Veggie Days, City Nights in Melbourne, AU ~ April 12, 2012 - Present

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Melbourne is awesome. In fact, Melbourne wins the “Genuinely Hip City” prize in the LQJ book of Travel-To-Date (even, I sheepishly add, compared to Our Fair City of Cambridge). Live music for free at creative venues in every neighborhood every night. Beautiful graffiti mural art everywhere, encouraged and appreciated by the city. Great public transit. Weekly markets all over the city, each with their own niche: gorgeous specialty foods, local organic produce, and art/crafts/vintage fun. People from all over the world, bringing personality and culture and delicious (and cheap!) food from Lebanon, Turkey, Africa, Italy, Greece, Korea, Vietnam, China, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Japan. Amazing cafes that seem creative and inviting with a laid-back mix of coffee, wine, foodie food, indie art, music, and performance; there's always fun to be had out here. Distinctive architecture with single-story houses in rows and rows, shallow A-frame peaks and curling wrought-iron on the front lip of the roof in bright colors… always a little yard in front and enough space in the back for some happy veggies. Heaps of “opp shops” (“opportunity shops”, Aussie for “thrift store”) made for the community with vintage finds to be had. Bicycle culture and carbon-free wheels on the road. Backyard veggie gardens in abundance and a widespread healthy attitude of do-it-yourself living and responsible resource conservation. Hipsters and hippies and eco-activists in their fair share but outweighed by a general population who are just genuinely cool, down-to-earth, mindfully people with a sense of fun and a sense of conscience. Good citizens.

I didn’t expect that I’d come to the big city and learn as much as ever about farming and growing, but that has been the case. My time in Melbourne started with an amazing intensive urban wwoofing experience. Through my wonderful Tasie blueberry friends, I got connected with a friend in Melbourne, Kat, who runs an amazing permaculture property/sharehouse in one of Melbourne’s neighbourhoods called Northcote. Kat and her partner Nik welcomed me to wwoof with them for the first three weeks I was in Melbourne getting settled. They were extremely knowledgeable and driven in their vision about permaculture design (in a tiny little backyard they fit about 100 ingenious design elements, all positioned for multi-functionality, all made with renewable and/or salvaged resources, all inspiring and eye-opening), earthbuilding (we worked constantly on re-constructing their back shed into a gorgeous little clay straw house, a project they had been working on for nearly a year – the “studio” is their baby!), fermentation (virtually everything in the kitchen was soaking – nuts, oats, sprouts, kombucha, ginger beer, kefir, beets, sauerkraut…), composting (they have an impressive compost toilet in the city! no smell at all, and it produces beautiful non-toxic soil), and preserving (their pantry is just about as big as their kitchen, and though I never actually saw them enjoy a whole piece of fresh fruit, they had preserved literally hundreds and hundreds of jars of locally harvested fruit). “Wow” doesn’t begin to cover it! They are intense! I admire their vision of creating a life that is both ecologically sustainable and is a demonstration site for others who are newer to these projects. I attacked their enormous bookshelf of literature on all the above topics, and read voraciously. I learned heaps from living with Kat and Nik, and feel really lucky to have found yet more folks who so warmly included me in their home and circle of fun and dedicated friends.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve delightfully achieved something new in my journeys: my own space and schedule! I found a friendly sharehouse just down the street from Kat & Nik’s place – I can now call 201 Separation St. in Northcote home! New housemates are relaxed, fun, friendly, responsible folks in their mid-30s, and the house has some nifty 1950’s vintage charm. We cook delicious dinners from the garden, enjoy music or coffee in the city, and are happy to have each other around. At the moment I’m sitting in front of the woodstove warming my toes; last night I made roasted veggies and gingerbread cookies. My room is mint green, white, brown, and red; it feels nice and I sleep well there.

I’ve found work at an amazing, famous place called CERES – it’s an environmental park that has a beautiful patchwork of projects going simultaneously: huge community gardens; countless programs for visiting school groups (on organic growing, water and waste management, energy impacts, Aboriginal culture, and local environment, etc.); a community bike shed where staff teach you how to make and fix your own bike 7 days a week; a beautiful café serving organic food grown in CERES own gardens; a nursery with loads of plants and books and tools for growing your own feast and recycling your waste back into the growing cycle; and a market and organic food shop that have beautiful produce and crafts on Saturdays! Everything happens at CERES; it’s a hub of the community. Lots of Melbourne natives first visit as little kids on school fieldtrips, which are the programs I’m teaching. Fun to be working with kids, teaching a range of interesting and important curriculum, and doing it all outside in a lovely peaceful atmosphere. I’m also volunteering doing some policy work at Cultivating Community, an interesting local nonprofit that works for good food specifically for urban low-income folks –that’s soooooooo interesting and important to me, so I’m happy to be involved. My income is still too miniscule to let me properly enjoy the city, but I think I’m on the right path to cover my living expenses eventually… it’s definitely not worth being in a city if you can’t feel comfortable buying a cup of tea (or a glass of wine) when you want it.

