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Sunday, 23 September 2007

SPECIAL REPORT...

The permaculture papers

PERMACULTURE PEAKS - the 1990s

Angus Campbell discusses worms with a primary school student in a Permaculture in schools programme in Sydney. Permaculture Sydney's Doug Bailey (at back) planted a food forest in his Marrickville backyard.

The decade brough expansion into new areas such as community food gardening, Permaculture in schools and overseas aid.

He had just finished his talk and questions were now coming from the audience. Not many questions - perhaps what he had said would have to sink in a bit before thoughts arose around it. Many there would not have questioned Bill Mollison anyway, as they were aleady favourably disposed towards his message.

One questioner, though, was a woman sitting in the middle rows of the lecture hall. I don't recall what she asked but I do recall it was harmless enough and did not challenge Bill's subject matter. It was more a question of clarification, of explanation.

The audience, however, was about to experience how Bill could occasionally sound offensive. His response to that unfortunate woman was such that she must have squirmed a little in her seat.

It was another of Bill's talks at the University of Technology, Sydney. The time the mid-1990s.

Whether or not this response occurred more frequently with women remains conjecture, however more than one female Permaculture activist alleged that Mollison was tougher in his attitude to females. Some said he was a misogynist, though other women said that it was just his traditional Australian male attitude to women.

An example of Mollison's propensity to give the unexpected is the anecdote about his being invited to address a UK assembly of Permaculture people. The audience came anticipating a talk on organic gardening but what they got was a talk about economics and the need for their organisation to withdraw its funds from the Bank of England and invest in something more ethical.

In later years, Bill would wander from the subject while giving addresses though this could still be entertaining. Some said that it produced a reluctance for event organisers to invite him to speak.

Mollison was an accomplished public speaker who could draw on anecdotes amusing and tragic to illustrate his point. His public addresses during the early years of Permaculture were critical to the popularisation of the design system. They are remembered fondly by those who experienced them.

Gardening with the community

It was a flat field of lawn when the gardeners arrived early on a Saturday morning. A chainlink fence surrounded the patch on three sides and a slope with a sandstone shelf projecting from it formed its northern boundary. The sole item of vegetation, apart from the lawn, was a Camphor Laurel tree growing from the embankment.

The council trucks arrived precisely on nine. The larger disgorged a tray load of organic matter while the smaller unhitched a Bobcat. By three in the afternoon a circular garden and six allotments had been constructed. Randwick Community Organic Garden was a reality.

The garden was the design project of the urban Permaculture Design Course Fiona Campbell and I were running at Randwick Community Centre. The students, having completed the design, had become so enthusiastic that they had to make the garden.

This was not the first of Sydney's community gardens. That honour goes to Glovers Community Organic Garden in Rozelle. It was operating in 1986, a full nine years before the Randwick garden.

Others followed Glovers. Sydney-based Permaculture designer, Bronwyn Rice, designed and oversaw the construction of Eveleight Street Community Garden, a project for the Redfern Aboriginal community. The Angel Street Permaculture Garden in inner-urban Newtown was built by a team who had been refused land in Sydney Park for a city farm. More would follow as community gardening picked up momentum through the 1990s.

Community food gardening had long been practiced in Europe and the US, but it did not get underway in Australia's until the first, Nunuwading Community Garden, made a start in Melbourne in October 1977. It was here that Permaculture was to play a part, but this was not the part it would have desired. I learned about it from someone who was a member of Nunuwading when it started and who later worked with Rockdale Council in southern Sydney.

"They created a mess", he said of the permaculturists who joined the garden. "They brought in bits of old carpet and covered the soil with this. It was an eyesore". Clearly, here was a difference over process and aesthetics. It would not be the last time such differences surfaced.

Permaculture continued to play a role in community garden development in Sydney, but in a more constructive way, especially after the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network was set up by Dr Darren Phillips in 1995. Morag Gamble and Evan Raymond in Queensland, then associated with Brisbane's successful Northey Street City Farm, and Fiona and I became state contacts for the network. Later, Fiona and I set up the community gardens network website.

