. Rather than the warm temperate climate of the coastal plain, the altitude of the mountains creates a microclimate more akin to the the cool temperate of the southern states.

Rosemary Morrow

The town of Katoomba is the largest of the small towns and villages strung along the Great Western Highway where it crosses the Blue Mountains. And here, in a modest brick veneer house that she is refitting for energy and water efficiency and home food production, lives a woman who has accomplished much permaculturally, Rosemary Morrow.

Rosemary became a Quaker in 1978, she says, the year that Permacultre One was published. She describes her discovery of permaculture.

The different Permaculture Design Courses were often quite erratic

Rosemary recollects the early days of permaculture.

“Well, they were chaotic really. The information was all over the place and some of it was relevent then, but today it’s quite dated. Some of the claims were extravagant and not realistic. It all sounded so simple.

“It took me ages to realise that design was the main subject and that Network Science was the key to it all. My background in agricultural and environmental science and horticulture helped me to make sense of it at a deeper level. It was very attractive because it put all these in the same frame.

Permaculture became my vocation

Rosemary tried to make order from confusion and explains that permaculture education has changed from its early days.

“The different Permaculture Design Courses were often quite erratic and no one had a sense of the skills and knowledge they wanted participants to have by the end of the course. It was taught by enthusiasts with no teaching skills. Copying Bill Mollison meant a 72 hour talkfest which few could emulate. That’s pretty well changed now.

“I was also intrigued by a course which began with ethics… none of my other studies had ever mentioned the word. There was a correspondence between Quakerism and permaculture. They had in common things like care for people, simplicity, community, ethical use of money and right livelihood. I was at home.

“Permaculture became my vocation and the more I worked with the content, the more interesting and the deeper it went… links started to happen with special nodes around water, plants and soil. I saw design as philosophy and practice and the true subject of the course.

After discovering permaculture, Rosemary went on to take its ideas to Vietnam and Cambodia and to other places. Today, she teaches the design system in the Blue Mountains, where she lives, and promotes the virtues of localism. Rosemary has built a network of local permaculture practitioners.

She has also become an author of permaculture books. First, in the mid-1990s came the Earth Keeepers Guide to Permaculture, then a teacher’s manual based on the content of that book. Later, she wrote a manual on saving seeds for use in developing countries. On a sunny late Autumn day in 2006, a new, updated edition of the Earth Keepers Guide was launched amid the sweet white blossoms of the heritge apple tree collection in the Blue Mountains Community Garden.

Growth continues

“The 1980s were a period of growth for Permaculture”, says Francis.

“The decade started with the Alternative Economic Summit in 1984 – which introduced permaculture to economics – and in 1987 August Investments made a start.

“We had the the Earthbank Conference – that was the outcome of Bill talking with the Schumacher Society. There was the establishment of the Maleny Community Credit Union, the first and second international permaculture convergences, the first permaculture design courses in Nepal, India and Zimbabwe and then the third international conference in New Zealand.

“There was the opening of Crystal Waters Permaculture Village, Australia’s first ecovillage, a project driven by Max Lindegger (now with the Global Ecovillage Network) and his team.

“Declan and Margrit Kennedy, in Germany, taught the first urban permaculture course, for the first time taking permaculture beyond the rural. Canadian, Michael Linton, introduced LETS (Local Exchange and Trading System) to Australia. In 1988, Bill taught the first permaculture course to an Aboriginal community at Alice Springs and the decade culminated with the publication of Bill’s Permaculture – A Designers’ Manual, the most substantial of permaculture texts and one still in print.”

It was late in the decade that the design system appeared on the tube in front of a mass audience, thanks to the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), an event that sparked wider interest in the permaculture agenda. Two early programs featured Bill and permaculture, one entitled In Grave Danger of Falling Food and another, a permaculture garden makeover, shown on the Extra Dimensions program.

