This episode of Sense-Making in a Changing World is the final of our 5 part Urban Agriculture series released during Urban Agriculture Month in November 2022.
Here, Morag Gamble is joined by Chris Smyth, a coordinator of Community Gardens Australia (WA). They talk about the gardens he co-founded on the Murdoch University Campus, as well as the community gardening movement around the country.
Chris, a retired Assoc. Professor and Dean of the School of Media Communication & Culture at Murdoch University, was able to assist students negotiating the university landscape to enable this garden to happen, and link many of the faculties to the project.
Community gardens and city farms are places where people come together to grow fresh food, to learn, relax and make new friends.
Community Gardens Australia connects and celebrates the growing movement of city farms and community garden around Australia. It is a community-based organisation linking people interested in city farming and community gardening with each other and other projects.
Morag was a founder of this organisation back in the 1990s with just a few dozen projects. Now there are hundreds of active projects. The resources on the website are vast and a go-to place if you are interested in starting a new garden. All the local coordinators in each state and region are volunteers and love to hear from those wanting to create projects, or from projects that need help.
PODCAST HOST: MORAG GAMBLE
This show is hosted by speaker, filmmaker, humanitarian, author, global teacher of permaculture teachers and Permayouth mentor, Morag Gamble of the Permaculture Education Institute.
This podcast is an initiative of the Permaculture Education Institute and our Permaculture Educators Program – teaching permaculture teachers on 6 continents.
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Urban Agriculture Month
This special Urban Agriculture series on Sense-Making in a Changing World is brought to you by the Permaculture Education Institute in collaboration with Sustain Australia – celebrating growing food in cities and towns for Urban Agriculture Month.
Full Transcript Below
Morag:
Welcome to this episode of Sense-making in a Changing World podcast, it’s a special episode again as part of Urban Agriculture Month. So here at Sense-making in a Changing World, we’re collaborating with Sustain Australia, who’s the initiator of Urban Agriculture Month and we’re having this series of conversations with people who are involved in different aspects of Urban Agriculture around Australia and today I have a special guest with me from Western Australia. So here with me today, I have Chris Smyth, who is on the National Board of Community Gardens, Australia. He’s the Western Australia coordinator of community gardens and he’s one of the founders and current treasurer of the Murdoch community garden, which is based at Murdoch University, just south of Perth and I just learned too that Chris very humbly said, “Yeah, I was just before recently, the Dean of the School of Media at Murdoch University, as well.” So welcome so much, Chris, to our show today to explore community gardens in the world of Urban Agriculture.
Chris:
Thank you, I’m looking forward to this.
Morag:
So tell us a little bit first about the community garden that you’re involved in.
Chris:
The Murdoch Community Garden, we wanted to establish to involve students and staff and local residents in producing food on campus and in addition to that, we wanted to promote the idea of resilience and sustainability and self reliance, which were important factors and particularly for students who are short on money, often don’t eat the right food and it involves a social activity as well. But it’s not a kind of welfare arrangement, it’s productive and creative and people bring different skills to it and it’s kind of changed its focus from time to time from producing certain items just for consumption, to putting on parties with the excess produce, to making preserves and that kind of thing that we can sell at a store, start conversations within the campus and the community, I would say, is the campus community. So although we do have residents from nearby, essentially, the activities are focused inside the campus. Now, it’s a big community, a campus as it happens and from my experience, now, with the community looking at community gardens elsewhere, the community is what you want it to be. And it can be associated with a block of flats, or it could be associated with residential senior citizens complex or something like that or it could be the whole of a country town. So the community we have is the university.
Morag:
I wonder, Chris, what was the initial impetus for this garden? Did it come from the students or who was the group that said, “Let’s start a community garden on campus?” What process did you need to go through with the university editing place?