Some of the gardens set up with the assistance of South Sydney Council (now absorbed into the City of Sydney) have notices that attempt to explain Permaculture and its role. Most, however, allude to it as a method of sustainable agriculture or gardening, reinforcing the message that the design system is all about organic gardening. That may change. The 2004 community garden network weekend at Bendigo, Victoria, organised by Melbourne's Cultivating Community, attracted participants involved in both community garden development and Permaculture design, raising hopes for a broader interpretation of the design system.

Permaculture has had a design role at Bendigo's Gravel Hill Community Garden. The garden is different to others in that it produces organic products for the local food market, grows food for a CSA (a Community Supported Agriculture or subscription farm scheme that operates from the community garden) and trains people through the federal government's Work for the Dole programme. The nexus of community gardening and Permaculture may yet produce a type of garden-based training and social centre serving the real needs of society.

Permaculture goes to school

It was 1995, the week before the national Permaculture Convergence in Adelaide, South Australia, and forty or so people had gathered in the suburb of Black Forest for a three-day intensive course with Robina McCurdy, an energetic New Zealander who had developed an approach to introducing Permaculture to schools and to working with children in general.

Participatory planning of a school grounds re-design, Sydney

Robina would later go on to aid work in the South African drylands and, after that, in a Capetown squatter settlement. She then returned to New Zealand to set up the year-long Planet Organic Permaculture and organics training course, the first major initiative in Permaculture training since the PDC was first offered.

Robina's Adelaide course signalled the start of Permaculture involvement with schools in Australia, although there had been isolated initiatives before. Some, like the impressive garden at Black Forest primary in Adelaide, with its curriculum and in-service training for teachers, had been developed without any Permaculture input.

Permaculture Goes to School was the title of a booklet Fiona and I produced following the course. It contained a bibliography drawn up by participants as well as articles.

Robina's presence stimulated activity in this new Permaculture sector and one of her early proteges, Sally Ramsden, was soon offering training workshops around the country. Projects were started in schools.

Fiona and I assisted a primary school in Hurstville establish a food garden. Later, we were involved with Lewisham primary in inner-urban Sydney where we were funded as part of a school grounds redesign team.

Apart from Robina, the most durable and authoritative product on Permaculture in schools came not from Sydney but from Brisbane where teacher Carolyn Nuttall developed an edible garden with students at Seville Road State School in Holland Park. Her 1995 book, A Children's Food Forest, is based on her experience and remains the reference for people interested in the area.

Permaculture in schools remained a growth area until late in the decade, but then interest disippated. This was puzzling given the energy evident following Robina's 1995 courses. The pertinent question is: what led to decline? I have no answer, just a few ideas:

1. New practices require the presence and stimulus of a trainer to provide follow-up and keep the momentum going for some time after it is introduced. With Robina going into aid work overseas and Sally Ramsden eventually moving on, the main reference people were gone.
2. Market saturation - there are only so many Permaculture people in Australia and only so many of those are interested in Permaculture in schools. Perhaps, after Robina's initial flurry of workshops and the follow-up that Sally and others provided, all those who were interested had received training.
3. Permaculture in schools can only be carried out during school hours. If the times allocated by the school do not coincide with the times available to the Permaculture designer, then the activity will not happen.
4. Permaculture in schools is mainly a voluntary activity. The lack of income is a brake on long-term involvement and sustainability.
5. Successful Permaculture in school projects rely on integrating training with school curricula. This requires the production of training resources such as manuals, a time consuming process for which there is little prospect of financial return unless a grant can be obtained. Without integration, teachers are less likely to welcome something that takes the focus from an already-crowded curriculum.
6. Lack of a media to publicise and sustain the activity. The Permaculture International Journal was the avenue through which people learned of Permaculture in schools. The journal carried a number of pages dedicated to working with children in Permaculture. Its closure deprived readers of that information.

One of Permaculture's weak spots has been a lack of evaluation of its activities. Permaculture in schools is no exception. The absence of evaluation deprives the movement of learning because projects are not documented and, therefore, are not repeatable. Weaknesses and strengths go unidentified; information is lost, the record is bare and Permaculture's 'corporate memory' is weakened.

