This website and all its posts are devoted to my permaculture life and work committed to creating the world we want. It is solution- and good news-focused. But my life’s...
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Topic: Publishing
RetroSuburbia Rollout
Retrosuburbia is more than just a book – it is a wholehearted celebration of empowered do-it-yourself and do-it-ourselves culture. With the book now into its second print run, the retrosuburbia...
Read MoreRetroSuburbia Bushfire Resilience Extract
This is an extract from my book RetroSuburbia: the downshifter's guide to a resilient future, a 550 page richly illustrated manual that has become a best seller since its publication...
Read MoreThe Problem is the Solution: how permaculture-designed household isolation can lead to RetroSuburbia
COVID-19, an invisible agent that barely qualifies as a lifeform, is bringing the most powerful civilisation the world has ever seen to a grinding halt. In three months it may...
Read MoreRetroSuburbia, Energy Descent, Degrowth and TEQs
Changing our habits for self-reliance and resilience requires us to skill up, get in touch with our sources of sustenance and help the next generation find what they need to...
Read MoreOther News

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:




