David was recently a guest on the Rune Soup podcast to talk about the feature-length documentary, Reading Landscape with David Holmgren.

In the podcast, David and host Gordon White discuss:

⭐ The development of the film
⭐ What is meant by ‘landscape’
⭐ What is meant by ‘reading’
⭐ What has changed in permaculture over the decades
⭐ Learning from Indigenous teachers in Australia and New Zealand

You can listen to or watch their conversation in its entirety in the YouTube video below.

This is the second time David has appeared on Rune Soup. You can listen to his first conversation with Gordon here.

Interview Transcript

(0m0s) Introduction and Project Origins

Rune Soup Podcast Host: This week we welcome back the one and only the legendary, the man himself, the co originator of permaculture, activist, author, philosopher, parent teacher, many hats, the one and only David Holmgren. Thank you very much for being here.

David Holmgren: Well, it’s good to speak to you again, Gordon, after some time.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: Yeah, it goes quick. This old time business. It definitely goes quick. So we’re speaking today about a remarkable little film that I watched last night that you guys have put together called Reading Landscape and. I want to talk about the origin of it and then go into some of the meat of this wonderful project.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: So, I mean, let’s begin there. How did this project originate?

David Holmgren: Yeah, it originated with colleague Dan Palmer, who got me involved in a permaculture design project. He was involved with, it was a large scale rural design, and at that stage in his work, that was fairly new for him. And he brought me in to do some reading of the landscape to get interpretation of the geology and other features, and that he didn’t feel he fully understood from all the contour mapping and other stuff that he’d done on the side.

David Holmgren: And he was so excited by what came out of that process. That he became enthusiastic about recording me reading the landscape. And it was also for me, after decades of being passionate about reading landscape as a fundamental skill for permaculture design and also how to communicate and educate people about this, because it’s not about, here, I’ll tell you something I know.

David Holmgren: It’s about enlivening our innate abilities to read landscape. In the same, we have innate abilities to read people. And ironically, Dan Palmer gave me a bit of a breakthrough because he was reading me, reading the landscape and he gave some terminology even to describe what I was doing. And so that intensified our partnership.

David Holmgren: And then, he sort of talked about making a film and then there was involvement from someone who had been a student of his, who was a filmmaker. They were spending time together and had been involved in other possible documentation projects. And so that emerged from there with Dave Ma, the filmmaker.

David Holmgren: And it was a very organic project. And I suppose I was the primary subject, but we were also involving progressively other people, both with me reading the landscape and others in different ways. So very much the film was Dan Palmer’s project rather than my Mind. I was sort of the subject of it and sort of to an extent did what I was told or felt led by him in that project until last year when the project was a lot of it was coming together.

David Holmgren: And of course we’d had a crowdfunding to support, because it had become bigger than a purely pro bono project. And you of course were involved in helping that sponsor the film.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: Yeah, I remember talking to Dan about this idea, you as the inspiration. Early on because how he described it to me was watching David on country there is, you have to go back to pre-colonial times to find someone who has that much experience with that specific piece of country that where you were talking about where you and Sue have lived for the last few decades and worked, and that he was really electrified by the idea of, ’cause I remember in the early discussions we have these two words reading landscape.

(5m22s) Defining “Reading Landscape”: Literacy vs. Participation

Rune Soup Podcast Host: And one of the things the film does so well is situate the good and the bad of that term. And what I, by bad, I mean shortcoming because reading implies literacy and landscape implies a way. Of seeing the world as something that’s external and flat rather than something in which we participate.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: And all of this was going around in Dan’s head, and he was explaining it to me quite excitedly to see someone who like yourself, who has, and it comes from a depths of experience. Like it’s from the actual doing it and struck by your expertise, is definitely transferable around the world, but it’s a particular kind of power where you are, where you know the endemics where you know what the weather patterns are like over the times of years, you know the geology and the topology.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: And that really struck him. So we as a collective, as a society or whatever we are, aren’t very good as well. Historically, we’ve been better at it at the moment. At the moment we’re not very good at it. And that really appealed to me. There’s this idea, reading landscape is a practice and an invitation to sit with even what we mean by both of those words.

David Holmgren: Yeah. There’s definitely something in that for me, from the beginnings being inspired by my work with Bill Mollison. And then shortly after that, my, someone who I regard as my second mentor in permaculture, ironically, Haka in New Zealand, who really lit the spark for me recording my readings through using a camera to the extent that that’s actually possible.

David Holmgren: And of course, as someone who’s a visually dominated person in a culture that’s visually dominated, then reading also implies. The site. And that’s one of the limitations of the term two, because it’s in fact all the sensors that we’re drawing on. And obviously in more recent times, the indigenous use of the English word country to describe something perhaps different from landscape, which may be given the cultural lineage implies some separation of observer and observed.