Chris:
There were a number of interests, shall we say, of different people. Murdoch was well known and still is as a kind of hub for education in sustainability and environmental science was one of the first universities in the late 70s to have something called Environmental Science and no one knew what that was. It wasn’t biology, ecology, zoology was environmental science. Of course, that’s so strange to us today. So there was a site that showcased new technology associated with permaculture and innovations in sustainable living. There was a group also who were interested in food, so food culture largely and of course, like most universities, there’s an agricultural or some horticulture or any case of veterinary department if they’re a big one. So there were those interests in farms and farming and the primary industries. So you’d see a cultural gathering, those are associated with sustainability, including students who had associations, researchers, and there was a sustainability officer and still is the same person in Murdoch who kind of helped push the idea within the administration of the university. Essentially, though, it’s a separate organization from the university. It gets its water and electricity and its needs supplied free from the university. But it is an unincorporated association, like any other small community group or big community group for that matter and it’s also a student organization. So it’s a part of the guild. It’s nicely kind of connected inside and outside of the university.
Morag:
Is there any connectivity between different faculties integrating it somehow? How are they thinking? What assessments or projects or anything?
Chris:
The site is attractive, it’s a kind of little haven, you might know that Perth can be crispy at times, it’s quite warm and dry and this is the spot. The site is a little bit on the edge of the campus. So it’s quite a walk for 20 minutes or so. It’s one of the largest campuses in Australia, as it turns out, because it’s got a veterinary school, it’s got fields and horses and cows and things. So it’s a lovely green spot. That was a nice place to do an excursion or teaching or primary schools would come and have a look and things like this Environmental Technology Center Center, where we established some plots, but it had attracted over the years environmental engineering classes. So they would hold their work there to look at how you can recycle water, you can discuss solar panels, all sorts of engineering, solutions to environmental issues, their little weather station there as well. But essentially, it was the sciences that took their classes there and showcased to students and other visitors, primary school kids and other other visitors, the technology and the understanding of the environmental needs of the world and of course, they’ve become very much more acute in the 40 years since they started.
But more recently, we’ve had students from classes from Community Development who want to come and see how an organization like ours operates and the newly established food and food science and nutrition course come and have classes there. But also, it’s always been a center for research and we’ve tried to maintain that. So we’ve had honest students doing communication projects, which is very advantageous for us. We’ve got a little website and Facebook group and they’ve been able to give us some good advice on how to have a profile. Also, we’ve had researchers involved in community development and still some environmental engineering. So for example an aquaponics setup, so it involves fish and the growth of leafy greens, for instance. At a university, there’s many aspects to assets like ours.
Morag:
I think it’s absolutely fantastic and I wanted to ask you whether the network in Australia is within the community gardens network, or gardens at, on campus because I know that there’s many of them, but is there a connection between them?
Chris:
There isn’t, as it turns out and I think they’ve grown on their own in their own way and I think this is the same with being siloed. If the universities are like that they do talk about interdisciplinarity and it kinda doesn’t happen a great deal sometimes. But a site is a very good focus for people to bring their own talents and interests and see each other at work and appreciate that and see the advantages of working together. So I would say that there might be connections between, for instance, academics, whoever has a specific interest and applies that through the garden. Then gardens themselves talk to each other. I think, because they’ve probably got different interests and focus.
Morag:
Yeah, that makes sense. So who leads the garden? Is it student-led?
Chris:
It doesn’t have to be, but we make sure that the President and most of the board are always students who put their hand up and we try to have a bit of a succession plan, because in having students involved there is an ebb and flow of activity.
Morag:
I want to ask you how you keep that continuity going? What is that way of working?
Chris:
This is a lesson for all community guards and all community organizations and I would say also, in the student organization, students often at the university, invariably the university only for three or four years, so they’re not going to be interested after they’ve left the uni often. Then there’s the internal cycles of years and summertime when they get work and then there’s the sort of micro cycles of semesters and assignments being due and you can’t get your weeding done in spring, just at the moment because everybody’s studying for their assignments and it’s fully understandable, but at the beginning of each semester, it’s full of energy, it’s quite exciting and the word of mouth gets around. So it’s a matter of thinking that through taking advantage of the moments when someone shows an interest and I think like in any organization, you want to be able to say yes to their involvement. Even when they say, “Look, I don’t really know much about gardening” I’m not a gardener, I’m not a horticulturalist, I make the jam, the marmalade, and I keep the books.