Both the practice and record of Permaculture in schools has faded, yet there are now signs that a conjunction of community gardens and schools may provide the stimulus the field needs for its revival. How that eventuates remains to be seen but servicing schools is proving a successful field of activity at Northey Street City Farm and other community gardens, such as Eastern Sydney's Waverly Community Garden, are becoming involved although they may not link their programmes directly with Permaculture.

Local government in Sydney, in a few cases, is investigating working in schools on Permaculture-like projects although there is no reference to the design system in their work and those responsible for the activity often have no knowlege of Permaculture in schools as it was developed in the 1990s. The work is the responsibility of new local government positions such as that of Sustainability Education Officer, a role that also entails working with local institutions, business and the public.

The importance of mainstream media

Bill Mollison stands amid the mulch and shrubs of his garden... the image cuts from one showing the bare grounds when he moved in to a picture of the garden in full bloom... the camera pans... Mollison's bearded figure crouches... he places a sheet of newspaper as a weed barrier and mulch layer on the soil then addresses the camera: "This is the best use for advertising, for bad news", he says. Surveying his garden, he turns to face the camera: "I would like to run this all the way into Murwillumbah".

This is Mollison at his best, the entertaining teacher who uses humour to make an important point. His face, with its trim grey beard and suntanned and wrinkled skin appears that of a knowledgable father figure passing on wisdom.

It is how Mollison appeared on ABC TV in a video production entitled In Grave Danger of Falling Food. Like the broadcast of Heartlands a few years before, the production, by Julian Russell and Tony Gailey, attracted wide attention. It proved very important in bringing Permaculture before an audience larger than it could ever have achieved by itself.

Mainstream media has been important to the growth of Permaculture but never more so than in the 1990s. No media organisation has been more important to Permaculture than the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). Through television and radio, the national broadcaster brought Permaculture to a broad audience. Max Lindegger, Robyn Francis, myself and others have received coverage on a number of ABC radio networks.

In Grave Danger of Falling Food was a one-off programme that had less impact than the later four-part production, The Global Gardener, a series that looked at Permaculture overseas and in Australia. Consisting of four, 30 minute segments: tropical, arid land, cool climate and urban Permaculture and filmed in Australia, the US, Europe, Africa and India, Global Gardener was the most successful of all the video productions about Permaculture. Destined to be rerun twice on the ABC, community-based Permaculture associations and teachers, most likely in breach of copyright, have made use of the videotape as an educational tool.

Global Gardener pushed Permaculture before prime time audiences and can be credited with filling Permaculture courses after it was first broadcast. If anything boosted the prospects of the design system during the decade, it was this production.

Over the longer term however, it has been Permaculture's own media, the Permaculture International Journal, that has deepened the understanding of the design system. The journal brought people together in a community of interest and engendered a common identity. The PIJ, first under the editorship of Robin Francis and later Steve Payne, continued to fulfil its valuable role as networker, news source and educator through the decade.

Tape and print - spreading the message

Mollison and Reny Slay released their 1991 book, Introduction to Permaculture, just in time to the growing interest in Permaculture. Bill's Permaculture - A Designer's Manual had appeared in 1988 and was more a product for the trained Permaculture designer. Introduction to Permaculture was a basic text aimed at the general reader.

Like the Designer's Manual, the publication of Introduction to Permaculture was timely. There had been no popular exposition of Permaculture since Permaculture One and Permaculture Two. Now, with public interest increasing, a new introductory book was just what was needed. Introduction to Permaculture would go into reprint by the end of the decade.

Unlike books, video productions are ephemeral and are soon lost unless published on videotape or DVD. Fortunately, the ABC had the good sense to sell the videotape of In Grave Danger of Falling Food. This made the production available to a wider audience and to those not near a television set when it was broadcast. The ABC also marketed copies of The Global Gardener, the 1991production by the team which had made In Grave Danger of Falling Food.