David Holmgren: Yeah, absolutely.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: Which means I’m going to ask you a sorted mean question in its difficulty early on in the interview. But David, how does one read landscape?

(8m27s) How to Read Landscape: Slowing Down and Being Present

David Holmgren: Well, firstly, slowing down and sitting with it. Being in place and that what you referred to earlier as sort of knowing a lot about a place, in the modern world being in place, even just waking up most days and staying and not being teleported in a fossil fuel powered magic machine to another place for the day is actually increasingly a rare experience for most people.

David Holmgren: So the whole thing of being in place on country, and doing things slowly, and sensitively and curiously without judgement of good or bad, and an open inquiry. Without specific goals, without, I’ve got to find out this so I can do this, or, so I can find out what I should do. At the same time as being in a small way, practically involved in a, working, in a working relationship with nature through gardening, through relating and being dependent on the weather for what you do through all of the ways that our ancestors work connected to the environment and unlike most of our modern lives that are in the insulated from that in the techno spheric bubble.

David Holmgren: So I think that process of reading landscape is most efficiently learned basically as a baby exposed to the natural environment and then as a child being able to explore and interact with that, even in destructive small ways, unregulated directed by adults. Now that process, which was a normal background for people who then, whether they became farmers or whether they became soil scientists or politicians or teachers or nurses, people once had that osmotic absorption to some degree of those skills.

David Holmgren: But modern people have been so separated. So there’s a process of attempting to remedially learn these things. And of course we can do that and accelerate that to some degree by all the secondary sorts, sources of information, books, videos, being told by experts what something is. I suppose ironically, those things in themselves and all the things we can rapidly learn from secondary sources of information can undermine our own innate journey of discovery.

David Holmgren: So it’s a really tricky problem for modern educated people. How do you do this? Other than to say, oh, well we need to start with the next generation. And even that, the process of raising children requires us to completely change the way we see things and what we do and discard a lot of the norms of society.

(12m34s) Indigenous Perspectives and Deep Listening

Rune Soup Podcast Host: Well see, I think that’s key. ’cause it strikes me in one of the other things I enjoy about the film is the bringing to the centre, because it’s an Australian film, obviously, with with some New Zealand cameos, the centrality of a indigenous or First Nations perspective because what I sit with, what you were talking about there that I love is an invitation to unpack the word reading even more.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: There are sensory capacities, and even that word is not correct. Let’s just say human capacities, that every other people around the world, including our own ancestors, not even that long ago used and we’re aware of that. A contemporary society has declared by fiat isn’t true. And we can be confident that I would say we’re wrong about that.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: And these capacities are in fact there. There’s some lovely moments we can see for people who are watching this on their video version. We can see Sue in the background, Sue telling stories of the early days of Melliodora, when she was pregnant, and obviously not much use in a earth moving project at that point.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: And just being on country, on the land underneath the tree and having just by being quiet in the place that became your home and having what emerges, and allowing what is ready to emerge in her experience in her body and her mind to come up via that process. Now I think it’s behind me. Let me see if I can find it.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: I’m back to it. There’s a fantastic for people international audience. There’s been some fantastic books by aboriginal authors over the last few years who talk about this process of, one of the words for it is so deep listening. Mm-hmm. And the notion that country can be treated or can be experienced as something like a library where it actually contains, and this is where the word reading invites me back in, right?

David Holmgren: Mm-hmm.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: Where when we talk about reading landscape, it invites us to look at the shortcomings of the word reading, but also how we can make it bigger again, by learning from other people and learning from peoples who experience country as a font of wisdom and intelligence, and that that shows up in the film in a way that I think is really lovely.

David Holmgren: Yeah. It’s a controversial question that comes up, of course, of how come you as a middle class, older white guy who wasn’t even born in that place, is embedded in this country. And what is the reference to learning from indigenous culture? And I suppose my answer to that is this film as constructed and focused by Dan Palmer is about that journey of how as growing up in the suburbs in middle class Australia, not particularly with parents who were deeply immersed in country relative to their generation.

David Holmgren: How did I come to this? So it’s, and that that context for someone born in 1955. Coming to Central Victoria in 1985 and not even being aware whether there were any surviving people from the Holocaust of the gold era that devastated this region and the people here more rapidly and intensely than arguably anywhere else in Australia.

David Holmgren: And in a way like Tasmania, the whole discovery of, oh, there are indigenous people, that was happening when I was in Tasmania. In fact, my co originator, Bill Mollison, was responsible for doing the genealogy of the Cape Barren Islanders and showing to the authorities that they actually were indigenous Tasmanians.

David Holmgren: And I met some of them at that time coming to Central Victoria. I now know there were 20 surviving people who were the forebears of the current people connected to this country who are rediscovering, reclaiming words. And I think that’s sort of shown in that in the film and that’s a learning process that I am going through like other people.

