Read Part One of this series here.

Listen to David reading this piece here:

Connections to locals and land use history

Focusing on tree planting down the gully for future abundance, fire safety and beauty was something that I was able to share with born and bred fourth generation local Vern Howell, a logger in local Wombat Forest and son of the local identity Vera Howell. My first encounter with Vera was in early 1986 on the newly excavated house site at Melliodora. Vera was out on one of her frequent walks around the neighbourhood and had just come down the Fifteenth St road reserve, across the gully and up the unfenced Olver St road reserve next to Melliodora. As the only flat space out of the way of tractor slashing and earthmoving, we had stacked our stock of precious timber from the Mt Macedon fire salvage that would become the joinery and panelling timber for the house. As a discouragement to possible thieves, I had strung a wire across the lane. 

As she strode on the building site, the first words I heard from this woman were, “You know that’s a public right of way”. After a somewhat begrudging acceptance of my explanation for the temporary impediment she had to duck under, she looked around. “Just a bit of advice from an old lady: don’t worry about windows on that side,” she said facing the drive and the street to the southwest. Sweeping her hand around in an arc to the north she went on, “In Hepburn it’s the sun that will keep you warm in winter, so you want plenty of windows on this side.” I thanked her for the idea. I had just received a lesson in passive solar design in direct contradiction of the convention of having most windows facing the street. But her proviso about the power of the sun in Hepburn also reflected the significant mesoclimatic difference between relatively sunny Hepburn and the twin town of Daylesford. Only 5 km away and 120 m higher on the Great Dividing Range, Daylesford is more often shrouded in cloud on a winter’s days. If I had mentioned mesoclimate or passive solar design I was sure this woman would have no idea what I was on about, but clearly we were on the same page. 

Finally she asked, “And where do your people come from?” Ancestry and connection to country is commonly an up-front subject when Indigenous Australians meet. Modern white Australians’ first encounters more typically stop at first names and going further tends to focus on work and brand preferences, and now gender identity, even before immediate family. In that process they are mostly oblivious that for our forebears, like Indigenous folk, one’s clan and country were fundamental points for reference and connection. After we moved into our house with infant Oliver and his half-brother and -sister, Vera summoned Su Dennett to visit her for tea and scones and we added the moniker “the queen of Hepburn” when speaking of Vera. Amongst the old local families there were some down-and-out battlers and some that weren’t, in my estimation, the brightest, but as a family, the Howells seemed capable, smart, energetic, curious, interested in the world around them and the new ideas.

Like my first encounter with Vera, my first encounter with Vern was talking about the commons, in this case the wild, overgrown gully that flowed below Melliodora on its way to Spring Creek, a landscape transformed by gold miners in the 1850s and depicted in a famous von Guerard painting in 1864.

In discussing the overgrown gully, I expected the usual whinge about the then Daylesford & Glenlyon Shire Council or ‘Parks and Sparks’ as we called the state government authority responsible for management of the 2000 hectares of the Hepburn Regional Park that surrounded the twin towns. Instead I received a suggestion about land management we could do, and instead of a recommendation to burn off, or worse, that I might have expected from a local working class rural redneck (a reasonable judgement of Vern), he said, “That stand of Yellow Box on the dry west slope is occupying the ground just fine, but where the blackberries are head high on the red dirt east slope you just have to plant deciduous trees that can shade them out.” This suggestion stunned me in its common-sense; prioritising acceleration of a stalled succession process on the better soil, while leaving the native forest to tick over on the tough ground. I later found out that if he had the social licence and a team of helpers, Vern would have also chosen to thin that regrowth stand to bring on the best of the trees that since his childhood in the 50s and 60s had emerged from the annual coppice cut by the neighbouring guesthouse owners who treated that part of the land as their woodlot. 

In fact when I spoke to most old locals about the Hepburn Regional Park, which was only gazetted from undifferentiated Crown Land in 1983, they mostly looked perplexed. With some further info they said, “Oh, you mean the bush.” Since the gold era devastation, Hepburn residents had informally managed their own patch of public bush, while the local district forester focused his authoritarian control over the 64,000 hectares of the Wombat Forest to the south that had been husbanded back from ruination in the 19th century to one that supported a dozen or more family sawmills. 

