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Sunday, 14 October 2007

SPECIAL REPORT...

The permaculture papers

PREPARING THE GROUND

It is one of those warm and humid Sydney afternoons, one of those languid days of late summer when people move at an unhurried pace and the city slows as the day moves into late afternoon.

From inside the old building on Enmore Road comes the low hum of voices in conversation. It's no grand building this, with its faded, peeling paint, and it lacks the Art Deco grandeur of the Enmore Theatre across the road. But no one notices that because all eyes are on the front door where a red ribbon is being stretched across the entrance.

A man steps forward, his bearded eminence familiar to some but new to many. He speaks slowly as he addresses those gathered around, then he turns to face the door. Raising the scissors in his right hand, he reaches out and... snip!... the ribbon, severed in the middle, flutters down and to the sides.

Bill Mollison has opened the Permaculture Epicentre.

It was a culminating moment for Permaulture in Sydney and a significant one for Permaculture in Australia. The Epicentre, home to the International Permaculture Journal recently acquired by Robyn Francis from Terry White, would for a few years be the focus of Permculture in the city.

There, in addition to International Permaculture Journal, as Permaculture magazine was renamed, Permaculture Sydney's own newsletter would be published by laboreously typing, cutting and pasting copy onto a paper stencil. This was before the days fo desktop publishing. Variously called Passionfruit Vine, Choko Vine and other vine appellations, it was posted out to Sydney's still small but growing band of Permaculture afficianados.

But how had the incipient movement come to this? How was it that something known only to comparative few had by now achieved recognition? What had prepared people for it?

To find answers we step back in time to the previous decade and look a little more closely at the social mlieu from which Permaculture emerged.

The quickening

Picture what happened. Australian society of the 1970s was being battered by change, bewildering to many but welcome to some. The social change that had started during the late-1960s had levered open the minds of the youth cohort and created an anticipation of change for the better. There was an air of optimism as the stolid conservatism of the previous two decades finally abated. A new generation was coming of age. It seemed a new time was being born.

Into this readiness for new ideas were thrust Permaculture One and Permaculture Two. They launched the ideas of Bill Mollison and David Holmgren at those ready for them and, in some cases, altered the course of their lives. That would not happen for awhile, but happen it surely would.

As the1980s progressed, many of those who had drifted from the cities in search of a new life in the country as part of the back-to-the-land movement now returned to find a career, an education, start a family and buy a house in the suburbs. Livelihoods, it turned out, were not all that easy to find in the country. Making a living had not been a big consideration when they broke free.

But what was a phase of life to some was all of life to others. Those who stayed built their lives in the hills and in towns like Nimbin, Bellingen and Maleny in the north and Castlemaine in the south of the country. Some started small businesses, others found employment in jobs financially less rewarding and less interesting than they would have had in the cities. But the sacrifice was worth it, they believed, to live the way they wanted.

A legacy that informed Permaculture

The 'new settlers' or 'alternatives' must be given due credit for creating a new way of living, elements of which informed the emerging Permaculture idea.

The movement wasn't without precedent. William Lane's colony of Australians had sailed for Paraguay in the 1890s to form an intentional community. Their descendents are still there, blended with the local population.

The new settlers of the 1970s attracted sometimes sensational coverage in the tabloid press. Usually, illicit drugs figured somewhere in these reports. It was true that drugs - mainly marijuana - were a recreational component within the culture of the alternatives, but they were not the dominant feature that the headline writers imagined them to be.

Apart from mainstream media with its reports sensational but sometimes fair and factual, another group was asking questions around those alternative population centres. Academic researchers such as Dr Bill Metcalf at Griffiths University and Peter Cock revealed a movement still is its heyday. Cock's findings were published in the 1979 volume Alternative Australia (Quartet Books, Melbourne. ISBN 0 908128 09 6) .

"Alternative Australia has pioneered a way of life very different from materialistic suburbia", the author of the book's jacket blurb states, " ...a way of life that owes much to our village ancestors and to the 'natural' technologies of the future". Little could the author of the book's subtitle - Communities for the Future - know that those early intentional communities would later influence the ecovillages of today.

Margaret Munro-Clark's Communes in Rural Australia - The Movement Since 1970 (Hale and Ironmonger, Sydney. ISBN 0 86806 219 7; 0 86806 218 9) came out of later research into intentional communities established after the end of the Vietnam war. At the time with the University of Sydney, Munro-Clark's book provided an update nearly ten years after Cock's volume.