David Holmgren: But again, that is, can be fall back into, oh, we need to learn from the elders, the experts, and myself as a do it yourself. Self-starter, disrespectful of my own society’s authority. Structures expertise didn’t naturally come here and say. Oh, I need to learn from the people who are the experts and elders I found through process, older, fourth generation people who I learned from too, by serendipitous processes in this landscape.

David Holmgren: But those are those secondary sources, and it’s important to, I think, be respectful of those. But they’re not actually what reading landscape is, and I think reading Victor Steffenson. Uh, his book and the Way. He as a young aboriginal man from different country, was taken by the elders and taught. But what they also taught him is that the country will teach you. And he says that in many ways in the book and clearly that for indigenous people, especially those reconnecting to ancestral country, but more generally to the original Australians, there is a huge connection there.

David Holmgren: But it is also possible for settler peoples who are indigenous originally somewhere to rekindle that direct experience. And we all need to do that.

(20m1s) Bridging Settler Learning and Indigenous Wisdom

Rune Soup Podcast Host: We do. And I’m very interested in that, in that divide or that edge land. Right. Because I’ll tell you a story of a Maori friend of mine actually, and his experience that is relevant to this, but we’re at a point where it’s almost like a loop where we have to, if we say we’re going to take, and we do in indigenous epistemologies. Indigenous cosmovision, seriously, when they talk about country will speak to you and we would like country to speak to you because you’re getting a lot of things wrong, we actually have to do it. And the idea of keeping it respectfully, like, oh, we shouldn’t do it because it’s not our practice.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: It’s actually keeping us trapped in keeping everyone trapped in the wound. That is the presentation of that colonial mindset, it looks, it’s deceptively the quote unquote right thing to do, to step back from this learning because they say, well that’s, that’s not mine. And I can understand why people would, why that might come from the right place.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: But it’s this funny loop where actually, well, if indigenous elders are saying, here is how we speak to country, here is how we are speaking to country, here is how you can, and it looks something like a thing you had as a capacity, as an ancestor. It’s, it strikes me that the obligation to learn from country however one lives, is there, and it’s this loop, right?

Rune Soup Podcast Host: Like you have to kind of, you have to step into it wholly. It’s like, okay, well if this is, if this is what indigenous, if frameworks and intelligence are that I’m going to actually do it rather than step back and look at it as that museum unified form. And it’s, and I appreciate that it’s, it, there’s a tension for people in actually making that step.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: I have a friend of mine, Monte Faro Lloyd, he’s now Riki Kathi, so southeast of the north island. And he, I write about him in my book. He’s. He came, he had a career in it in Auckland, and then he came back to his family land. And on the hill where they live, there’s the ancestral past site that was destroyed about 120 years ago, halfway down.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: And for six months, he sat there every night listening to place, listening to his ancestors to see if it, if it was his to do, he felt very called to bring it back into a living context. And eventually he got the okay and started doing it. And he didn’t know, no one knows how to build a par side. Right.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: No one knows the measurements of things. And so he started doing things like using his arm as the measurement for the twine, for the fence, figuring that his ancestors probably would’ve used that. And I’m really struck by how that’s hermetically true, because the western length would be different, but the arm length is exactly the same.

David Holmgren: Mm-hmm.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: Like it is the length of one arm of that resident. And he’s very much like the same thing. This is, we listen to country, we listen to spirit, and. And bring it back. And that’s, I think that’s where permaculture is. It’s now exploring that tension because funnily enough, it’s a pattern, like, it’s a pattern that we just hadn’t noticed before. It’s a human capacity that’s involved. Does that make sense?

David Holmgren: Yeah, definitely. These things are deep within us and need to be rekindled and that can come in all sorts of ways. I mean, I would describe myself as growing up being a super rationalist, and my journey in reading landscape has very much been, I suppose you could see it akin to the lineage of the naturalist leading to the biological or natural scientist, studying things, but also engaged as.

David Holmgren: As a practitioner, as a land manager, as someone responsible for doing things, not just observing. And those, that journey has brought me slowly to progressive exposure to some of those things you alluded to, that our culture just dismisses. And I don’t see myself as particularly intuitive or connected to the esoteric, but through the process of rational science in its most holistic form, you come back to the logic that the land is alive, the rocks are alive, that there is consciousness in some form, in everything.

David Holmgren: And the echoes of everything that’s been done in the landscape in the past, going back millions of years is still present. So that gradually that process has shifted my thinking and to some extent, because I’m a thinker and a rationalist, the idea of it sort of has come into my thinking more easily than the strong intuitive connection to those things.

David Holmgren: But certainly, Sue has managed to point me to evidence that some of my design and my. Thinking is actually informed by intuitive responses as well.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: I was about to say that’s what you have Sue for, you don’t need.

