Vaticinor Stories

Fiona Aveyard, Tullamore

Fiona Aveyard from Tullamore in Central NSW, about an hour southwest of Dubbo. I’m a, ah, fifth-generation family farmer on a property called “Westpoint”. We farm, ah, do cereal cropping, er, Merino sheep for wool and prime lambs for meat production. Mother of four—ah, eldest is 17, youngest is 10.

We really are probably on that cusp of having to imagine what farming is going to look like for the next generation and start to make those movements towards it. And it is, it’s really hard to imagine a post-carbon world when we live in a world that is so absolutely carbon—from our machinery to our vehicles are all diesel driven. You know, we use fossil fuels for our energy, um, we’re on the grid so we don’t use generators or anything like that. It’s all…our fertilisers are, you know, um, we predominantly use nitrogen.

So, everything we do is going to change dramatically and it’s very hard when you’re successful in a business and doing things well, to change from that to do something really different. So that, for us, that’s um, quite a fundamental shift. And it’s also really hard to imagine what it’s going to look like

I think the customer really has to understand the power they have, because they are very much on this journey with us… currently, we are in a situation where food is a commodity and people want really cheap food and they really, genuinely need to understand about the true cost of production and who’s paying that tax already, on carbon.

Bruce Maynard, Narromine

I am Bruce Maynard. I live ah, outside of Narromine in Central West NSW on my fourth-generation property called “Willydah”. The drivers for me and ah, my immediate family to change were partly push and partly pull factors, in that ah, we did have some financial pressures on us but also the first changes ah, majorly in climate that we were seeing. So, this goes back to the 1980s and ah, early 90s. And so those factors were push on us to actually do something different, but deeply I always felt if we wanted a very ah, significantly different outcome we would need to adjust our systems, not just try and improve on things that were already leading in a path that wasn’t going to fit long-term goals.

I see myself as ah, just a custodian on a long lineage of 47,000 years of people that have trodden around these parts of the world. Ah, significantly different then as it was now and the future will be different. So, my place is to, ah, as best I can, ah, produce more, consume less and expand the biodiversity while I’m here.

The two main challenges ah, I see are inexplicably linked, are species decline and climate change. That’s going to bring about factors that, that are well outside our immediate control and that I believe applies to anybody around the world now. And we are all interconnected, so that’s going to require some substantial change for all of us to adopt a feedback model which assumes we are all interconnected rather than individually doing our own things or directing our own actions for our own desires.

Collaboration and working within systems, especially agroecology ah, ah systems is exactly where I sit. Ah so, I’m not if you like, somebody who would advocate completely rewilding everywhere, because then that, that gives a lesser range of results out of that landscape than if we actually have humans actively engaged.

Karin Stark, Narromine

Karin Stark. We’re in Narromine NSW. There’s a lot of farmers and they’re involved in groups like Farmers for Climate Action that can see changes that are happening on their properties that they’ve never seen before and there’s an acceptance of climate science and a wanting and desire to do more and see more action. But then also in some regional communities, such as the one that I live in, I think there’s still a bit of climate science denial and people thinking that they’ve seen these types of events in the past and it’s not caused by human activities. So, there’s a bit of a split and I often wonder what that denial, you know, who, who does that serve really when there’s climate science denial, because farmers are really at the coalface of climate change.

I think with food supply, you know, I think it’s important that agriculture does continue to develop and adapt to, to different technologies, different weather events, in order to secure our food supplies. But I think really with energy and food, we need to have a more interconnected or integrated way of thinking, so that, you know, we can do both in this region. So you know, something like agrivoltaics as an example of that, where you grow food on the same parcel of land that you have solar panels, and they can actually be benefits to agriculture and crops that have partial shade—particularly in a warming climate—um, they’re mostly horticultural crops. But you know, maybe we could be looking at doing cropping, you know, wheat and barley between solar panels, which is done overseas but hasn’t been done in Australia. So, you know, integrating that and ensuring that our food productions, um, our food production is also powered by renewable clean energy so that we’re decarbonising and able to continue to trade overseas. And also showing consumers that we’re a green, clean sector as well.

