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 be modest. Doing so without some collateral damage to those in your wake is almost impossible. Being a woman in a man’s world is a great handicap, something drummed into me by my own mother, a radical feminist of Joan Webster’s generation. Attending Joan’s funeral and wake in Castlemaine earlier this month filled out my already substantial appreciation, and promotion of Joan Webster’s work as a bushfire awareness and response educator over many decades. Beyond bushfire, Joan’s earlier and ongoing achievements as a journalist, satirist poet, activist and strong role model for many women of my generation, provided some answers to my questions.

I grew to know Joan a little when we shared speaking platforms in 2009 following the Black Saturday Bushfires. Her work as the author of The Complete Bushfire Safety Book (1986) and her receiving the Australian Fire Protection Association’s Community Service Award, 1990, cemented her reputation as Australia’s leading bushfire awareness and preparation communicator. In 2001, Joan distilled that work into her Essential Bushfire Safety Tips which contributed to national recognition with the Order of Australia Medal in 2010 for her years of work on bushfire safety..

It is somewhat ironic that her OAM was awarded at the same time policies shifted from more than two decades of community education around ‘Stay and Defend or Leave Early’ to ‘Leave and Live’ following the Black Saturday Royal Commission in 2009. Media accelerated fatalism about unstoppable fires, further fuelled by climate change disaster angst, saw Joan’s incredibly important and empowering work sidelined as ‘out of date’.

Being in her 80s did nothing to dent Joan’s constant research and in 2012 she reviewed and significantly updated Essential Bushfire Safety Tips, which included a foreword by Phil Cheney, the former head of CSIRO Bushfire Behaviour and Management. Phil came from Canberra to speak at Joan’s funeral and afterwards confided, that like Joan, even he was now a ‘dissident’ in relation to bushfire land management and response policies.

Bushfire resilient design was part of the genesis of permaculture itself, crafted in the house on the foot-slopes of Mt Wellington, Hobart that Bill Mollison successfully defended from the great 1967 fires a few years before we met. Beyond the bushfire resilient designs in Permaculture One (1978), the Ash Wednesday fires (1983) stimulated several case study designs and publications featuring bushfire resilient design including The Flywire House. Beyond this work, we always pointed permaculture tour and course participants wanting more information, to Joan’s books to further empower themselves about the facts (and myths) around this challenging but important subject. So after the Black Summer bushfires (2019) when CSIRO Publishing inexplicably declined to publish Joan’s latest update of Essential Bushfire Safety Tips, we as Melliodora Publishing eagerly took it on.

It was a privilege for me and Su to work with Joan to keep her work in print. In the process we became somewhat aware of her more than 60 years of professional and award winning writing and her ongoing passion in a wide range of creative pursuits including poetry. We also found that Joan was very certain about what she expected from us, and had the passion for her subjects and self-promotion that seemed more characteristic of a rising star in her 30s than someone in their twilight years. I could say Joan was ‘a difficult woman’, a somewhat dated phrase that my own mother would use ironically. Both were strong feminist women of their generation, both mothers and wives who did their best within those socially prescribed roles but both independent thinkers, activists and writers.

At Joan’s funeral her daughters Katherine and Claire filled in all the gaps in what turned out to be my threadbare knowledge of the breadth and depth of Joan’s life and creative work. Claire’s description of Joan’s last months as her body failed but her mind as sharp as ever was quite special.

I had been aware of Katherine’s role as photographer and illustrator documenting Joan’s bushfire work but her role in initiating Joan’s focus of her prodigious research and writing skills on the subject was new to me. Living on farms in the bush, Katherine would leave her photographic negatives and notebooks with Joan during the summers and on one fateful day in February 1983, Katherine suggested Joan write a book with her, for Katherine and people in similar positions, to understand fire, how to best prepare and what to do if a bushfire came. That afternoon they nutted out a book outline without knowing at the time that large swathes of Victoria and South Australia were on fire killing 75 people and destroying more than 3,700 buildings in over 180 fires covering more than 12,000 Km2.

The publisher Katherine worked for accepted the idea and so they worked on the project together. This was an eye opener for me and chatting with Katherine at the wake we exchanged insights about our mothers, recognising some of the collateral damage that flowed to family and others in the wake of their prodigious energy.

One difference in our respective relationships with our mothers was that I was more publicly ‘successful’ than my mother although on one occasion in response to an exclamation ‘Oh you are David Holmgren’s mother!’ she immediately quipped ‘No, he is my son!’ While Venie Holmgren had to keep her passion for expression reigned in most of her life as dutiful daughter, wife and mother, it seemed to me that Joan was less constrained with more opportunities, or just more prepared to burst the bonds of her generation.

Katherine’s recollection of her mother saying she needed a wife to handle the domestic chores also struck a familiar note. It was exactly what another ‘difficult woman’ in my life used to say when she got advice that she needed a husband to help her with five kids on a rural property.

Katherine’s role as effectively the co-creator of The Complete Bushfire Safety Book also suggested parallels for me in my relationship to Bill Mollison, the person who, after my parents, most influenced the path of my life. From my personal perspective, Katherine Seppings has lived a life that is a hybrid between my own relationship with Venie Holmgren and Bill Mollison.

Like most funerals, Joan’s deepened my appreciation for the departed but it also felt like an opportunity to build new connections based on shared experience in publishing and with ‘difficult women’ who made a difference in what was a man’s world.

David Holmgren
March 2024