Tag Archives: Australia

Forest Yatra

April 14, 2014Community, Meditation, Yoga and Spirituality, NatureAustralia, carbon footprint, dandenong ranges, flying, gower power, lyrebird, scarab beetle, sherbrooke forest, Wales., wallaby, yabbielivinginthefuture

I’ve spent the last three months dithering. Dithering about whether to book a flight to visit my home in Wales this Summer (ok, Winter, if you’re in Oz). There are so many reasons not to, starting, and perhaps ending, with the reluctance to fly anywhere. In the environmental movement in the UK, it is frowned upon to fly. And with good reason. The overwhelming evidence is that my flight will eat up more than 10 tonnes of carbon emissions – one way! The average British person uses 9.5, and ideally, we would all be cutting our footprint to less than 2 tonnes. How can I justify flying home?

In Australia, this argument against flying has not made it onto the green agenda. Even the most committed amongst my friends thinks nothing of hopping on a plane to Sydney – the fifth most popular route on the planet. Australia is so big, people get used to driving long distances, but with a flight to Darwin taking nearly five hours, only the most adventurous (and time-rich) Southerner will choose a more climate-friendly option of driving or train travel. This might account for the average Australian climate footprint being more like 18 tonnes per person. Having lived in Australia a year, am I starting to acclimatise to this flying frenzy? Well, no…and yet…eventually, I have booked a ticket.

As soon as I do, the heavens open. Melbourne experiences the wettest start to April for a decade, catching the tail end of cyclone Ita. It’s like a “told you so” and a “welcome home” all at once.

On Thursday evening, I’m sitting on the train heading up to the Dandenong ranges, where I’m going to house sit for a friend. The rain drizzles down the train window as I stare out into the darkening gloom. It looks like that stretch of Wales between Bridgend and Cardiff on a damp winter evening. Yuck. Fortunately, the house has a cosy wood fire and a friendly cat to welcome me and the next day, despite the drizzle, I venture out for a walk in the forest.

The multitude of greens that is Sherbrooke Forest is the last remaining temperate rainforest in the Dandenong Ranges, to the East of Melbourne. The gum trees here are Mountain Ash (like the village in the Welsh valleys) and are the tallest flowering plant in the world. Today, I can’t see the treetops, as the mist is hovering, almost like smoke, at the level of the treeferns. As my eyes travel from the thick tree trunks skywards, my gaze gets lost and my face is dampened as if with dew. It’s a gentle, soft feeling. Soft on the skin after the harsh summer suns and soft on the eyes, which can’t get a focus on anything. I am walking as if in a dream.

The first time I came here, I was on a Yatra – a silent walk which takes its name from the sanskrit word for pilgrimage. We meet – a group of ten of us – at the Belgrave station of Puffing Billy. Puffing Billy is a steam train originally built to gain access to this hilly region but now run for tourists. It is far more exciting than I expected and the “toot toot” of the whistle follows us as we start into the dense undergrowth…

Through our opening circle, a bird swoops, feathers rustling, wings the sound of air. Nature welcoming us. Layers of bird song create a choir. High above us, cockatoos wheel and cry and the group mind chatters like the crimson rosellas flitting from tree to tree. The business of the world is hard to leave, but our boots on the soft earth make a calming mantra and soon, we soften into the silence.

The walk is punctuated with process taken from Deep Ecology – a way of reconnecting with Nature which was pioneered by Joanna Macy and John Seed. Our walkers are graduates from a Seed workshop and carry the experiences from that weekend into this – creating a comfortable closeness and familiarity. Lunch is in a meadow clearing guarded by forest. We hide in tall grasses, reflect and catch up. As we begin again, we are as gently focussed as the scarab beetle making his own slow pilgrimage across the path. The forest holds wallabies, which peek out from the trees before thumping off, crashing through the leaf litter. There are lyrebirds, too, waddling about trailing long feather-like tails and scratching like chickens at the dirt, in search of tasty grubs. This weekend, we even spot a blue-clawed yabbie – a kind a cray fish which we are surprised to see in the forest until we notice that his hidey-hole bottoms out into a pool of water. No doubt he has been enjoying the recent downpours!

As I’m walking in this beautiful, ancient place, I feel a pang of regret that I succumbed to the other life pressures which have finally made me book a ticket home. I remember a friend who has started a community energy project in Wales, called Gower Power. One of their recent activities involved planting 1,625 trees in Gower, the place I call home. Maybe, while I’m there, I go and plant a few myself. I’m aware that it can’t make it right, but it can’t harm, either.

CERES Community Environment Park

March 24, 2014Community, Events, Permaculture, Sustainability & EnvironmentAustralia, brunswick, CAT, Centre for Alternative Technology, ceres, david holmgren, environment, harvest festival, insight meditation, Melbourne, park, permaculture, Wales., yogalivinginthefuture

I was aware of CERES before I even moved to Melbourne. Not because it is an amazing environmental oasis of calm in a huge, sprawling city, but because it is home to the Melbourne Insight Meditation Group. I’ve been sitting with Insight meditation teachers for about 10 years now and was pleased to find that I could continue my practice when I moved to Australia. Uprooting your life is unsettling and I found my way to CERES even before my jet lag had subsided. I loved it. Somehow, it immediately felt like home.