Through our mutual love of trees and reading landscape in our complementary ways, Vern and I began working together in the gully on weekends and drew in other families and locals, both old time and ‘blow-ins’, to join our informal working bees. For Su and I involved in several more formal community activities including the Daylesford and Glenlyon Residents and Ratepayers Association, time down the gully was a balance to all the meetings and process stuff. Whoever turned up made the decisions and did the work. Nevertheless it was Vern’s energy and passion that spurred others to help as well as my permaculture explanations of the vision and value from our work. Creating and maintaining pedestrian access and bushfire safety were the two most common benefits for most people involved, as well as being good for nature.

For Vern and I, our common purpose also balanced our occasional heated arguments about capitalism and communism, chemical and organic farming, the (first) Gulf war, Muslim immigration and other issues by which he might have otherwise judged me as a typical blow-in, ex-urban, middle class, university-educated greenie.

Redneck ecological wisdom 

Vern had spent most of his life cutting down trees in native forests for a living; a dangerous industry where you learnt on the job in the old school way. When I met Vern in the late 1980s he was the first chainsaw trainer at the Victorian Timber Industry Training Council and his first job was to give a licence to all the old bushie libertarians that, like him, were self-taught. Although back then Vern was not very articulate and even less so on paper, he had obviously been picked for the job not just because he was one of the boys, but because he was a keen observer, a quick learner, an engager with people, and, in fact, a conceptual thinker who grasped the big picture.

Explaining his tough love for animals, children and trees alike, some might imagine his tree planting passion was part of an atonement for past sins, but it was just part of the cycle of life. Vern never saw a need to plant more of the native trees he had cut down because he knew better than anyone the huge capacity of our native forest trees, especially eucalypts, to regenerate from seed and/or coppice off the stump. He knew this so well that he was able to dispute the universally accepted principle in management of Ash species of eucalypts, including Messmate, the dominant and higher value timber in the Wombat Forest: that coppice from these trees will never survive and grow to form a sawlog because decay of the stump will, at best, result in hollow trees. Vern said he had cut many sawlogs in the Wombat that were clearly from coppice stumps and I noted how in older books the local Messmate was classified as a subspecies of E. obliqua, evidence that Vern and the long-dead taxonomists knew something that more recent foresters had not found out in their training. 

Everywhere in central Victoria and further afield we agreed that nature was planting more eucalypts than all the efforts of Landcare and the plantation corporations combined. Like me, Vern was more taken to planting deciduous fire-retarding, soil-building trees with complementary values and yields to those from our local natives. Rainforest natives from the south and east coast of the continent that had a chance of surviving our frosty climate were also on his list to experiment with. Maybe it was our plantings in the same vein across the boundary from Melliodora in 1986, that showed Vern we were on the same page even before we met in that memorable first encounter. It could have been the two bunya bunya from subtropical Queensland that survived the minus 8 degree frost in 1989 that killed some local native trees and shrubs, which suggested to Vern that I might know a thing or two about trees, and be as much an experimenter as him. 

Vern often made statements about the abundance of nature increasing rather than decreasing over his lifetime, how there was not a shortage of resources in the world but a shortage of skill to make use of them all, and that there should be enough trees around so kids could go out with axes into the forest to make cubbies, clear space and explore without the adults restricting them because of a sense of nature collapsing.

While we were both experimenters, Vern was always more of a risk taker and prone to see everything as an opportunity, whereas I was a bit more ‘black hat’ about hazards and obstacles and wanting to control things. In response to me saying we just needed to keep fire out of the gully for enough decades to secure the succession to a fire suppressing ecology, he saw fire as an opportunity to temporarily remove the cover for the rabbits as the main obstacle to tree regeneration and the opportunity to reset the whole system with direct seeding of appropriate mixes of trees. More practically, he said anyone is welcome to try anything as it will only get better, even the stuff-ups are just another opportunity to learn.

I know Vern’s views of the environment were partly a projection of his worldview informed by a socially and politically conservative ideology, in the same way that my understanding of the same environment was informed by a radical green left/anarchist ideological worldview. But I was attracted to understand, and work with, him because of his excellent observation skills, as the inheritor of multigenerational knowledge of place, and his enthusiasm for a freewheeling partnership in creating natural abundance, which included stocking dams with fish, and tree planting on both public and private land, as well as harvesting through fishing, hunting and sawmilling.