David Holmgren: Yeah. And, it’s also, I had a deep lesson, shocking lesson in that from Haka in New Zealand in 1979 when as two designers were laying out a site for some Easter workshops of people who were coming in and camping and where the camping would be and the camp kitchen and the sauna by the mountain stream and car parking.

David Holmgren: And we’re just running through this whole site design. And we got to a point where there was some decision and we threw up all these options. These two, two options emerged and we couldn’t sort of really decide. And he said, oh, this is a case for the coin. And he calls out a coin and flips the coin.

David Holmgren: And I’m sort of shocked from, as a rationalist, that could I make a decision by flipping a coin? And he gave me a long lecture about the Ching.

David Holmgren: And the whole process, the various psychological aspects of uncovering what your emotion is to the random choice and all sorts of other aspects of it. So, either the years I’ve had those, various lessons and occasionally those lessons have also come from indigenous people in different places over over the years.

David Holmgren: But for me, they’re all windows into Or that other, other ways of understanding things.

(27m47s) Intuition, Human Capacities, and Plant Connection

Rune Soup Podcast Host: It’s funny, I think it, I, I’m sure Sue’s correct that it’ll show up in your designs without a conscious awareness of it. Are you familiar with, he was a, died recently. Stephen Harrod Buhner, very famous herbalist and herbal teacher.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: And what he would do, what he would do with students who were very absolute beginners, would, he’d put this one and get rosemary this one and get whatever plant in front of them and say, as long as they didn’t know which one it was, and just get them to gimme your impression of this plant. Like, what’s its personality?

Rune Soup Podcast Host: What does it feel like and what do you think it might be good for? And people will swear up and down that they cannot do this, that they cannot tell what these plants are traditionally used for in herbalism. And so they’ll, they think they’re guessing and two thirds of them get it right. So it’s about 66%.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: Get it right with plants they have no knowledge of whatsoever. What’s interesting to me about that is that that 66 ish percent, if you know anything about like remote viewing and telepathy and so on, that’s about the accuracy rate for something like remote viewing. So it suggests that there is this human capacity that other cultures or other lifeways have been better at safeguarding and activating so that, we, this comes back to who gets to own this idea, not that’s a mean way of saying it.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: But who, who is this notion of reading landscape available to, we have in our own lineages, the tantalising and our own experience, the tantalising suggestion that these are human capacities. These are, these are things that have something to do with just how we are as people without it needing to be quite, although it’s almost Halloween, without it needing to be quite so esoteric.

David Holmgren: Yeah, I mean, I suppose over the years I as a skeptic and that word of course is highly contaminated these days. But, I would look at people, as a sometimes as a consultant and people saying, oh, we bought this land, we came here, and it just felt, this was exactly the right place for us to be.

David Holmgren: And oh yeah, it was a sunny day in spring. And, so distinguishing that sort of deep intuitive experience from very superficial emotional triggers that we are susceptible to and respond to, and that it’s actually very hard on the surface to actually tell one from the other. And of course there’s parts of ourselves, with our desires and our judgements and everything that are sort of constantly tricking us.

David Holmgren: And from the outside it’s almost impossible to me to necessarily distinguish those things. But I think they are, they are different.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: Probably, oh, they’re certainly different. One of the things that I spoke to Faro about when I was, I was back there in July actually, and the process of listening to country for him, that, those are my words, obviously.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: It’s more likely to be authentic to your point, like, is this, have the land spirits told me to build a Ferris wheel? Like probably not. You could discount that one, but the intuitive messages come step by step. So you don’t get given the whole vision. You get give and put that there.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: That was what it was for him. You get like, oh, you can, you dig this hole? And he uncovered some fascinating things as he was building the, the res, he was guided to dig a hole in one of them to make like, and put hot rocks in it, and then put various healing plants in as some kind of steam bath. He said, I don’t think our people did this, but he was guided to, so he dug it.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: And one of his cousins who is a like a Maori historian at University of Waikato, I believe, was coming by to see it. And he pointed to it and said, oh, that’s a, I can’t remember the word. That’s a blah blah, blah. That’s one of our healing pits. That’s what we would use to steam. So he’d built something that he didn’t know, and it was because the play spirits or whatever you want to call them for this past site, didn’t give him the overarching vision.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: They told him, dig here. There’s, for me, how I would describe it is you’re more likely to be getting a true inspiration if it doesn’t follow human logic. If it doesn’t follow like human patterning, if it’s, if it’s more short term, like do this and then have it open up. And it strikes me, this is just a take.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: It strikes me that this is because if you do one, if you do one thing and they realise whoever they are, if you listen, oh, he listened. He got that one thing. We’ll give him two things next. Like it’s almost like it is a ham radio or something. Like if they can tune in, then they’ll give you the next one rather than just laying out like this grandiose plan.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: And that, I think just as a contribution to the discussion is how, when it comes to navigating with intuitive processes, what it is like. For me, it’s like you don’t get the whole vision. You’re just like, I, this is supposed to go here. Right. And it opens up from there.