As a country girl, it has been a shock to find myself amongst skyscrapers, traffic and so many people, so I need a place I can get away from it all. Melbourne has such a huge suburbia, it takes about 40 minutes to get completely out of the city, but along the river, you can find pockets of tranquility and CERES is one of them.

From my home in Fitzroy, I cycle through Edinburgh Gardens and take the Merri Creek Trail to Brunswick, where this parkland has been sculpted from a old quarry site. David Holmgren told me that it was modelled on CAT, in Wales, which, coincidentally, was also an old quarry. Just one more reason to love it there.

As well as the Learning Centre where we meet for meditation and yoga, CERES has many other meeting rooms, where workshops are taught on tai-chi, organic gardening, group facilitation, Deep Ecology, massage and all sorts of learning for sustainability. They also teach a Permaculture Design Course, which are so popular here in Australia at the moment.

In March, they host their annual Harvest Festival. Last year, we went along and enjoyed the bands, workshops and a talk on Earthships with Rachel Goldlust. I thought it would be a great opportunity to film the place humming with life, so this year, I’ve done it. It was fun, but I was a bit distracted, because this year, I bumped into so many people I know!

I chatted with Greg, whose book, Changing Gears, I talk about in the blog post on Sustainable Living; I met my neighbour Karen, who collates the Yarra Transition website; I saw Anna Crowley, my wonderful yoga teacher and several of my own yoga students, too. It really is a place for like-minded folk to gather.

Watch Episode 53 of the Living in the Future online film series to enjoy the CERES Harvest Festival and find out why this place is such a great model for community sustainable education the world over!

Renewable Festivals

January 31, 2014Community, EventsAustralia, cara sandys, festival, future art research, indigenous storytelling, lammas, living in the future. david holmgren, Melbourne, rainbow serpent, solar cinema, sustainability, uncle larry, victorialivinginthefuture

By European standards, the Rainbow Serpent Festival is small. By Australian standards, it’s huge – 18,000 people. 3 main music stages, and a central stalls area filled with the usual cheap cotton, studded leather and this year’s essential for the laydees – twerking pants.

Happy Rainbow! is the refrain and it is, in spite of 36 degree sunshine and dust which makes it difficult to breathe and dyes the inside of your nose black.

I’ve spent the morning at the solar cinema, run by Pippa and Rich from Future Art Research who have the shadiest spot on site. They showed my Lammas documentary on Friday and have entertained me since with Indigenous stories from Uncle Larry, sourdough breadmaking workshops using their solar oven and now, an interesting history of the activist scene in Australia.

In the early noughties, Undercurrents Beyond Tv Festival was showing films from Jabiluka uranium mine protests and Woomera detention centre. That footage of the fence coming down and refugees spilling out into the desert is unforgettable. Now, the scene has shifted to the brilliant Lock the Gate campaign against coal seam gas and instead of just the usual suspects, farmers have united with locals to create a united resistence.

We’re led into the discussion by a query about the lack of environmental awareness at this festival. My friend Cara has been flown in from the UK to do a talk on Free Economy and to show a film called Connected. She estimates her audience at 0.025 of the people here. She is camped in the artists quarter and is amazed by the DJs detailing their litany of flights to travel around the world for gigs.

“What’s it all for” she laments. “Just to have a good time?”.

David Holmgren‘s talk, however, is well attended, but then he’s a local. Known as the father of permaculture, he has established a self-sufficient homestead down the road in Hepburn Springs. He and his colleagues set up festivals in Tasmania, back in the day, which they wanted to be living examples of sustainability. They would plant veggies on site 6 months beforehand, so that festival-goers could harvest free food during their stay.

Here at Rainbow, they could take a few lessons from the Green Gathering, who run all of their site on renewable energy. If it’s possible in the UK, with all its rain and mud, it must be possible here, with its 36 degrees of sunshine.

Intentional Communities Conference

December 9, 2013CommunityAustralia, bill metcalf, Commonground, Intentional Communties Conference, jeremy shub, Melbourne, Moora Moora, tuntable fallslivinginthefuture

Peering through the foggy window, I can see the tall gum trees which line the windy road up Mount Toolebewong. Max wipes his sleeve across the glass and points his tiny pocket camera out into the rain. We are headed to the Australian Intentional Communities Conference, but instead of the desert summer we might have expected, a storm has arrived and it is a dramatic welcome.

If Melbourne is famous for “four seasons in a day”, then at 750m, this mountain sees them all. The view stretches down to the sea – by day a sprawling spiderweb of a settlement; by night a twinkling performance. When we wake, the clouds have scattered and all that remains is a blue parasol over the city and bright sunshine. That’s more like it!

Over the next three days, a parade of eloquent and erudite speakers expound on all things community. Bill Metcalf gives a talk about the history of intentional community in Victoria, with pictures of earnest church people in the 1800s serving a vision and joyful kibbutz-ers in the 1950s practising for communal life in Israel.