Naturally enough, Vern was a climate change sceptic but his enthusiastic response to each season and the tree growth that resulted was never just a barb to challenge environmentalist concerns about declining nature or to highlight the hypothesis that higher levels of carbon dioxide were contributing to accelerating tree growth and natural regeneration. It was also based on his real world observations and the emotional charge he got from seeing that biomass explosion each year, even if he was equally aware of the risk biomass posed each fire season.

Vern and I certainly agreed that while the greatest reason for the resurgence of biomass abundance we saw everywhere (and confirmed on my six-month teaching and study trip from Israel all the way to Sweden) was that people in the affluent world were no longer harvesting as much for construction, fuel, fodder and food. As life had become more urbanised and increasingly inside the bubble created by media technology, all powered by fossil fuels both directly and indirectly (through agribusiness and industrial forestry concentrated on the world’s best land), nature had made a resurgence, creating new wild spaces, many of them very close to settlements (for a recent exploration of this theme see McClure (2024) ‘The great abandonment’). Together Vern and I usually spent at least one day most winter weekends ‘down the gully’ making tracks through the modern wilderness nature had grown after locals got rid of their wood heaters and cooking stoves in favour of oil heaters and electric stoves in the 1960s, sent their old house cow off to the knackery getting their milk and dairy from the shop instead, and replaced their sheep with tractor slashers and lawn mowers. 

Ecosynthesis in action

In the process of making tracks, we marvelled at Mother Nature’s efforts at ecosynthesis and succession to novel riparian ecosystems that were creating new soil profiles. We focused our efforts on assisting those processes, and in the early 90s wet years, we were particularly energised by the success of our efforts adding extra tree species into the mix with a preference for dense canopied deciduous trees that would shade out the pioneer brambles and thorny nitrogen fixing shrubs, build soil and be a buffer against fire. In all these processes we were simply ‘accelerating succession’ that nature was already doing. That what we were doing was a fundamental expression of many, if not all, permaculture principles was not something I talked to Vern about early in our working relationship. I remember one day he curiously asked what this stuff permaculture was all about. Instead of launching into didactic mode, I replied it was just what he and I were doing down the gully. However when we started using Spring Creek to teach ecological succession, local land use history, plant ID, hydrology and commons management on our Permaculture Design Courses we involved Vern in showing people the patch that we later came to call the Vern Howell Arboretum. 

Reflection

I was seduced by our successes in tree planting, and nature’s greater success in natural regeneration, advancing our emergent novel ecosystem dominated by fire-retardant trees including oaks, but over the following years the slowdown sobered my expectations; another reminder for our need to go with the flow of nature’s patterns both regular and irregular. I later came to realise that those successes were a result of a couple of years of above average rainfall, especially abundant summer rain, that created the regeneration pulse. It was not until the hyper-wet year of 2010/11 that we saw such a pulse again. 

Vern, and just as importantly, the trees he planted down the gully and further afield are featured in the documentary Reading Landscape with David Holmgren

Silent Spring

At Melliodora, our dams collecting urban stormwater provided us with an auditory window to the world of amphibian life. Following the wet years of the early 1990s I remember having dreams about being in a court attempting to defend the frogs in our dams against legal writs for noise well in excess of EPA guidelines for residential areas. I never identified all the species that rapidly occupied the dams with their then thick fringing reed vegetation, but the diversity of calls suggested at least four species including the well-known Pobblebonk. 

Some years later the use of a persistent herbicide by the shire council in spraying roadsides in the catchment, and possibly the impact of amphibian chytrid fungus spread around the world on African frogs used for laboratory work, may have contributed to the decline. Around the same period I became concerned that the population of small insectivorous birds that had started to colonise our plantations and gardens were declining and replaced more by pest species such as sparrows and blackbirds. Given we have never used toxic chemicals on the property and despite being in a small village, there are few sources of toxic chemicals in the surrounding mostly forested and low intensity farm landscapes. This was decades before we had a cat, although domestic cats did traverse the property at times. I found it disturbing that our diverse and structurally complex permaculture system did not seem to be supporting as many birds or species as I expected.