(33m26s) Unfolding Knowledge vs. Rationalist Design Plans

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, I suppose in my own processes of finding some connection or some pattern, and developing some hypothesis about why are those trees growing there but not there, those questions often end up just sitting and you don’t have an answer or you gain some sort of idea, but it raises more questions.

David Holmgren: Mm-hmm. So whether that process is being aided by other beings, entities, agents, and or whether it’s internal. There’s this process that Dan Palmer was very much exploring in his living design process that you, each stage of doing something is recognising that, that a place is not a blank slate.

David Holmgren: It’s actually already a whole, and doing something to it is maybe differentiating, unfolding something. But at each stage, a living design process, like a living entity, going from seed to plant is a whole thing. It does. It’s not, it’s not assembled and we’ve got all the pieces and we assemble it. So in some senses, there’s that unfolding of knowledge where you don’t know what the next step is.

David Holmgren: You don’t actually have the whole plan. And that was also an exploration with him that. We were exploring my own design processes through courses and teaching we were doing that included the very rationalist plan, everything on paper, think it through, make the mistakes in the virtual before doing, and all of that sort of conventional design.

David Holmgren: And there’s also this other process that comes very slowly and unfolding. And I see that second processes as very much related to reading landscape as well. Whereas my initial incentive and focus was to be able to go onto a piece of land, especially as a consultant and to be able to advise people from one day on site.

David Holmgren: Where they’re going to put a house, where the road should go. Dams, these frighteningly big questions while just one visit. ’cause those were the realities of trying to earn a living, providing people with useful information and help them make at least fewer mistakes. And so that, how do you gather and absorb that possibility to make those big decisions and think ahead.

David Holmgren: But obviously at its best, it’s sort of actually at a much slower unfolding process.

(37m4s) Permaculture Consults and Early Melliodora Earthworks

Rune Soup Podcast Host: There’s, I’m glad you mentioned that ’cause there’s a line that I wrote down when I was watching the film last night. From you permaculture projected itself into the world via the landscape consult. And it’s a very interesting turn of phrase that when I heard that, and I’m it that’s historically correct, but it’s like, oh, this is what we’re talking about here.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: That’s, that’s, that’s this one statement that has a whole lot underneath it because it’s, at least, it’s for better and for worse. Like that’s how it was. Right. And it, I guess it kind of brings up one of the things watching the film, which was lovely, was seeing like super early, before Melliodora became Melliodora, pictures of where you guys live.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: One of the things I wanted to ask you, ’cause there’s a, there’s a shot of a tremendous amount of earthworks on the land at the very beginning. And I mean, I don’t know the initial context obviously, or what it looked like at the time, but this propensity for earthworks was one of the early, I guess, criticisms, and valid to the, like, let’s say permaculture 1.0 back in the day of like showing up and going, right?

Rune Soup Podcast Host: Swales, dam. Let’s do it on contour. Bam, bam, bam. Book, book, the book the earth movers. Knowing or having gone on this reading landscape’s journey, I mean, for people, you’ll see it in the film, Melliodora is this dimension’s Rivendell. Like, it’s fantastic. And you guys have done an incredible, incredible job dwelling and sharing that place as a, as a this amazing teaching and inspiration.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: Would you have done some of that early stuff different with the benefit of the intervening decades of experience and contemplation and so on?

David Holmgren: Yeah, I think so. Uh, not, I don’t have sort of major regrets or regrets about major de decisions. And I suppose I had been what came here in 85, I spent more than a decade obsessed with this whole permaculture project and design and doing these things that developed a property on the far south coast of New South Wales with my mother that involved earthworks and passive solar building and and ecological forestry and all of the infrastructure for her to have productive food gardens in a new rural property.

David Holmgren: So when I came here, there was both the energy of having. Gone through this decade focused on all of these things, and then several years of homing in on Central Victoria and Hepburn Dalesford and learning everything I could about this country that led to this piece of land and about community and connection.

David Holmgren: So there was a sort of like the piece of land just wasn’t something that appeared. It was a sort of a homing in a localising down. But coming here in a context where Sue was giving up her her job effectively as an Italian interpreter in the city to move to the country, we were dependent on my micro business as a permaculture consultant.

David Holmgren: Two pre-teen kids going out of school and a baby on the way. And a limited set of savings and no loan from the bank. And it was go, you need to do this, that urgency and also a piece of land, which while I thought it was incredibly special, was incredibly damaged. Yeah. There’d been a sawmill here in the fifties and sixties, and then they’d bulldozed all the debris to fill the erosion gully and done some crude earthworks.

