The robin has been around a lot today. No wonder, the sun shining after a frost, down to a shirt, the best sort of winter day. For a while there was another fellow sitting on the fence with him; is spring already in the air when winter has hardly begun? Beware little robin, slow down, there are two more months of official winter to go.

I started the day by reading this: https://theconversation.com/if-everyone-lived-in-an-ecovillage-the-earth-would-still-be-in-trouble-43905?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=The+Weekend+Conversation+-+3020&utm_content=The+Weekend+Conversation+-+3020+CID_e92a8a0e9176c8150b84fe98ec5a9da2&utm_source=campaign_monitor&utm_term=If%20everyone%20lived%20in%20an%20ecovillage%20the%20Earth%20would%20still%20be%20in%20trouble – phew – and it made me wonder how big my ecological footprint is these days. When I’ve tested it earlier, it was stretched way out by the amount of driving I do. Alone. Not cost-efficient let alone energy efficient. No choice. Either I disengage from society wider than my very local area (where hardly anyone lives) or I drive. I drive. One day our ability to receive the internet might allow webinaring and more skyping. That might be within three years if Telstra delivers on its plan to erect a mobile tower on Honeysuckle Ridge.

That will make living in this part of the country a more realistic option for more people.

One part of the ecological cycle where I do quite well is waste management. My own waste that is, and that of my animals. I did a bit of it today, Sweeping the saturated straw litter the the chooks shit on all night from their perches and hosing the diluted urine on deserving areas of the garden.

Living where I do, there are no sewerage or grey water systems to plug into and no reticulated water supply – unless you count the Jingallala River, and I do). No electricity grid either. And yet I have all these services. I am my own waste manager. I am also a gardener and my life’s mission is to add humus to my garden. Consequently, all of these things find their way into my soil:

• my (and visitors’) bodily wastes; separated at source and collected, composted and much later, put back in the soil as rich humus
• dog shit: compost
• chook shit – raw, in compost; mixed with straw, as a layer in garden-building
• grey water – trickles through garden paths, tipped directly on needy trees
• newspaper from neighbourhood house lights fires and is laid as mulch to suppress weeds
• ash from stoves is added to human waste to suppress smell and sprinkled to reduce slugs and soil acidity

Sadly, hard waste requires a journey. Although there is now a recycling trailer at the Bonang tip, it has been contaminated each time I’ve tried to use it, meaning the contents go straight to landfill. So I save my plastics, paper and glass until I go to Orbost for some other reason. And there is a supermarket bag of plain old rubbish every fortnight. They go into an ordinary rubbish bin which gets emptied every six months or so.

There are a couple of car-wrecks down at the shed which are gradually rusting into the ground. People occasionally get enthusiastic about the old Land Rover but its still there. They are other peoples’ contributions and likely to outlast me.

Plastic bags are my bete noir. I never accept one at shops, even when I’ve forgotten to bring my shopping bags. That can look pretty stupid, unless its the kind of shop that offers boxes. I never accept a plastic bag yet they are oozing out of my drawers. I will be lucky to achieve my objective of being bag-free before I die.

Back in the halcyon days of UNCED – early 1990s – when Agenda 21 was the talk of the world, we used to talk about closed loop systems and whole of lifecycle approach

Its a little bit of ecological sanity in a world where no-one seems to give a damn, and our leaders seem intent on trashing the world while they can.

Yes go back to your comfortable homes in your electorates where wives and families await you. Feel that smug glow that your raised hand felled a forest for unsustainable energy production and/or rendered a person a non-citizen. That you have power, that you represent a constituency. That you as an individual are not accountable, your role is dispersed in party room decision making. You never need to meet that suspected terrorist do you; years later, they may be found innocent, they will be forgotten and no connection will be made with you, and your raised hand.

Laugh to your mates that you have the ABC squirming, exactly where you like it. Call for an inquiry because of course you can’t expect the left hand to be critical of the right. Must have the right judging the left. Always.

Go home, leave Canberra to its chilly winter, go home and complain about the weather in the capital. A few of those leftie public servants are wondering about their jobs aren’t they? Good riddance to them, if they aren’t with us they are against us, and don’t deserve their cushy jobs. Do they even deserve their citizenship? Hmmm. Maybe next term.

Bombala Council has started a series of Fireside Chats, of which the first this year was held in a room without a fire where the quickest way of getting warm was holding a cup of tea. It seas one of those frosty mornings when most people had obviously decided to stay in bed. Either that or the event had been poorly advertised. In any case, a small group of well-clad people sat with Aileen Blackburn in the Delegate School of Arts to hear about her favourite topic, the Yam project, part of our deepening knowledge about the Bundian Way. Once plentiful, soil compaction and other impacts of agricultural cultivation and its hard hoofed animals have made the yam shy.

“Yams hide. They are mysterious.” Aileen says this with a twinkle in her eye. Clearly she loves the yams, and everything about them.

