Page updated:
Friday, 7 September 2007

ON THE ROAD - travel & places...

Tagari - an experiment blooms and fades

Julia des Brosses surrounded by bananas and sweet potato at Tagari Farm.

The circle itself is one of a number along the lower contour, a shallow depression maybe two metres in diameter with banana trees planted around the circumference. The idea is that rain water draining from the slope above accumulates in the depression and is absorbed by the banana trees. The banana circle is a type of micro-catchment that produces food.

Above the banana circles is a long, shallow ditch below which young mango trees struggle to stay above the encroaching grass. This is another type of water catchment called a contour ditch or swale that takes the form of a channel excavated along the contour so that it has no rise or fall. It detains runoff moving downslope. I imagine that, in the subtropical wet season, the swale might fill with water and overflow.

We exchange pleasantries with the suntanned grass cutter - an Englishman living at the Permaculture Institute - and leave him to his labours. I know that Permaculture is supposed to be a low-maintenance system, yet here is this man labouring in the early afternoon heat to keep the grass down. I wonder why some other solution, such as grazing animals, has not been introduced to deal with the grass.

No ordinary farm

A couple hours before, the three of us - Julia desBrosses, New Zealander Robina McCurdy and I - had set out from Djanbung Gardens in Julia's colourful but ageing combi van. Taking the northbound road from Nimbin, we stop at Uki, a small village dominated by the angled bulk of Mt Warning. There, we refuel the combi and pick up another New Zealander - Alfredo - a man in his mid to late thirties, blonde hair tied back in a ponytail.

Julia des Brosses later went to live in Brazil

Visitors to Tagari Farm, New Zealanders Robina McCurdy and Alfredo. Robina had recently worked as a trainer on an aid project in South Africa and returned to New Zealand to start the Planet Organic training programme.

Bill made a large food garden and planted native trees to revegetate the slope between the house and the narrow gravel road that connects the Institute to the town of Tyalgum. A few years later, Bill's wife of the time funded the acquisition of the neighbouring land, a large property that, like the original block, had been used for grazing. This became Tagari Farm.

Bill's garden

While walking over the farm's undulating landscape I recalled video images of Bill's food garden in its early days. Then, it was a heavily mulched open space with vegetables below fast-growing leguminous trees such as Croatalaria. How different it is now. The garden we walk through consists of mature coffee shrubs growing as an understorey to large, spreading legume trees known as Pride of Bolivia. It is dark and cool here and we are greeted by a cloud of voracious mosquitos hungry for our blood. They buzz in our ears and sting exposed hands and arms. Bill's food forest is a good place to get out of.

On the edge of this tree garden is Bill's house. Concealed by vegetation, you do not see it until you came right up to it. Bill, though, is no longer here. He returned to Tasmania, his home island, a year or so before and has reestablished the Permaculture Institute at Jackys Marsh, a rural backblock in the foothills of the Western Tiers. The house is now occupied by Jeff Lawton, to whom Bill had handed over care of the farm, but he is overseas working on a project. We hurry out of the garden to get away from the mosquitoes.

Tagari is not a farm in the ordinary sense of the word, more a rural training centre. People come to do two week residential courses in Permaculture design, a few staying on to spend additional weeks developing their skills. The practice has been formalised through a system of internships which provides the opportunity to trial designs of their own. The internships have succeeding in attracting people, however one ex-intern said that they were little more than a way to raise money and provide farm labour.

The bamboo forest

The tall, arching stems of bamboo form a lattice high over our heads. The feeling in one of being in some alien environment, some un-Australian forest devoid of the familiar eucalyptus.

The bamboo forest at the Permaculture Research Institute

I had stood here several years ago. My guide on that visit - a young man living at the farm - explained that the bamboo had been planted on the creek flats as a commercial crop. The young shoots were a food in demand in metropolitan markets. He showed us one, a large, pointed growth the length and width of a forearm, pushing up through the moist soil. The hollow stems, cut and dried, had commercial value too. A bunch had been cut and now lay stacked nearby, their green colouration turning a pale yellow.

Commonworks - a brave but doomed experiment

On that earlier visit to Tagari Farm, I found the place entering a new phase in its development. People were setting up what they hoped would become income-producing mini-enterprises.

Mollison had talked up the idea of these 'Commonworks'. Blocks of land were made available for small rural enterprises which were to provide an income stream to the lessee. In return for a management fee, Tagari would maintain roads and other infrastructure.

Back on the gravel road, the guide explained how the short, steep slope nearby had been graded into a series of broad terraces. These had been planted to young tropical fruit trees that had reached a metre or more in height. We walked on, then stopped at a clearing in which poultry wire was being attached to tall poles. This, the man busy stapling the wire to the posts exlained, was to be his free-range egg production system that would accommodate several hundred chickens. The enclosure was divided into a number of separate yards through which the chickens would be moved, the yard they had been in being planted to crops.

Turning off the road onto a track, we emerged on the banks of a creek where a market garden was already in partial production. Lettuce and other leafy greens were in various stages of growth and the rich, dark soil had been prepared for the planting of more seedlings. There was potential to expand into the long grass around the edges but how much of the area, I wondered, would have to be bought under cultivation before it yielded a worthwhile income, and how labour intensive was it to manage?

Closer to the farm buildings, immediately below the bamboo aboraetum where species of the giant grass were grown out and assessed for potential use, someone had invested time and effort in the excavation of a large fish pond complete with a long, pivoting fish scoop of the type found in South East Asia.

These installations - the chicken run, tropical fruit orchard, market garden and fish pond - were microenterprises set up by participants in the Commonworks scheme. It was clear that Tagari was the site of a new type of income generating initiative. The Commonworks had received coverage in Permaculture magazines and created a lot of interest in the Permaculture community in Australia and overseas.

The chinampa system consisted of a row of flooded ditches separated by raised strips. Inspired by the agricultural chinampas of Mexico City, fish can be grown in the flooded ditches and the strips between used for crops or micro-livestock.

In the photograph, chickens in a mobile cage graze on the grassy strip between chinampa ponds. The cage is progressively moved along the strip.

Chinampas require managing to ensure nutrients, such as chicken droppings and compost used to fertilise the crops grown on the strips, do not overload the water system and cause outbreaks of blue-green algae.

An enterprise ends

Now, some years later, I am back at the farm, this time with Julia and Robina. And this time we have no guide as we make our way towards the creek flats where the microenterprises are located.

Walking downhill, past the bamboo aboreatum, past the fish pond, we cross the gravel road and enter the bamboo forest. Once again I stand in the mottled shade. It feels and looks the same.

Back on the road, we retrace the route I trod several years ago. Opposite are the terraces where the tropical fruit seedlings had been planted. But something has surely gone wrong, the terraces now have the unkempt look of abandoned gardens.

I experience a feeling of apprehension which grows as we walk on. What of the chicken yards and the market garden, I wonder? Are they still in production or have they too been abandoned to the bush?

The chicken yards are no longer. All that is left are tall poles protruding from a field of long grass. Where I had spoken with the man stapling poultry wire to the posts, the subtropical bush is reclaiming the site.

And the market garden? Abandoned and overgrown.

We stand at the edge of the garden and I tell Julia and Robina what it had been like on my previous visit when the feeling had been one of hope, when vegetables had been growing in the garden and the wire on the chicken run was new. I do not communicate the feeling of sadness which has enveloped me, the feeling of opportunity lost. It is an empty, draining sensation to see something started that you expect to see to fulfillment, only to come back to find it in ruins.

What had gone wrong? I have never received a clear explanation. The people I have asked either did not know the details or were being cagey with their information. Mollison - nobody at Tagari Farm - had offered a detailed explanation to the wider Permaculture community.

Research unfulfilled

The failed Commonworks was not the only unfulfilled ambition at Tagari Farm. On my earlier visit, a resident, a man by the name of Paul if I remember correctly and who had a background in emergency service planning, told me that Institute had applied to the CSIRO - Australia's national research body - for accreditation as a research station. The name Permaculture Research Institute had apparently been adopted in anticipation of CSIRO approval that never came.

And what of the research? From what I could see, what existed was at best semi-structured. There was no evidence of a scientific approach although there was the bamboo aboraetum, interesting and probably valuable in a botanical sense, the bamboo forest and a few small experiments with mixed plantings. There are no publicly-available papers documenting whatever research went on and none recording the history and experience of the farm.

Through the garden

Between the bamboo aboraetum and the training building on top of the hill we walk through a garden that might not be recognised as such by the majority of Australian gardeners. In appearance and structure it is more like the bush gardens of the Pacific islands - a mass of sweet potato vine above which stands low growing trees such as banana, pawpaw, Croatalaria and others.

Past a large herb spiral typical of those popularised in Permaculture literature, we pass beneath the pergola attached to the training building. Here we sit, shaded from the hot afternoon sun, drinking instant coffee.

The table opposite is occupied by a quiet and tired-looking team of farm residents. They do not attempt to communicate, only one of them offers a few words of enquiry. Most of them wear the blank, weary expressions of people who have been working hard. The impression is that they would really like to take the rest of the day off to doze away the heat of the afternoon.

The training building is a sprawling structure with a wide pergola running the length of the sunward (northern) side. I imagine classes sitting here in the shade, the students trying not to drift off to sleep. I think of Bill Mollison teaching there, the students listening attentively as he relates some humourous anecdote or warns of disasters to come. Bill is an orator, a story teller who educates by regurgitating tales from his vast experience and, some would say, occasionally embellishing them a little.

A garden of circles

Our break over and the afternoon getting on, we check out the large vegetable garden that occupies a fenced, rectangular area on the opposite side of the building. Around the fence, broken only by the two entrances, is a garden a little over a metre in width. Occupying the area inside are a number of circular garden beds each perhaps three metres in diameter.