The Manual, along with a cut-down version, Introduction to Permaculture (1991), still sells well today. Among Mollison’s other books, which collectively have sold more than 100,000 copies worldwide, are The Permaculture Book of Ferment and Human Nutrition (1993) and his autobiography, Travels in Dreams (1996). Mollison was rumoured to have been working on a number of other publications in recent years but none have yet been published.

1990s – years of consolidation… and expansion

The decade started well for permaculture as it continued to spread its influence. It was growing overseas, too, in both developed and underdeveloped countries. In Australia, the PIJ held the movement together, providing it with the news and information that bound it into a diffused but coherent movement.

Permaculture was still far from mainstream but it was gaining in respectability and credibility. Change, however, was only ten years away.

“The 1990s brought further growth”, Robyn Francis continues. “My own project, Jalanbah Ecovillage, made a start in rural Nimbin, as did my permaculture teaching base and permaculture demonstration centre, Djanbung Gardens”.

The Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network was operating by mid-decade, promoting community-based urban agriculture as a venue for permaculture and associated ideas. Notable also was another television program, the four-part Global Gardener series shown on the ABC, which swelled attendance at permaculture courses.

“In Sydney, the television broadcast of Global Gardener boosted attendance at our permaculture introductory and Permaculture Design Courses, something that other educators reported too,” said Fiona Campbell, who led a Sydney-based permaculture education team that developed a 110-hour, part time urban Permaculture Design Course. “More so that the earlier television programs about permaculture, Global Gardener brought permaculture before a mainstream audience in a powerful way”.

Fiona Campbell led a permaculture teaching team which developed an urban Permaculture Design Course in Sydney in the 1990s and worked with the Permaculture Sydney association.

By this time Mollison had established for himself a reputation as the visionary communicator of permaculture. He stirrer his audiences and was the outspoken public voice of the design system, a reputation he had built over the previous decade. He travelled widely to deliver the permaculture message to audiences both eager and curious.

Holmgren re-emerges

While Mollison was increasing his public presence, Holmgren remained largely out of the public eye, quietly and busily testing permaculture principles on his own property at Hepburn Springs, a couple of hours from Melbourne.

In 1995 Holmgren published a documentation of those years on the land in the form of the large format book, Ten Years of Sustainable Living at Melliodora. This set out in detail the creation of his productive small farm and permaculture demonstration site that included a passive-solar sustainable home, contour planting and tree crops.

Other case studies and writings followed, including case studies of Holmgren’s integrated house and landscape designs in south eastern Australia. Most recently, the landmark 2002 publication, Permaculture – Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability has appeared. Popularised through a speaking tour that promoted the book, it quickly captured the permaculture imagination. The book offered a reinterpretation of the design principles of permaculture and Holmgren’s are now more frequently cited than the earlier set although they in no way disagree with it.

Permaculture – Principles and Pathways and Holmgren’s national tour to promote it did more than remind the permaculture network that David was still there, applying the design system on his own land, overshadowed by Bill’s public presence though he might be. It marked the emergence of Holmgren as the most prominent authority on permaculture in the country, a reputation increased later by his speaking tour with US peak oil writer, Richard Heinberg.

The popularity of Permaculture – Principles and Pathways rests on Holmgren’s reputation as a permaculture pioneer and its serious approach to design concepts. This, despite the appearance of other permaculture books in the period between the publication of Mollison’s Designers Manual and Holmgren’s book. There was West Australian permaculture educator, Ross Mars’ introductory volume and Patrick Whitefield’s books in the UK. Significantly in Australia, Rosemary Morrow’s Earth Users Guide to Permaculture was published in themid-1990s, a book which, thanks to being written in her down-to-earth style, achieved status as a recommended text for a number of Permaculture Design Courses.

In recent years Holmgren has ‘come out of his shell’, speaking and lecturing around the world on permaculture and peak oil and sharing the platform with prominent environmental activists such as Richard Heinberg. He continues to live with his family at Melliodora.