“I’ve been going to one plot for over two years now. Gone up and seen nothing. When I say nothing, there’s never ‘nothing’ there. There’s always something. That’s part of yam culture too, connecting with country, there’s never nothing. At the end of our day, we are always enriched and wiser. Telling stories and sharing experiences, that’s part of the work. It’s an absolute pleasure for me.

“Its not just the physical properties of yams – they are good for your diet and you can cook, roast and boil them. You can eat them raw. So they’re the ideal food source.”

Aileen works with two young Aboriginal woman, mentoring them and learning with them. “I’ve seen a real change in the girls working with me. Picked the two toughest girls. Two years later, they are on time, ask, is this okay? The trainees will be the ones who take the project into the future.

“People can’t practise what they’ve been doing for thousands of years. Burning off, airing the soil. These areas have had no aboriginal women out there for 200 years to do what we are doing. We have a lot of healing, rehabilitation. We are part of that. We have our cultural practices which we are building into this.

“Its like growing potatoes but much harder. They are fickle, really temperamental. We’ve had a wet season and that’s going to help. It’ll be just great if we can replenish the plots we have now and extend them.

“Its hard to believe that whole mountains were covered in yams. From what we hear from our old people, they were everywhere. (In the 1950s pioneering ecologist Alec Costin found the Yam Daisy distributed all across the region, including tableland, montane, alpine and subalpine areas.)

Aileen wants to share the yamfields with everyone who is interested, but says there is still a lot of work to do before the team feels comfortable about showing us. The elders must make the first visit. Then they will take us.

When the yamfields are open to the wider public, we will need the knowledge of enthusiastic guides like Aileen and her team, or we’ll probably miss the plants. I am looking forward to that day but I don’t need to visit the yam fields to see that the project is working for everyone involved. I just need to look at Aileen’s glowing face and hear her saying, “Telling stories and sharing experiences, that’s part of the work. It’s an absolute pleasure for me.”

Here by the Jingallala River the world is far away. The nearest neighbour is a kilometre away by road, metres if I cross the river and walk over the paddocks. Living here, one chooses to participate in the world, and I do.

I listen in via radio to the main actors who strut the stage, cringe as Abbott sinks his boot into yet another minority group and wonder how Hockey manages to know so little about they of whom he speaks. And, knowing little, why he doesn’t keep his moth shut. Then I go into my garden.

I was going to call this blog ‘Gardening and other things’ because gardening does provide the solid base of my life. When in doubt garden. So much to be said for it, the most obvious being the production of tasty, fresh wholesome food. But its a psychological thing too: One feels better out in the garden (especially if the sun is shining). But its also physiological: the bacteria in soil really do cheer us up.

http://www.gardeningknowhow.com/garden-how-to/soil-fertilizers/antidepressant-microbes-soil.htm

Gardeners inhale the bacteria, have topical contact with it and get it into their bloodstreams when there is a cut or other pathway for infection. The natural effects of the soil bacteria antidepressant can be felt for up to 3 weeks if the experiments with rats are any indication. So get out and play in the dirt and improve your mood and your life.

I’d rather be gardening than most other things, hence the subtitle of my blog. I’d rather be outside – but instead I’m in here, writing a blog.

The world needs another blog! More accurately, I need another blog. The ones I’ve kept in the past have disappeared into the ether of unpaid domain names. Much has happened since then; it remains unrecorded except in the annals of Facebook which has been for me a kind of blog.

Anyway, its a gorgeous day to start something new; four degree frost followed by a sunny day.

I’m being visited by Andrea Lane who is the Creative Arts Recovery facilitator for our area. Although the fire was 16 months ago, most of the recovery programs only commenced this year. They’ve added some much needed excitement that we didn’t know we needed. Andrea was at Goongerah today where the community created a unique sign for their new community hall. This was inspired by regular get-togethers the community has been having with the Shire’s Recovery Facilitator who is also incidentally a Goongerah resident. Yes, we have facilitators galore and we are making the most of them.

Tomorrow she has a day off but we are going to a meeting anyway, this one in Delegate with Aileen Blackman:

Aileen Blackburn is an Aboriginal woman of Monero/Yuin descent from Cann River. She is currently working as Cultural Adviser on the Aboriginal Women’s Yam Project and is involved in the traditional harvesting of yams and preservation of oral traditions along the ancient Bundian Way.

At the School of Arts on Sunday June 14 from 10am, Aileen will introduce AWAY; the Aboriginal Yam Project and her cultural ties to the Monero/Cann Valley. She will address issues as diverse as traditional burning, local Aboriginal land management, native grasslands and Ancestral trading. An entry fee of $5 includes a morning tea for which the local community is renowned.

I first met Aileen in Canberra; our daughters attended the same high school and we rubbed up against each other at meetings, can’t remember which. Now I go to DELWP Roundtable meetings with her but this will be the first time I will hear her talk about her stuff. If its interesting, I’ll report on it tomorrow.