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Bruce Charles "Bill" Mollison (4 May 1928 – 24 September 2016) was an Australian researcher, author, scientist, teacher and biologist. He is referred to as the "father of permaculture."[2][n 1] Permaculture (a portmanteau of "permanent agriculture")[3] is an integrated system of ecological and environmental design which Mollison co-developed with David Holmgren, and which they together envisioned as a perennial and sustainable form of agriculture. In 1974, Mollison began his collaboration with Holmgren, and in 1978 they published their book Permaculture One, which introduced this design system to the general public. Mollison founded The Permaculture Institute in Tasmania, and created the education system to train others under the umbrella of permaculture.[4][n 2] This education system of "train the trainer", utilized through a formal Permaculture Design Course and Certification (PDC), has taught thousands of people throughout the world how to grow food and be sustainable using permaculture design principles.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Mollison
Copy of archived feature article from theage.com.au:
Making a mess of his life
February 12, 2004
Bill Mollison, the founder of permaculture, believes there should be awards for untidy towns, writes Glenn Mulcaster.
After 25 years wandering the world exhorting people to live close to the food that they grow, Bill Mollison has come home. The founder of the permaculture movement, Mollison was born in Stanley, in Tasmania's north-west, and returned about three years ago after 15 years based in northern New South Wales. He has recently settled on a seven-hectare farm at Sisters Creek between Stanley and Wynyard - both recipients of tidy town awards - and, in characteristic fashion, has set about making a mess.
Amid the neat rows of potatoes, onions and beans of the neighbouring farms, Mollison is creating his own jungle, planting rainforest species and "production trees" to provide food and shelter for grazing animals, as well as feeding his household.
Visitors must dodge geese, ducks and rabbits to get to his door.
Mollison does not believe in tidy farming - nor in chemicals nor soil tilling. Instead, he encourages communities to plant low-maintenance, high-yielding food gardens, using pigs and poultry to fertilise and condition the soil.
"As for tidy towns," he says, "Shit. There should be awards for untidy towns."
At 75, however, Mollison remains as hard to pigeonhole as his famously imprecise system of sustainable living and gardening. ("I'm certain I don't know what permaculture is," he once told a United States magazine. "That's what I like about it - it's not dogmatic.") Mollison believes in walking gently on the earth - he goes barefoot or thonged - but loves to use a bulldozer when redesigning a farm.
Critics have labelled him a conservationist, yet, he says, "I'm right in the middle, between the conservationists and the extirpationists. I hate extremists."
Which is not to say that he is not forceful in his opinions.
The Macquarie Dictionary defines permaculture as "a system of agriculture that does not involve yearly crops but crops which are self-sustaining". Mollison insists that permaculture was never just about agriculture.
Instead, he says, it is a way of designing systems to support human existence without mucking up the earth - except that Mollison uses a stronger verb than muck.
It is 25 years since Mollison finalised a curriculum for teaching permaculture, later published as the Permaculture Designers Manual. In 1978, he co-wrote Permaculture One with David Holmgren (who now teaches permaculture at Hepburn in central Victoria, and has recently published another book on the subject). Between them, they spawned a movement that now has tens of thousands of members worldwide and many devotees in Australia. Mollison estimates he has visited 160 countries as a lecturer.
Mollison's life has been as unruly and abundant as his gardens. By the time he came to formulate the principles of permaculture, he had already spent nearly half a century fishing, farming, pub brawling, tree-felling, timber milling, hunting, snaring, bushwalking, beachcombing, glassblowing, manufacturing scientific equipment, working as a clerk in a steel factory and working as as a bouncer.
As a teenager in the 1940s, he flew Tiger Moths in the air training corps (his father, Rowland, had been one of the gunners who shot at Baron von Richtofen the day a single bullet killed the German flying ace of the Great War). When his father died, Bill at 15, was put to work in the family bakery by his mother (whom he has described as a bully). He later ran away to sea, working on couta boats in his late teens.
By the '60s, he was a pipe-smoking radical in a polo-necked jumper wearing a bushman's beard. In the '70s, he marched against the Vietnam War. As a CSIRO researcher, he proved that foresters did not need to lay 1080 poison to stop wallabies grazing regrowth forest. He also helped fund Aboriginal scholarships by selling wallaby skins. He has milked snake venom for the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories and handcrafted geiger counters for Antarctic researchers.
A trained psychologist, he graduated from university in his mid-40s and was a foundation member of the Organic Farming and Gardening Society in Tasmania with Cundall in 1972.
He ran for Parliament alongside Bob Brown in the 1970s in a party regarded as a forerunner to the Greens. But Mollison says he never wanted to lead the country. "I got out of politics because all I want to do is green the earth and I've chosen to do that in different ways."
Mollison moved to NSW in 1986 to try farming in a tropical environment, but tired of the weather - hot, humid summers and frosts that froze citrus fruit in winter. He and his fifth wife, Lisa, a Californian, have turned down seven offers for the land at Tyalgum, because they don't want farmers to graze cattle there.
Mollison still has the bushman's beard, but it is snowy. He serves me tea and water in cups and glasses the size of buckets. He talks commonsense with a bit of exaggeration and a dose of humour and finishes anecdotes about 60 years of troublemaking with a hearty laugh that crackles and rasps at the end - the legacy of former heavy smoking.
Here on his seven hectares in Tasmania, Mollison is probably as close to retirement as he will get. He is working on four books and has been invited to set up a permaculture school in South Africa later this year. He wasn't able to harvest the herbs in his garden in spring because he was overseas, working.
Although the years of lecturing about energy conservation have had some impact, Mollison's home at Sisters Creek is surrounded by farms sprayed with chemicals that he says make them unfit for human consumption. But Mollison says he has no plans to try to convince his neighbours to change their farming practices.
"I'm not in the convincing business," he says. "Instead, it is best to concentrate on the doors that are open."
Bill Mollison features on Australian Biography, SBS, on February 18.
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