Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Gut Lore with Su Dennett
1.3k Plays11 months ago
Today's yakkity yak is with one of the most radical women in permaculture -- and you know how wild those permies can be. It's Su Dennett! Life partner of David Holmgren and unspoken ruler of the roost at Melliodora. Su is a seventy seven year old inspiration, a permaculture matriarch and precious repository of ye old skillz. I sat down with her in the teahouse, a few moons ago now, and record this conversation. (This was actually the first interview I ever recorded for Reskillience, so don’t be alarmed by the references to winter, the bushfire season ahead and fabricated listener questions.) What is totally timeless is Su’s take on food, the gut, kids and parenting, eating animals, talking to animals, household roles, wealth, community, and small town gossip. Get into it.
Come to the Do with Su online launch with Costa!
The RetroSuburbia community on Facebook
RetroSuburbia ~ The Downshifter’s Guide to a Resilient Future
Recommended
Transcript
Homesteading and Preserving Journey
00:00:03
Speaker
Hey there, I'm Katie and you're about to hear one of the most satisfying sounds for any homesteader. Okay, here it is. It's a jar of tomatillo salsa, depressurizing and sealing with a pop. My benchtops are covered in bottle produce, blackberry jam, tomato salsa and pickled cucumbers, all jostling for space.
00:00:32
Speaker
And with every jar that successfully seals, when the squishy little button on the metal lid sucks down with a sometimes hours later, I feel like I'm being applauded by the garden, the larder and the grandmas. Jars popping and clapping as I capture and store summer abundance, squirreling it away for winter.
00:00:56
Speaker
For a long time, I avoided bottling up produce because it always seemed tedious or complicated or risky. Even when I made a rare batch of green tomato chutney, I didn't have confidence that I'd done it right or that it was safe to eat. So those expensive mason jars of homegrown produce languished on the shelf, gathering dust in the mausoleum of my half-baked homesteading attempts.
Podcast and Influence of Sue Dennett
00:01:20
Speaker
It's only now after spending time with Sue Dennett and seeing how simply she does things, how little fuss and fanfare are involved in her food preparation and storing processes that I've been able to get over myself and become the gurken queen I was always destined to be. And if you're not already, this episode of Resculience with Sue Dennett might just coax out your inner pickler, butler, baker and beeswax candlestick maker too.
00:01:49
Speaker
Resilience is a weekly podcast about skills, resilience, and living closer to the ground so we don't have quite so far to fall if our fragile modern systems fail us.
00:02:01
Speaker
It's hosted by me, Katie Payne, and gratefully recorded on the unceded lands of the Jaja Wurrung people in central Victoria. Today's guest, Sue Dennett, is life partner of David Holmgren, an unspoken ruler of the roost here at Meliodora. She's a 77 year old inspiration
00:02:20
Speaker
a permaculture matriarch, and a precious repository of ye olde skills. I loved being able to sit down with Sue in the tea house many moons ago now and record this conversation. It was actually the first interview I ever recorded for Resculients, so don't be alarmed by the references to winter, the bushfire season ahead, and listener questions that are entirely fabricated because at the time Resculients didn't have any listeners, let alone exist.
00:02:47
Speaker
However, what is totally timeless is Sue's take on nourishment, the gut, kids and parenting, eating animals, talking to animals, household roles, wealth, community and small-town gossip. When I listened back to this convo after being stored away in the audio ladder for so long, I wondered why the hell I hadn't released it earlier. But in a way, it's perfect because Do With Sue has just launched.
Course Launch and Collaborations
00:03:16
Speaker
Do With Sue is a long-awaited online course led by Sue and filmed right here at Meliodora that walks you through things like bottling, sourdough bread baking from scratch pasta and cooking on wood, demystifying and de-intimidating these essential frugal homesteading arts. It's so good and so refreshing to learn directly from an elder.
00:03:41
Speaker
I highly recommend becoming a Do With Sue student, and I've linked it in the show notes, and also grabbing a free ticket to the launch party event that we're throwing in a couple of weeks time with Costa. It's going to be a riot.
00:03:56
Speaker
And for one last piece of joyful promotion, Sue and I also cooked up a zine together, which is a really sweet and fun handmade illustrated booklet that complements Do with Sue and visually communicates some of Sue's most dearly held values and quintessential food rules.
Technical Issues and Daily Life
00:04:14
Speaker
Getting the Do with Sue zine back from the printing press was one of the proudest moments of my life after the popping of the lids.
00:04:21
Speaker
Just so you know, there's a bit of microphone noise in this episode because we were using handheld mics and waving them around like batons. So please forgive the turbulence. And here's the sound of a powerful owl in a nearby forest to lead us into this robust conversation with Sue Dannett. And if you listen right through to the end, I'll also let you know who's up on the podcast next week.
00:04:51
Speaker
We're drinking chicory root tea from our local co-op with goat's milk, freshly squeezed from the udders just yesterday. Of the girls out there that are more my pets at the minute because they're getting older and they're making us do a detox from our dairy affliction.
Life and Practices at Meliodora
00:05:13
Speaker
So we're just getting enough for a cup of tea really these days.
00:05:18
Speaker
And the work load is still the same. But, you know, they take us down the gully and we're doing fire prep stuff down there too, which is essential, especially for this year. I think we might have quite a lot of a threat from grass fires since we've had, I think this is the third wet winter we've had. So I think we'll have a good fire danger period here. So we need to be well and truly on the wall to do fire prep now.