Morag:
I think that’s a really important point that these gardens are often a place to grow community as opposed to necessarily just about the food and it’s about all those other lessons that can take place. They’re thinking about the bigger picture of how this is helping to ground us to think about how we can be in the world in a more resilient way to face the future, to look at ways of understanding, ways of designing landscapes, or designing community connection and I wonder how much of the focus of the people who get involved in that are there because they’re concerned about the state of the world? What are the motivations of people being there?
Chris:
It’s an interesting one that changes according to the activities you do and the type of people you attract, as a result of that. But there are some threads that are always there. I think one of them is that students are concerned about the future of the world, it’s theirs and they want to do something and it’s important that organizations and society can find really valuable ways of saying yes to that question and that desire. And in our case, it could be somebody who would get to call them and I think they call themselves nerdy. People who wouldn’t know which end up is a weed or which is a weed and which is the parsley. That doesn’t matter. Because they can blog on the website or they can fix things that have always been troublesome that we never get around to and there are also cultural connections that we can develop.
You find that often they don’t value their own skills and networks. So we can say, “Oh, you know an Indian recipe? And they go, “Yeah, my grandma’s Indian” and then, “Well, what can we do with the lines?” So take that example. As it turns out, there was a researcher who was a research academic and she had a recipe that was her grandmother’s and we made tons of limes. So we made lime pickle from this northern Indian recipe and family recipe and I said to the person who brought it to us, “So what should we call it?” Then she said, “Well, lime pickles, let’s give it a name.” So we named it after her grandmother and that’s what we produce now. We produced a killer lime pickle.
Morag:
That’s such an amazing story. I love it. You know, there’s so many different aspects of all of our foods, all of the plants, parts that we don’t even know that we could eat that we do when we start to connect with all the different cultures that are involved. But I wonder, why did you get involved? I mean, you’re not a student? What’s a university garden appeal for you?
Chris:
It’s interesting, actually, I do like gardens and when I visit other places, I like to go to the gardens or botanical gardens or the gardens around some historic site or whatever. I do like history and I’ve seen some really lovely ones around old churches and abbeys and things like that in various parts of the world. So in a sense, I liked the idea. But as one of the academics who was involved in food culture and media culture, you have to think about all the films that you might have seen and the food scene in that movie and there’s lots of them. Some are associated completely with food, like shock alarms or something like that. But others, like say Reservoir Dogs has got a great restaurant scene. So the academic who was involved in this was interested in how we can make food more integrated in the university and it was that impetus plus another, as I mentioned, another a number of others who wanted to do the environmental or the horticultural side who got together and it was just mine. So we’re thinking of the same kind of thing from different angles and a garden was the solution to their hopes. So that’s how it worked and in some sense, I probably put that together, rather than lead some cause with an ideal in mind. It was more the sort of thing I do, which is to enable others to achieve …
Morag:
Creating the space all that fertile ground, news, conversations, and things can emerge. What happens to the food? Does it go into the campus or does it go to individuals?
Chris:
Gardeners would know it comes in great waves, often and then sometimes there’s always kind of leafy stuff that people can pick and take with them, we have a communal garden. So the way community gardens operate is usually in two general formats, sometimes combined. One is the allotment arrangement where people can hire a plot, they can go into the garden, they have to look after their little plot and they pay for that exclusive right to do that gardening and that’s very useful for people who don’t have land where they live or just want to get away or want to have some level of connection but they want their own produce. The other one is communal, where everybody can sort of decide what we’re going to plant and get on and do the weeding and then they take a kind of reasonable amount of food themselves. We’ve never had any problem, not too many problems, where people have been greedy. We’ve had situations where people don’t understand what they’re doing and dig up all the potatoes at once. That’s not so good, all the lemons off a tree once was not the cleverest thing, but it was ignorance. It wasn’t like, let’s take them because they didn’t even take them. They just picked them.
Morag:
I’ve been involved in lots of community gardens and even here where I live in Ecovillage and have lots of golfers and that people go out and they think they’re helping, but it’s a learning journey, isn’t it? As a Western Australian community gardens coordinator, you’ve visited lots of different gardens. I wonder whether they’re any outside of the Perth area? Are they mostly concentrated there and what’s the main sort of flow of them? I was involved in helping set it up a lot in Queensland and mostly they’re sort of the community garden star there. What is it? What’s the flow or feel of them in Perth?