Going home

The Tweed Range falls as a rugged, precipituous escarpment clad in subtripical rainforest to the less-precipituous but still steep hills that abutt it. Over the generations farmers have opened the country, clearing those hills to graze their cattle. It was this rolling country that attracted Bill Mollison and led to his establishing the Permaculture Institute on a 2ha block near the end of a narrow, dusty road not all that far from the town of Tyalgum.

Here, Mollison and others living on the site rehabilitated the old farmland with tree and vegetable crops as an example of rural permaculture design. Within a few years the adjining farm went on the market and Mollison bought this, setting up the Permaculture Research Institute.

An experiment with a Permaculture Commonworks was launched, a scheme through which individuals were given access to land, for a fee, on which they would set up income-producing enterprises. A market garden appeared down on the flat land by the creek; a bamboo plantation was started to supply shoots to the food market and to market bamboo stalks; a large, free range chicken system was fenced; a hillside was terraced and tropial fruit trees planted; and a large dam was seeded with edible fish. The scheme seemed to thrive for awhile on the enthusiasm of those setting up the enterprises. Within a few years, however, it had collapsed.

It was now the late-1990s and it was a time of change for Mollison. Having lived for many years on the Institute property in the sub-tropics, he returned home to Tasmania to write and occasionally teach.

The Permaculture Research Institute he handed over to Permaculture designer, Geoff Lawton and his team. When the property was sold, Lawton reestablished the Permaculture Research Institute near The Channon, in northern NSW, not all that far from where Mollison had originally set it up.

Mollison now lives with his wife, Lisa, at sisters Creek near Deloraine in northern Tasmania… his homeland and not all that far from his humble beginnings in Stanley.

Permaculture – established at last

Permaculture is now mainstream in Australia, at least in gardening and environmental circles, with ‘permaculturists’ on national television and writing for major publications.

Key breakaway movements, now also mainstream, were inspired by permaculturists in Australia, from ethical investment to community gardening and the national Seed Savers Network. Some, like community gardening and city farms, were not originally established as permaculture projects, however permaculturists soon found them fertile ground in which to implement their ideas. Northey Street City Farm in Brisbane, set up in 1994, has perhaps taken the link with permaculture the furthest with permaculture educator, Dick Copeman, offering the recently-national accredited certificate courses in permaculture as well as the traditional Permaculture Design Course.

Holmgren believes permaculture’s popularity to be at least partly due to its comprehensive nature as “ …a design system for sustainable living and landuse that’s concerned both with the consumption and production side and that’s based on universal ethics and design principles which can be applied in any context.

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

Numerous books have been written here by other permaculture teachers and there has been a coming together of permaculture and organic gardening groups into a strong and vibrant force for the future.

Going international

The road from the coastal plain is long, narrow and dusty. Towards its end it rises through farmland and eucalypt forest and ends abruptly in front of an old, weathered timber building at a place called Pappinbarra. Here, in 1984, at its first international convergence, permaculture was born as an international movement. Present were permaculture’s early adopters, the people who would take the design system to the world.

The international story of permaculture is so diverse and idiosyncratic, it is impossible to throw a net over it. Certainly, an army of field workers has taken the design system far and wide (as Mollison set out to do), even if many no longer wear the public cloak of permaculture, preferring to use its principles within their occupations or community work – whether farmer, architect, planner, simple gardener or community activist.

More recently, permaculture has started to infiltrate the new local government area of sustainabilitty education, although this is taking place only in limited areas such as among some NSW councils. Why the development is significant is because the predecessor approach to local government community education — environmental education (the actual meaning of the terms is somewhat fluid) — has focused mainly on the conservation of the natural environment, water and waste.

Even in the 1980s, without the aid of the internet, word of permaculture spread rapidly.

The first International Permaculture Conference was held in Pappinbarra, Australia in 1984, kick-starting its international outreach.

The second international conference took pace at The Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington (USA) in 1986 and featured not only Mollison, but famed Japanese natural farming pioneer, Masanobu Fukuoka (author of The One Straw Revolution), and Wes Jackson, founder in 1976 of the Land Institute (researching perennial agriculture in the USA).