00:05:46
Speaker
not wait until fire sees it is upon us. Yes, it feels like we've been lulled into a sense of security over the last couple of seasons. Yeah, we have because that hasn't been the forest fire threat. But also, this time of the year, it's a time of year to do it because this is the
00:06:02
Speaker
time of year where you want to warm up and when you're doing all that physical work, you know, slashing the blackberries and the gorse and the broom and getting the goats here and getting the goats there, you really are warmed up very nicely. Well, speaking of slash hooks, I wonder if you could describe what a day, there's no typical day at Meliodora, but what a semi-typical day in the life of Sue Dannett would entail.
00:06:29
Speaker
Well, once upon a time, I would go down the gully every day. But now that we share with others that that is limited to three days a week. And when we take the girls right down the gully to where they have a rather large electric fenced off paddock.
00:06:46
Speaker
where they're doing their jobs to eat up the blackberry. They don't eat the stems, they just eat the leaves. So I go down there with a slash hook. And I haven't been going this winter very much. I don't think I've been fit enough this winter to go down, but things have changed back again. And slash the canes so that the girls have access to more of that blackberry leaf to eat off.
00:07:13
Speaker
And the good thing is about having an animal that takes you for a walk. It just makes you slow down, observe, look around you and enjoy just what you see around there, all the birds and the different things that are happening with the trees and the different foliage.
00:07:33
Speaker
the oaks that some of which are deciduous, others seem not to be and it helps you to kind of see where you fit in and that's a big joy.
00:07:45
Speaker
And then coming back, I suppose I cook every day from fresh food out of the garden. And we have a lot of meat in the freezer these days. We don't eat meat that comes through an abattoir. I cannot support that system, even if it's organically grown, as we say, which kind of
00:08:13
Speaker
is an attitude in itself to say you're growing an animal. It seems rather an odd concept. However, even if it's not had things to make it not an organic free of pesticides and all those sorts of things, I still think I can't support that industry that
00:08:39
Speaker
carts animals in big trucks all around the countryside and then they have to line up for death. If an
Sustainable Living and Education
00:08:46
Speaker
animal is killed in the paddigore wild, then I can see that that is something that Mother Nature provides that.
00:08:55
Speaker
And I like the animals that are provided by Mother Nature in this country and I'm not such a big supporter of the cattle and sheep industries because they are displacing those and in fact they compete with the land that would be supporting the kangaroos etc.
00:09:16
Speaker
And their numbers grow immensely in some seasons, and then they crash when there are bad seasons. So it doesn't seem such a bad idea to actually take some of those animals for your own use.
00:09:32
Speaker
and to eat those animals. And I think if you're going to eat meat, you really need to learn how to kill. Although for me, that is a very big issue, especially as I'm getting older. I feel taking a life is much more difficult. But then if I'm to eat meat, I have to participate in that whole thing, even if I don't.
00:09:54
Speaker
do the killing myself. I can prepare the excess boys roosters or the excess boys in the goats to go to their deaths. But that has to be very quick and where they don't suffer.
00:10:16
Speaker
What else do I do inside? The house is passive solar, so that means that in winter, when you have a good winter, unlike this last winter, that's been a lot of no solar, so it's just basically the house is a bit passive and a bit cold.
00:10:34
Speaker
But other than that, normally with a fairly bright winter that we will get here typically, the house gets heated by the greenhouse and it's a very light house, so it's a very nice place to live in. The natural materials as are employed in this tea house here and also the studio down the hill that was built for Dave's mum.
00:11:02
Speaker
All natural materials, I think, makes a difference to how you feel, how you relate. It's a bit more like relating to outdoor with those natural materials. So I also will work in the office a very short amount of time during the week these days.
00:11:23
Speaker
run Meliodora Publishing anymore from here, so that's less work. But we do have tours once a month for nine months of the year, so that's of a Sunday, and I do morning and afternoon teas on those tours where people look at the house, look at the food systems in the house, and more and more that is getting popular because people are really, really wanting to engage with
00:11:53
Speaker
their own food, where their food comes from, what you do with it. And what, since we've been doing that for quite a lot of years, then I think I've got quite a bit to share with people, even though that's only my take on how you would do something. Everybody has their own individual take. But as with recipes for food, a recipe you look to for guidance of how to start making something,
00:12:20
Speaker
And then you go on an adventure of experimentation, changing ingredients, changing amount of this or that. And that's pretty exciting. And I found that over the years, that's been really fantastic with kids as well. They love all that outdoor food, the berries in season, the first oranges or the first mandarins or anything like that. They're the first ones to know about it.
00:12:49
Speaker
they love helping themselves in the garden. And I think that will beat anything that you can buy at the shop. And in terms of getting familiar with your environment is such a joy. You know, little kids, when they're babies and they can't walk yet, they experience everything through their mouths. And so on the ground is where they need to be, you know, to experience everything. They'll see their first little,
00:13:15
Speaker
little ants or bees or whatever, they might get stung, but that's not a big deal. So experiential learning is the way that we all need to go and learn through the gut. I mean, I think the locus of learning is in the gut, not in the head. That's just one pathway into the gut.
00:13:39
Speaker
Can you say a little bit more about what you mean by learning through the gut? Is that literally popping things in your gob and seeing what happens or is it intuiting using your feeling senses more in the world? Yeah, it's
Cultural Experiences and Bread-making
00:13:52
Speaker
using all your senses and that what you put in your mouth and that goes into your stomach influences how your body responds to things.
00:14:01
Speaker
and how your other senses develop, I think. And when children are outside and on the ground, they are fulfilling what I see as their role in being a conduit between heaven and earth. And so we're the intermediate conduit between those two mediums. And so the spirituality of the sky and the grounding of the earth and the nourishment of the earth
00:14:28
Speaker
So you've got the strength from the ground and the more airy, light, spiritual, more, less concentrated if you like, but more connected into the emotions.
00:14:43
Speaker
And so the gut seems to be the centre of us, so therefore the centre of those things. And so it's important, I think, for children to learn that what they put in their mouths does nourish every part of them, and that children don't have to be fed this, that or the other. If there's a choice on the table of good food, they can always make that.