David Holmgren: And then the town had been sewed, was still being in the process of sewage lines being installed. And the stuff that was done through our place was early on in that period and was real cowboy earthworks, all the top soil buried in the trenches and clay spewed out over the ground. There were so many things.

David Holmgren: About this place that said, like that freedom to work with it, even though there were also special things on the place in certain parts, like the old ancient pear tree from the 19th century, from the 1860s actually, and the well, and the site where someone had lived once. No one had lived on the land since the 1860s.

David Holmgren: So all of those factors coming together, made me, yes, I am breaking the rules that ideally it should be sitting with this much longer. But also that confidence that that’s what all this work has been for, for yeah, exactly more than a decade and. You have to apply it and you have to make mistakes in the process.

(43m0s) Learning from Mistakes: Soil Fertility and Observation

David Holmgren: But when those mistakes are things you do yourself within, even with fossil fuel power, but within the limited budget of savings as opposed to a corporation with massive bank finance, the scale of mistakes are actually part of a learning cycle for society. And if we think about there’s orders of magnitude difference in the scale of mistakes we can make and we see being made around us.

David Holmgren: So I think, yeah, I was definitely in the state of mind that, to make an ultimate, you need to break eggs as well.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: Well, so here’s the thing about mistakes, right? Like. In your yours and Sue’s context, it’s a little bit different because whether we do this as a mere intellectual exercise or whether this is some kind of true, when David Holmgren, and this is something that Dan would’ve agreed with, goes out onto someone’s property for a consult, and we joke that yes, I think the problem with the landscape consult model is that you do your two week course and hang out your shingle and then off you go telling someone, oh yeah.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: That that’s the era when David Holmgren does it. What’s actually happening is, and this is what I mean by we can do this as an intellectual exercise or it’s true, the spirits of country that have taught David are then speaking to another part of country through him when he’s doing the consult because you have that experience of.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: What these species assemblies are here and what, what this pattern is and so on. And it’s so Melliodora. I meant it literally in the sense that it is a Rivendell because it’s a place that when David and Sue make mistakes that undoes in the future dozens or hundreds of mistakes that don’t need to be made.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: Right. So there’s, it’s a special case and it comes back to that idea of, yeah, is this just an exercise or when is there, how to say this, right? When we do something like a consult, we can step into a frame where it has been country who is taught us, and it falls to us to be the conveyor of that information to elsewhere on country.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: And that opens up, I think, I think if we step into that, it changes, I think different things will emerge. Right? I think then we would think more like David Holmgren at that point because we’re actually much more in that observation space rather than. Falling back on our panicked memory of what goes in what zone, right?

Rune Soup Podcast Host: Like we can actually listen. And that, that’s very interesting to me when we step into a flow model, which is one of those patterns where it’s your experience with country, so countries taught you, and then it’s like country speaking to country through you. Does that make sense?

David Holmgren: Yeah, yeah. And I mean, when I, when you asked me about mistakes, those early things and those big impacts with earthworks, still feel really strong. But ironically, the strongest sense of mistake was a decade later actually with the soil and as some of the processes by which the improvement and balance in fertility started to peak and.

David Holmgren: And go into some degree of decline that my responses to that showed up that pattern that many people like myself, who think very strongly and have ideas that you can start to see things through your own ideology, your own theories, your own hypotheses about what the thing is, and that you can easily become blind to something that’s sitting right in front of you.

David Holmgren: And I made one of those big mistakes that, and it was around the overuse of dolomite lime, right, and the its impacts on the soil. And that led to a whole learning journey. But also a very slow recovery process because of the particular nature of that particular mineral. And it’s powerful reshaping of soil tending to make soil clump together and be more clay-like, rather than open and friable so that that effect can actually sort of persist over time.

David Holmgren: So that’s an example of what I experience as a great mistake and a sort of like, why couldn’t you see the signs that were there? And you could say, well, I didn’t have enough knowledge. I hadn’t consulted the right people, I hadn’t done the soil tests and various, various things.

David Holmgren: But I was also not seeing the signs that were actually in front of me. So I would probably regard that as my sort of greatest mistake here at Melliodora. And that is an interesting one because it connects to the whole mystery of soil fertility and what is it. And it, it’s such an area which is so complex from a scientific point of view.

David Holmgren: And and those processes by which people find that sweet point that often is expressed as, oh, that person’s got a green thumb. That actually understanding how the soil is has reached a sink where things are working generally. Comes about by all sorts of processes that are, that include the intuitive and the serendipitous and chants and things can spiral into greater soil imbalance.

David Holmgren: And they can also stabilise around a natural fertility that self, that that can be, to some extent self-feeding then. And those two different dynamics can be informed by both Yes, science and information and detail. But that can also be informed by other processes, including things that we don’t understand at all.