There were other productions by Permaculture videographers in the '90s but these were not made for broadcast. A series of short productions came out of Crystal Waters ecovillage as a means of explaining the place. In 1995, a videotape was released about the work of Carolyn Nuttall's Permaculture in school project. Entitled A Children's Food Forest, the tape was less useful than the book released the following year.

As for Permaculture magazines, Permaculture Edge, started by Permaculture Nambour Association, had by the mid-90s gone to Permaculture Western Australia. For years troubled by an erratic publishing schedule, the magazine made its final appearance at the 1996 international convergence. While it may have been possible to revive the publication it would have required a substantial investment in design, content development and marketing. Nobody had the energy for that.

Meanwhile, PIJ had become available from newsagents, a move that took it to a wider readership and placed Permaculture further into the public eye. Financial viability had always been a challenge and now, to pay for national distribution, advertising took on greater importance.

In Victoria, in the rural town of Castlemaine, a quietly determined redhead named Joy Finch was about to launch a new magazine, Green Connections. More modern in presentation than PIJ, the magazine would compete with PIJ on the newsstands. It reported Permaculture and a mix of associated material but, despite the appeal of Green Connections, PIJ maintained its loyal readership.

Other Permaculture titles released in the 1990s include:

• a book on Permaculture design by West Australian Ross Marrs, The Basics of Permaculture Design
• You Can have Your Permaculture and Eat It Too, a combination Permaculture garden design manual and recipe book launched at the 1997 Perth Permculture Convergence by Maleny (Queensland) based Permaculture educator, Robin Clayfield.

A new teaching manual

In 1993, Blue Mountains Permaulture teacher and development worker, Rosemary Morrow, set down her approach to Permaculture design in the Earth User's Guide to Permaculture. Like Mollison's Introduction to Permaculture, her's was a book aimed at newcomers. Some preferred Rosemary's book to Mollison's but despite its popularity among teachers it did not displace Mollison's book from its pre-eminent place - Mollison's name had cachet when it came to credibility.

After Rosemary's book went on sale the story circulated that Mollison had objected to it because some of the content was similar to his own work. This was due to a misunderstanding by Mollison and the Permaculture Institute that copyright protected ideas as well as content. Mollison later admitted this when he moved to trademark the terms 'permaculture design' and 'permaculture course'. Copyright protects only a particular expression of an idea, not the idea itself. Mollison could not stop others writing about Permaculture and elements of it that he had developed.

To make Earth User's Guide to Permaculture more useful to Permaculture teachers, in 1997 Rosemary released the Earth User's Guide to Permaculture Teacher's Notes.

The 1990s were a bumper year for Permaculture publishing and Australian titles were complemented with other from the UK. It was the publishing glut that preceded the drought.

The attrition of teachers

By the late-1980s teaching had become a growing area of Permaculture activity, not least because there were few other outlets for the skills picked up in Permaculture training. No employers were advertising for Permaculture designers.

Teaching was - and continues to be - seen by new PDC graduates as an opportunity to develop a livelihood. This is seldom the reality. Setting up as a teacher of Permaculture demands a lot of commitment and expense in developing a set of teaching resources and acquiring teaching equipment. With the new accredited Permaculture training, becoming a teacher involves expense to acquire a certificate in workplace training and in meeting other costs, another potential barrier.

Existing teachers are unlikely to assist those who aspire to teach. Teachers jealously hold on to the instructional materials they develop and newcomers are soon disabused of the notion that existing teachers will be happy to share their resources. A number of trainers have been asked for assistance by would-be teachers, usually in the sharing of teaching resources, but this has - privately at least - been met with a firm negative response.