00:15:10
Speaker
that choice themselves so that then they get a feeling for what their bodies need at that particular time. And that's not to say you ask a child, what do you want to eat today and I'll cook it for you. That's not the idea.
00:15:24
Speaker
The idea is we eat together, we're very social beings and that community is the ultimate and that children just start off in small numbers of people, two or three or four people and then, you know, as they get a bit older, they are more external looking and the broader community then is the holding of them.
00:15:49
Speaker
So, yeah, does that answer your question? Not my question. Above and beyond. And it's a really nice place to pick up your own origin story because we were looking at photos recently of you from back in the glory days or the Italian days and you were very glamorous. I saw you on a beach with a fella, on a motorbike, not necessarily the Sue Dennett that I would have envisaged.
00:16:17
Speaker
knowing you now as such a radical permaculture elder and principled human being. So I'm wondering if those seeds of true connection with your lifeways were always there despite the polaroid shots of you with fabulous hair and high heels? Or have you consciously chosen this life and cultivated all of the skills that it requires?
00:16:46
Speaker
Well, I think going back before those years of my Italian years and Greek years and Italian years, I grew up on the edges of the towns and my father worked in a bank and we got moved every four or five years. So we experienced different places, but we always ended up on the edge of town and my mum always started a garden there.
00:17:14
Speaker
because I was born in 1947, which is not that long after the war. So everybody, you know, all the women sewed the kids' clothes and they grew gardens and had chalks and these sorts of things. And so I did grow up with animals around me and with food in the garden around me.
00:17:37
Speaker
and with my mum making all those things. Now you can say that the little woman in the home is pretty boring but I eventually did choose that for myself again and I see that as the little woman in the home is just definitely not boring at all.
00:17:54
Speaker
In fact, the little woman, the little man, and the little child should be in the home, really, for a much longer time during the day than they are these days, where you have to get in a car and rush off to work somewhere, drop the kids off at the crayshore at school, and just then all get home at a certain time, and you're time poor, and then you cut corners for your food, and it's very regimented, and there's not a lot of room for things just to emerge.
00:18:24
Speaker
and I think lockdowns showed many people this. Anyway, getting back to my origins, when I was 19 I decided that I would go to Greece and Italy.
00:18:36
Speaker
because I was pretty fond of art and architecture and I wanted to see those places and just see how people lived a bit differently. And that's where I really met the base growing of food and the real focus on good food and the honouring of each ingredient that you got out of the garden and or from the village or from the fields.
00:19:05
Speaker
In Greece, I always remembered seeing early on, I'd see these women in their black aprons and often in their black gear, the widows. They'd be out in some field somewhere or other, three or four of them, and they'd be bending over bumps in the air and kind of, what on earth are these women doing? And they were collecting their greens for the day, and those greens were the weeds. They were the horta that you collected every day because
00:19:34
Speaker
that you didn't have to grow them. They grew themselves, and they grew in the right place for the right nourishment in those different things. And they knew the complementarities of their food. They knew the characteristics. They knew medicinal value of a lot of those things. And I've never met that before. My mum was a nurse, so I grew up with the Western medicine and
00:20:01
Speaker
hospital and all this kind of stuff. So it was quite an eye opener and similarly when I went to southern Italy where I lived for 11 years, I was in Greece for nearly two years. I had a girl looking after my firstborn when I went back to teach at school and she was only 13. She was a village girl and every day she would go out with him and pick
00:20:29
Speaker
some greens from in the wild and bring them home and she'd tell me how to cook them and we'd cook them together and sometimes she'd bring something back from the villages as well. So flavour then became something that was really precious and junk food didn't seem to be on the horizon at all in those years. I remember in Napoli when I went there there was a tiny little
00:20:58
Speaker
Kentucky Fried Chicken in the middle of one of the sort of CBD areas. But it was sort of like one, two arms wide little place. And it never grew in size because people like food and they didn't consider that food really. You'd go to the Tava Lakaldo where there were all the dishes that you would see at home and more in, you know, the Bung Marie, they were already prepared and you'd have your hot,
00:21:27
Speaker
lunch meal there.
Practical Skills and Community Building
00:21:29
Speaker
So I found that really exciting. And then one spot I lived in, which was more urban, there'd be this little fruity vandal or the man would come around with his fruit and veggie in the cart and call out to the women and, you know, the women up in the higher rise places, they'd drop their baskets down on their ropes and haggle over what they wanted. No, that's rubbish. I don't want
00:21:55
Speaker
Oh, they're much better. And those ones you gave me last week were not good quality. I want better quality this week. And people were really fussy. But they cooked, you know, from scratch every day. And that's where I learned to do that. And that the family then that I married into, they had, they were in the rag trade. So hence I became a yappy girl.
00:22:22
Speaker
along with him, but they still got their olive oil from the village, their wine was made in the village, their own grapes, et cetera, and food wards of the essence.
00:22:37
Speaker
whenever I'm listening to a podcast or conversations that people are having and the guest always seems that they have life in hand and they've got their skills honed. And I wonder, yeah, but how? I guess I'm a little bit obsessed with...
00:22:54
Speaker
making those things relevant or offering inroads for people who aren't in a context like ours and aren't in a bubble like ours. And I wonder if you have any words to say on that. Let me tell you about my first bread making experience. When I was living in Napoli, we used to go down near Malphie Coast and we had this little piece of plot of land with
00:23:19
Speaker
just a little sort of wreck of a building where somebody had lived in the past. But when we first went there, it had lice in it and we had to sort of, you know, whitewash the walls and everything. But that was in Positano, a lovely little town right on the beach. And it was all walking there. There was, you can drive down to the beach or anything. And I went with a friend who'd been living there a while. She was Canadian, married to one of the locals.
00:23:49
Speaker
And we popped into one of her friends and she was making bread in this lovely, broad, little, flat, wooden thing that you made your bread in that was dusted with flour and you just covered it with the tea towel. You never washed it or anything, it wasn't any need. The tea towel stopped the dust and then you just put a little extra flour in when you wanted to roll out your bread. So here am I watching this woman and going, wow, I've got to have a go at this.
00:24:16
Speaker
And so she gave me a bit of instruction and I went down to the little local shop and I bought some crappy flour and I didn't really think about it as crappy flour at the time. But I went home and I did what I'd seen her doing and I rolled it up into a breadstick and I popped it into the oven and it came out like a rock. And I kind of went, oh, geez.
00:24:46
Speaker
But anyway, we couldn't eat that. You needed an axe. You really needed an axe. And I didn't know what to do with it. So I threw it away. Something I'd never do these days. So I had another go and guess what? Exactly the same results.
00:25:03
Speaker
And I had a third go with the same results, and it was like, what am I doing wrong? I just don't understand. And then I was explaining to my friend, look, I've done this three times now, and it's still like a rock, and it's just inedible. You need to change all of this. Anyway, she said, well, tell me what you're doing. So I explained to her, and she said, oh, did you put the sourdough in to rise it? And I said, what's sourdough?
00:25:33
Speaker
And she said, oh, well, it's in the place of yeast. And this woman, you know, she's got her own little sourdough thing that goes on all year round and you don't need to go and buy yeast all the time. And most people just buy yeast. That's really convenient. And you could just make a yeasted bread. That's quick. And I said, well, she didn't tell me you had to do that. And I didn't see her ever doing that.
00:25:56
Speaker
And she said, oh, no, she'd probably put it in before you arrived. So that was kind of like, oh, well, you know. How does one know these things? Because, you know, when somebody shows you something, you expect them to show you the whole deal. But when you've been doing something for a lot of years and you just learned from your mum or your aunt or whatever, from the extended women family, because all those skills were passed down by the women,
00:26:27
Speaker
then they expect that you know all these things. I'm just dumb about these things because my mum never made bread. I saw her in the garden and what she had to do with the garden and I'd help with the chooks and things like that. So it's really a slow, slow business. And I think the key is
00:26:48
Speaker
To take something that takes your fancy that, oh, I want to do this particular thing and then go visit someone or find out who in your neighbourhood does that particular thing and go and hang out with that person, see if you can help and learn how to do that. Because learning by doing is how we all can learn, irrespective of who we are or how we learn, we can all do it by
00:27:15
Speaker
just doing and then you know take that one thing and you have several goes at it you'll get better or worse and you learn that okay while I'm experimenting these are good ingredients if you're getting good ingredients you don't want to throw them away even though then they're not a great success you can convert them into something else if they're not as good as you think and your family kind of doesn't want to eat them
00:27:43
Speaker
So yeah, that's how I've learned many of these things. And then once you've done some, you get really confident about, well, I reckon I'll have a go at doing this or that. So it's whatever takes you fancy. And that brings out the creative side in you. That brings out the more intuitive side of you. And then if you've got the kids around and doing those things, they are great at those things.
00:28:11
Speaker
I remember the first time I made pasta. I had my three year old with me and it was going on for hours and hours and I wouldn't have, you know, I don't think I would have managed it within the timeframe to make a meal. You know, this is pasta from scratch. Had he not been there and he was great. And kids love doing these real things.
00:28:33
Speaker
Why give them Play-Doh if you can give them bread to make? They love it and they're very capable. Okay, so I'm hearing follow your nose and your fancies, fail a lot, enslave your family and keep a chainsaw to hand.
00:28:51
Speaker
Oh well, with bread, for example, you can just wet it up and put it back in the oven and that makes it soft. I love the way you do that. That's a total revelation. It doesn't matter to me how old my bread is because I know I can sprinkle some water on it, put it in the pan with a little bit of butter and it fries up a dream. Oh, I just put that piece, wet it all up and put it in the oven and it comes out like fresh. Yeah, such a good hack. I've also seen you sharpen a knife on the back of a plate. Oh yeah, well,
00:29:19
Speaker
Um, I have my knife sharpeners. First of all, it was used to be David that used to do it. And then Oliver learned, um, how to sharpen a knife and he.
00:29:29
Speaker
That was something he really loved to do, so I always had sharp knives. But then we've gotten a little bit of slack with that ritual, but even if they get a little bit blunt, then you can grind a little bit on the rim at the back of a plate or a small plate or a bowl, just as long as you've got that raised surface and you rub the knife around on that almost flat.
00:29:55
Speaker
And that will just give you a little bit of a hone until you get the real knife sharpener to do you a really good job. Yeah, it looks pretty bad ass when you're doing it as well, whilst serving up an amazing lunch.
00:30:10
Speaker
So I'm wondering from your perspective, what are some of the skills that can help people actually feel a lot less anxiety around what's coming down the pipeline? And also too, not to take for granted what you think that future might look like. Maybe it isn't doom and gloom, I'm not sure. So I'd love to hear about those skills that you think are really crucial and important, and also too a bit of a vision of what you think might be ahead.
00:30:37
Speaker
I because I'm I'm a very sort of intuitive person and I
00:30:42
Speaker
focus a lot in my gut and fairly sensitive to those issues of what's going on in the world. I find that really depressing. And so I think that that is disenabling us to do the things that we can do. And in Australia, we live in paradise. We don't have, you know, the regime that's at our heads with a gun yet, because that's what stops you from getting your skills and
00:31:12
Speaker
being more open-minded and engaging in things around you and getting into a strong community. And I think the skills that we need and that all children need these skills more than anything else, forget schools, you know, they need to learn about where the food comes from.
