Category Profile

David Holmgren is a thinker. David not only questions the status quo, but redesigns it and creates an alternative. In the 70s, faced with a world that he questioned, he came up with the permaculture concept, along with his mentor Bill Mollison.

Bill immediately took the concept and travelled the world, teaching it to thousands of people worldwide, making himself and permaculture a household name. David however felt that the permaculture design principles needed testing. He turned his focus to building his skills, and testing and implementing the principles they’d created.

The result is David’s home, Melliodora, an inspiring and beautiful working example of permaculture on 1 hectare of intensively farmed land. There you’ll find a passive solar mud-brick home and office, a team of willing workers and a well-integrated selection of trees, animals, vegetables, fungi and bees. Along with his partner Su Dennett [who was profiled in Pip issue 5] and their son Oliver, David has developed Melliodora into one of Australia’s best-known permaculture demonstration sites, hosting tours and workshops for hundreds of people every year. Although it’s affected by frost and at risk of bushfires, Melliodora is at the core of David’s determination to demonstrate that permaculture works, even in tough conditions.

Darren J. Doherty grew up on the family farm near Bendigo, learning rural and farming skills from his grandfather. ‘He saw that they would hold me in good stead,’ says Darren. ‘As someone who had lived through the Depression, he could see that those times may come again, so if economic circumstances collapsed I’d have the ability to survive.’

While it was a scary message for a kid, Darren says it was also a great one, because it was backed up by experiential skills he still carries today. When Darren became interested in permaculture, the set of agricultural and design principles already sounded familiar to his grandfather. “When I showed him Bill Mollison’s Permaculture – A Designer’s Manual, he said ‘we’ve been doing all of that stuff for forever’,” says Darren.

A farmer, developer, trainer and author, Darren coined the term ‘regrarian’, a combination of the words ‘regenerative’ and ‘agrarian’. He developed the Regrarians Platform, a framework to help people design and plan agricultural projects, and works with his wife Lisa Heenan and their daughter Isaebella Doherty as directors of the Regrarians.

‘Regrarianism came out after we did the world’s first carbon farming courses and world tour in 2007,’ recalls Darren. ‘We started to look at all of these different methodologies and built them into the framework that became The Regrarians Platform. It’s based on the Keyline Scale of Permanence which P. A. Yeomans developed in 1958. I did some work for holistic management educators and they determined that the Keyline Scale of Permanence would be a really good framework to build our training around. I looked at it and thought “how can I make it more holistic?” I brought in additional layers, such as the economy, energy and social issues.’

Darren

Rosemary Morrow is an author, permaculture legend, teacher of teachers, aid worker and the patron of Permafund, a charity within Permaculture Australia which raises funds for projects in disadvantaged communities around the world. This septuagenarian is having a brief recharge after working with refugees in Italy and Spain. I asked her what it takes to be an aid worker; it’s not a task for the faint-hearted.

What sort of person do you need to be?

‘The life of a permaculturalist in a camp is probably three months, if you can last that. You’ll be lonely. If you’re sick you just keep going. The physical conditions are hard. There’s a camp in Greece between an army base, a major highway (that runs either side) and a big industrial centre, between stinking traffic and polluting stuff. In a Kenyan camp they’ve cleared all the wood and water for ten kilometres, and people just walk further and further. There’s a couple of million displaced by the Taliban in Kabul, in absolutely disgusting living conditions with no sewerage or water. People use plastic bags for cooking fuel.

The honey dripped off my sourdough toast and I licked it off my wrist. The honey is from bees pollinating the fruit trees in the orchard, and the flour is milled from grain from an organic farm, eighteen kilometres away. The bread is baked in an oven f ired with wood from the trees around the property; any leftover scraps go to the chooks, who provide eggs in return. This is closed-loop eating, and it’s all about good permaculture design – having the right things in the right place.

Su Dennett has been sourcing, cooking and serving fair food for three decades. Su’s kitchen is at the core of the Melliodora Permaculture Farm, Hepburn Victoria, and feeds up to twelve people on a normal day; and dozens more when the house is open for public tours. Her deep commitment to ‘being the change’ means that much of the food she serves travels just a few metres to her kitchen, making ‘food miles’ almost irrelevant.

Every food source is considered, including weeds and trees on public land, and every opportunity is taken: Su can do things with food that most permies throw away – carrot tops are part of the salad, and dried broad beans are a staple. When the parrots learned to get the walnuts before they were ripe, Su organised a team to pick them green for pickling.