Chris:
Well, I’ve got to say, around Australia, it’s quite a movement. It’s burgeoning. I mean, they’re just popping up all over the place and I’ll come back to, in a sense, why that’s happening. But there are some out there with plenty outside the city. I mean, there are many reasons why community gardens seem to proliferate within urban areas and that’s partly caused by population. It’s partly because it’s a way of growing food outside your house, but not an hour away on a farm. It’s just down the way, it’s just down the road and they are very local, there’s no doubt about if you see them dotted around and there’s a map on community gardens Australia website. It’s actually the landing page and you can see the 700 or 800 gardens that we know of and it’s probably the same again. I would imagine probably 1500 Gardens, at least, I would think generally. And you can actually see where they are and see the nearest one to you.
So I encourage people to do that. So they can see how local health community gardens are. But in country centers, community gardens are popping up and they do fulfill a need and a service for their community in many ways. So some are being set up associated with, say, community resource centers. So they want a site of activity and a garden is a good one, because in a way, they’re going to have a garden, even if it’s just nothing on, just weeds and maybe a tree. So that and that might have to be maintained by the council or by the Community Resource Center. So they use the opportunity to make it a place where people can come. It helps with security, like vandalism and things like that if people own the environment around an activity center and this, of course, is well known back into the 1960s and 70s in big cities like New York or Chicago where to protect the community and to give it a sense of ownership and value. Community gardens were established in precincts that in some cases, were the subject of crime. So food was one aspect of it, but security and safety and social engagement were just as important.
Morag:
Sorry to interrupt you there, but I wonder whether the ones that you’ve seen around Perth are fenced? Are they not fenced? Are they open spaces? Is there that much sort of trust or building or how does it work in that way?
Chris:
Yes. There are all sorts and sometimes that’s determined by the council. For instance, if on council land. I know one council in the northern suburbs, of a very kind of suburban area of Perth, where you can’t have a community garden unless it’s not fenced. So it’s got to have community access in that regard; most of them are fenced. Sometimes there’s a gate and you just walk through it. Others are well protected in that sense, particularly ones with allotments because there’s pretty much an undertaking that your produce is going to be saved not only from other gardeners, but from the rest of the world in a sense and you just get a key or a combination to the lock at the front.
So it is a bit of a mix, most of them are fenced though, and certainly where tools are kept and other equipment and things like that that needs to be secured. And of course, that means then there’s a whole aspect to ministration of this. So it means that there’s got to be safety, chemicals have got to be carefully stored, there’s some insurance as well. So you have public liability insurance, in most cases, sometimes that’s provided by the in one case, in Adelaide, for instance. The suburban areas, community gardens can get free insurance for public liability for their garden through greening Adelaide. But in any case, they would need to have insurance or be concerned about the security of the equipment. And sometimes they look like they’re exclusive or that they’re somehow got a perimeter. But the clothes when you get to it actually you can go in and enjoy it. So it depends on how they’re designed, really. But they’re certainly accessible. You can’t really have a community garden and call it that without accessibility and we proclaim this quite a bit about the accessibility of community gardens and I actually think we can do a lot better generally speaking in the sector, in doing this, in providing ways for inclusion of different cultural groups of people with different abilities and be safe places often, they’re a bit Higgledy Piggledy and there’s sticks and stuff. There was one old early established urban community garden in Melbourne, that recently got called, about two years ago, and was closed by the council. Because a new team, I think, had come in and determined that the place was unsafe, because it sort of boarded a river. So there would be snakes and there were lots of sticks and posts and stuff sticking up. So community gardens, you think that are just an example of different attitudes towards accessibility.
Morag
I think there’s something really wonderful about them not being too controlled and having a bit of wildness, that there’s a community space on our comments, we have an opportunity to generate something together. It’s not like you inhabit a space that’s designed and made for you and you just put the plants in, because that doesn’t really feel like you have an engagement. So the importance of having that sort of sense of co creation or that this is our place, we have some agency here. I think that that’s been my experience.I wonder whether that’s been echoed over in your part of Australia too.