00:31:35
Speaker
how it gets to their plates, how to cook it, what you use to cook it, what will give you independence from the systems that we depend on that may or may not be there but that then leads you to more interaction with your community and that non-monetary economy which is like
00:31:56
Speaker
That was the old way of having an insurance system because what you could give ensured that people would feel that they wanted to give you something back. So if you like, it's ensuring indebtedness of others and you say, well, that's not a very nice way of looking at things. But that is your local insurance. It's much better than paying money.
00:32:22
Speaker
to the insurance company and the insurance company who knows how long it's gonna be around, especially with more disasters and things that are happening, the insecurities of weather changing a lot. We're on track for big changes and that's just normal whether you believe in climate change or you don't. If you look back in history, we have these big ups and downs of ice ages, et cetera, and we're getting close to one of those again now.
00:32:52
Speaker
But even forgetting those things, you want to enjoy this life that you have been given. It's a precious life, so do as many things as you can for yourselves. And I don't think that by having all renewable electricity is going to do it. It doesn't do it for me. I don't feel secure there because I'm so
00:33:17
Speaker
feeling dependent. We use computers and things like that. But for me, if the computer crashes and business goes out the window, I've still got my wood for cooking. And I feel really rich when I'm well endowed with wood. And that thing of going out to the forest and cutting the wood, collecting it, spending that time out there, looking around and then having an enjoyable time,
00:33:43
Speaker
doing that is such a reward. It's not work to go and get play at the end of the year or you're two weeks off so you can fly to Bali or whatever. What you have around you is very precious and you don't have to go far to see a change in things.
00:34:02
Speaker
So it would be ideal for me if I didn't use the car and that I went places where I could just walk. That would be something that I would really aspire to. And I haven't managed yet. And I would really like to do that. Or if you can ride or if you can hitch. Mostly, for example, when I drive to town, I have several things to do. And so, yes, checking in with each other and having the time to do that
00:34:31
Speaker
is an essential part of it all. Not to try and cram too much into your day. The other thing, the hitching
00:34:40
Speaker
I found really good because it gets you to see people that you wouldn't normally see. And we tend to get into our own little ruts with people we identify with who are a bit similar to us. And, you know, we tend not to relate so much to those who don't, you know, have the focus on the same things. And that cross kind of cross community referencing and
00:35:09
Speaker
Influencing.
00:35:10
Speaker
because they influence you as much as you influence them. And we mustn't be that arrogant that we think we've got it all right and they've got it all wrong. It's not like that. It's not like that at all. So hitching against silos. Yeah, hitching is really good. I'm very embarrassed to say. Quite a few years ago, I hitched with this woman and I asked her about what her name was. Oh, where do you live? And she happened to live at the end of my street and she'd been living here 15 years and I had never met her.
00:35:41
Speaker
That was so embarrassing. Kind of went, well, you think you're into community, Sue, but you don't even know the people in your street. What are you talking about? Well, I think a lot of people, especially over COVID, got to know the people in their street in a new way. But I'm wondering about this sense of indebtedness and
00:36:06
Speaker
engendering true indebtedness and if that's possible whilst ever we have access to things that are convenient because what I saw in the city was there was this upswell of seedling swapping and backyard produce sharing and all of the warm fuzzy things but ultimately we still fall back on supermarkets and electricity and our own
00:36:31
Speaker
cars to get places and that true need for each other is never there. Well, we have those entities that we can procure our needs from and through. So I'm wondering, do you really feel interdependent and indebted to this community and have you seen
00:36:51
Speaker
evidence that people would support you in a pinch. Absolutely. If you can work together on something too, like instead of going to a cafe and having a cuppa, if you go to somebody's place and they're shelling peas and you sit there and shell peas with them, that's a sense of shared things that are useful rather than just empty consumerism.
00:37:13
Speaker
And this is very much a tourist town, and that is a very big focus. But it's a very fragile existence. And if you don't have the money to do that, and to get the money to do that, you need to go out and do your penance in whatever job you can get.
00:37:30
Speaker
Jobs aren't always that easy or desirable and they require quite a lot of money like in a car or whatever. We think we need to get there, the clothes that you need to wear there, that sort of thing.
00:37:46
Speaker
I also think that things in the Pass For Me community has been a very big focus because, in effect, with a friend of mine who just lived across the road here, we'd be chatting away in the office and she'd say, oh, yeah, look, I really want to do this particular thing. Like, I want to learn how to spin.
00:38:07
Speaker
And we'd say, well, let's see if we can get somebody to teach us how to spin. And that's wool not a class in a gym. Oh, yes. To spin wool because in effect at the local tip.
00:38:20
Speaker
The local tip was an absolute gem for getting all sorts of things. I got 13 bags of alpaca fleece that was already washed everything.
