STORY BY MAHMOOD FAZAL, PHOTOS BY CHRIS TURNER

Winding down a path littered with fresh Feijoas, we discover Melliodora; a 2 1/4 acre property nestled on the edge of Hepburn Springs. However, it’s the integrity and significance of the philosophical landscape that startles the imagination.

“I'd consider myself a better ecological builder than I am an ecological farmer,” explains David Holmgren, who has offered tours of Melliodora since 1990. “We've always been working one-third in the household economy; growing food, building things, doing stuff for yourself. One-third paid work, and one-third work in the community or the global permaculture networks.”

Melliodora, sometimes referred to as “revolution disguised as gardening,” is one of the best documented and well-known permaculture demonstration sites in the world. Permaculture is a word originally coined by David Holmgren and Bill Mollison in the mid 1970’s to describe an “integrated, evolving system of perennial or self-perpetuating plant and animal species useful to man.”

In a concert of energy at Melliodora, the passive solar house, mixed food gardens, orchards, dams, livestock, and creek revegetation in the nearby public land, exemplify the way permaculture design can help restore and improve land while providing for residents’ needs in a cool inland climate.

“The idea of having a job and being told what to do by other people, rather than creating your own livelihood, didn’t make sense. I decided that when I was 17, on a train in Sydney commuting for a job,” explains David, as his nosey chicken Dazzle follows us toward the dam. “Looking across the trains with all the people sitting there reading The Sydney Morning Herald every morning, today it’s probably an iPhone, I just thought this is fucking mad! I am never ever going to do this every day.” 

After graduating from Australia's most radical experiment in design education, at the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education, David embodied a practical way to live that lit the embers of an idea that could change the world. In many ways, his subsequent Permaculture design principles lay the foundations for the modern sustainability movement.

“Ever since I was 19 and I grew an interest for self-reliance and what became permaculture,” explains David. “All of this environmental thinking that was sort of welled up in the 1970s was partly in response to the energy crisis of ‘73 and ‘79. And partly the influence of the The Limits To Growth Report (1972) that basically said; if industrial civilization continues on its path, it'll go into some sort of collapse, due to limits of resources and degradation of the environment.”

The movement coincided with the rising awareness surrounding environmentalism when David and Bill Mollison published their first book, Permaculture One: A Perennial Agriculture For Human Settlements. “It set the course for my life,” says David. “Even though I rejected the path of getting on the speaking circuit, I was just more focused on the question; how do I build the skills to live in that world that we want to create?”

In his book Retrosuburbia, David provides practical solutions that focus on what ordinary Australians can do at the household level to create a self-sufficient home, which in turn offers viable solutions for Australian suburbs to become resilient in an energy descent future.

“The required skill set [to work on Melliodora] is incredibly diverse; milking goats, chooks, bees, vegetables, fruit trees and then all the infrastructure maintenance and management of pump systems. It is technically quite complex but it's the way to demonstrate permaculture design and permaculture systems and permaculture living.” 

On the back of the property, an assiduous peach tree towers into the sky’s last light. “What sort of a future are we likely to be facing in what we call the energy descent future? A world of less instead of a world of constant more.” David asserts, “That's just the inevitable future despite all the hoo-haa about renewable energy.”

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