The rationale for the shape of the beds becomes apparent as we stand in front of a dome-shaped structure of poultry wire attached to a framework of agricultural polypipe. The dome fits neatly over the beds.

The polypipe and poultry wire chicken dome was moved between the circular gardens to prepare them for planting

Inside, a dozen or so chickens scratch around. The gardeners use the scratching behaviour of the chickens and their propensity to eat almost anything to clean garden beds of the residue of harvested crops, to turn the soil and fertilise it with their droppings. This done, the dome and its resident chickens are easily moved to the next bed for treatment and seedlings planted into the turned soil. The method uses the labour of chickens to replace that of people.

The vegetable garden is perhaps the best maintained installation on Tagari Farm. The reason for this is clear - the residents eat what they grow, straight from the soil. The garden is their survival.

There is the dam with its shallow, terraced edge where water crops grow and its depths inhabited by edible fish. A shed made of strawbails plastered with cement render, built in the years before strawbail building became popular, has withstood the heavy seasonal rains. An old farmhouse in traditional North Coast style, raised to allow cooling air to circulate, is used to accommodate the farm's male residents.

It takes a couple hours to take in Tagari Farm and to comprehend what goes on here, a couple hours walking over the rolling terrain, taking to people, asking questions, thinking.

The farm, gardens and buildings are embraced by a ring of steep, blue-green mountains. This is the Tweed Range - the forested, precipituous edge of an ancient caldera. Millions of years ago, the range formed the ramparts of a shield volcano of which Mt Warning, a volcanic plug, marks centre point. It is such a perfect setting, spectacular, rugged, preciptious; the steep mountain wall holding the farm in its curve and marking an abrupt break between the world of human endeavour and nature. The mountains give the area its character, and what a bold character that is.

A succession of dreamers and doers

Amid this wild nature, on the edge where wildness gives way to farmland, a succession of practical dreamers has laboured to create a working example of the Permaculture design system.

To the extent that the idea attracted both international and interstate visitors, that Tagari Farm became a focus of Permaculture in Australia, it worked. Yet, as we walked Tagari's rolling land and as we talk in Julia's combi on our return journey to Djanbung Gardens, we come to realise that the Tagari undertaking had several shortcomings.

Prime among these was that there have never been enough resident workers to manage the land, let alone undertake any substantial enterprise on it. I acknowledge that Tagari Farm residents might dispute this, but the impression I gained over a number of visits through the 1990s was that people living there struggled just to maintain the land, to keep the grass down, the chickens fed, the gardens cultivated. Others who visited Tagari agree.

This does not detract from the achievements of the farm residents, such as the bamboo plantation, the aboreatum and the vegetable garden. But the impression I have is that the effort of maintenance has been the dominant factor in Tagari farm life. There is too much land, too few people, and, unlike other farms, there is little or no supplementation of manual labour by farm machinery. The dominant form of work at Tagari Farm has been manual.

As a permaculture teaching venue, the farm succeeded. Many who did their Permaculture Design Course here speak well of the experience.

The dream ends

As of 2001, Tagari Farm had no future. In the face of local government demands for expenditure on roads and other infrastruture, Mollison decided to put the farm on the market. That was the reason I was given, anyway. Jeff Lawton and the Permaculture Research Institute moved on to land close to the village of The Channon. Mollison, by this time, had returned to his home island, Tasmania.

I thought about the lessons coming from Tagari Farm although I knew that was the job of the people who lived there, the long-term residents. But for an outside observer there appear to be lessons about taking on too much land and about the need to document what has worked and what has not and to make this available for the beneit of all.

It was a unique experiment... an exercise bold in its imagining... an attempt to find workable solutions by living them. It was a prototype and, like all prototypes, had to pass through several iterations before something workable, something practical and reproducable, would emerge.

There has been no attempt to emulate Tagari Farm and it is my belief that such large scale projects are no longer viable in Permaculture. Not only are funds difficult to find within the Permaculture community, but organic farming, now a successful industry, has achieved the economic viability that Tagari never enjoyed. Rather than Tagari, it is organic farming that has become the model for sustainable agriculture in Australia.

Down the gravel, back to our scattered lives

The afternoon is advancing, the sun now low in the west as we climb into the Combi and bump our way down the gravel towards Tyalgum.

There, we take a right turn and speed - if that is the right term for Julia's Combi - down the hardtop, past the green fields of the flatter land, past Mt Warning and on to the Nimbin turnoff. Julia's long blonde hair streams in the wind flowing through the window; those of us in the back spend the return journey in quiet talk or private thought. The day has been full, the lessons many.

The next day we would leave Nimbin and return to our lives... mine in Sydney, Robina's in New Zealand, Julia's to work in India for a few months and Alferedo to continue his travels.

In memory, I see that suntanned man under the warm spring sun, scything the grass with his long sweeps. He stops to talk to us, then I look back to see him resume his work. I also recall, there at the head of the Tweed Valey, below the forested caldera wall, that a bold experiment took place. I wonder if we will ever see such a thing again.