Land Stewardship and Urban Living
00:38:33
Speaker
Just needed a bit of carding and then you could spin it. 13 rubbish bags full for $5 and you kind of go,
00:38:39
Speaker
What am I going to do with all this wool? I'm never going to get around to doing all that, and I don't even know how to start, even though I had my mum's spinning wheel. So she said, oh, well, let's see who we've got in the way of spinners around this town, and let's do it through Hepburn Real Localisation Network. And our Real Localisation Network that she and I started, we started with that kind of thing in mind. Oh, I want to do this. Do you want to do that? Yeah, well, let's organise it. Other people will want to do it. And then we can have somebody
00:39:09
Speaker
that we can pay to show us how to do it. And that kind of thing was really exciting to do. And it led to us hanging out together a lot. We'd have film nights and all sorts of things like that. And it was such a buzz for us all. And it was generally a gold coin donation or something like that at a local pub that we were trying to get not to focus on alcohol, which is
00:39:37
Speaker
in this community is a bane of many people's lives. Especially at that time, it was really bad. There were the footies who were generally drunks and very bad news around the town, all the young people. So we would go there and the pub would give us the venue for nothing. And just if we said that you could get dinner there beforehand. So we'd have all these film nights and then we'd pick our films and with the gold coin donation,
00:40:07
Speaker
we could either buy a film or we used to get the film through the State Library Film Archive and they would send them up to you free and you'd just have to have the money to send them back. And we showed heaps of good films and we would have discussions afterwards and those sorts of things that made us really tight as a community and we'd discuss things like hitching or
00:40:34
Speaker
where we didn't need the money, where we would put our energies and how the kids could thrive in this town without having to get on public transport and go to Melbourne for entertainment and things like that. You'd have people that would go bush with the kids or we'd encourage them to go themselves. And that really knitted us together and gave us a sense of
00:41:03
Speaker
You know, if I'm sick, I know someone is going to bring me a meal because we then people, women who were having babies, there would be a meal tree for them when they just had their baby and someone would do their nappy washing for two weeks or, you know, those sorts of things really boomed. And this community has been and continues to be highly focused on these things, even though tourism is the dominating feature of the town behind that.
00:41:33
Speaker
there still is this very strong community. It's a really simple, I'm going to say a technology of community building, which is simply gathering, gathering people together and communicating about your needs, having a request fest, you know, what do people need? Put those questions to the group and with a very small handful of people, the resources in terms of the knowledge and the skills and the
00:42:00
Speaker
the support that are there in that group are extraordinary. Yeah and things like
00:42:08
Speaker
particular people are really good at, say, killing an animal. There are others then who have emerged that are very good at tanning the skins of those animals. And then there are others, again, that can use those for making clothes or shoes. And it just extends on and on. People seem to get really inspired like they do. We used to have
00:42:34
Speaker
open mics at a poetry venue here and people would come up with the most amazing stuff. People who'd never written anything before would get up and recite their poetry or read their little piece that they'd written about the town or sing a song
00:42:55
Speaker
about the town that could be pretty scary, daubing this person in, but very cleverly hidden and daubing that person in. It was all, you know, tongue in cheek. But that's another thing that I wanted to say. People say, oh, there's so much gossip in small country towns. This is very true. But the gossip that people see is a negative. What I see is you gossip about this person and that person, but it's usually,
00:43:24
Speaker
we care that he's gone off the rails, or she's having a really hard time with so-and-so, or her mum died and so she, you know, the kids need this or that. And so I think there is a very big plus to gossip. If it's not done with malevolence, it's a great thing. Of course, in small communities where you know everybody, then you kind of go, someone, a friend of ours left because she couldn't stand,
00:43:54
Speaker
how everybody knew everybody's business but I think that in a way helps to keep you honest if you like and there is a lot of room to be yourself here because we are so financially independent
00:44:12
Speaker
of each other still, there's that not complete dependence. So it's not quite so insular. So this community is very varied. And if you're a weirdo, you probably fit really well in this place. All the weirdos, we are now requesting your presence in Dalesford.
00:44:33
Speaker
I'd like to know, Sue, how you think about money and its place in your greater ecosystem of income and wealth. Money is an important part of things because whether we think we are or we aren't, we are definitely within
00:44:53
Speaker
the mainstream society. And we have people working for us and it costs to maintain a property, but you can have swaps like we do here for people to work. But a certain amount of money is required for some of the basic things that you need, like resources for a lot of maintenance is happening.
00:45:17
Speaker
at this time. And you do need to buy those resources. So there is a place for money, but it's not the principle thing that we do to earn money. We try and we've never earned a taxable income and we've tried to be to substitute for the taxes that we would have paid. We've tried to do as many things as we possibly can ourselves.
00:45:42
Speaker
like we try and pay for our own health care, for example. And we also try and maintain a lot of things like fire safety in our fire sector and encourage other people to do the same. Because if you have to pay the government or the council to do these things, it's actually very, very expensive. So you're better off to spend some of your time doing that and not
00:46:12
Speaker
paying, you know, not working to get that money to pay those institutions that don't always service that will either. And our expectations are not fulfilled. I love that because it draws attention to
00:46:30
Speaker
I know for myself personally all the things that I don't even see and that are invisibly operating that I take so for granted. It's like you're telling me that I might have some responsibility for the land around me beyond this little demarcated area that is known as mine.
00:46:47
Speaker
So even the idea that we go out further than this property, what's on the title, but we have a sense of obligation responsibility and I suppose indebtedness to the land down the gully. Yes, well I think because we owe our whole existence to the land, then we have a reciprocal need to give back.
00:47:13
Speaker
and to do what we feel is our right contribution. That will depend on what your attitude is.
00:47:24
Speaker
The idea is to not take more than you give and that I would love somehow to get back to that idea that like the the Aboriginal peoples had right to live on land and be on country and there was no title to the ownership and no exclusion.
00:47:45
Speaker
You had a right to fish and hunt and do those things but you didn't have a right just to this little bit of land that was yours. It's not necessary because their attitude of you belong to the land as well as the land belongs to you gives you a different perspective but you know in our society it's really difficult to know how to approach getting
00:48:09
Speaker
more toward that than the English system of land tenure. I'm remembering my life in the city walking without actually making contact with the ground because my feet are in shoes and I'm walking on asphalt or concrete and this is such a leap to think about.
00:48:28
Speaker
not having a place that I would call mine and also looking after a verge or something that seems like of course it's someone else's responsibility because there are so so many people here all crammed in and I'm not even making contact with this
00:48:45
Speaker
this living country beneath my feet. So I'm wondering how you see people's attitudes changing in the city and what people can do if they are in the thick and the throng of humanity where most people are in an urban context. Yeah. Well, I think in the cities, the cities could become very liveable if we could only eliminate cars from them.
