[Pil-pc-oceania] Permaculture history

[pacific-edge]

On 13/7/07 7:28 PM, "permaculture at apollobay.org.au"
<permaculture at apollobay.org.au> wrote:

> Thanks fern,
> 
> I have a masters in History!

> Great Tamara!  The permaculture movement really needs more of it's history
> documented, researched & collated.
> cheers
> Fern 

Too true Fern. That's what one or two of us have talked about on and off.
When Steve Payne and I cooperated in writing about permaculture's past for
this month's edition of New Internationalist magazine - a special on
permaculture - just the experience of talking with Terry White, who - back
in 1978 - started the precursor that became Permaculture International
Journal, made this very clear to me. Over the period of a phone conversation
all of this 'hidden history' poured out as I furiously scribbled to keep up.
After hanging up I sat and realised that our history is still out there but
it's becoming blurred with the passage of time and those first
permaculturists are become harder to find.

This notion of people being out there and still having memories of
permaculture's early period in their heads first came to light a couple
years ago. In my memoir of permaculture which I published online I mentioned
an early permaculture group in northern NSW - Borderlands Permaculture - and
their publication about permaculture planting systems for that part of the
world. Out of nowhere came an email from someone that had been in that group
and knew the publication. He had been trawling the Internet and had found
the memoir. He then told me about the first courses and how there was the
notion of a franchise-like arrangement for permaulture consultants. Lucky
find. 

It's by compiling recollections such as this that we could build a more
comprehensive picture of permacultue's past. It's easier than trying to
produce a comprehensive history as a narrative. That's difficult with more
than one writer because you have to negotiate varying memory of particular
events. This I found when writing a shared memoir with a long-time friend
about the people and times we experienced in our youth.

I do have the rough imaginings of a permaculture history documentation but I
have yet to talk to others about it. What is clear now is how different each
of our experiences in permaculture is and how this would make documenting a
concise history a difficult thing. What I am thinking, instead, is that the
best form might be as a collection of oral histories.

...Russ