By the end of the 1980s a number of teachers had established themselves along the eastern seaboard and were offering the PDC and associated courses on a regular basis. It was a good start but within a decade Permaculture teaching would run into its own limits to growth. With the exception of Robyn Francis in Nimbin and Jeff Lawton of the Permaculture Research Institute, most of those offering PDCs in the 1980s and the 1990s have now left teaching:

• Lea Harrison ceased to offer the PDC in the early 1990s
• Jude and Michel Fanton stopped offering Permaculture education and instead offered specialised courses in seed saving from their Seed Savers Network premises in Byron Bay
• the Gravenstein's offered farming-oriented Permaculture design courses in southern NSW and Victoria but have dropped out of teaching
• Southern Highlands Permaculture in NSW used to offer the PDC on a part-time basis
• Action for World Development, a Sydney-based development education organisation, offered a part-time design course in the late-1990s led by Permaculture activist Jill Finnane, as well as short introductory courses; that ceased with the closure of the organisation
• Bronwyn Rice was a horticulturist and landscape designer who offered a part-time PDC in Sydney in the early 1990s and who taught in courses organised by Pacific Edge; she has since dropped out of the Permaculture scene
• the van Raders, who live on tropical North Queensland's Atherton Tableland, ceased offering the PDC in the late-1990s
• Pacific Edge offered a longer, part-time, urban-oriented PDC through the 1990s after starting in teaching with Rosemary Morrow and in the TAFE horticulture course in Sydney, but has ceased teaching.

There are many reasons why people move into and out of Permaculture teaching. For some, teaching is only a part-time activity and the demands of their regular employment take precedence. Others try it the way children dip their toes into a swimming pool to see how cold the water is, then withdraw when they realise that there is little financial reward for a lot of work. Some fade away in the face of competition from established teachers.

By the late-1990s it was market saturation and too few students driving people out. At one stage there were four teaching venues between Nimbin and Crystal Waters; too many, it turned out.

A new cohort of Permaculture teachers emerged in the 1990s:

• Morag Gamble and partner Evan Raymond started teaching after they moved to Crystal Waters ecovillage; they have expanded their offerings through their organisation, SEED International (Sustainable Education and Environmental Design)
• Naomi and Rick Coleman started to offer the PDC through their organisation, Southern Cross Permaculture Institute, from their rural property in Gippsland, southern Victoria
• the PDC is today offered by Dick Copeman who is based at Northey Street City Farm in Brisbane.

Training appears to still be available at times through the Permaculture Association of South Australia and in Perth, Western Australia. Permaculture Melbourne seems to have opted out of teaching although an association of Permaculture teachers has emerged from the organisation. Rosemary Morrow, in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, offered a course in the late-1990s.

David Holmgren started to offer Permaculture courses in the 1990s after he set up his smallholding in rural Victoria. Bill Mollison still teaches on a occasional basis, sometimes in Tasmania and occasionally as a guest teacher in the USA.

Reaching the natural limit

In Sydney, Fiona and I first taught the PDC with Rosemary Morrow, initially in the Pittwater region then on the Central Coast. After that, Rosemary left to work on projects in Vietnam and Cambodia. People would call, asking if we were planning to teach more courses. No, we were not, we would tell them. But why not, we thought?

Rather than the 14-day intensive format in which most PDCs were offered, we followed Rosemary's example by offering a part-time course on weekends. The course grew to more than 100 hours because we found the 72-hour format developed by Bill Mollison too short for practical, participatory learning. We also added a segment on people skills, group skills and planning skills because we had found them conspicuously lacking in Permaculture training.

Earlier, we had taught introductory courses for a community college and managed to fill them, thanks to The Global Gardener. Permaculture education was enjoying boom times but we eventually passed the introductory courses over to one of our students who had expressed an interest in teaching.

Courses were now offered in most states but by late in the decade competition had left only the Crystal Waters crew, the Permaculture Research Institute and Robyn Francis' Permaculture Education as training providers in the Northern Rivers district. With the exception of the Institute these trainers now offer accredited Permaculture training, consolidating their position as trainers who can attract course participants from the entire East Coast. The Institute occasionally offers non-accredited courses.

So it is at the time of writing. The market in the region has 'rationalised' to the maximum number of providers it can sustain. Teaching reached a point of statis the boundaries of which, by 2003, were defined by a market no longer expanding sufficiently (if at all) for newcomers to set up. Now, with accredited training, there is again the chance to expand the numbers in training and to financially sustain the sometimes shaky incomes of the teachers.

It was only last year that someone emailed me, asking advice on moving to the NSW country where they hoped to earn a livelihood teaching Permaculture. I suggested, as delicately as I could, that they consider other livelihood options.