00:49:11
Speaker
And that would allow us to have more land that then was not covered over. Because how do we have connection to the land that's all covered over, even if we go barefoot? You don't get the opportunity really, unless you go to a park or somewhere like that, to really have that complete feeling of having an earth connection. But most places have at least a little handkerchief plot that you could grow something in.
00:49:40
Speaker
And there are also other spots where you could go and do that with a community garden or on somebody else's land, go and help them. There's still no need to own in the city.
00:49:57
Speaker
even though it is more depressing from the point of view of there's so much in the way of full-on energy that distracts you. And I think you have to turn off a lot in the city because if you had all your senses open and to receive, then I don't think you would cope because it's overwhelming. The amount of energy moving is immense and very disturbing.
00:50:25
Speaker
So going to places nearby, most people have somewhere nearby they could go to have some connection to the ground.
00:50:39
Speaker
and interact. I think a lot of people, a lot of young people especially, I see that in people who come on the tours, have created quite little oases in the city. They've got their little share house and they've got their food in the garden out the back and they're all doing a bit of interaction there. They're still free to come and go because we live very
00:51:03
Speaker
non sedimentary lifestyles. So we're kind of nomadic in a way, most people move within seven years from one place to another. But yeah, a lot of these young people really have it together and they go skipping a lot and save the food that's thrown out from behind.
00:51:25
Speaker
the supermarkets, et cetera, and I'm not a fan of supermarkets. I think the supermarkets are the enemy of farmers. So if you can shop at places that are not supermarkets that really, we can have an impact on what they do because they only have a margin of, I think it's two to 3%, so they really rely on turnover. So, you know, if not very many people decide not to go there,
00:51:54
Speaker
then they are going to be really looking how they can get these people back. And I think farmers markets, for example, are making quite a big impact on that. And young people are working on farms a lot more too. City farms, there's a connection between land
00:52:17
Speaker
that people are giving for people to grow on those sorts of things that you've experienced too, Katie. I think those people are being much, much more informed now about, gosh, I do have choices. Gosh, I could do this or that. And feeling the benefits in their own bodies, their spiritual connection again, because we've lost our spirituality and that's not religion and spirituality is the basis of religion.
00:52:46
Speaker
We all need a spirituality and that's an honouring of what we have been given here. I'm very optimistic about the numbers of people who are taking up those options and feeling really nourished by that and feeling that they don't need a lot of physical stuff and they don't need to have their high heels and
00:53:13
Speaker
their clothes that they change every second day and wouldn't be dead seen dead wearing twice in a row or something like that or boyfriend with a big fast car or you know those sorts of things
00:53:26
Speaker
going to high-end restaurants and these sorts of things. Consumerism is just not within what they think about.
Household Roles and Community Engagement
00:53:36
Speaker
That's very encouraging. And I love the way you've tuned into the pleasure, the pleasure of tending the things that support us. Because when I'm working, working physically,
00:53:50
Speaker
And that is manual labour, which is supposedly so beneath someone who has their sights set on an impressive career. But I take so much delight in turning the compost pile because it's my gym. It's my the fertility of the garden. Yeah. Even when it's hard. Yeah. And the children learn through adversity. We've got to stop thinking that we have to protect our children from everything. Children's experiences can't be substituted. No one can
00:54:19
Speaker
substitute that and do the learning for them or protect them from this, that and the other. If you don't ever have any adversity in your life, you don't learn how to deal with it so that when you come to it, you're very ill-equipped.
00:54:33
Speaker
I have a few listener questions for you, Sue Dennett, which I just made up because we don't have any listeners at this point. I'm going to pretend there are listeners and they're getting by request to pick your brains. Oh, okay, here we go. What do you think should be normal but isn't? Well, what I think should be normal is children
00:54:55
Speaker
parents doing kid swaps never to go to daycare or creche or any of those places and that you need two or three families that do something a bit similar to you not exactly the same and you do kid swaps and kids have to learn how to navigate that the differences of what people eat whether you're allowed to jump on the couch or whatever it is that they do
00:55:22
Speaker
And that would be very something that I would really appreciate and that kids would be then outside at people's homes, in gardens, in the forest, those sorts of things. Cracker answer. When are you least permaculture?
00:55:41
Speaker
through my sugar addiction. I grew up with a lot of, we didn't drink water we drank cordial and we always had sweets at the end of the meal so I grew up with a lot of sugar so that's something that's really difficult to crack I found and that yeah if I had a half a metre of chocolate in the house I would eat it all in one sitting so my
00:56:08
Speaker
The way of dealing with that is to try not to have it in the house. Chocolate is not permaculture, if anyone's wondering. Addictions. This is a question from me. I've seen you talking to the cats, or the cat, Mala, and the goats, and they actually listen? They do. How do you do it? You just do it.
00:56:31
Speaker
and eventually you'd talk to them like you'd talk to anybody else and eventually you get an answer. Like yesterday we were going out at five o'clock, of course it was still light, and Mauna the cat usually gets fed after dark. And I said, oh, I think you're going to have to go and get your own food tonight. Is that okay, Mauna? And he went, meow! Like, no way!
00:56:59
Speaker
So yeah, just keep talking and they get to know what you're saying and it's just interacting and observing what they do. You and David split household roles.
00:57:16
Speaker
It's not about you both doing all things equally at all. It is very specific, the niches that you occupy in this household and on this land. Can you give a retort to someone who might say that's old fashioned?
00:57:32
Speaker
Yeah, well, when we first came here and we bought this property and we were, you know, raving to go and we were young and fit and lots of ideas and, you know, big property, we had to get everything contoured and planted up and everything and we were going to do everything. Both of us were going to do everything.
