My First WWOOFing Experience...

The first town we decided to stay at was Esperance, as we had heard many, many good things about how beautiful it was. So here we also hoped we would find our first WWOOF host community for WA, though first we just wanted to spend some time being stationary and getting to know and enjoy the area. We couldn't find any sustainable communities in Esperance, but we did find a really interesting sounding WWOOF host, so it was here we decided that Molly would get back into WWOOFer mode, and I would gain my first WWOOFing experience. Not being a community, and therefore being irrelevant to Molly's research and documentary activities, would also allow us to ease into our work mode and frames-of-mind.

This first WWOOF host was Geoff Tonkin who owns and runs the Permaculture Education & Research Centre (Inc). He had been abroad for three years before returning to Australia and his property about three months ago. As a result his property was a little neglected, but compared to the state a non-permaculture property would be in after three years of no work being done on it, it was looking very healthy in deed.

Geoff is also a state distributor and installer for composting toilets, and as such had one in his house. The house was built of rammed earth, concrete, steel and granite and, as also demonstrated by the toilet, was designed along sustainable building principles that have affected decisions and design features regarding, inter alia, aspect, window placement and design (i.e. passive solar), power sourcing and usage (i.e. wind, solar and 12-volt), and water capture, storage and use. The house is as yet unfinished, with roof insulation and ceiling yet to be started (which made for some cold nights), but the house and the thought that has gone into its design are none-the-less impressive.

The gardens have all been designed around permaculture principles that inform how water will be captured and distributed, where plants will be planted, and which ones to produce what, when. These principles included making sure

that plants always saw enough sun during the day (mature hight/competition considerations), that their root systems wouldn't compete with neighbouring plants, water catchment, mulching and nutrition systems, and use of keyhole garden beds (so that a garden bed never need be trampled on) and swales.

What was particularly interesting however was that already I am being challenged as to what actually constitutes a sustainable technology, or even a technology for that matter. This was exemplified by Geoff (who has also practised aromatherapy and reiki) using Pagan techniques and tools such as dowsing (in his case a pendulum) to help determine plant placement, and having an approximate 1:10 scale Irish Round Tower in his garden to harness paramagnetic/cosmic energy from the sun and to nullify negative energies brought in by underground water streams - all for the betterment of individual plants and greater gardens alike. More on dowsing and Irish Round Towers can be found in Alanna Moore's book 'Stone Age Farming: Eco-agriculture for the 21st century'.

Pictures of this property will be uploaded onto this blog on a later date.

Although interesting, the technologies in use here are however disparate, stand-alone, and do not constitute a formal information system as such. Though there certainly are systems and processes in place that in a holistic sense are interdependent they are manually operated and managed. As for digital technologies used, phone, fax and a laptop used for email (using a dial-up Internet connection) and word processing was all that was present. There was no digital management of significant and/or substantial data, crop management processes, or of domestic/house processes. Technology need and usage (and integration) may however be greater and more sophisticated in intentional communities, the first of which I stay with for one week in Denmark WA on the 27th of June. My quest for a new or modified PhD question continues...

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The Journey Begins...

Unfortunately this first entry to my WWOOFing travel blog will be a little light on specifics as I am yet to develop the self discipline to write as I go, therefore I have forgotten much of the details of what has occurred thus far. Two weeks into our journey, this should not be a problem however as we are yet to any work on the true purpose of our trip. This Sunday will see us at our first WWOOF placement for the trip, but it is not with an eco-community, but rather with a Permaculture Research and Education Centre - this is for personal interest aside from that of the main mission of our journey, because we happen to be in the right place at the right time, but will also serve as a good introduction for me into WWOOFing (and reintroduction for Molly) before we hit the eco-communities that we are interested in later on.

The trip so far has been largely leisurely and relaxed, with us choosing scenic routes over the quickest. Before heading across the Nullarbor we decided to explore the Eyre Peninsula. After leaving Port Augusta our first stop was Kymba, as our route was also to be somewhat dictated by 'big things', and Kymba is home of the Big - though rather emaciated looking - Galah. The next morning, after our photo-shoot with the galah, we drove to Cowell. It was here that I drove Chester for the first time. This was a somewhat momentous occasion for me as I had not driven a manual for about 20 years, and had from memory never driven one well, hence giving up the practice before ever really learning how. After brief verbal tuition from Molly I was way. To both our surprise I took to it easily and without incident. I would then go on to drive for much of the trip to this point so that I could clock up experience and confidence, with the latter only occasionally dinted through silly mistakes usually borne of being tired and/or flustered.