New beginnings, new endings - the Permaculture Research Institute

The setting was spectacular. The rolling terrain of the farm was set against the steep, jagged slopes of mountains clad in subtropical rainforest. The mountains formed a rampart along the western edge of the ancient caldera and, set amid the rolling, cleared terrain at their foot was the Permaculture Institute.

Here, students attracted by the mythology that had accumulated around Bill Mollison would gather in a teaching centre adjacent to an extensive vegetable garden. The garden was perhaps the best maintained component of the Institute's lands. It was prepared for planting by chickens kept in polypipe and wire mesh domes that were moved from garden bed to garden bed.

Bill Mollison had made this upland farm his home when he left Tasmania in the late-1980s and moved the Permaculture Institute here, thirty minutes drive along a gravel road from Tyalgum. Far from the windswept grasslands of Stanley he built a house for himself and an office for Tagari Publishers, the business that publishes and markets his books. This 2.5 hectare subtropical backblock, soon augmented by the purchase of the adjoining farm, would be home to Mollison and the Permaculture Institute for the next decade. When he returned to Tasmania at the end of that period, Bill took the Permaculture Institute with him. Tagari Farm became the home of the Permaculture Research Institute which, under the leadership of Jeff Lawton and his team, continued to teach the Permaculture Design Course.

The Commonworks

Once settled on the land, Bill set about planting the 2.5ha to a mix of food producing and native plants. The garden seen in the video production, In Grave Danger of Falling Food, is the garden of the Permaculture Institute soon after Bill moved in. It quickly grew into a food forest. When the adjoining farm went on the market Bill's wife of the time provided funds to buy it. Here, he set up a new organisation, the Permaculture Research Institute (PRI).

One of the PRI's innovative moves was the attempt to set up a 'Commonworks', an imaginative scheme that would use the new property as the venue for livelihood projects. Individuals would set up their own projects and pay an amount to PRI for management services. The idea was reminiscent of the microenterprises that development aid practitioners set up in developing country villages.

A large dam was excavated for a fish farm, a slope terraced for a tropical fruit orchard, bamboo planted for the food and cane market, a large free range chicken yard fenced, an extensive vegetable garden established on the river flats and a 'chinampa' system - a series of flooded ditches separated by agricultural strips - excavated. Modelled on the ancient Aztec chinampas of Mexico City, fish could be farmed in the flooded trenches and crops grown on the soil strips between them. When I saw the chinampas in use, guinea pigs were being kept on one strip (they are eaten in parts of South America) and flowers, presumably for the cut flower market, were being grown on another. The next time I next visited PRI, I found the system undergoing an algal bloom. The last time I visited, the chinampas had fallen into disuse.

The Commonworks project appealed to the Permaculture imagination. Leaseholders did not live on-site but travelled from their homes to tend their enterprises. I have no idea if a financial feasibility study or a business plan were ever developed but it seems unlikely that anyone could have made a living solely from their Commonworks enterprise. It would better be considered as part of a wider livelihood mix.

Commonworks got off to a good start. Vegetables were planted, fruit trees establish and edible fish introduced. Stimulated by reports in PIJ, there was a lot of interest from the Permaculture community, even from overseas. Unfortunately, the initial enthusiasm for this pioneering venture faltered and it collapsed.

Like so much in Permaculture, no evaluation of the project was made public and no evaluation may ever have been made. Project monitoring and evaluation are not Permaculture design's strong points and, once again, there is no accessible record for the Permaculture community, no learnings drawn from experience.

Returning home

I visited the PRI site, or Tagari Farm as it was known, a number of times. After speaking with residents and interns I formed the opinion that even when they numbered as many as 15 they were still too few to effectively manage the site and carry out new works. Apart from a tractor, little farm mechanisation was in evidence to make up for the labour shortfall.

The PRI continued to attract students and interns through the 1990s when Mollison was living on-site and offering PDCs. International interest brought a constant stream of overseas visitors who made their way along the dusty road from Tyalgum. The place became a significant node on the international Permaculture circuit, if such a thing existed.

