House-Hunting

I haven't written here for a little while, sorry about that. This is, partly, because I am so easily distracted -- but to be fair, there is so much happening to be distracted by!

For starters, uni is in full swing (well and truly, first term is practically over now!) and there's been all the usual lectures and excursions and assignments demanding my time. All my classes are in the evenings now, so I find it hard to find a little time to sit and write. Often, too, the last thing I want to do with my free time is sit in front of the computer again.

Transition Darebin (TD) has been keeping me busy of late. There have been meetings, and training sessions and crafternoons. Its all going very well, and I'm really enjoying being involved.

And we've been looking for a new house. My flatmate, Kitty, has moved out with her boyfriend into their first home together, and after some consideration, Dom and I have decided that instead of getting another person to move into Kitty's old room, we'd rather move and get another person to join us there. There are two main reasons for this: we'd really like a house, instead of a unit, with a little bit of privacy and a back yard, and this unit is full of mould and damp and is making us sick.

We'd like a nice big back yard where we can grow our own veggies, and fruit trees and herbs, and have a bit of room to move, and Dom would love a shed where he can store his tools and build things. And I'd love a nice big kitchen to bake in, and a study in which to ponder and potter and create.

We've been looking for over two months now. A whole mix of reasons as to why it's taken us so long, from being too fussy to dealing with less-than-scupulous real estate agents. Every weekend of open-for-inspections that goes by we get a little more relaxed on our specifications (number of rooms, location, etc) but the things that don't change are shed, garden, study and gas heating. I know something will turn up soon. Here's hoping we don't have to wait too much longer! And I'll try to post a little more often.

Walking the Path

I am so excited. Tomorrow I return to uni for the year and my new working arrangements commence. As from tomorrow, my work hours will be less, and I’ve taken on one more uni subject a semester. Even though I’ll be earning less money (and I wasn’t earning that much to begin with...) this balance feels better. From now on, I’ll be a publishing student who supports herself by working in childcare, not a childcare worker who studies publishing in her spare time. It’s a small distinction, I know, but an important one.

It feels like my new year is starting now, and these last two months have been a sort of holding pattern – necessary to recharge and regroup and save a little cash, but not the year proper.

This week, there is also a Transition Darebin meeting happening. At this meeting, I’ll be talking to members of the ex-initiating group about the role I am to play. I’ve volunteered myself – for better or for worse – for the role of media officer. I figure it’ll be a way to use my new found publishing and communications skills for sustainability and community, and it might even look good on my resume...

I’ve also joined the ‘Clothing and Materials Working Group’ (better name yet to come) working with some other people around ethical and sustainable clothing and crafts.

In a way, this week feels like a microcosm of the rest of the year to come – shifting focus from the dominance of a career that doesn’t quite make my heart sing, to all the things I really do want: books and how to make them, and sustainable living. It feels so exciting and I feel the presence and power of it.

I was at a talk today at the Thornbury theatre, Women of Letters. Six women wrote a letter to their ‘turning point’ and read them out aloud to us. One awkwardly beautiful woman told us her turning point came to her as an epiphany one listless, leisurely afternoon in a long line of listless, leisurely afternoons. It was something I’ve heard many times before, but there was something about the immediacy of this young woman standing before me that really made it resonate this time; she could have been me, so her story could have been mine. ‘Find your passion and stick to it,’ she said. ‘Walk that path, even when it’s hard,’ and she tattooed a compass on her wrist to remind her.

I have no compass tattooed on my wrist, but I can feel it pulling me in the right direction. I know my passions now, better each day. And I’m walking the path.

Transition Towns

Upon my return from travelling in Africa, I spent two months recovering from broken ribs on my mother’s farm, Purple Pear. Here, sitting around the dining room table drinking tea and nibbling on home-made biscuits, I witnessed the first few meetings of Transition Maitland, and had my introduction to the Transition Towns movement.

Transition Towns, a movement that began in England in 2006 aims to create societies resilient against two of the biggest challenges of our time: climate change and peak oil. It aims to do this by strengthening local communities and creating initiatives which move away from a reliance on fossil fuels and towards self-sustainability.

It was a very exciting time to be around Transition Maitland, to be a part of its visioning process and the first few events. I had the sense of it being a very important initiative, with the right focus for me – dealing with important problems with an active, but not overly political approach. I felt torn about leaving, then, when everything seemed to be happening, but in the end I cam to Melbourne anyway. However, I knew this movement was something I wanted to be a part of, so I started looking into it when I arrived.