"The 'alternative' sector in the Rainbow Region of NSW [the North Coast] and, to a lesser degree, other coastal districts that had become centres of communitarian land settlement, can be said to amount to a new kind of ecological niche... (the Rainbow Region) has the rare character of being an Australian cultural niche in which a low cash-income and a materially simpler standard of living are acceptable for adults of good education and middle-class background, and in which personal identity is not based on place in some career structure", the author writes.

Description 'right-on'

Munro-Clark's description of the alternatives as being of "low cash income", "middle-class background" and "good education" are apt because that is what they were, for the most part: middle class sons and daughters of Australia's spreading suburbs, often with some level of tertiary eduation, who had - inexplicably to many of their parents and contemporaries still in the cities - given up opportunity, financial and social security for a new life in the bush, a life that most knew through mainstream stereotypes around the culture.

She was also right in her assertion of their seeking a "materially simpler standard of living". Even in those day there was a backlash against the consumer society and its obsession with acquisition, accumulation and possessions. Generally, the alternatives sought what would later in that decade become known as 'voluntary simplicity'. That, itself, would become a minor sort of social movement.

With antecedents spanning millenia, especially among those seeking spiritual growth, the voluntary simplicity movement in the 1970s rediscovered writings, such as the classic exposition on the topic by Henry David Thoreau (Walden, written in1854). In 1980, Duane Elgin published another key text, Voluntary Simplicity (ISBN 0-688-12119-5).

Voluntary simplicity persists today as a 'good idea' rather than a cohesive movement but it retains an attractiveness. The idea of living well with less is a theme in Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss' 2005 book, Affluenza (Allen & Unwin, Sydney. ISBN 1 74114 671 2) and in Linda Cockburn's 2006 book, Living the Good Life - How one family changed their world from their own backyard (ISBN 1-74066-312-8).

The movement's influence on the then-emerging Permaculture idea came through osmosis rather than the deliberate adoption of voluntary simplicity as a complete ideology of living. It never became a regularly expressed, explicit component of Permaculture although it lies there below the surface in an implicit form. That is to generalise, of course, because the notion and practice of voluntary simplicity varies as a conscious practice among those professing some alliegance to Permaculture.

A movement explained - further academic interest

The 1980s, after the exodus of city youth had peaked, brought more intense examination of intentional communities, including interest from government.

In 1983 the University of New England's Australian Rural Adjustment Unit produced the first of a number of studies of the potential of intentional communities as alternative settlements. Low Cost Rural Resettlement (ISBN 0 85834 515 3) was followed in 1984 by Sustainable Rural Resettlement (ISBN 0 85834 548 X). Both volumes explored the scale and nature of alternative lifestyle settlements, the problems experienced, employment prospects and initiatives to provide assistance. The second report quoted academic researcher Bill Metcalf's figure of in excess of 60,000 participants in what was popularly known as 'alternative lifestyles'.

In 1985 came Metcalf and Vanclay's study, Social Charactristics of Alternative Lifestyle Paricipants in Australia (Griffiths University, Queensland), essentially a sociological survey. Metcalf produced a more recent volume, From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality (1995; UNSW Press, NSW. ISBN 0 86840 087 4), a study of participating individuals and an historical overview of communal land settlement.

Approaching threshold

After 1973, Tuntable Falls community near Nimbin had spawned numerous similar settlements. Just over the range was Bodhi Farm and Dhamananda. Like Tuntable, they are still there today.

But that is not the case with all of the intentional communities that spread across old dairy farms aand bush paddocks in that period. What became of plans for the New Farm Community's Kibbutz Village near Gosford? What happened to plans for Cooplacurripa, a proposed intentional community near Taree that offered shares in the land at AU$250 per adult, inclusive of residential status, and three acres of land for personal use? Like so many proposed communities, they were stillborn.

By 1980, the outflow of young people form city to country had slowed to a trickle as had the rate of creation of intentional communities. In Nimbin, the murals on the shopfronts painted during the Aquarius Festival of 1973 had not yet started to fade. Nor had the town's demographic started to change. That would come, but not yet.

The experience of individuals on these intentional communities and their record of triumphs and failures fed into Permaculture as it matured. Some of the people who lived on the communities would later embrace Permaculture. Eventually, the lessons of that pioneering phase of community development would inform people like Max Lindegger, one of the designers of Crystal Waters ecovillage, and Robyn Francis, co-designer of Jalanbah.