Get yourself comfortable and settle in for a thorough look at David Holmgren’s latest thinking on the prospects for our future. In this interview Samuel Alexander of the Simplicity Collective poses written questions which David addresses over an epic 90 minutes.
For the last few months (and before) David has been absorbed in writing a new book, so there may be hints of some of the book’s contents in the interview. David’s thinking is informed by his daily work in the garden, even while keeping the water up to the food production system, the complex ideas are forming, being reorganised and constantly critiqued. The book is about retrofitting society for a quite different world. It elaborates and extends David’s 2015 Aussie Street Presentation, and Retrofitting The Suburbs essay .
The Aussie St story that traces four adjacent suburban houses and their inhabitants from the “1950s Golden Age of Suburbia” to the “Second Great Depression of 2020” has been particularly powerful at engaging with Australians who live in or grew up in suburbia. The new book will build on this and take a wider perspective.
David will be launching “RetroSuburbia; a downshifters guide to a resilient future” in the new year with a website to match Retrosuburbia.com so watch out for the website going live, a book launch close to you, and associated workshops all over Melbourne.
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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