00:57:54
Speaker
So, you know, we started out, didn't take that many weeks to work out that there was so much to do that it was maybe better if, oh, you do this because you already know how to do that and I'll go and do a so and so. And so very soon that
00:58:14
Speaker
reverted to gender roles and those gender roles have continued and you're going oh you know that's really passe and you know why did you fall into that that's a real trap and you know barefoot and pregnant at the sink and this kind of stuff it's when it's by choice that's a different matter it's a totally different matter and I'm very happy to do those gender roles because
00:58:43
Speaker
I've developed those skills and I like the things that I do. Sometimes I get sick of them and sometimes Dave gets sick of his role and then it's not necessarily we swap, but the times that I kind of go, oh, can you get dinner tonight? And he just goes and gets dinner. It's not a problem. It's not like that's your job. I've been working all day or something like that. We have that flexibility. Can you go and do a so-and-so instead of me or whatever?
00:59:12
Speaker
So I think those...as long as you have an agreement between yourselves. I had some friends when I was living just outside Rome. He was like...he took the feminine role and she took the classic male role. She went out to work and he did the kids and stay-at-home parent.
00:59:33
Speaker
That worked brilliantly for them because he loved cooking, he loved all those things and she didn't want to do those things. She was English and her food skills were non-existent. So, you know, it's whatever works for you, whatever you organise amongst yourselves and that doesn't have to stay the same all your life either. Yeah, not being wedded to an ideology at the expense of efficiency and natural inclination. Yeah.
01:00:04
Speaker
I'm wondering, are goats assholes or just misunderstood? Well, I think the thing that you have to understand with animals that you need to not think that you're going to dominate them and that it's give and take in a way. I mean, we have that idea of, you know, the flock of sheep out in the paddock and then you get the dog to round them all up and then you put them on a truck and you do this, that and the other.
01:00:31
Speaker
That's a commercial way of dealing with animals, and I think to a certain extent.
01:00:38
Speaker
I'm not very comfortable with it because when you interact with animals directly, then you get to see each one has a personality and just like us, we're all the same. We're all animals and we like to be respected in our individuality to a certain extent. Like, as you know, we've got Pip here that you say, Pip, let's go this way and Pip goes the opposite way.
01:01:02
Speaker
You know, we've rechristened her, Mondure Pip. Because Pip's always doing something. So I think, yeah. And if you don't follow what you set as a sort of a regime, if you're late, if you're an hour late to Milgore, you know, you've done something drastically different.
01:01:31
Speaker
Animals do love their regime, as do little kids. Little kids love their regime. Then they'll pay out on you. They don't bite you necessarily, or they'll just go and eat that tree that is just gonna not grow if you take that bit out of the top of it, or they'll pay out on you. So that's where the asshole bit comes in. And humans are like that, aren't they?
01:02:00
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. There's no question there. Yeah, what I've learnt from the goats is there's usually a reason why. There's hesitancy or obstinacy. If they don't want to go to a certain paddock, the weather, it might be a sunny, blue, clear-skied morning, but they know that it's going to rain.
01:02:19
Speaker
So they've got to go to Peter's paddock and walk down the doorway. So they want to go somewhere where there's shelter. So when I think, when I actually realise that they're logic, I feel quite humbled and like a bit of an idiot as well. Because they're the ones whose little beard is picking up on the meteorology of the
01:02:35
Speaker
that we hadn't worked yet. Exactly. So do you have off the top of your head a few recommendations, even if that's a book, but potentially teachers or schools or things that are happening in this area that you would offer to people as really good ways of getting resilient? Well, first and foremost, I think you need to look around at the people who live here and to see what skills they have. If you can go and hang out with someone, talk to them and
01:03:05
Speaker
not use up their time sitting down in a cafe, but to go and help them to do something and learn by doing there. And you can be of assistance to them that exchange in skilling up in any of the things that you want. Like we have volunteers here who come and say, can I come and hang out when you're working on Monday or Wednesday?
01:03:26
Speaker
and they'll come along and the experience that they get here is valuable to them. And people like Megan Patrick from Artist as Family, they also have people who go and hang out with them. If you know people who have goats or whatever you want to learn, there might be a blacksmith or somebody like that, find those resources in your community
01:03:53
Speaker
And of course there are plenty of books, but books are never the substitute for the real thing. They're just a place to start looking. And we have plenty of those resources. As you know, I sell books in lots of places. And there's our website in holmgren.com.au, which has a very nice array of the different books that you can start skilling up on.
01:04:22
Speaker
Too many for you to buy all. And also libraries are a good place to have those things. And books are a great thing to gift people and to share with people. If you've just got a book sitting on yourself from one year to the next, that's not a good use of a book.
01:04:38
Speaker
sharing those resources is always really good.
Episode Conclusion and Next Guest
01:04:44
Speaker
And the Retro Suburbia chat group is a great resource where you can ask questions about things and you've got lots of people who engage in that. That's on Facebook. That's on Facebook, yeah. Fantastic. I'll link to all these things in the show notes.
01:05:03
Speaker
It's really lovely to sit with you in the tea house for the afternoon. It was actually too bloody sunny. We had to pull the curtain across. This big north facing window. I don't know who designed that.
01:05:16
Speaker
Sue's laugh is one of my favourite sounds in the Meliodora ecosystem and I hope it got you in the gizzards too. I promise to reveal next week's guest and I'm pleased to say we have a Dennett-Hongren double bill on our hands with David Hongren joining me for the kind of conversation you'd expect from the person who co-originated permaculture.
01:05:36
Speaker
It's rich and tangential and, according to David, unlike any interview he's ever done before. I'll say no more, except be sure to come back next Monday. Thank you so much for tuning in to Resculience.