This article was written for the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network following criticism in February 2014 of community food gardening and farmers’ markets by a representative body of the vegetable industry. ………………………………………………. IN MID-FEBRUARY 2014, community gardeners around Australia suddenly found themselves under attack from the horticulture industry. Ausveg, a national industry organisation, […]
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JENNIFER ALDEN, the Victorian food consultant, gave me the book just a few weeks ago — a little A5-size publication with a photo of a bright red strawberry on the cover and the logo of the City of Greater Bendigo below. That was at the national gathering of the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens […]
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Some might call it preaching to the converted, my talk about the work of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance with Permaculture/Transition Blue Mountains there in the community centre in Lawson that night.
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I’VE READ ONLY one book by Peter Matthiessen, and that was some time in the 1980s. It was his tale of wandering in search of the fabled Himalayan animal, the snow leopard, portrayed in his 1978 book of the same name. The book moved me… it moved me so much that I’ve read it at […]
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THERE's a lot in Philip Ackerman-Leist's book, Rebuilding the Foodshed, but don't expect to come away from reading it with a formula to go and create a viable local food system...
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A Tasmanian journey… LIKE THE AUTHOR, when I lived in Tasmania I too felt the allure of the Bass Strait islands. Unlike the author, changing circumstances prevented me doing anything about it. Now I get to look down on Flinders Island every time I fly into Tasmania, providing the weather down there is clear. And […]
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It was a city already saturated from days of rain that those of us peering through the big windows of Blacktown Council’s Narimba room looked out over. A grey scene of low clouds scudding past, their dark mass frequently unleashing the downpours that have become a constant presence in city life this past week, the […]
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FOR MONTHS they had been meeting and now, on the warm Sunday morning of October 27, they were ready. How many would turn up? Would it all go well? Would it be a success? The transformation started. The trees arrived and were unloaded. Tables and chairs were set out. Street barriers put in place. It […]
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IT WAS A TALE of two farmers. The first came as a call from a Sydney region grower. Would Ronny like to come and collect some oranges? It was cheaper not to take them to market, said the grower. Two tonnes were collected. The second farmer to call had 16 tonnes of carrots. The supermarket […]
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I ATTENDED the ABC Gardening Australia Live event at the old Sydney showgrounds last Sunday and it’s this that leads to what I want to say about entry fees, the willingness to pay and the value proposition. Let’s deal with this theoretical stuff first, because it bears upon what I want to say about the […]
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