This interview by ABC radio's Landline program by Tim Lee was first published 28/03/2004. It features Rod May, an organic farmer and the former mayor of Hepburn, Ted Lefroy of...
Read MorePermaculture
Topic: Permaculture history
Garden Agriculture: A revolution in efficient water use
First published as an (edited) opinion piece in Water Volume 32, No. 8 in December 2005, 'Garden Agriculture: A revolution in efficient water use' by David Holmgren discusses food futures...
Read MoreTreehugger interview in Buenos Aires
David Holmgren is interviewed by Paula Alvarado for Treehugger. Buenos Aires, 2007.
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Personal Histories
An except from David Holmgren's 'The Long View', from Permaculture Pioneers: stories from the new frontier.
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A chance meeting
David Holmgren describes the story of the chance encounter that led him and Bill Mollison to cross paths in the spring of 1974.
Read MoreRadio National interview: ‘By Design’
Here, available to listen to in full is David Holmgren's interview for the By Design program on Australia's ABC Radio National.
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Vale Errol Mutch
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...
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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...
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A Short Personal and Global History of Retrofitting the Suburbs
My childhood and adolescent years in suburban Bicton (between Fremantle and Perth WA) were set against a backdrop of Swan River estuary beaches, swamps, cliffs and caves. Many summer nights...
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Keith Roby Memorial Lecture
Last month while David was in Perth for the Australasian Permaculture Convergence he gave The Keith Roby Memorial Lecture in Community Science, a free public lecture funded by the Keith...
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Vale 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...
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Vale 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...
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The Overview Effect with James Perrin
In this episode of The Overview Effect, James Perrin interviews David Holmgren, live at Renew Fest in Mullumbimby in May 2021. In this conversation, David discusses his Future Scenarios work,...
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Protesting Permaculture: the last five weeks and the last five decades
On Saturday 13th and 20th November, my partner Su Dennett and I joined others from central Victoria travelling by train to the “Kill the Bill”/anti-lockdown/anti-mandate protests in Melbourne. This essay...
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David Holmgren on Ideapod
Permaculture is one of those words many of us have heard but aren’t exactly sure about what it means. The best person to ask is one of the folks who...
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Future Ecologies podcast
Are agriculture and biodiversity always at odds? In the late 1970s, a radical environmental movement rejected this dichotomy — rebuking conventional farming in favour of holistic & mutualistic principles, with...
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Saving Warners Track: Jackeys Marsh Forest Festival Aftermath 1983
Listen to David reading this piece: Heritage restored Warners Track in Tasmania was built by farming pioneers in the 1890s in the Meander locality of northern Tasmania to provide access...
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Permaculture: weathering 50 years of climate change
Listen to David reading this piece here: This story began as one of my longform essays, which I started on our southern hemisphere Spring Equinox in September 2024. Over...
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Part Two: Life in the Weather
Read part one of this series here. Listen to David reading Part Two here: Big-picture speculations about human futures in a world where ‘nature bats last’ were certainly part...
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Part Three: Fire, Water, Trees & Houses
David Holmgren talks about the Ash Wednesday fires, home based lifestyles and the second wave of environmentalism
Read MoreOther News
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
2024 Venie Prize winner
MegU August 27 2024
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
MegU August 13 2024
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: