Read issue 5 as a flipbook

Many people speak of our current era as the time of the Great Turning, or the Great Transition. We are at a point in our journey as humanity where, as the philosopher Thomas Berry puts it, we must move from a ‘period of human devastation…

An excerpt from Fair Food: Stories from a Movement Changing the World (edited by Nick Rose, UQP, 2015)

Food Connect works in the vein of the ‘small is beautiful’ philosophy or what others like to call ‘economies of community’ rather than the old model of ‘economies…

Why does a tomato plucked straight off the bush in your own backyard taste so much better than one from the supermarket? Why does an egg laid moments ago by Henrietta just outside your kitchen window look, taste and even feel better than one from…

A fair food system begins with you. These three contributors walk their talk. They are actively raising public awareness of things you can do to make our food system fairer. Here are their top tips.

1. Learn to cook. It changes everything: you can make what…

Buena Vista Farm is a small family farm growing food (primarily pastured meat chickens, and a market garden with laying hens, bees, ducks, pigs and cattle), making delicious fermented foods, and teaching homesteading skills, in particular ‘from-scratch’ cooking (e.g. sourdough and sauerkraut).

We’re on eighteen acres…

Over the last two decades I have explored permaculture as a set of thinking tools for the energy-descent future and outlined a nuanced and over-the-horizon view of the diverse ways in which that energy-descent future might unfold. Since then ‘resilience’ has displaced ‘sustainability’ as the…

Outside the small village of Bethel, in the remote mountains of Lesotho, southern Africa, is a remarkable community. Surrounded by degraded land, characterised by heavily eroded washouts, is a verdant forest of food.

Tiny and landlocked by South Africa, Lesotho is a mountainous country where most…

“Biochar may represent the single most important initiative for humanity’s environmental future. The biochar approach provides a uniquely powerful solution, for it allows us to address food security, the fuel crisis, and the climate problem, and all in an immensely practical manner”. Prof. Tim Flannery…

Common2us is made up of a small team of young farmers from Spain and Australia who are passionate and driven to produce fresh, local, sustainable organic food for their Sydney community. They focus on producing highest quality food for their community and believe that ‘healthy’…

There are many ways to start a garden bed: no-dig to double-dig. Each suits different situations, people and budgets; how you do it is up to you. Double-digging – the biointensive growing technique – is excellent for anyone wanting to grow a large quantity of…

Josh Byrne, presenter on ABC TV’s Gardening Australia, and his wife Kellie Maher began construction of their remarkable 10-star rated house in Hilton, near Fremantle, in November 2012. Construction of two dwellings on a little over a ‘quarter-acre’ (1012 m2) block was completed in June…

Rob Scott and his family of five own a 180 hectare organic farm in the Macedon Ranges, just outside of Melbourne, Victoria. The family has a huge passion for organic farming, permaculture, animal husbandry, alternative building and holistic living. Rob started out building ‘tiny houses’…

When we bought our 1.2 hectares in Old Warburton, east of Melbourne, Victoria, our aim was to grow the majority of our vegetables and fruit, enabling us to eat fresh food in season and to preserve our requirements for the rest of the year. In…

What would happen if we taught our children that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people planted crops, tilled them, irrigated them, stored and preserved surpluses, built houses and sewed their clothes? Would the sky fall in? And why would we teach them such things? Because…

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…

Creating a truly local meal–where every part of the meal is produced locally–can be a challenge, but once you get into it, it is also quite addictive. It takes a bit of a mind shift – to look at the harvest first, then let the…

The blackboards at every corner of this neighbourhood are a giveaway – there is something at work here, bigger than the sum of its parts. In this pocket of a suburb on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, a community project is changing the way local…

Cara Edwards rents a flat in the heart of Hobart and, despite not owning land or having much space, she has become an urban farmer, using her own small backyard and other pockets of land she has borrowed from friends. She sells her produce from…

A bioregion is a geographic area with boundaries defined by natural features such as catchments, soil types, geographic features or vegetation types. Bioregions create a sense of place; where people can identify with their location; in which people can create some form of community self-reliance,…

There is something so absolutely delightful about seeing children play outside in nature, creating worlds and games together, using just the things they can find around them – branches, sticks, feathers, rocks, water – and being totally enthralled for hours.

Ask my children where their favourite…

Connecting with the earth and nature gives me a very different perspective on which to base my environmental endeavours. Feeling a deep connection with nature, and experiencing myself as part of our living, breathing planet – not separate from it – supports me in acting…

Designer: Taj Scicluna, in collaboration with Linton Cummins

Client: Lordy Dannaoui

Location: Yarraville, Victoria

Aim: To design an urban sanctuary of edible and medical plants.

Background: The property is in a region with a history of industrial use, close to the city of Melbourne and the estuary of the…

Taj Scicluna is working to create a fertile and abundant world, where the earth’s resources are distributed fairly, with care and responsibility.

Her passions include beekeeping, primitive living skills, herbal medicine – which she studies – and spoken word poetry. And she aims to bring back…

Only three per cent of the earth’s water is fresh water; and only one per cent of this can be used for life, people included.

While the amount of water cycling on earth remains the same, the availability of this water – for humans – depends…

The Ekukhanyeni Relief Project was started in 2003 to support vulnerable children in communities affected by severe poverty and HIV/ AIDS. Ekukhanyeni has created fifteen childcare centres, which incorporate permaculture gardens, to help care for over 600 children in informal settlements around Johannesburg.

Ekukhanyeni* identified that,…

Here is a product that you don’t have to buy but you can make yourself and simultaneously create connections and community. Nothing quite reminds you of summer than a bottle of preserved tomatoes in the middle of winter. Gather your glut of tomatoes or buy…

The theme for the Perth (Swanleigh) convergence in October 2016 is ‘Permaculture – designing for resilience’. David Holmgren, Rowe Morrow, Robin Clayfield and Graham Bell are running advanced courses, and some prominent permaculture practitioners have indicated that they will be there.

Registration information

Registration will soon be…

Australian settler geese (previously ‘pilgrim geese’) were developed for Australian conditions. They are hardy medium sized geese. Males are born white, and females grey.

The breed is becoming rare: it has lost popularity to larger exhibition breeds and slender Chinese geese. It has also been crossed…

BOTANICAL NAME: Phormium tenax

ORIGIN: New Zealand and Norfolk Island

DESCRIPTION: This clumping, evergreen, perennial plant has sword-like leaves to two metres long, and grows to sixteen metres. It will grow in most soil types, is relatively frost tolerant and moderately drought tolerant once established. Cultivars come…

Black nightshade (or blackberry nightshade) Solanum nigrum is a highly adaptable plant, and a common weed across Australia, from the south to the tropical north. The species can look quite different from region to region. It produces small edible fruits throughout the year (depending on…

Words and photos by Steve and Kerryn Martin from The Lost Seed In most of Australia cucumber is a warm season crop; sow after frost. It likes well-drained soil, but don’t let it dry out. Can be sown indoors, then transplanted out when first leaves…

Building your own cubby – using things found in nature or your garden or scavenged from waste – is immensely satisfying. Depending on where you live, and the materials you can find, your cubby is going to look wonderfully distinctive: there are always different materials…

Film directed by Lisa Heenan and Isaebella Doherty, created by Darren Doherty (Regrarians Media 2015),

Review by Robyn Rosenfeldt

‘This is not just a film about farming, it is a reminder to us that the food we eat is farmed by people on land, in soil’, Darren…

After reading Nick Rose’s book, Fair Food; Stories from a Movement Changing the World (UQP 2015), I knew it was going to be the theme for this issue. Fair Food is central to what so many of us…