I’d heard of a few Transition movements in Melbourne. There was one for our Local Government area, Transition Yarra, but aside from a few movie nights (which I’d managed to miss due to uni assignment due dates and the like) it didn’t seem to be very active. Then there were two others nearby: Transition Brunswick and Transition Darebin.

We went to a picnic run by Transition Brunswick on what felt like the hottest day of the year (especially after biking for half an hour!) which was fun. It seems like an energetic group with a lot of exciting ideas about what to do next. There was a talk from the sustainability officer from Moreland council about waste reduction and recycling, which was rather interesting. A lot of it was stuff I was already aware of, but there was some new stuff too, like: I didn’t know that the somewhat squishy plastic of the biscuit tray is recyclable, as is aluminium foil. Now I do. Or: in Germany, there is a tax on packaging. In an effort to create a ‘polluter pays system’, the more packaging a product has, the more the tax the producer of the product must pay. Also, if a product at the supermarket has more than one layer of packaging (breakfast cereals in plastic and then in a cardboard box, or individually wrapped muesli bars, for instance) you can leave the outer layers at the checkout and the store has to deal with them. Which just sounds fantastic to me. Lets all move to Germany.

It was a fun afternoon, but, all in all, it wasn’t quite what I was after. For starters, I want to move to a different area of Melbourne – not too far away, but not in Brunswick either. And secondly, while Transition Brunswick is an exciting new group, it is just that: new. And with any new community group, there is a lot of planning and talking to be done. While I appreciate that this stage is important and necessary, I really want to be doing right now. So, it was off to investigate Transition Darebin.

Transition Darebin felt like what I was after from the start. It’s in the area where I want to live, and it’s been running for nearly two years. All the groundwork has been sorted out and now it’s time to get stuck into things.

Dom and I attended the kickoff meeting in early February, and it seems we came at a good time. The initiating committee – a group of skilled and enthusiastic people who’d established Transition Darebin – were wrapping up and preparing to take on less lime-lit roles. They asked for volunteers to take on some of the key roles like IT person, meetings co-ordinator, council liaison and so on. I put my hand up to be the media liaison, because I think it will be a nice way to link in my current studies with my involvement in Transition Towns.

There was a lot of talk about where to go next. Now that the group is established with a fairly strong active membership, there are a lot of ideas floating around for exciting projects for the group: urban orchards, food swaps, preserving workshops, and the one I was most interested in was for a group of people who meet regularly to swap skills and tips about sustainable craft. Right up my alley!

So, a very interesting introduction to Transition Darebin. There’ll be another meeting soon where we will all plan the next steps in the new project working groups, and I’ll meet up soon with someone who’ll introduce me to the media liaison ropes. This year is shaping up to be something good!

Introductions

Eight months ago, my partner and I moved to Melbourne from regional New South Wales. Our reasons were varied. For me, I came to Melbourne to study publishing at Melbourne University, and to hopefully open up some options for work (jobs for people with a background in theatre and writing are a little thin on the ground in a small town). My partner came to see what the city might offer in the way of professional roles in environmental sustainability (again, not so many of those where we’re from). And both of us thought we might like a little taste of the big city before we retreat to try our dream of living on the land – soak up all the theatre, art and exciting new sustainability initiatives, before setting up our cabin in the hills (or yurt in the woods, as the case may be).

So, we moved here. But I had a concern.

Both of us are pretty sustainability-minded – focussed on green-living, caring for the environment, and preparing for a post-peak oil, post-climate change era. Up north, the life we led made a focus on these things easy. My Mum and her partner have a biodynamic farm up there called Purple Pear, so we always had plenty of fresh veggies, yoghurt, honey and preserves. I lived in a collective where we supported each other to keep our foot-print low. I knew where to go to get organic produce and I knew all the ways to get around town and beyond by bike or public transport. In short, I knew just how to live gently on the earth in that time and place..

But I was leaving that behind, striking out in a new and unknown place. I would need to find a new source for all my green goodies, find somewhere to get my local fruit and find a new community of like-minded people. I was worried it would be too hard to do in the city, that it would be expensive, or that I’d lose momentum and lose my way.

But where there’s a will, there’s a way, and I made a firm commitment myself to keep living as sustainably as I could. Perhaps even to use this as an opportunity add new practices to my life, and break some old, bad habits. I’ve still got a lot to learn! And this blog is a record of my attempts to tread lightly, find creative ways to reduce, reuse and recycle, and live sustainable urban life.