Guy Baldwin, founding editor of The Permaculture Activist magazine (launched in 1985 and still going), says the conference was pivotal in bringing permaculture to a mainstream audience in the US although courses and talks had already been held there and a key networking organization, the Permaculture Institute of North America, had been formed.

There is still strong activity in permaculture circles in the US although Baldwin believes that, to some extent, “the momentum started by permaculture in the early 1980s was largely swallowed up by activism in other ‘alternative’ movements such as organic farming, sustainable agriculture and deep-ecology.” Nevertheless, he remembers a great buzz around the international conference which led to many courses and further visits from Mollison.

Outside the US there have been conferences and courses in diverse locations, including New Zealand, Nepal, Zimbabwe and Denmark. The New Zealand conference included cosmologist, Paul Davies, and Ecologist magazine founder, Teddy Goldsmith, as keynote speakers. The latest international gathering was held in São Paulo Brazil in May (2007), featuring alternative and innovative thinkers from around the world.

Many countries now have their own peak permaculture bodies and publications, among them the Permaculture Activist and, in the UK, Permaculture. Although PIJ is no longer published, the Permaculture International organisation remains, maintaining a website and a global directory as networking tools.

Permaculture’s future

Rosemary Morrow describes how she sees the future of the design system in an upcoming book of biographies of people with a history in permaculture.

“I view permaculture today as still a prototype. It is barely thirty years old and continues to grow and stretch out into people’s lives and take forms of its own, especially if we think how David Holmgren has stretched the parameters.

“I remember Mollison saying to me ‘permaculture is about tangibles.’ Today I see the tangibles embedded in intangibles… the conversations, the solitude, the insights, reflections and feedback and new findings in every part of the Permaculture syllabus”.

……Bio notes: Russ Grayson is a journalist who has taught permaculture design, worked on international development projects and is active in food security issues in Australia. Steve Payne is editor of Organic Gardener magazine in Australia and was a former editor of the Permaculture International Journal.

IF YOU HAVE TIME TO HANG AROUND, I’ll tell you a little story about literature and coincidence. It’s not a significant story nor an exciting one, rather a recounting on one of those minor occurrences that sometimes appear in our lives.

A couple months ago I accidentally embarked on a Jack Kerouac reading binge. What happened was that I noticed the copy of Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums on my bookshelf and thought it would make rewarding bedtime reading. It did. Finishing the novel a few nights later, I replaced it on the bookshelf and… it was almost automatic… took down the neighbouring volume – On The Road. My binge was underway.

This was not the first time I had read these books.

Words revisited

It was perhaps the late 1960s when I discovered those two Kerouac books. On The Road was my first find. As I started reading it I felt a little uncertain about Kerouac’s ‘spontaneous prose’ style of writing (I didn’t know then that it was called this), but sooner rather than later it caught on and I was hooked. His rolling spur-of-the-moment unpunctuated impressionistic writing was refreshingly different and I found On The Road, and The Dharma Bums – the next of his works I stumbled upon – to be exhilerating reading.

My discovery of Kerouac came after Alan Watts and just before Ernest Hemingway and Yvonne. Watts was an American Buddhist whose writing preceded the mass discovery of Eastern spirituality by hordes of youthful and footloose Western youths. That was during that great outpouring of the late 1960s, when so many went forth into the world to discover what was out there and, perhaps for the few, to discover themselves.

Now, to Ernest Hemingway. The novel was called For Whom the Bell Tolls, his tale of the Spanish Civil War. I recall sitting around the kitchen table in our big share house in Wooloomooloo discussing the book with the other residents. I even suggested that Yvonne’s sister, Sol, name her soon-to-be-child after one of the main characters. That didn’t happen, but the reading of Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Green Hills of Africa did.

Books trigger association

Books become associated with places and people. Yvonne, my campanion when I discovered Hemingway, was a spontaneous, go-getting, sometimes bold young woman with dark, shoulder length hair parted down the middle – when she actually bothered to brush it. Her boldness and assertiveness, I came to realise, covered a psychological vulnerability that was well hidden and that seldom surfaced in those years.