Most interns seem to have found their time at PRI to be rewarding. There was, however, an undercurrent of complaint that internships merely provided free labour. A one-time resident verified this. Given the size of the property, such a motivation was understandable.

All seemed to be going well but in 1997came change when Bill decided to return to Tasmania and take the Permaculture Institute with him. As the institute was the owner of Tagari Farm, that left the new caretakers, headed by Jeff Lawton, to pay the $2000 monthly rent (the figure was supplied by a past-resident). A constant throughput of paying students for the design and other courses was critical to meeting this cost and an aggressive programme of courses scheduled and advertised in PIJ. The impact of this intensified activity on other training providers in the region is unknown, but it could not have helped them greatly.

Later, I learned that local government was making tenure at Tagari Farm difficult by insisting that the farm contribute to roadworks. Eventually it became too much and, in a move that surprised and disappointed many in the Permaculture movement, Tagari Farm was put on the market. Suddenly, something iconic was gone and Permaculture, somehow, seemed the lesser for it.

In 2001, the PRI acquired land near the village of The Channon, twenty minutes drive from Lismore and just over the range from Djanbung Gardens. The first design courses were offered there in 2002.

Handing over

It was a fine, warm Sunday morning when we assembled on the hillside in front of the stage on the last day of the 1997 Permaculture Convergence at Djanbung Gardens.

A small crowd had gathered in anticipation of Bill Mollison's appearance and they sat quietly in the sun. Bill appeared and was surrounded by well-wishers. He chatted awhile then climbed onto the stage, looked out at those gathered and started to talk about Permaculture. Then the unexpected happened. Bill announced his retirement. He was returning to Tasmania and would withdraw from teaching.

This, we realised with some amazement, was a farewell speech. Bill explained that he was handing over Permaculture to those assembled there, to its participants. It was a transition point, a moment of significant change and, in its own way, a moment that moved us emotionally.

Later that day, someone commented that they would believe Bill had retired when they saw it. As it turned out, Bill's retirement was not quite what it seemed and he went on to offer the occasional PDC at the Permaculture Institute's new property at Jacky's Marsh, Tasmania.

Transition to new times - a decade fades

And so the 1990s played out. After twelve years of growth in Australia, Permaculture had surged to a peak of participation and public interest only to experience declining participation in the decade's later years. Reduced media attention contributed to this, but there must have been other factors at work as well.

The positive achievements of the times included the:

• establishment of education and demonstration centres such as Djanbung Gardens
• growth of Crystal Waters ecovillage and the teaching of Permaculture and other courses there
• establishment of the Coleman's teaching centre in Victoria
• rise and fall of Tagari Farm
• setting up of Permaculture teaching as a livelihood
• Seed Savers Network, that went from strength to strength
• UNSW Ecoliving Centre, which became the focus for Permaculture just as Permaculture Sydney started to fade.

During that decade, permaculturists became involved in:

• schools
• community garden development
• overseas aid, a practice stimulated by the Permaculture Global Assistance Network (PGAN) set up in Melbourne by Adam Tiller and others.

In other moves into the aid sector:

• there was a Permaculture presence in Kosovo after the conflagration in the Balkans, thanks to the PRI's Geoff Lawton
• Amy Glastonberry from the Seed Savers Network spent time working in East Timor following that country's bloody battle for independence from Indonesia
• Tony Jansen was given an award by Permaculture International for his work with the Kastom Garden Programme in the Solomon Islands
• PGAN was involved with an urban agriculture training project in Havana and supported the publication of Getting Ready, a book for aspiring overseas aid workers.

Like so much else permacultural, PGAN, too, was gone by the end of the decade. Permaculture activity in overseas aid, however, has been sustained on an individual basis although no Australian Permaculture NGO (Non-Government Organisation) has emerged to further its potential.

As for the Permaculture press, the PIJ struggled through successive financial crises and by decade's end was approaching its final edition. So too was Green Connections. Permaculture would soon be a movement without a voice.

By 1999, the time seemed right to set a new direction, however there was nothing in the offering as the new decade and a new century opened.