Chris:
Absolutely. I mean, in fact, that community garden in another state would be completely recognizable to a visitor who comes or knows of community gardens in their place and around the world, by the looks of the web, they look pretty similar in some cases. Now, there are some big different designs, like for instance an urban food bowl or some kind of urban farm is looking to do a different thing that they want food production, they just happen to be farmers in the city. They do use volunteers, they involve a community, get cultural events and various other things. But essentially, their MO is to produce food for the community. Many other community gardens don’t produce enough food to live on. They weren’t just their leisure or an activity of some sort and a social one as well, of course. They do look, sometimes, a little disorganized, if there, as you say, but I think there’s a balance there.
I think there’s got to be some level of organization because the articulations have to be turned on. There’s got to be insurance, there’s got to be certain factors, it’s got to be open at certain times, there’s gotta be some level of organization and planning that’s either top down, or even if it’s not top down, it’s organized by group who have a single agreement about how it’s going to operate and then you want to let ideas flourish, so that it becomes theirs, and it’s not confined. So you don’t necessarily want someone coming up with their own wacky idea about how they’re going to regulate a certain area or what kind of chemicals they’re going to use. It does require a certain level of agreement and that codesign aspect of it doesn’t mean that everybody appreciates the very many ideas and lets them get on with it. It’s about creating something together, that can be one idea or one activity, that all contributed to. So there’s a balance about people’s engagement, involvement, and appreciating that and a grand vision.
Morag:
So I think it’s kind of a very interesting point to maybe stop and explore here is how to cultivate that sense of community vision, that sense of wholeness. I know that various community gardens often struggle with this interpersonal, like how to make decisions together, how to get that common vision together. What would be your tips and advice from your experience of being in the Western Australian community garden coordinator position? Or even from the Murdoch community garden? What are your top tips?
Chris:
Well, I think the main problem that community gardens suffer from and I think the same with any small community organizations, is that the activities, the responsibility often falls to a small handful of people who are the [inaudible] and you’ve got to make sure that you’ve got some succession. If you’ve got 20 odd people who show an interest and you’ve always got people who are willing to put their hand up for events and activities and to be on a committee or to look into some new project or raise beyond any event Coordinating Committee, then that’s great and that’s to strive for. But so often, it falls to a very few who can get burned out and then the organization goes into a lull and then that doesn’t help with recruitment and satisfaction and it shows in the garden often as well. So there’s got to be, I think, a groundswell enough of a population, enough people interested, dare I say, a market, enough people who have have the capacity or the the interest to be involved, then once you’ve got a kind of critical mass of people who can get things done is to have a balance of skills, if that’s at all possible, but you can guarantee there, although CGA is looking to kind of have a program, hopefully in every state where we can help train or skill people where they don’t have, where there’s a hole in the capacity of an organization.
This is very common. In fact, we’d like to pinch a model from Europe, where the community gardens actually have an organizer kind of role. They develop the skills for an organizer role in a garden or an area or district and it’s actually certified so it’s a bit like permaculture certification or any other skill development like a TAFE. So that they can do the people skills side of a community organization and this relates to community gardens. I think though the attitude that fosters the best relations and the best activity is to have tolerance that people come with their ideas, they come with energy and skills and think they have the imagination to see how they can contribute, even if they either can’t see it themselves or have a mode or a plan that isn’t helpful to the general good of the organization. Somehow, if that can be accommodated and fashioned towards benefiting the whole, then it’s a win win, because the people feel valued and they’ve been incorporated or involved in the organ up in the things that the garden does and everybody else and the garden benefits from the skills and ideas of that person’s brought. I think the greater the mix of those things, that’s why we should have more young people in gardens more than we do, we should have people from different cultural backgrounds more than we do. And those things can be, there’s no reason why they can’t be developed and thought about when you’re recruiting or providing information to generate another generation of people who want to be involved in the garden.
Morag:
I think it makes sense too in that way to have multiple different ways that people can get involved in the invitation so that the invitation comes along to work to a feast or come along to a cookout together or maybe there’s music or maybe there’s some art or something else, like there’s different dimensions. So the garden is almost like the venue, in a way for the community to come and then it sort of seeps into people’s elbows and knees and this is a great space. I’d love to maybe host yoga classes or children’s classes here or something else, so that it becomes a lens that you put on what you already do and so you bring your passion for your thing that you already do, but bring it into the garden and that’s sort of how I’ve found ways to be able to weave the thread of connection and to support that individual agency of each member so that they’ve been that deeper connection.