She showed no literary bent then. She didn’t read much and there were no books in her room. In fact, there wasn’t much at all in her room… a wardrobe for her minimalist set of uncoordinated clothes, a matress and a chair. Yet, years later, she would put together more than a few words of fiction and even venture into journalism while living in Beijing. That, I understand, was accidental, having more to do with serendipity than planning.

We were together there at 168 Cathedral Street, Wooloomooloo (“…there, in my own slum”, as she would later write) as the new decade dawned. Despite my interest in Hemingway at that time, I didn’t see her as a Hemingwayesque or Kerouacesque character, not consciously anyway, but her up-front approach to life and the way she wore her khaki jacket with its big pockets and her dark blue beret set her apart from her contemporaries. Yes, perhaps she could have slipped out of either writer’s novels because there was an attitude, a presence about her that suggested that here was a young woman eager to taste life and ready to go where it took her.

With the end of the decade, and Yvonne’s immediate presence in my life, I put Kerouac and Hemingway aside, for years as it turned out.

Quite a pleasant place in winter

Byron Bay in winter is a pleasant place to be. There’s none of the steamy heat of summer nor the mobs of tourists that season brings. You can wander streets without crowds and even get a seat in a coffee shop.

You can also explore the town’s bookshops. The good news is that these have multiplied. Once, there were two – Icon, in Jonson Street, which sold second hand, and a small shop selling new titles on Fletcher Street.

Now there are four. Those earlier two still exist but they have been joined by another second hand dealer and – until it closed a year or so after opening – by Byron Books, which was on the corner just down the road. Making up the four is a branch of Brisbane’s Mary Martin bookshop which, like those in that city, includes a coffee shop.

How four bookshops survive the off-season in Byron Bay, a town of only 9000, remains a mystery, but the area does have an abundance of literati, some with deep pockets, and an annual writers festival to keep things literary moving along.

It was some months ago that I was in Byron and I took a walk downtown. When not in a hurry to be anywhere, when simply wandering, bookshops attract me. Like the way that honey attracts ants, their presence is somehow carried on the air and this I seem to detect and slowly home in on. So it was that this subconscious homing behaviour brought me to the newer of the town’s second hand dealers.

I wandered in – the place was empty save for a saleswoman busy shuffling books in the way bookshop staff do. She didn’t notice me walk in but as I did so my attention was drawn to a rack of books next to the counter. My eyes skimmed over titles and author’s names… and then I realised what I was looking at… Corso, Ferhlengetti, Ginsberg and… yes, Kerouac. Here they all were, the famous coterie, the inner circle, the Beats… here, in front of my eyes in, of all places, Byron Bay. I would have anticipated finding their works in an inner-urban bookshop of one in the big cities – Sydney, certainly; Melbourne, for sure; Brisbane, doubt it; Adelaide, just possibly; Hobart, forget it.

“Are people still interested in reading this stuff?”, I asked the saleswoman as I flicked through a second hand Kerouac. “Oh, yes”, she answered. “There’s quite a lot on interest in the Beats. Especially among young people”.

Satori in Desire

Another beachside place, another city.

In distance and ambiance Manly is far from Byron Bay. It’s less-well endowered with bookshops and, unlike Byron, does not have an annual writer’s festival.

What Manly does have is two sellers of new books. There’s a branch, a franchise I think, of Dymocks, the Sydney bookseller you find in suburban shopping malls whose stores range from the banal to the almost interesting. There’s also Humphrey’s newsagency, a large establishment that carries a modest stock of new titles.

Like Byron, Manly has two second hand dealers. One is tucked away in the corner of the minor arcade that gives onto the pedestrian area that was once Sydney Road. It’s a cramped little shop selling mainly popular fiction. The other is called Desire, a place with an Art Deco ambiance that matches the building that houses it and suggests, architecturally, Manly’s origin as a holiday destination of the 1930s.