David Holmgren: And the soil stuff is still unfolding. It’s amazing how rapid and radical the shift in soil science has been over the last. 30 or 40 years, and it’s ended up confirming most of the understandings of organics and increasingly even ideas like biodynamics that were seen as as complete scientific nonsense in the past.

(50m55s) Reading Landscape in Changing Times: Affordability and RetroSuburbia

Rune Soup Podcast Host: Exactly. So when I think about reading landscape, I know one of the things you’ve been interested in over the years is, I guess changing affordability patterns is one of the things that happens with us, where we are as a society and at this point in it, right? ’cause famously you wrote RetroSuburbia and it’s a deep exploration of what we can do, where we are amongst other things.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: And this is what I think about reading landscape, like fundamental affordability has changed yet again even since RetroSuburbia. And it’s like, I was thinking about this the other day. Well, actually last night after, there’s an inversion now, a where it used to be that you could live cheaper in the country than you could in the city.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: That you actually could still get like an $8,000 bit of land now in, you can still, last time I looked, which was two or three years ago, you could still get a rundown house in Queenstown, Tasmania. It was one that was for sale for $11,000, but that’s it. Right? So I’m really interested in what, what happens now from a fundamental affordability perspective.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: How do things look? Not like what point is reading landscape for people now, but how do we under, how do we take this new understanding of learning from and being in country in the context of this, the lack of accessibility to legal ownership of land moving forward? What does that look like?

Rune Soup Podcast Host: Do you think now? Like what is. What’s a top line of errata to add to RetroSuburbia for 2023 in a higher interest rate world and all the rest of it?

David Holmgren: Hmm. Well, I think, I mean, I said earlier that being connected in one place, and coming from that rather than moving all the time, obviously is assisted by by tenure, by ownership, by security and the possibility of continuing connection.

David Holmgren: And that, yes, in the current context is not something that’s available to people, but in another way, it actually breaks the idea of connection to a parcel of land and takes us to actually the broader indigenous view of. The whole of country that all of it is part of where we live and understanding all of it.

David Holmgren: That’s been part of my journey in permaculture from the beginning of of knowing where the the wild fruit trees are that you can forage from. That knowing when is the season to go and get something in the public commons. And knowing whose places have particular qualities in everything from what is the place where someone you might have some relationship with, whether that is family or friends or connections, what possibilities you may be able to.

David Holmgren: Enable or take benefit from in that place as opposed to this other place, which is on different country of a different nature. So all of those things of feeling in the whole landscape in the way I said, coming to Central Victoria and then coming to Dalesford and Hepburn and then looking at where is one locating that, that is sort of being part of a wider landscape.

David Holmgren: And it was then from Melliodora that one of the criteria here was our connection to the wider hinterland, the commons around us. So whether we’d been owners or whether we’d been in Central Victoria, generally all of those connections would be. Important and valuable. And so there is that aspect of being nomadic, of the understanding country reading landscape is actually a really critical skill.

David Holmgren: Because by default, when we actually are in one place, we do end up learning a lot about what it’s like. ’cause just stuff happens, So you learn from experience. Oh yes. Well, whereas when you are somewhere new, when you are arrive somewhere or there’s some opportunity emerges to be somewhere, the whole reading landscape is so central in the same way that it’s.

David Holmgren: Reading community, what’s the deal here? What’s going on? What are the opportunities? What are the threats that one needs to move away from? And we talked about that in RetroSuburbia in terms of four patterns of response of consolidating in a place one knows versus going to somewhere new on one axis.

David Holmgren: And on the other axis, the whole mu how much we create our own world retrofit or create something fit for purpose and how much we downsize and disown and adapt, flexibly respond. And that creates these four different spaces. And one of those is the mobile minimalism. So that reading landscape is actually.

David Holmgren: Absolutely core skill in that for people in that space. So I think that’s something that’s important, but I also think we still shouldn’t regard that access to land as inevitably constrained in the future. But it’s interesting what you said about the house in Queenstown. Of course, that was one of the bases of RetroSuburbia that the patent of moving to small, less favourable country towns was in and in some ways still is an opportunity of value compared with the going and getting somewhere in the country.

David Holmgren: And when we came to Melliodora, that was literally the case. There were. The odd five acre block available in rural areas, and they cost four times more than we paid for one hectare within the town. Yeah. So that thing of recognising those those opportunities and a lot of those opportunities relate to places that are perceived as economically and socially undesirable.

David Holmgren: And so in those landscapes, of course, it’s absolutely essential to read the community, read the people, make the connections, see, ah, this is actually a place we could could live in spite of all the limitations. And we’ve seen that number of. Occasions in RetroSuburbia projects that people have done in very apparently down and out communities where those real estate values have been much, much lower.