Chris:
Yes, I don’t think I’ve talked too much about that side of things in the sense that a community garden is for the community and not everyone wants to join or grow or be involved, shall we say. But they would like to come along to an event, buy some jam, donate some compost or something and the same with organizations like businesses might want to do, likewise, might want to provide or be involved to some extent and likewise councils. So something that gardens don’t appreciate enough and we’ve been trying to push this a little bit in WA, is that they are assets. Some of them are beautiful and very accessible to the community. They have pizza ovens and places to meet and beautiful shaded spots for young parents to bring their toddlers to have a little playgroup sesh session. Some of them have even got a kind of stage platform where a performing artist could do their thing and some have got really quite lovely kitchens, where there’s no reason why other community groups or families, for instance, couldn’t come and use the facility which is for the community.
So that could be developed and thought about a lot more and I think we’re too much in the weeds and often involved in the survival of the organization to think more broadly about its contribution to their own community. I think that brings me a little bit to how community gardens do appeal, for instance, to local councils and we’ve put together quite a list of the benefits that community gardens can bring and I’ve got to say that I recently had a look at my own council’s strategic plan for 2022 to 2025 was on and they wanted to green the environment there. The Council, they wanted social inclusion and security was another issue in our area and I was thinking that’s why community guards are so beneficial; they want people out being active. They want the mental well-being of developing resilience and a sense of safety and confidence and in so many ways community gardens deliver on that very cheaply to a community and I think the more local councils see that. Some of their KPIs can be met, for nothing, or very modestly, through a community garden, in knitting together the community and providing lovely spaces.
Morag:
You’re absolutely right and you can also look at state policies, health agendas, education agendas, ecological agenda. It doesn’t matter which angle you look at, you can start to see how by engaging people in this. I wonder if the councils in Western Australia are supportive and encouraging and open and facilitate this? Or is there still work to be done? Have you noticed more broadly across Australia with your engagement in the Australian network? Are you seeing a shift in this local government support of gardens?
Chris:
Yes, there is generally. So I mean, for instance, if you looked 10 years ago, you wouldn’t see as many councils then as now that have a community garden policy. That can be good and bad, just having a policy isn’t the answer to things. So for instance, I know a particular one where the policy is very prescriptive and it then becomes just a terrible ordeal to try and get a community garden up, because it needs to meet so many things that the council demands and they say, “Well, look, we’re very supportive. We’ll help you through this process.” You think, “Oh, why did you give us a process? That’s impossible.” And then others, sort of hands off, the best ones are the ones that are a little bit hands off, but provide $5,000 grants every year or something.
Morag:
I think you’re absolutely right and I wonder what feedback mechanism is being given to councils about that.
Chris:
It’s one of the key relationships that community gardens have, there’s no doubt about it, because many are on council land and if they’re not on council land, the amenities or there are some aspects that fall within the remit of municipalities of local government. So they do have to have good relationships with the council and just as you said and I said, that there are so many aspects that community gardens deliver on that can actually be a little bit of a problem with local government, because the community garden might have to deal with the parks and gardens department, if they’re worried about the reticulation or the electricity or something, the community development to people if there’s a grant or some aspect that involves a cultural event or something, the sustainability officer of the council in some aspects of their work and in some cases, I’ve had to deal with the health inspector as well, because I make the marmalade and they’ve got to certify that the place where we make it meets the standards.
Now, this can be a problem, but the best councils often pool their communication internally, so that the community garden doesn’t have to deal with four different departments and people. They deal with one and then they talk to each other. We had a recent event in WA in Perth, which was all about councils and it was quite productive because the people who came there were good and didn’t also pick from different councils and realize that they’re dealing with the same issues as well. So they formed a kind of informal WhatsApp kind of network on their own so it was developing that now I think because count community gardens are popping up all over the place. Councils need to become more aware of the needs of community gardens and also the logistics and to some extent the liabilities. So I think of community gardens and they need to balance all that and they need to. They need their officers coming from different kinds of mindsets to accommodate a good working relationship with a community garden.