Desire is that sort of small bookshop that attracts the serious reader as well as the passer-by looking for a cheap, quality, second hand read. The lighting, a helpful staff, the record player that staff sometimes play jazz LP’s on give it a sort of vintage, comfortable atmosphere that makes you feel as though you can linger as long as you like. It has seats and a table. It’s what a serious bookstore should be and what some of those big book barns are not. Writing on July 2008 in the comments on the dumbofeather.com/bookshops/, Jade voted Desire her favouite, describing it this way: ” …Put a bow tie on the front window and I would marry this store. All the second-hand treasures inside would become my little babies and we’d live happily ever after!”

Anyway, I wandered into Desire and started looking around… plenty of contemporary titles, some older books, fiction, non-fiction, science fiction, psychology and philosophy… even a large format hardcover of the work of Magnum agency photographer, George Rodger… different themes neatly arrayed along the walls and across the stands in the centre of the shop. Completing my circuit I edged closer to the counter and, there, I came across a peculiar set of titles arranged according to theme.

A mixed bunch of authors they turned out to be as my eyes scanned the titles. And there again were those familiar names – Ferleghetti, Corso, Ginsberg (quite a selection of his work), Cassidy (who was the main character of Kerouac’s On The Road), Clark’s biography of Kerouac, Memory Babe – Gerald Nicosa’s biography of the man and a copy of Gary Sneider’s Turtle Island. Sneider, you probably know, appeared as Japhy Ryder in Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, in my opinion the most enjoyable, most life-loving and exuberant of Kerouac’s works. Deja vue a la Byron Bay, I thought.

“Is there still a demand for the authors on this shelf?”, I asked the shopkeeper who had by now given up on his chess game outside in the arcade.

“Oh, yes”, he responded. “Especially among young people. Stuff like Kerouac’s On The Road appeals to them… the life, the experiences he writes about. It’s why we keep the writings of The Beats on a shelf by themselves. I’ll bet you haven’t seen anything like that in any other bookshop”.

How do I break the news, I wondered? How do I tell this proud bookshop owner, with his specialist sideline in the writings of The Beats, that his shop is not quite as unique as he imagines… nearly, but not quite?

“Well…”, I replied somewhat hesistantly, ” …there’s this little second hand bookshop up the coast in Byron Bay… and they too have a shelf set aside for the writings of The Beats… but I’ve never seen anything similar elsewhere in Sydney” – the latter added as an afterthought to head off any loss of bookseller ego.

“The Icon?”, he asked about the Byron shop.

“No, the new one the next street over”, I responded, knowing now then that he must not have been to Byron for some time.

Late the next day I once again walk through Desire’s Art Deco doorway and part with $16 each for Clark’e and Gerald Nicosa’s biographries of Kerouac.

Authors refound

I can’t account for my recent immersion in Kerouac’s writing. I enjoyed reading him in times past but I find so much more in his work now. I’ve still got a copy of Big Sur to get through – that somewhat downbeat tale of Kerouac’s time in a cabin on the sparsely populated Big Sur coast of California where the Santa Lucia mountains rise abruptly from the Pacific, and where in 1960 he sought escape from the fame that On The Road had brought. There’s a copy of Lonesome Traveller next to it on the shelf.

As for Desolation Angels, Kerouac’s story of his time as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the Cascades (something he took up on the suggestion of Gary Sneider, who spent a number of seasons isolated on one high peak or another reading, studying, writing, philosophising, doing his Buddhist practices and looking out for forest fires), I hadn’t been able to locate a copy at the time. One day while downtown I recalled seeing Satori in Paris in Borders bookshop in the city – which keeps perhaps the best selection of Kerouac of any mainstream bookshop, even more titles than that home of Sydney’s literati – Gleebooks – though I had wandered in to find their last copy of Desolation Angels.

