With the passing of Bill Mollison, aged 88, in Tasmania on Saturday comes the end of an era for many thousands of people around the world whose lives were transformed by the teaching and writing of one of Australia’s most influential ecological pioneers. My two year student/mentor relationship with Bill from late 1974 was certainly the defining relationship that set the course for the rest of my life. This piece (published in the 2011 Permaculture Diary) recalled that pivotal moment when I first met Bill and effectively selected him as ‘the teacher’. Bill’s brilliance was in gathering together the ecological insights, principles, strategies and techniques that could be applied to create the world we do want rather than fighting against the world we reject. His personal life was as tumultuous as his public persona, at times tragic but always full of the passion and contradiction that the term ‘ecological warrior’ represents. His legacy lives on in all those who were transformed by his teaching. This tribute by leading British permaculture teacher, Graham Bell, provides an excellent overview of his life including his confronting character.
https://www.permaculture.co.uk/news/14747967337497/bruce-charles-bill-mollison-1928-2016
David Holmgren
2026 Venie Prize winner
MegU September 1 2026
Here is what judge Peter O’Mara had to say about all of the poems entered in this year’s Venie Prize: In such a conjectural, estranged times, this year’s entries arrived, not coincidentally, from a multifarious array of the environmental poetry index — the polemical, the elegiac, the embodied, the observed, the incidental, the expansive, the
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