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Showing posts from April, 2018

RetroSuburbia and Abdallah House

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One project that has dominated my life over the past couple of years has been my involvement in the production of RetroSuburbia: the downshifter's guide to a resilient future , permaculture co-originator David Holmgren's new book. It's been a really exciting and challenging project for me, tying together the various threads of my life - with my background as a graphic artist / designer, passion for permaculture and regenerative living, desire to inspire others to make change in their lives, and development a successful ethical enterprise. Ever since I read David's essay on Retrofitting the suburbs for an energy descent future I've been nudging him to write the book. We met fortnightly for a year or so while he worked on the initial manuscript, while I developed the first incarnation of the RetroSuburbia website - which has since been upgraded and redesigned by Ostii and the team at Flowji . An important aspect I wanted to get across in this work was that R

Happen Films, and the Abdallah House doco

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I've been a big fan of Happen Films , ever since I saw the first short film that Jordan made a few years ago about Agari Permaculture Farm (see below) - just up the road in Longwood. I've been following their releases on their YouTube channel ever since. I've been particularly impressed by the professionalism in production, a rare thing to see for the types of subject matter that I'm attracted to. Antoinette and Jordan were out in Australia for the launch of their feature film Living the Change . Unfortunately I missed the premiere Melbourne screening in early March. I reached out to the local BEAM sustainability group to see if there was interest in a local screening, and got a very positive response. I was in the process of organising an event when I was contacted by Antoinette out of the blue, who was keen to spend 2 days filming at Abdallah House for a short doco about our place. Richard Telford, Jordan Osmond, Antoinette Wilson and Kunie Yoshimoto I