This renewed interest in Kerouac kicked off a minor Hemingway binge. I didn’t return to those titles I read decades ago but did enjoy The Sun Also Rises (also published as Fiesta), To have and Have Not and A Moveable Feast, all early works. The latter is about his six years in Paris in the 1920s when the city was the counterculture capital of the time, home to writers, artists and jazz musicians. It’s a book about living cheap and trying to make it in journalism and, later, as a writer. It’s about the people he met and the cafes he frequented. The Sun Also Rises, too, comes out of his Paris years. It describes the lives of that avant-guard coterie which stimulated Gertrude Stein to exclaim to Hemingway that “You are all a lost generation”.

Books first read decades ago, now redicovered. Why? One thing – I now have greater understanding of the social currents of those times, and having that context makes sense of much of what those books say.

Perhaps it is a coincidence that I rediscovered Kerouac and Hemingway at the same time Yvonne and I started a writing exercise – a shared memoir. An experiment this certainly is, but I’m curious – what will it yield about my association of Yvonne, Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac?

I cross a narrow bridge then, cresting the top of a bare hill I catch a distant glimpse of the ocean. A sharp turn and it‘s up a hill then into a long, sweeping curve that brings me to the road along the edge of the escarpment that forms the backdrop to the narrow coastal plain.

Seen from Cape Byron, the long beach to the north seems to go on and on.

Here on the edge of the escarpment a farmer has retained a big patch of subtropical rainforest of the type that once covered this rolling country. I slow to take a closer look. “Tall trees, dark forest”, comes the thought as my eyes traverse the trees and their shady interstices. “Looks mysterious, primeval even” comes a thought unbidden.

The dense, green wall blocks the view over the coast but in a few minutes I clear this remnant and approach the sharp turn that precedes the plunge to the plain. Brake, change down, into the sharp turn… and I come to a stop a little way down the hill where I pull over, pull on the handbrake, turn off the motor, get out and look on country new to me.

…………………………

It is the closing years of the 1960s and I am on the first of my solo road trips along the great highway that goes north from Sydney all the way to Queensland. It’s a long line of asphalt that takes travellers to destinations planned and unplanned, to those imagined and to others discovered only by chance. To set out on the highway without any firm idea of destination is to accept serendipity. I know that it is a type of aimlessness but doing it makes me happy.

I resist the urge to move on… I resist that senseless pull that I experience all to often, that seeks to keep me moving for no good reason at all. “Pointless urgency”, I think.

But there is some impetus that keeps me going as long as the direction is north, and I have to admit to finding happiness in traversing this ribbon of grey that links town and city, farm and coast. This is something I don’t talk about with friends in Sydney for I fear that they would not identify with such sentiment.

Road signs bearing the names of towns encourage turning off the highway and this I cannot resist. I know it makes the journey long but I am in no hurry. Obediently I turn to follow minor roads to minor towns that cling to the coast… places of old fibro houses with rusty galvanised iron roofs… of men and women standing patently on piers with lines curving into the water, their gaze and minds elsewhere… of people taking the morning sun on long yellow beaches. These are towns the images of which assume a sameness in mind and, given only a little time, blend together into some composite of Australian coastal existence.

This is all part of the joy of movement over long distances… it is refreshing, it is exhilarating, it is freedom.

…………………………

I close the door and look out over the little patchwork of roofs down there, where the coast turns abruptly to climb as a headland atop which stands a tall white lighthouse. Stretching north, a long way north from that cape all the way to a horizon concealed by sea mist is a beach that seemingly goes on and on.

“Something special about this place”, I think, looking out over it for the first time. I stay here awhile, propped on the bonnet of my small grey car. Then I drive into town.

…………………………

“Bit like other towns on the coast”, comes the thought as I drive slowly past houses, some old, some newer but most of them older structures of painted weatherboard. Here and there are people — families on their annual holiday from the city; older people, presumably retirees and not particularly wealthy looking, the type you might find around the bar of an RSL or a football club; and younger folk in couples or walking along in small groups.

