Thanks and a Thomas Street Recap from Dan

I just picked this email from Dan off the permaculture-oceania mailing list and figured it belongs here too....


Dear all,

I have been meaning to acknowledge and thank you all for the supportive
and helpful emails in response to my earlier post about our situation
here at Thomas Street in South-East Melbourne. I've also been meaning
to let you all know how things have progressed since then.

To recap, we've developed a food garden over the last two years in our
rented quarter-acre suburban property. Little by little, the garden
has grown beyond the dimensions we originally gained consent for, and a
fair bit of lawn has been replaced with edible and medicinal plants
(with much help from our chickens and ducks and their tractor). About
a month ago, our landlords sent us a breach of duty notice demanding
that we had 14 days to either restore our food garden to lawn or pay
them $2100 compensation for "the loss or damage" we caused by
converting a good chunk of the lawn into "intensive permaculture with
associated ponds and mulch supply."

Though we understood their concerns, we found their terms a bit
unreasonable. So a few days later we responded to the notice with a
letter in which we stated our hope to work together to come to some
alternative resolution satisfactory to us all. We acknowledged we had
added to the property without their consent, and we acknowledged that,
if necessary, we intended to honour our previous verbal agreement that
we would revert the garden to lawn when we left. As another proposal,
however, we also suggested the possibility that we work together to
take the garden forwards to something that is still productive but at
the same time is not perceived by the landlords as a disincentive to
future tenants wanting to move in. We asked if they could get back to
us within a week, hoping that we might be able to announce and
celebrate a friendly resolution on the open day we planned shortly
after receiving the initial notice.

Though we didn't receive a response within that timeframe, we did
receive a call from the real estate agent. We arranged a day and time
to meet, and the tone of the conversation left us feeling quite
positive about figuring the whole thing out (and reaching "a happy
medium" in her words).

We then held our open day with garden tours, a permaculture documentary
screening (Global Gardener: Cool Climates), two introductory talks
about peak oil by EnergyBulletin.net's Adam Fenderson, a workshop on
"The Living Soil: Making the Invisible Visible" by Megan Floris, South
American food stalls by Codemo (http://www.codemo.org.au/), poetry
readings, and some live music. We had a novelty auction for a giant
home-grown pumpkin ($70 it went for!), a mini six-herb garden in a box,
and a photo of a flower taken in our garden. A sizable crowd attended
despite the patchy weather, and several guests left inspired to go home
and start food gardens, with questions about what to plant first this
time of year (broad beans!), whether we could help get some compost
going, and so on. Neighbors brought along plates of home-made cookies
and Cambodian sticky rice cake. It was a really neat day, a culturally
diverse community celebration of suburban food gardening, and $832 was
raised towards resolving our situation (which will go toward a
community garden project if a non-financial resolution is reached).
Thanks to Kerry for her prior advice and her attendance (and photos!)
on the day. Thanks to Fern of Permaculture Melbourne for her statement
of support. Thanks also to Peter of the South Australian Permaculture
Association, who traveled a long way to give us his support and
solidarity.

There has been some coverage of our situation by local media. That
initial email got forwarded far and wide and various media outlets
received it and got in touch. Prior to our open day we had three
interviews on Melbourne's community radio station 3CR, one of which
began with David Holmgren setting the big picture about peak oil, food
security and permaculture before we were interviewed about our specific
situation within the context of this bigger picture (we are also
grateful to David for his letter about our situation which is available
on our blog:
http://thomasstreet.info/2006/05/letter-from-david-holmgren.html). The
day after the open day a front page article came out in one of our
local newspapers. A week later a page three follow-up article
described our open day and the community support it generated. Both
articles are on the blog, so see what you think - we thought they came
off reasonably well in terms of us coming across as reasonable human
beings as opposed to lawn-destroying misfits - the word permaculture
making a minor appearance in both articles. It was exciting to think
that through all this various people are being exposed to the question
of whether there is something to be said for growing your own food
where you live. Articles are being written about our garden in ECOS
and ARENA - more scholarly and big-picture focused magazines. A show
on Melbourne community TV station channel 31 is planning to come out
and do something about our place. It's by this greek guy Vasili who
apparently has a sort of cult following in the Greek community here
(http://www.vasilisgarden.com/).

Meantime, the agent's visit towards reaching "a happy medium" never
happened. When we didn't hear from her our calls to the agency were
met with "she's not available right now but will be contacting you
shortly." Then on Friday May 12 we received another package by
registered post. It was another official notice, this time an
application to VCAT, the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal.
On May 31 a magistrate will review the evidence and decide on the fate
of our garden.

If the garden has to go (which means we have to go as we'd get hungry
otherwise), we will probably make another community event out of
exporting what we can't eat to other gardens and re-sowing lawn. Since
receiving the notice, we've sent another letter proposing a third
option of setting aside the funds we've raised in a dedicated
third-party account we would use towards removing the garden when we
leave. We have also approached Consumer Affairs Victoria, (Actually it was the Department of Justice, Victoria's Dispute Settlement Centre -Ad.) who are
sending an official request for mediation to the landlords. Various
commentators have pointed out that the landlords will not look that
good at the tribunal should they continue to ignore all the
opportunities to get together to work this out. It is apparently
possible the magistrate will force the matter into mediation anyways.
We will see.

Although things are still very much up in the air, we've been surprised
and delighted with all the positives that have come from this affair,
things like:

- Public awareness about the issue has been generated, with community
support and ongoing interest (and visits from plant, advice, and
compost seekers!)
- Around 150-200 people have seen our garden as one example of what
growing a decent quantity of your own food looks like.
- We have compiled a list of about 30 renters who have signed a
petition saying they would find an edible garden like ours an incentive
to move into a place as a tool for negotiation by ourselves and people
in similar situations in future.
- We have had around 8 offers and invitations from landowners in
various contexts expressing interest in having us (and presumably
edible-garden friendly folks like us) to come and be their tenants, or
in some cases to come and live on their land for free while developing
its sustainable food producing capacity with the possibility of
long-term arrangements. An interesting sign of the changing times, to
say the least.
- There has been a surge of interest in the 'Permablitz' (Permaculture
Backyard Blitz) series that we've been getting going down here, where
groups meet to learn about permaculture together in the context of
setting up food-producing systems in the houses of local residents.

Anyways, that's where things stand right now - for the moment we are
collating letters of support and seeking legal representation for the
31st. I'll plan another update after the hearing when a whole bunch of
uncertainty will have evaporated.

Best and thanks again,
Dan Palmer
http://thomasstreet.info/