After Cowell we headed to the Knob rest-spot in Port Gibbon. A rather unattractive name, but a beautiful, out-of-the-way (and free/by donation) camp-spot. Driving in to the tiny village you pass what looks to be decommissioned military bunkers. These along with some at-the-time unexplained red lights along the inland horizon that night gave the place a distinctly Area 51 feel about it. These lights however were no more, or so we were told the next day by Tom - a local resident (one of only 10 full-timers) and volunteer 'watchman' - than those of the nearby wind-farm mills. Nothing sinister there!?

The Eyre Peninsula has many beautiful places to visit all be they separated by long, tedious stretches of straight highway flanked by uniform pasture land, but I won't go into much detail here as this blog is not to be a source of sight-seeing information for tourists and travellers. One point I will mention however is that at Port Lincoln we were aloud to sit in the Clubrooms' bar at the Town's Leisure Centre complex and use their wireless connection to access the Internet for free (though we did end up staying for a meal and beer): so thanks guys!

News Flash: Molly has just found out, through reading New Idea in the waiting room at Esperance Hospital while I was doing exactly that - waiting - that her cousin in the US is again dating Pamela Anderson. Oh well, we can't all find someone as beautiful and amazing as Molly can we?

Now onto the Nullarbor, though again without much detail as the true purpose of our trip - and of this blog - is still yet to begin.

Before commencing this trip across the Nullarbor we were consistently told two things: one, be prepared for a long, monotonous drive where the scenery never changes; and two, take lots of water. Well, I personally found this drive much more beautiful and engaging than the one through Eyre Peninsula: there is a profound and overwhelming beauty in the ruggedness and vastness of the Nullarbor, and something almost incongruent with desert and bush suddenly dropping away to ocean.

We didn't spend long exploring off the A1 Highway, but we did take a detour to view the Bite's rugged cliffs. Even from ground-level it was obvious why it is call the Great Australian Bite, as the jagged cliffs stretching as far as you could see truly did look light some huge giant had simply taken a bite out of our continent. And to add to the wonder, below us we saw a colony of seals living within caves at the bottom of the cliff face. But no whales, which brings me to the first of two things that detracted from our Nullarbor crossing experience.

Upon reaching the eastern head of the Bite we saw a road-sign pointing us of the A1 to a spot where you could view migrating Great Right Wales, with a further promise of four whales currently viewable. After driving a reasonable distance to the lookout we then found out that we had to pay $10 each for the 'privilege' of viewing these whales. Nowhere was there a sign indicating why we had to pay, or where the monies raised went. This was not National or even state protected and managed parkland - and the whales certainly were not the 'property' of any entity other than themselves. So we left without viewing the whales.

The other negative experience was our misfortune at waking up one morning in a rest stop just East of the Nullarbor Roadhouse to the sounds of a truckie nearby yelling abuse at someone or something. I got up to investigate and to my horror found the source of this din to be a dumb-fuck Neanderthal with, I would suggest, a serious case of small-man complex hurling venomous verbal abuse at sheep on his abattoir-bound truck of death whilst he aggressively and abusively tossed them around to 'rearrange' them, every now and then throwing a dead one over the side.

To make matters worse his dog, Jessie, was terribly thin and malnourished and clearly terrified of its master - to the point that he clung to me for some minutes at on stage with the most pathetic pleading eyes I have seen in an animal ever (more so than even the look I first got from my dog when I rescued him from abuse and neglect on a farm).

After photographing the truck for an RSPCA report I left the site with tears in my eyes and remained somewhat traumatised for most of that day, regretting that I had not verbally and physically confronting the idiot-truckie - a decision I made in light of being with Molly and travelling in a very distinctive and uniquely painted campervan (I certainly didn't want every truckie on the East-coast trying to run us off the road a la Tasmanian Log Truck Tactics). But if you ever happen to see the truck in the photograph below please feel free to inflict as much damage as possible onto the truck and/or driver if you feel you could safely get away with it. And liberate Jessie from his living hell if possible also. And please, if you're going to eat meat, try to know where it's coming from - if you can, don't support the factory farming meat industry: buy locally and humanely, and from a butcher that cares rather than from a supermarket that doesn't!

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