A sharp left then a sharp right and soon I realise I’m on the main street. It’s a town of low buildings, Byron Bay. Old timber houses turned into shops, cafes and milk bars. There’s an intersection where the road turns north, towards Queensland, but I keep straight ahead and come to a large car park behind the beach. To my left is the town’s swimming pool and I wonder why people would swim in its chlorinated waters when there’s this beautiful beach a few metres away. And there’s that headland with the lighthouse I saw from the escarpment above.

“So, this I Byron Bay”, I think as I get out and lock the car before walking into town.

There’s a temporariness about this place. Is it the buildings of wood and iron? The way the town sits on the very edge of the land as if about to topple into the sea? Is it something about the ambience of the place? Yes, it’s like other coastal towns, insubstantial in some way. There are a couple solid-looking buildings, both hotels, and there’s that old two story timber place on the intersection where the road takes you north. A bit run down perhaps, it appears to have been here awhile. As for the town centre, there’s nothing of great substance there.

I had seen other places on this journey north. Earlier today there had seen Lismore, a sprawling, sleepy place with a lazy feel about it basking in the heat of the summer sun. If you stop and listen, I imagine, you would hear the crack of iron roofs expanding.

It was a more substantial a place than Byron Bay and had a feel of having been there longer… there were those old houses whose timbers have greyed with the years, long ago having become a stranger to paint. Its city centre, too, I found a slow place completely lacking any sense of bustle or urgency. Different way of living here, I thought.

It — Lismore —  wasn’t an unpleasant place but I didn’t say long and set off on the road to the east and up into the hills. But once up there I stop because the land t0 the west lay revealed… rolling country to a horizon of blue mountains that form a distant edge to the view. What are they? What’s out there among them? Where are they? What do people do out there? Thoughts come and go unanswered. Maybe, one day, I’ll go out there and find answers to these questions.

Then there was Bangalow, a town that spills down a steep hill. It occupies a bowl in the landscape that opens to the east and driving into town from Lismore the steepness of the main road is such that you need to apply your brakes lest you zap through town so rapidly that you find yourself in open country again before you know it.

Byron Bay — town by the sea. I drive up to the lighthouse and see that long beach that seems to go on and on. I look south over bush and beach to a distant headland.

I stay, but not all that long. The road continues and I must get back onto it.

…………………………

It’s a decade later and I am a long way from Byron Bay when I pick up a book of short stories by Australian author, Craig McGregor. I’ve encountered his writing before, quite by accident, and I liked it because it was life translated into stories… I would like to be able to write that way myself one day, I think.

I start to read, then I encounter something familiar, something I imagine I have experienced years ago. The realisation comes as a sense of familiarity that starts as a vague tingling feeling then grows into a dawning of realisation.

It was this. McGregor, too, followed that winding strip of grey asphalt that joins Lismore to Byron Bay and he, too, stopped at that same place on the winding downhill run, just past that patch of rainforest, and looked over that same view of coast, cape and lighthouse.

This must have been some years before I did the same but what was pleasing to find was that he, too, experienced some sense of place on that road where it descends the escarpment to the narrow coastal plain below.

…………………………

More years pass… many of them. I drive that long road north again and, turning eastward at Lismore, eventually come to that bare hill atop the escarpment. I brake and curve into the sharp turn… and come to a stop a little way down the hill where I pull over, pull on the handbrake, turn off the motor, get out and look on country now better known to me.

Below is that town that I first saw from the escarpment all those years ago as a patchwork of roofs amid trees. And here, on the headland, is that white lighthouse. The difference is that, this time, I have come to stay.

Many times I drive that same winding road that descends the escarpment but only occasionally now do I stop to look. When I do, memory takes me back and I again feel that same sense of being here.

Yes, it is still the same view, the same long beach stretching far to the north, a view largely unchanged from when I first looked upon it. Yet, it is always a new experience, a landscape seemingly unchanged but a mindscape that sees the familiar as if for the first time. The difference is that this landscape is now home.

Byron Bay. Discovered and rediscovered.