EMR Resistance

Around the same time, my partner Su was active in opposing mobile phone towers, around the concern of potential impacts on human (and wildlife) health. I however accepted the scientific consensus at the time: that non-ionising radiation was harmless to organisms in general and the concern about phones and the towers was unwarranted. Even though I thought it was a classic NIMBY issue, I did support Su on some of her non-violent direct actions that involved her being hurt by police and detained.

A decade before, I remember ribbing Vern Howell about the big brick of a mobile phone that was part of his forestry logger’s kit; fancy excess tech I thought. He looked me straight in the eye and said that before long it might be seen as gross negligence in his business (a very dangerous one) to not have such devices. And so it came to be that 5 years after Su’s direct action resistance to mobile phones towers, we temporarily had a phone to help organise the East coast speaking tour to promote my book Permaculture: Principles and pathways beyond sustainability. Since there was no mainstream media reporting about the impacts of non-ionizing radiation, that started with radio in the early 20th century but was, by the turn of the millennium, growing by leaps and bounds, I put the concerns on the backburner as just one more novel factor technology that was in the nexus between environmental and human health. 

Redneck and green perspectives

In our local community, Vern Howell was just one of the born and bred local rednecks that we engaged and sometimes collaborated with who thought socialism was evil, Muslim immigration was bad for national identity, didn’t believe in anthropogenic climate change, and who didn’t know anything about permaculture beyond being a funny version of organic gardening. Most thought greenies were airheads disconnected from practicality and nature. 

In one particular case, I remember a very vocal local at community meetings who was convinced Agenda 21 coming out of the 1992 Rio Earth summit was a plan to institute global government and take away our rights. I was frustrated by this perception, which was spreading in our local community, increasing distrust of progressive ideas that could relocalise our economies and communities. I remember my sense of superiority to this particular character who earned a living as a gold prospector. I tried to engage, explaining that Agenda 21 was the recognition that climate change was a problem on a scale beyond governments and that a whole-of-society response was needed. From my understanding at that time, the global corporates were incredible spooked by Rio and Agenda 21 and in response had developed ‘astroturf’ movements to support their agenda (as explored in Sharon Beder’s 1997 book, Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism) especially in rural America, where the still relatively self-reliant rural folk stressed by falling commodity prices and lost jobs might have been at the vanguard of redeveloping localised self-reliance to model living well with fewer resources. 

These days, I can see and recognise the elements of truth that had this uneducated, paranoid redneck up in arms about Agenda 21. I also remain open to the idea that elements of conspiracy, rather than just organic, undirected evolution over the years, could be part of what we now face, with its offspring Agenda 30 and the proliferation of top-down globalist agendas to fix the climate emergency. 

Kyoto corruption

By the time leaders met in Kyoto in 1996, the bottom-up community-led processes trumpeted at Rio had been replaced with market solutions managed by the global corporations. My cynicism went over the top when I learnt that the elites, who all flew to Kyoto, decided to leave aviation, the fastest growing global source of greenhouse gas emissions, out of the treaty because they thought it was too hard to allocate to a particular country. Further, as globalisation was exporting all the manufacturing to China and other developing countries, they were allocated the greenhouse gas emissions rather than the rich countries that consumed the manufactured goods. Worst of all, Australia, one of the richest countries in the world with a whole continent to sustain us, received special treatment to count a cessation of clearing vast swathes of forest and woodlands towards our carbon budget. It seemed clear to me that corruption and climate were going hand-in-hand.

From the early 1990s on Permaculture Design Courses (PDCs) I pushed back on the emerging environmental orthodoxy that fossil fuels were inherently bad, rather than precious and in need of conservation for special uses. In my energy literacy sessions I suggested, somewhat tongue in cheek, it would be an advance in consciousness for Victorians to kneel and pray each day in the direction of the Loy Yang power station in the Latrobe Valley, which supplied much of their reliable and cheap electricity from abundant brown coal. 