Morag:
Are there any community garden officers employed by councils in WA?
Chris:
No. But there are sustainability officers who get this, shall we say, the prime responsibility or in some cases, community development officers. Especially if they stay around for a while and there’s a lot of movement within some councils, less so I think in that country. But what happens is, I think you develop connections and logistics in any job and knowledge and experience and that they’re valuable people to have a relationship with. So I cannot do that for a group of counselors in Melbourne, because I was in Melbourne recently, and I went to the open day of one in Altona as one turns out, and I met somebody there who’s I think on two days a week, and she was employed by the Alliance of councils. So I think it was like three or four councils. Now, they couldn’t all have a community garden officer. But between them, they could easily put on two or three days a week and this is what this officer was doing and she was involved in supporting community gardens in a number of councils. Now, that’s a great solution to it and I think that’s a great contribution and not that costly, I would imagine for each of those councils, but they wouldn’t have been able to do it alone.
Morag:
No, and that makes it so much easier. So if you want to start a community garden, you go and see the community garden officer, they link you into all the different things that you need to know and guide you through the process of how to get it going in your place. It helps to facilitate this so much. So I wonder what are the directions of the national network in terms of helping to facilitate this movement going ahead? I remember when I first started the network with a group of friends back in the 1990s, we were doing a lot of networking. There was the American group of community gardens, it was the European Federation of City fans and community and so it was the British one, we were kind of networking between networks and I wonder is there that sort of learning taking place across the globe as well? Because movement flourishes.
Chris:
It’s timely, actually, the community garden gathering is on November 5, not quite sure when this session will be available to people, but it is in Melbourne and its theme is international. So there’s a speaker from the UK who’s going to speak about their experience with Incredible Edible, which people might want to look up as an urban food network, which started in the North of England, we’re in town and now it’s all over the UK and around the world. So I think there is a community of people who are international and our president and one of our Queensland reps actually have been on different scholarships to travel around and find out more and bring back ideas from elsewhere. So Naomi’s coming back from Europe to America to talk about and bring back ideas from there and Gavin Hardy, who is a coordinator in Queensland, has a Churchill scholarship and he is looking at Forest food forests, in other places, I think largely in the US.
So I think the kindred spirits and because we’re talking about the world, we’re talking about our environment. I think it’s naturally been outward looking and experience with this and contribution to this. It sort of proves that point about an international perspective that people can share. So one of the things that CGA community gardens Australia is trying to do is to make sure that local governments and other tiers of government understand community gardens because people come with ideas, sometimes based on experience that they have seen one, and then think everything else is like that or ignorance where they don’t really know what a community garden is or they’re driven past and it seems pretty hippie. So they don’t, it’s about telling the story and one of the things we’ve been actually quite poor at and I only realized this because we made a contribution to the New South Wales parliamentary inquiry into food supply and production is that we need to prove the value of community gardens. We say they’re healthy. They bring people together, they provide safety and improve well being that their heat sinks that they are organic, they sequester carbon. But we needed to put together the substantiation of that in scientific terms to lawmakers and that was quite a job because it’s not really been done before. So it was a good piece of work for us to build on to say that this is the proof of what we say gardens deliver.
Morag:
And can people access that report?
Chris:
I think it’s on our website. If it’s not, I’m gonna put it up very quickly.
Morag:
Fantastic, because that is so great and I was thinking too the fact that number of these gardens, like the one that you’re involved with in it Murdoch uni, these questions of research and validation is the possibility of doing really substantial research and all these different universities where there are community gardens and a lot of people I know even in Brisbane. I’d be supervising students of all different levels at the northeast street city farm and there’s so much research being done and I wonder is that being collated as well? Because one of my laments all the time was you’d come and do this research on the community garden giving all this sort of support for research, but it never came back to the community garden network and I wonder whether anyone’s been documenting that since? Because there is a huge body of work that exists. Where is it?
