[I am involved in organising an unusual local festival that combines Arts and Activism, the Two Fires Festival in Braidwood, NSW, 12-14 April – soon!  That’s the main reason there hasn’t been much posted here lately.  I’ll put a few more festival things up over coming days.  Here is the blurb on the session I care most about.]

The challenge for our generation is to create an enduring way of being, in Australia and around the world, so that our children may look forward to an indefinite future of healthy life in a healthy landscape.  Our agricultural and other direct involvements in the landscape have a key role, and the search for enduring systems has been under way for some time.

Historian Bill Gammage’s remarkable recent book The Biggest Estate on Earth teaches us that if our descendants fulfil this aspiration they will not have been the first.  For millennia prior to the arrival of Europeans, the Australian landscape was managed comprehensively, intimately and enduringly to be productive, diverse, and safer from fire, flood and drought.

The example of the First Australians can inspire us, and perhaps it can also teach us many lessons in the modern search for another enduring way of being, in our very changed landscape.  This session aims to promote such inspiration and learning.

The session will feature three speakers:  Bill Gammage, indigenous writer Bruce Pascoe, giving an indigenous perspective, and local Ben Gleeson, who has some stimulating ideas about developing an enduring future landscape.