David Spain and Peter Cock founded the communities at Tuntable Falls and Moora Moora 40 years ago. They have lived at opposite ends of Australia and never discussed policies, but in discussion find so much in common it makes them laugh with amazement.

In Jeremy Shub’s workshop, which advertises itself as “creative and fluffy”, people travel inward, sharing stories of their dreams. We play community games with Kate Lewer from Commonground– bonding over giggles and breaking down boundaries of personal space and appropriate behaviour. These spaces allow balance between the head and the heart – showing us how both are essential for us to thrive. All of life is here.

From the kitchen, comes music and joy and deliciousness. Meals are on time, plentiful and frequent. At breakfast, warm pears and home made granola; for lunch, fresh green salads with wholesome veggies and for dinner, steaming bowls of lasagne or curry. Susannah, the chef, dusts moroccan spice over a fresh bowl of humus and the table is dressed with flowers for morning tea. It’s what every conference needs – and so much more.

The community at Moora Moora manage us all with care, attention and patience. No-one seems to bristle when the tour is guided over their way. Everyone is open and helpful. For me, the conference seems to bring out the best in this community, drawing the members together around a common purpose.

Holding a conference about intentional communities in an intentional community seems like an obvious thing to do. They are set up to house many people and usually have communal facilities such as kitchens and meeting spaces. Moora Moora is well equipped. The Lodge house has dorms, a large lounge area and a dining room. The Octagon can hold fifty people comfortably. There is ample ground to set up a marquee. They even have a stage to host the evening’s entertainment! Esme, the compere, is looking forward to becoming a member next weekend after two years living here on probation. He’s both excited and nervous. It’s a big commitment.

But aside from the physical space and the obvious capability of the crew, this conference has something else which is special. There are so many people here who know how to forge relationships. They understand how to help us create connections and when you add that to the enthusiasm and passion of the participants, it’s not surprising that as they leave, people hug with shining eyes.

On the last night, the remaining delegates are invited to join the residents for a final gathering. In the state of Victoria, this is the beginning of their bush fire season. A drum circle calls the community together in ritual and small children carry hand painted lanterns into the labyrinth as the chant rises. A blessing is spoken.

For a newcomer to Australia, my eyes and ears are opened again to the very real threat of wild fire. While I wish for warm weather and a respite from the unpredictable spring rains, I see that for these people, up here on the mountain, the summer is not just a time for barbeques and swimming.

A Big Trip

October 2, 2013Community, Documentary, Natural Building, Nature, Sustainability & Environmentalternative, Australia, brisbane, Commonground, Crystal Waters, Dharmananda, director, Documentaries, Ecovillage, Films, green living, Helen iles, land rights, Living in the Future, maleny, Melbourne, Moora Moora, Narara, paul joseph, sustainability, sydneylivinginthefuture

I’ve been on a trip. A big trip. Two big trips, actually. The first one took me away from my lovely home at Holtsfield in Wales and right over to the other side of the world, to Melbourne, Australia. I’ve been living here for seven months now and taken many little trips to explore the area – up to the Grampian mountains in the north, down to the Great Ocean Road in the South and over to Tasmania, too. And then came another big trip.

When I came to Australia, I knew I wanted to make some films about intentional communities here. I have been making films on this subject for almost 15 years – the website tells the story of that. I had made contact with some people even before I landed, but it took six months of living here to gather what the story would be.

During those six months, I have been doing my research. I’ve been sitting in the beautiful domes of the State Library of Victoria and reading about land rights in Australia (shocking), about alternative lives here, about planning laws. I’ve made friends at two of the communities nearest to me. One is Commonground, a co-operative about an hour from the city, where their intention is to hold a space not only for individuals to live and work together, but also to host other groups who are working for social change. The other is Moora Moora, about an hour in a different direction. Their community is bigger, with around 100 people living in small clusters of the top of a mountain.

Visiting and staying at these communities gave me insight into the themes which are particular to Australia and I started to feel ready.

Then came the big trip. While talking to a journalist friend who also writes about living the simple life, it seemed to shout that I should be telling a history – a history of intentional community in Australia. So that is what I have set out to do. The big trip took me north of Brisbane, to Crystal Waters, a permaculture village near the funky little town of Maleny. From there I travelled to Nimbin, where I met, amongst others, a man associated with the Aquarius Festival in 1973, which brought not only a huge number of hippies to the broken-down town, but also the first multiple occupancy planning laws. Some of the communities established then still remain and have loads to teach us about how to live with each other and how to maintain such a project over time.

In Bellingen, further south, there are over 25 intentional communities a hotbed of activity which has spilled out into the surrounding area, including the local council, who have established radical waste collection initiatives.

Narara Ecovillage, an hour north of Sydney, is on the site of a horticultural research facility. This land will now be turned into one of Australia’s newest intentional communities.

I have some great stories to tell you and this is only the beginning. This blog will help me make sense of the film I am making and also of life in Australia, 18,000 km from the place I call home. Will you join me?