Those stores of fossil carbon were sequestered in specific periods of extraordinary biological productivity that nature was unable to recycle, and they were then transformed by the tectonic forces of the Earth, and remained in storage for hundreds of millions of years. My message was to treat them as the most precious of nature’s gifts that we should use sparingly for the most important of purposes. Thus the permaculture guidance on when and when not to use fossil fuels was founded on energetic, ecological and ethical principles rather than some inconvenient truth about the CO2 by-product of their combustion.

As far as the scientific mechanisms and models of climate change, I never got into that to any great detail. I remained focused on understanding the resource depletion side of the equation, which I assumed would constrain the human project before any anthropogenic-driven climate change was a major problem for humanity and nature’s ability to adapt. 

That we should think of carbon as a source of life rather than an atmospheric pollutant might be seen as pedantic, but that understanding steers our thinking toward supporting nature’s processes while the atmospheric pollutant perspective leads to wasting public money on bizarre schemes of carbon capture and storage in oilwells and other geological storages, along with all the other boondoggles that have so far sucked up the resources to address climate change.

Under the principle ‘Catch and store energy’ on PDCs, I talked about carbon as the stuff of life that nature captures from the air and, along with water and minerals from below, stores as biomass, especially long-lived trees and soil humus, for thousands of years with continuous recycle to the atmosphere. After thousands of millions of years of life in the seas, soil was Gaia’s greatest invention, allowing her to colonise the barren land. In the process, the extreme pulsing power of water, wildly fluctuating temperatures and the inexorable loss of essential life minerals to the oceans is buffered and even temporarily reversed. Eventually chemistry and gravity trump life, and nature has to wait for Gaia’s tectonic uplift and vulcanism to recycle the regolith, reverse the oxidation of minerals and again diversify the climatic regimes by mountain building. 

The lineage of work that started with permaculture as an effort to ‘design ecosystems,’ and my mentor Haikai Tane convincing me that nature was doing a better job of ecosynthesis, was confirmed by the restorative processes we observed and husbanded on the ground along Spring Creek in Hepburn. This increased my confidence in nature’s transformative adaptation and rapid evolution in the right circumstances, in contrast to the overwhelming dominant message from environmental scientists and activists that nature was falling apart at the seams from endless human impacts. While I saw the image of nature as the raped maiden needing our help as having some merit, I told a counter story of a powerful Mother Earth who is nurturing on one hand but can sweep her offspring aside or into the evolutionary rubbish bin if they get too far out of line, and that our task is to work within her design rules and assist in her restorative processes. 

Reflection

This counter story has a lot more adherents these days, but there is still so much confusion about how we should get our houses into nature’s order or even what those words can actually mean for most people deeply alienated from country and climate. My half-century working with wild novel nature gives me confidence that Mother Nature will provide the essential nurture, shelter and sustenance for those committed to the task of growing the successor culture to industrial modernity from first principles. 

So it is that with my hands, heart and soul I am committed to learning from, worshiping and defending Mother Nature’s own efforts to ecosynthesise novel systems. In the process, I turn full circle to the origins of permaculture informed by the defence of pristine wild nature from the ravages of extractivism. In the case of novel ecosystems, the destruction we resist is driven not by utilitarian extractivism but something worse: spite, guilt and ideological vandalism informed by the pseudoscience of ‘Nativism’, which wastes abundance without even the respect to eat what we kill.

Average vs extreme data

Back in the 90s, I assumed the pressure on the scientific modellers from the politicians and policymakers to come up with concrete and numerical relationships between increasing greenhouse gas emissions and key climate variables was relentless. The need to be able to turn those variables into key performance indicators for the economy, national and other strategic interests must have been intense. Conservation land managers wanted to predict impacts on biodiversity, or more specifically indigenous biodiversity, and health professionals increasingly wanted the same for impacts on people. 

I had no inside track on how this pressure shaped the mindset of the researchers or the output of the models, but I did notice that predicted changes in global and later bioregional average temperatures was the headlined output, while increased and more extreme events was the footnote. I found this a very frustrating, but perhaps an understandable, failure to communicate the science. Because tracking and modelling averages is easier than extremes, the modelling was always on the former, even though it is extremes that cause loss of resilience in natural, agricultural, infrastructural and cultural systems. Thus permaculture focuses on design for disaster, and recognises that Australia’s biological carrying capacity is mostly limited by the unreliable climate with lots of extremes and not much in the way of steady patterns for nature and people to adapt to. 

