The Sunshine Coast boasts the first permaculture group and now Australia's first transition towns initiative
21st January 2009
Must be something in the water...
By: Transition Sunshine Coast Co-ordinator
It recently dawned on me that the Sunshine Coast has been the birthplace of two very significant permaculture firsts…
In 2007 while co-delivering an energy descent action planning course on the Sunshine Coast one of the students bought in a copy of an international magazine which had several articles about permaculture in it.
I was surprised to read that the Sunshine Coast had been the site of the very first permaculture group – now I don’t know how many permaculture groups there are in the world today… thousands? Tens of thousands? The idea has certainly taken off and proven to be successful.
According to the story (so legend has it), Max Lindegger – a permaculture pioneer and designer of the world’s first permaculture village Crystal Waters – read an article about this new fangled thing called ‘permaculture’ in Tasmania’s Organic Farmer and Gardener magazine and it clearly and loudly resonated with him.
Max invited Bill Mollison to come north for a speaking tour.
Max was so impressed in 1976 – this is two years before Permaculture One came out – he started Permaculture Nambour.
Now Nambour is a stone’s throw from where I live – so the Sunshine Coast was the birthplace of the first permaculture group in the world.
I’ve spoken to Max about this, and he is coy about whether it really was the first group, but I like the story, so I’m sticking to it.
So in 2007 I find out that decades earlier the Sunshine Coast had a major ‘first’.
Then in October 2007, Rob Hopkins and Ben Brangwyn contact me to ask if we would like to become a Transition Initiative.
Turns out we were Australia’s first, and also the first new initiative outside the UK.
What a great couple of firsts to have under our belts. The third ‘first’ (?) is of course Crystal Waters.
Must be something in the water…
