Vale Errol Mutch. I remember Errol as one of those rare “salt of the earth” natural environmentalists, who charted his own path in working with nature though the difficult decades...
Read MorePermaculture
Topic: Obituaries
Vale Vries Gravestein
As I have been working alone in the garden over these last few days I have been thinking about Vries Gravestein as an elder of the Australian permaculture movement at...
Read MoreVale Toby Hemenway
Toby Hemenway, one of the most influential permaculture authors and teachers from North America, passed away earlier this week aged 64. Toby discovered permaculture in 1990 after a career in genetics...
Read MoreVale Rod May
Vale Rob May. One of Australia’s ecological farming pioneers, and a close friend, passed away today. Rod May aged 63 died in intensive care after a road accident between Ballarat...
Read MoreRemembering Dan Palmer
In the global forest of permaculture and kindred networks, a giant has fallen. Dan Palmer is dead. Rather than old growth, he was in his prime at 47 with deep...
Read MorePhil Gall: Permaculture Pioneer
There is no one who deserves the accolade of “permaculture pioneer” more than Phil Gall who died recently with his family around him in a Melbourne nursing home.
Read More“Dan Palmer’s Legacy” by David Holmgren
At the recent Australian Permaculture Convergence in Kaurna Country, Adelaide, David Holmgren, permaculture co-originator, gave a presentation to honour the legacy of his friend and colleague, Dan Palmer (1974-2022).
Read MoreVale Ross Mars: Persistent Permaculture
Ross Mars, permaculture pioneer of Western Australia, died peacefully on the 9th November from Motor Neurone Disease at home in Mundaring WA surrounded by his family.
Read MoreVale Dave Griffiths: Central Victorian pioneer tree planter
Back in the 1980s when fellow permaculture enthusiasts were beginning to try their hand at design consultancy, I would mention some of the substantial impediments with the analogy of imagining...
Read MoreVale Joan Webster OAM
How much can one person achieve in a lifetime? Without an army of followers and assistants to help, any contribution or dent in the larger society and environment will surely...
Read MoreVale Richard Heinberg (21.10.1950 – 19.7.2026)
It is with great sadness that I acknowledge the death of a man who has perhaps done more than anyone else to alert the world to the predicament of declining...
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2026 Venie Prize winner
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

2024 Venie Prize winner
Congratulations to Isabella G. Mead for writing the winning poem of the 2024 Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Prize, Melt Ice. Here is what judge Tim Loveday had to say about the poem: Melt Ice is a work that speaks back to our colonial inheritance with an acute and painful awareness of how our complicity as

Melbourne Documentary Film Festival Wrap Up
Many thanks to all those who attended the screening of Reading Landscape with David Holmgren at Melbourne’s Cinema Nova as part of the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival. Here are some snaps of the night:










