Bill Mollison & the Austral Summer: remediation in a disaster-prone world
In January 2008, we visited CERES Melbourne and met Bill Mollison, author of the seminal book Permaculture One. Reflecting on a remarkable day and the profound topics we explored.
In late December 2007, we lived in Barcelona's Gothic Quarter, and our oldest daughter was ten months old. Our old apartment was luminous and had a tucked-away terrace almost as big as the space indoors, with old planters and plenty of room to stay all day on warm days.
As our daughter set out to discover the world, first on all fours and then trying to hold onto anything to stand up and then asking for a hand to walk a few steps, it got cold enough to have her bedroom door to the terrace closed.
But the baby was lucky, for Barcelona's mild winter, which she didn't seem to love much as it established ridiculous rules like permanent barriers to the flower-rich outdoors of her early months, was about to finish abruptly: between mid-December of 2007 and mid-January of 2008, we experienced a warm Mediterranean summer, only thousands of miles away from the Mediterranean.
Kirsten's older sister was getting married in Sydney, so off we went to discover the Austral Summer, light in luggage and versed in Bill Bryson's writings about the wondrous anomaly of Marco Polo-like animals and accounts of the Aussie's nonchalant toughness. Bryson's In a Sunburned Country really made the long flight more enjoyable.
Travel as a fulfilling experience
Those who travel to places where they have relatives or close friends and acquaintances to welcome them know of the advantages of visiting a place and having an insider perspective of things, with all the comforts and particularities, which truly eases anything getting lost in translation.
Back in late 2007, I still struggled to understand people using English accents I wasn't accustomed to, especially American Southerners and Australians. So, I set to embrace two quick cultural shocks, or at least the two that made the biggest impression at the beginning: words and expressions pronounced "down under" and the absolute beauty of Sydney's gigantic natural bays, with their rather poetic names: Sydney Cove, Botany Bay, White Bay, Darling Harbor, Homebush Bay.
I could see the practical and geographical necessities that had brought the English to pick such a place for their early penal colony. This brings me to the present I got from my soon-to-be brother-in-law on Christmas day of 2007, Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore, an account of the experiment of Australia, which reads like an epic saga (and perhaps it is one). Our daughter got a real-sized stuffed wombat that followed us until not long ago.
Having a young baby came with privileges, and we borrowed the small but quaint row house of one of Kirsten's relatives, aunt and uncle, a retired couple then living in Australia and on vacation to visit their children, spread across the US.
From the little house, which I remember in a calm cul-de-sac of rowhouses in the Glebe neighborhood, we set to discover the area and the rest of Sydney when we had the chance.
Exploring Sydney and the surrounding bush
Sydney is a vast city clustered around neighborhoods, much in the chaotic style of London itself. Both cities' beginnings lacking central planning gave way to dense, multi-centric layouts, which didn't allow for a cohesive transformation in the style of Haussmann in Paris or Cerdà in Barcelona.
Each neighborhood was clustered around mixed-use commercial main streets that resembled places in Britain I had visited, sometimes borrowing the New World rationality of North America. There were plenty of Victorian houses, terrace houses, and other recognizable vernaculars that originated in Britain, and parks looked so welcoming to our baby that we soon relaxed despite Bill Bryson's warnings on the legendary dangerousness of the island continent's flora and fauna, from sharks to spiders.
I remember my brother-in-law joking about a spider making its web in his rowhouse's backyard, which faced the Glebe house we stayed in. He didn't seem that scared or concerned about it, just like Bill Bryson says—I remember thinking. If a place is shaped by its environment, our sense of humor is, too, a byproduct of its context. I found the lack of pomposity and dryness of some of the people we met refreshing. In it, one recognizes the British substratum; it just took a different path in Oceania.
I don't recall any particular interaction, but I still hold the impression I got to this day; this is why it's great to visit places not only having enough time and freedom to explore but also making sure that one is in contact with locals and gets to experience what their everyday routines consist of as well; we've never traveled to cluster around "our people," whatever that means, looking for the comfortable placelessness of expat communities.
Fire-prone Austral summer
After a short stay around the beach neighborhood of Coogee, where we tasted kangaroo meat at an up-and-coming local restaurant, we set to travel by train to Melbourne, and from there, we visited Tasmania and rented a car to explore many places, including the groves of gigantic eucalyptus, "gum trees" to locals, among them those around Cradle Mountain, a magic place in the Central Highlands of Van Diemen's Land, where one can imagine the last Tasmanian tigers in the wild must have roamed.
Back in Melbourne, we had time to discover the city's energy and the charm of Fitzroy, a suburb where coffee and food had nothing to envy any European capital. Falling for analogies, the Austral continent's Mediterranean southwest, with its population concentration and mild climate, enclosed a small-scale Europe: if Sydney felt more British, traveling to Melbourne made me think I was going back home from a trip in a warm version of somewhere the British islands. Melbourne's Fitzroy was, indeed, a blend between some places in San Francisco and the outdoor culture of the Med (with equally high standards of food and casual culture).
Back then, we were mainly living on savings and starting *faircompanies, for I had left my day job, and Kirsten moved from New York City, where she'd worked as a TV producer, first as staff and later as a freelancer.
Due to our website, we made sure to ask around and make appointments to see relevant places, from stores selling salvaged materials and antiques to actual municipal landfills, which back then were reintroducing programs to sort old windows, doors, and other construction elements in good shape, to give them another chance instead of burying them along with the rest of discarded stuff.
We also noticed one recurrent casual conversation among Australians: talking about the weather in the Austral summer means commenting on the fires going on and off around the country. When we visited, there were some significant wildfires in Victoria, New South Wales, Western Australia, and Queensland. Tasmania was the only place where the topic seemed less of a priority for people.
One thing was clear: people outside cities and near "the bush" were beginning to adapt their homes—and lifestyles—to extreme weather events, from heatwaves to wildfire blasts.
Dogs listening to a lecture by Bill Mollison
But the two places that made the biggest impact were a conventional old terrace house in Sydney's Chippendale neighborhood adapted by its owner, Michael Mobbs, to behave in a bioclimatic way; and our visit to the CERES eco-community outside Melbourne, where we met—and interviewed—Permaculture One's co-author, and father of the concept of permaculture, Bill Mollison.
Back then, we had not seen a conventional house looking like any other Victorian townhome in Sydney, like the well-adjusted house of Michael Mobbs, a sustainability expert before there were such people. His house behaved like a living organism, cool in summer and warmish in the wintertime, reusing bathroom and kitchen greywater in a garden pond that purified it. Mobbs was also experimenting with hydroponics. More interestingly, Mobbs' place was off-grid despite being in the city.
Could homes behave like trees? —Asked Mobbs. That was his accomplished goal.
January 12, 2008 was a pleasant day. Our flight back home was approaching, but we had an appointment at CERES, an "environmental park" that followed and taught permaculture practices in buildings, shops, and fields spread throughout 11 acres (4.5 hectares). We were very lucky: back then, Bill Mollison no less, author of the seminal Permaculture One along with David Holmgren, was teaching classes on the site.
When told that a Catalan-American couple of journalists were doing a tour of the place with CERES people, Mollison invited us over. We met him sitting under the shadow of an outdoor patio, surrounded by people attending his class. I noticed some of the alumni were barefoot, and at least one or two were also walking their dogs while learning. Everybody was listening, even the dogs.
Our day with Bill Mollison at CERES Melbourne
Mollison was 79 back then, with his beard neatly trimmed and casual but elegant attire, more timeless than classic. His speech was energetic. We quite didn't know how to interview him, and he must have sensed it, for he eased us up by asking about our places, and where we lived. Kirsten mentioned that she was from California, had worked in New York as a TV producer, and now lived in Barcelona, Spain, where I was from.
That was enough information for Bill Mollison to ask me about a few well-informed things regarding Catalonia's industrial past, which had been tied to the area's previous agricultural enrichment. He sensed that there was some seed of individualism in the place I was coming from, and was probably testing ground for how ready we were to talk about permaculture in Europe and California.
No matter our insignificance, Bill Mollison made the interview interesting for everybody, and in the end, we would have stayed for hours.
There we were, talking to the person that The San Francisco Examiner and the Chronicle had defined as "a new Schumacher" (author of Small is Beautiful, which The Whole Earth Catalog reviewed and popularized in Northern California and beyond), talking about the importance of smallness, local biodiversity, and interdependence of systems, "with a touch of Emerson, for self-reliance, and Jefferson, for independence on the land."