Chris:
Everyone’s a volunteer in the organization nationally. So it does fall on us to find the time to do that and when we put together a submission, the submission was timely actually or the request for submissions was very useful for us to focus on that very task that you just described, at least to take a snapshot in 2022, at least and then to build on that. So when we do find research just gets added in or localized. So for instance, when we were looking at the basic assertion that when people work in a community garden, they eat better food, which we kind of know intuitively, we couldn’t find out an Australian study to that effect. Now, if anybody’s out there, who knows of one, I’d be very happy to hear it. But we use one from Minnesota. From the last decade and the prove the point. But I’d rather have had an Australian example. Peer reviewed, hopefully, but even not, it would be a valuable contribution to the things we say.
Morag:
So I wonder if there’s anyone who is listening to this, who is thinking about doing research and they’d like to support the community garden flourishing in Australia and beyond? Who would they talk to to find out what would be the kind of questions that need to be asked and need to be researched? Would that be you?
Chris:
I’d be very happy to speak to somebody and encourage them and partly because I’ve got an academic background, but also our president Naomi Lacey would be a good contact as well. And if we weren’t the people who in the end became the liaison point, we will find somebody who was. We do have a relationship with Griffith University. Two, they provide interns or they offer community guards. Australia is a place where interns can come and do their community project and also we have informal relations with universities in each state. Where from time to time they make contact with community gardens for just what you say, to be a place where people can carry out a fire or bespoke kind of piece of research. But yes, it in a sense falls to us as the organization to keep an eye out for those things and to encourage those and be the conduit. So discussions like we’re having now hopefully might elicit that kind of response from people who are listening.
Morag:
Yeah, great. So please do get in touch with the network, if you are thinking along those lines. As a last thought too,, you mentioned that you do all this work as volunteers and there are community garden offices that are located in different places, informally, some as part of sustainability roles, some that are across networks, it kind of feels like there needs to be some support from, I’m not sure where, for these roles as community garden, national leader, coordinator, people who can this is the work that needs to happen. I mean, the fact that you’re all volunteers and doing this incredible work is amazing and I know how much effort goes into holding the energy of these things. But I wonder where that kind of level of support could come from? And are there any moves to try and put this into place as a national body and state bodies even?
Chris:
Yes, in our state, we’re looking at how we can sort of fund the coordinator for various activities, because we’re at that stage. The movement is at the stage where we need to build the capacity of gardens and to do that there should be training courses and support and advice and you can only do so much by putting FAQs on our website, which are excellent, I’ve got to say, and then you’ll be aware of those probably
Morag:
I’ll make sure that we post all the links to all those things down below in the show notes as well.
Chris:
Yes, but like I mentioned, the English or the UK and European arrangement where you can go to the organization to get real support, not just someone on the phone who can provide a bit of advice, but someone who can be seen around the place, who can advocate and who can really be truly a representative and we’re at that stage now, I think, with a number of community gardens that would be beneficial all around and it might fall to state governments. I mean, if it could be nationally organized in some way, that would be excellent and to some extent, project by project could develop a continuum or momentum in the sort of administration of a network that becomes more professional. So I guess it’s like how sports developed over the years and if the benefits can be seen, I think they’re pretty cheaply funded, to be honest, then governments could see the benefit of a modest investment and that would accrue many times in return for that contribution, I think.
Morag:
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today, Chris, about all things community gardens, from local gardens, university gardens, gardens in the country, gardens around the world. I think this movement has come of age in Australia and it feels like it’s just exploding in terms of where they’re popping up and the resources that are needed. So I will be putting all the links to all the community garden resources down below the maps that you mentioned, all of those things will pop them in. There’s also a guide for how to start a community garden that’s available. What are the things that people look for on the site that you think would be really handy for them?
Chris:
What events are good, so they can see what’s going on near them possibly and also, the fact sheets will also deal with other aspects of administration and some of those things that people feel are a bit off when they undertake a voluntary role or put their hand up to be vice president or treasurer or something. So there are those and plus a load of gardening tips, which is what many of the fact sheets, soils, and there are models for gardening. There’s quite a range there. They should make contact through info at community garden.org.au. and that way we can hopefully address them.
Morag:
Fantastic. Thank you and yeah, there’s an emergent process. All right. Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you today. Thanks for your time.
Chris:
Thank you very much. It’s been the most enjoyable. Thank you, Morag.
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