Some days I’ve even been drawing! That beautiful architecture is just asking for some pen and ink…

And I’ve been catching up with some of my wonderful wwoofing friends. Last weekend I danced to Eriko’s ska band at a popular Melbourne venue. Last night I cooked dinner with Nozomi after a gorgeous day at CERES together. Good times, good people.

Discover Tasie! - Tasmania, AU ~ March 10 - April 12, 2012

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After three months of blueberry love in Petchey’s Bay with Kris & Jilly, I was ready to “discover Tasmania”, as my wwoofing friends said. So, I spent March and early April on a variety of snipits wwoofing and roadtriping. Good thing I did – so much to discover!

Off the farm and into the big city of Hobart, a languid capital city for an easy-going state, I spent one week wwoofing in a hilly neighborhood overlooking the city and bay. From the front door of Annie March’s sunny little house, buried in a maze of vines and winding apple trees, another colorful wwoofer (a sparkly daydreaming Londoner) and I helped build a path from salvaged bricks and pottery. In the morning we worked and shared scones and a teapot with clips of fresh herbs from the garden among the backyard leaves with Annie; in the sunny late summer afternoons we explored the neighborhood and ran or walked along the harbor; and at night I stayed up late with my headtorch and book under my patchwork quilt, falling in love with the books on Annie’s bookshelf by stunning Australian novelist Kate Grenville. Annie herself is an autumn leaf with a delicate constitution but sparks of vivid passion; she is an ardent environmentalist, a radical feminist, and a devoted mother to her grown children and all the woofers she shepherds through her home. We passed a peaceful week together, this collection of ladies.

Next came ten full days of roadtrip around Tasie with Elisa, a German friend from the blueberry farm. On the road we found a constantly changing reel of gorgeous forest, dreamy coast, verdant farm, and desolate mineral mining vistas. Tasie is known as the Australian state with the most diverse terrain, and our little blue rental car made it all the way. We did lots of short walks every day (and my roster filled with more famous long hikes I can’t wait to do when I return to Tasie in the future), cooked spicy dinners on our camp stove, spotted wild wildlife (tiny penguins, enormous seals, lizards, adorable wombats, and the usual amazing Aussie birds, snakes, spiders in close-up high fidelity), camped (my little orange tent had been my home for the last 3 months and was a good friend on the roadtrip), and found friendly people in every corner of the state. By the end I discovered for myself that Tasmania is indeed filled with some of the most beautiful and varied sights in Australia, but Petchey’s Bay, my home-away-from-home on the blueberry farm, is in fact the single most beautiful place I experienced in the state. I can’t think about Jilly & Kris’s place without a breath of beauty running through my eyes.

More wwoofing was in store for me. I buzzed into a honeybee farm for a few days, which was long enough to confirm that I definitely want to learn more about bees. Bees are complex and intuitively smart, and beekeeping seems a delightful mix of fascinating in terms of understanding the bees, manageable in terms of logistics and workload for yield, and amazingly rewarding given the massive amounts of delicious honey that come off of each hive…Amazing! I helped Natalie Wright, who runs a successful Tasmanian honey business (Tasiliquidgold – the name doesn’t lie!) with her father and manages hundreds of hives all over the state collecting ten different varieties of honey from different types of native flowers. There was a 10 gallon tub of honey on the kitchen counter for the honey-bees-at-heart flying by, like me… I put my own little dent in that tub while I was there, for sure.

Finally, I shared ten more days with Kris’s Mom, Nell, at her beautiful property in Mountain River, Tasmania. Little river flowing, rocky mountains overlooking, lush eucalypts everywhere, and Nell’s sturdy cheerful energy for the planting, digging, chopping, clearing, harvesting, and enjoyment her land deserves. She has a good sense of fun and is a hard worker; we got on well. We also had the novelty of going on a camping trip over Easter weekend to a mountain ski hut, where we got snowed in with several inches of heavy snow – instead of going home as planned we went for a long hike in the mountains in the snow, at the end of the Australian summer!

Tasmania has been a beautiful place for me where I felt welcomed and at home with new friends and kin. One of the first things I noticed about all the Tasmanians I met was their clear open eyes, with a clear true warm spirit coming through. I think some of that goodness has rubbed off on me during my time here; I feel truer and lighter for my time here. And I will look forward to coming back through the future of my life.