I noticed then, and I keep noticing now, that people who seem to be able to talk in easy and clear terms about complex matters, connecting to any experience and people they are confronted with, often have a rather heterodox learning upbringing. Born in the small Tasmanian village of Stanley, Mollison left school at 15 and held a variety of jobs when others haven't left the class: seaman, shark fisherman, millworker, trapper, snarer, tractor-driver, glass blower.
Then he worked as a researcher in the Fisheries Commission, eventually becoming a tutor at the University of Tasmania, then a senior lecturer in environmental psychology. On the side, however, he learned and experimented with human-environment interactions, co-founding the Tagari Community in Stanley in 1978, the same year Permaculture One was published.
Mollison's musings about wildfires
There's a story related to that Mini DV tape we used to record the interview with Bill Mollison in January 2008; perhaps going through security in the airport, or perhaps due to heat, the tape got corrupted. We still keep that tape, and I'm about to set the task of asking for technical help to properly digitize the master copy so we can share it on Kirsten's channel.
(If you're reading this and know of anybody in the lost trade of digitizing video tapes in formats such as Hi8 or Mini DV, please drop us a line; I'd love to get in touch with you.)
I remembered our story with Mobbs and Mollison, and the adventure of particular tape, as the fires of L.A. were roaring during the last days, for there's a little compelling chapter on best practices around wildfires that Bill Mollison included in his book Permaculture: A Designer's Manual.
This is the beginning of that chapter (p. 451):
"Wildfire is a feature of many sites and climates, and can be created even in hot humid climates by logging, or by block plantings of eucalypts and pines. It is notoriously violent in summer-dry climates peripheral to large arid areas; "wet" savannah or chaparral scrub will burn fiercely when strong advected heat blows in from deserts."
At the end of the next page, he notes:
"In fireprone areas, houses are at most danger from upslope fire; few houses survive wildfire on sharp ridgetops, or in hill saddles that have diverging ridgelines creating a wind (fire) funnel effect. The same funneling or intensification of fire is created by planting inflammable trees (eucalypts) or grasses (pampas grass) along a house driveway; I have seen funnel shaped plantings of this type that would have the effect of a blowtorch on the house, when even concrete will powder, and steel posts behave like spaghetti influenced by Uri Geller (or an Indian snake charmer)."
Well-informed preparation
The steeper the slope of a canyon, the faster the fire will spread—he goes on.
"Wildfire will always happen, often every 8-30 years, on many sites. It will not be severe if normal annual fuel reduction is practiced; the most unsafe way to do this is to "cool burn." The safe ways are to graze off, slash, compost in swales, use as firewood, or to replace tinder with sappy green plants. Part of bioregional planning must be to keep monocultures of inflammable trees to uninhabited ridgetops, or better to scatter such stands throughout grazed or wet forested areas, or to tend them very well indeed in the matter of fuel reduction.
"Ida and Jean Pain (Another Kind of Garden, 1982) have clearly laid out a broadscale, beneficial, fire reduction system of chipping all dry forest fuels, composting or using them for biogas, which in turn fuels the chipping and carting operations, and lastly using compost and sludge to grow gardens, improve soils, and further reduce litter. Every bioregion should, perhaps must, adopt these methods if forests are to be preserved and eventually made fireproof.
"Likewise, in the case of scattered suburbs, it should be compulsory for houses to build to fire specifications, have large roof tanks and ponds, and for developers to build fire-damping dams able to operate by radiocontrol to sheet water over slopes on a Keyline principle. Fire will then be restricted to remote dry-ridge forests, and lightning strikes (as it should be)."
Unpublished interview
Instead of blaming nature for fires or stating that permaculture could avoid them, Bill Mollison stated that wildfires will always happen, and fire-prone areas must prepare to reduce their damage and keeping them out of neighborhoods. To do so, good environmental design and constant systems maintenance and adaptation were necessary.
Somehow, one of the pictures I took of Mollison during that interview made it to his profile on Wikipedia. Whenever I visit that profile, I think about our timely conversation with such an old-school sage.
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Maybe one day we can post that interview—that is, if we manage to bring that audio back.
Bill Mollison died in Hobart, Tasmania, on September 24, 2016, aged 88 years. Here's the obituary by The Guardian. In memoriam.
I wish you the very best of luck with the tape recovery!
Your and Kirsten's work has been life changing to me and I'm sure this interview would be too.
Thanks for your work!