Household skills - Transition in Action
3rd January 2009
By: Transition Sunshine Coast Coordinator
Workshops on household skills – for both men and women – might just be on the cards…
Saw this article in today’s Courier-Mail. It talks about how young women are turning their attention to ‘home’ skills such as cooking, sewing, gardening and keeping chooks. [Another article in today's Australian newspaper about future trends toward more self-reliance. And here is the transcript of a story from The 7.30 Report last week about co-operatives and how well they are weathering the economic storm.]
While the Courier-Mail story emphasises the return to the 1950’s which doesn’t sound so appealing, I think we should be focussing on our new interpretation of those ‘old’ skills. Not going back, but evolving forward.
I recall seeing a media story just after the economic collapse began to take hold. They interviewed a woman who runs a sewing machine shop and sewing classes – she said how she was run off her feet and sales were booming.
To me, this makes a lot of sense. I really don’t see what is wrong with taking pride in running a household. It takes a lot of skills and a lot of organising and most people do it while also working full time. I don’t see having a career and running a household as an either / or situation.
Why can’t we be proud of keeping our homes tidy and eating good quality home-cooked food? Preferably that has just been harvested from our own backyard veggie patches. Why can’t we be creative and make our own clothes or recycle old ones into new? Why can’t we home-bake a birthday cake for a loved one?
I think it’s one of the most fundamental things in life. My home is my refuge – and I like it to be clean, tidy and comfortable. After a busy day I usually don’t want to go out for a meal, I want to have something nice at home, sitting in comfy clothes, kicking back. If I know I’m going to have a busy week, I prepare food in advance so I have easy to prepare meals when I get home – our version of take away.
So now may be a good time to start running some ‘household skills’ workshops – on organic vegie growing, composting, worm farming, harvesting, preserving, cooking, how to dramatically reduce house hold bills, increase household efficiencies, how to mend things and recycle, build local community networks… hang on, that’s permaculture!
It’s interesting isn’t it? Things are changing.
I was part of a climate change roundtable conference in Queensland’s Parliament House last year and Thomas Homer-Dixon (author of the Upside of Down – a book about creating positive changes out of catastrophe) was keynote speaker and he said he was looking forward to when the girl’s name ‘Prudence’ made a comeback – he saw that as a sign that people were thinking less about over-consumption and more about living within their own means.
It’s not about living with less – it’s about increasing your quality of life while decreasing your dependence on money, fossil fuels, consumerism and the superficial things that don’t really make you happy.
Of course, this fits beautifully with Transition Towns. In fact, this IS Transition Towns in action.
This is reskilling coming to the fore. Keeping a happy, healthy home is going to be even more important in the future. We won’t have the disposable income to make our selves feel better with some (shallow) ‘retail therapy’. We’ll have to find new ways to live and if that means home cooked meals, vegie growing, chooks in backyards, local markets, local co-operatives, shelves full of preserved harvests and swapped jars of jam and marmalade – bring it on!
One of our main aims during our whole Transition process has been to actually do what we are asking others to do – so for the record, I have a full-time career (I run my own business), I’m studying part-time at uni for my Masters degree, I have two acres of organic food and habitat gardens, we eat mainly home grown food that has been cooked at home from scratch, and I have just finished pickling a batch of home grown cucumbers from the garden.