During the 1990s, I remember climate scientists and science journalists earnestly communicating the serious implications of a rise in global average temperatures of a few degrees without stirring a sense of urgency in people more focused on immediate concerns. In southern Australia, where daily maximum or minimum temperatures, especially in spring, can oscillate up to 20oC from one day to the next and be accompanied by hot drying northerly winds followed by frost, or even snow, and back to wilting wind, most people had trouble seeing the severity of a few degrees change in average temperatures. On PDCs, I would always emphasise the extremities footnote in the models, and how permaculture responds to that from first principles, rather than the separate but existential issue of climate change.

While there are many other indirect ways to discern climate patterns, another concern I had with the climate models was the baseline weather data for Australia being from 1961 to 1990. I understood this was selected because the records before 1961 were less reliable. In contrast, when planning the water systems for Fryers Forest in the late 1990s, I studied the patterns of rainfall from the Fryerstown Post Office starting in the 1870s to get a better sense of the still (very recent) past.  

Millpost Story

The late 80s and early 90s was also a time when I took on some larger whole farm, and prospective ecovillage, planning projects that required me to grapple with the design of water harvesting, land use options, subdivisional fencing and revegetation designs, much of it building on Trees on the Treeless Plains.

Perhaps the most interesting of those projects was the invitation in 1990 to develop a whole farm plan for Millpost, in the uplands of the Monaro Plains outside Canberra. Grazing sheep to produce fine merino wool was the main enterprise. As home to David Watson and Judith Turley, who had both participated in one of Mollison’s first design courses, Millpost had seen a decade of permaculture-inspired tree planting and self-reliant living before I became involved. Millpost was also a place where farm forestry, scientific research, tree growing trials, erosion control works and other Landcare associated innovations were underway.

While the larger story of Millpost is best understood by reading David Watson’s two modest books about the property, I am drawn to reflect how the diverse responses informed by permaculture ethics, principles and strategies have acted as a hedge in the face of variable seasons over several decades. Millpost has succeeded as a multi-generational farm where the land provides the livelihood both monetary and directly, through the on-farm multi-household economy, despite the marginal nature of the climate and soils for diversification. That success establishes Millpost as one of the relatively few first-generation permaculture properties where self-reliance and commercial land use have been successful.

The trials and tribulations of even the baseline Millpost climate have been substantial, but discussions with David and Judith have highlighted how changes in society and land use affected by the larger economic, psychosocial and geopolitical climate have so far been much greater existential threats to Millpost. To just focus on one of the most severe, the change from wool production on large grazing properties across the region to hobby farms and lifestyle properties has been associated with a massive increase in kangaroo numbers that has overwhelmed all of the efforts in pasture improvement, subdivisional fencing, rotational grazing, shelter and tree fodder plantings and other practices. Even with substantial permitted kangaroo harvesting, the sheep carrying capacity of Millpost has been substantially reduced over the decades. While value adding their own organic wool for knitting and experiments using Maremma dogs to keep kangaroos at bay provides hope for the farm in the future, without a substantial value gain from kangaroo harvesting and some system to allow their grazing to be rotated, the regional mob threatens to overwhelm this exemplary case of land care (while maintaining the robust smash repair business in and around Canberra city and the associated roadkill ecology).

Could some of this change be attributed directly or indirectly to climate change? As climate activists themselves over many decades, David and Judith would be the first to acknowledge this as a possible factor. However, by far the greatest factor is land use change, due to the economy and lifestyles of modern affluent Australia that have direct and indirect effects undermining the future of farming. What I find so frustrating about this and other challenges to our most sustainable farms is that, unlike longer term climate change, whether due to anthropogenic carbon emissions or other factors beyond our control, the proximate solutions are well within our collective grasp. Australians could all be eating more kangaroo, reducing intensive livestock husbandry and have the land sequestering more carbon to hold more water as a hedge against further climate change while reducing our collective CO2 industrial emissions in the process. In other words, simple changes to collective food habits, markets and regulations would have so many benefits. Those benefits would stand us in good stead independent of whether we are facing a larger climate emergency or simply the ups and downs of the continent with the most unreliable climates.