David Holmgren: But I think broadly the strategy that we were talking about of avoiding debt and not getting on the treadmill of enormous debt, I think that is still really true. And I think there will be a lot of tragedies for people as the interest rate squeeze and the whole debt cycle becomes more difficult as we said it would because we

(1h0m12s) The Film’s Creation and Poetic Nature

Rune Soup Podcast Host: unwind this project. Yeah. I, I really like the idea that it. We can frame it as a freeing up of, ’cause that’s always been Yeah. A freeing up if property affordability, property affordability in many respects has nothing to do with the capacity. Well, it has nothing to do with the capacity to read landscape, but if it frees you up to see country in which you dwell, uh, regardless of your c obligations to a bank in relation to, yeah.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: I think that’s really cool. And I also do like the idea, ’cause I agree completely that it’s pattern recognition rather than, you can call it investment, but it’s more pattern recognition of the behaviours of human animals to see something like a $11,000 house in Queenstown, which, if people listening to this, most of them aren’t in Tasmania, it’s not a desirable place to live.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: Yeah. The hills are beautiful because they’re denuded from 19th century mining, it looks like the moon. It’s, I was there last year. It’s improved somewhat, but you are, when you pay that little fixer upper extends to everything. And I think that’s what you were saying, but that’s actually the opportunity because if you can move into an area that is socioeconomically depressed and you can do things like a food share, well, you’re actually restoring outside of your own piece of land.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: So that’s, that’s a really medicinal frame, I think, for people. And it’s just, it’s still following patterns. So it, this is where, this is where the opportunity, speaking of Dan, that Carol Sanford would say that’s the, a nodal opportunity. Where are you going to get more energy out for your energy in?

Rune Soup Podcast Host: And that’s necessarily going to change as we move. Mm-hmm. But I that you’re correct. Like as the interest rates rise, if people can duck the falling. Rubble of modernity around them. There will inevitably more affordable opportunities coming up because that’s on the other side of tragedy and that’s the cycle.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: So that’s also true.

David Holmgren: Yeah. Just returning to the project of the reading landscape film, I feel a great sense of gratitude to Dave Ma, the filmmaker after Dan’s tragic death last year, how he not only stepped into Dan’s shoes as the visionary producer, director of the film, but brought his own skills as a filmmaker to create something that.

David Holmgren: Is in a sense quite risky. ’cause it’s quite slow in some ways that, and there’s that risk of, oh no, it’s too long or too slow or, and I think some people said that I was surprised at the poetry that came through from the film rather than just the pragmatics. And I think that’s,

Rune Soup Podcast Host: I would say that’s true. I thoroughly enjoyed it watching it last night, and it was, yeah, I see what you mean about the poetry, if that’s the director’s contribution to landscape, right? Like if, well on the one hand, the film is practical. We’re learning from David Holmgren techniques for things like reading landscape, but that must be combined with. I something more poetic, something more uplifting. It’s lovely. It’s, he’s done a really good job.

David Holmgren: Yeah. And obviously that is there in the material and in some of the things, that several people said they expect, they were quite surprised and pleased that it wasn’t too didactic. It’s not a how to film No, it’s not a seminar.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: Yeah.

David Holmgren: And, but I think, yeah, Dave Ma really brought out that through the editing and through the, just the, and of course the, yeah. His work behind the camera, even though he said following me round was sometimes like following a dog on ascent, but from a filmmaker’s point of view, trying to, I’m sure, trying to get the angles and everything.

David Holmgren: So, no, it was really nice. Yeah. And the film as was Dan’s intent and the commitment to the people who contributed that it would be freely available people can go, I can send a link to the news page on the, or you may have that on the Holmgren design site where people can get a link to see the film.

David Holmgren: It’s still through that sort of private viewing process, but that no cost that may. Have some implications for whether it can be in different film festivals, if it hasn’t been shown in a sort of public viewing.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: It’s not shown publicly, so it’s technically not being shown publicly. Yeah. But you just need to the password and the link to get to it, to quote unquote show privately. Yeah. That’s lovely. I know that was definitely, it was nice to see, it’s nice to see Dan again actually. That was a really good, it’s a really good way of doing that. Yeah. It’s, yeah, he was a good guy and it was, it’s a nice kind of revisitation of Yeah. Of the things that he contributed to the world. Yep. Yeah. Definitely.

(1h6m40s) Conclusion

David Holmgren: Nice.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: Alright, well Mr. Holmgren, once again, thank you so much for your time. Love talking to you. It’s amazing and the film is fantastic. I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed. Well, I learned things from it, but I actually really enjoyed that opportunity to sit with, well, what is reading and what is landscape and and how, and continue to sit with that.

Rune Soup Podcast Host: So, yeah. Thank you so much.

David Holmgren: Oh, thank you. You and good to connect again him.