So, slowly I think we are being set up with the Renewable Energy Zone (REZ) to do that, but I think there needs to be more focus on the distribution level of allowing farmers and regional communities to produce the energy themselves rather than these kind of massive solar and wind farms. Like, allow the community to also produce that energy, or farmers, ah in particular, to put into the grid and trade with their neighbours, or sell to local communities and then use when they can, when they’re pumping or whatever it might be. So, I guess I see it as quite, um, interconnected.

Simon Barton, Wellington

I’m Simon Barton, living ahh, just north of Wellington, at Bodangora. Ah, running sheep and cattle ah, farm with a few horses, and also host, hosting a few wind turbines.

We’re generating renewable energy so that’s also a plus ah, for the environment as far as I’m concerned. Ah, it also helps our business, so we actually don’t have to run our, our agricultural business quite as hard as we might’ve in the past to make ends meet. Um, so we can look after the country a little bit more that way. So, you know, that’s, to me that’s a win-win situation for us, ah, our business and the environment.

Ahh, with these wind turbines, you know, you just go…people, some people like them, some people don’t, um, some people, y’know. We know we’ve got to move forward, ah, rather than backwards in…ah, for our energy generation and for our environment

As humans, if we’re on the earth, we’re, you know, we have an impact. Ah, but the same as animals. You know, animals have an impact. Ahh um, you know, we’ve all just got to learn to live with each other and with the environment. So, the less impact we can have on, detrimental impact on we can have on the environment the better.

Margaret Clark, Wingham

My name’s Margaret Clark. I’ve had a long association with the area (Wingham) because we came up here as children since my father was born locally, my grandmother also, and we came for holidays during my childhood.

I think, er, we’ve become particularly focused here because ah, 2019 was a massive drought followed by devastating fires, which destroyed a lot of properties in the area, and I think, disturbed a lot of people because there was a real fear that this town would be affected. 

And I think that there is a growing feeling that insufficient is being done to prepare for the future.

I think that there are a number of people that are taking direct action. Um, people are installing solar power. If you look around at the town, every second house has got solar (batteries) on the roof and there’s a growing move to, ah, install batteries, which I’ve done.

Currently, anyone who’s renting, who doesn’t have solar power, is paying a lot more in electricity charges than those who own their own property and who are able to make the decision to go into solar…Um so, I feel that er, a lot of people will yes, be left behind because at this stage it seems to be an individual choice and not something that’s universal.

Stephen Callaghan, Dubbo

Stephen Callaghan. I’m currently living in Dubbo. I’ve been here for about 5-6 years. Ah, Newcastle born and bred.

The house we bought had solar panels on it. The area is ex-housing commission and pretty much every house has solar panels that just feed into the grid.

We looked at systems and we looked at rebates and we looked at what our electricity bill was (half laughs), and it was just climbing and climbing. And we thought we can’t keep paying, you know, $6,000 a year ah, on electricity, and it’s only going to get more expensive. So we looked and we got quotes and quotes, we got a…we ended up getting a 7 kW solar array, which is ah, 5 kWs facing north and two 1 kWs, um, facing um, east and west. So even right at sunset, on the west panel we get, we still get 500 watts trickling in ’til it’s dark. And we also got a 12.8 kW battery and a smart inverter, and the app that comes with it, you can see what electricity is being used. And it’s been, it’s an epiphany of how we’ve been wasting electricity, and I’m sure everyone does the same, and when we use electricity.

But’s what happening is we are doing most of the stuff during the day and I understand it’s going to be different in summer when we’re using air conditioning and things like that, but the aim is to not use any grid electricity and to go to sunset with the battery 100 percent full, 98.9 is all it goes up to, but…And then we have, and I know what we have overnight, and if we don’t run any heaters or air conditioners, we can live a normal life—the fridge, cook, watch TV, the kids can have their computers on gaming, whatever, we can live a normal life overnight completely off-grid and still wake up in the morning with anywhere between 40 and 60 percent of the battery capacity left. 

It, the technology’s here now, to ah, to provide that to everyone.

Um, I can see a future where it’s not going to be survival of the fittest, but it’s definitely going to be the haves and have-nots, and it’s going to be related around power and energy.

Idishta Nabi, Dubbo

My name is Idishta and we’re sitting in Dubbo. I’ve lived in Dubbo for coming up to three years soon, um, and I’ve lived in Australia since 2015.

The thing is coming from a developing nation (Bangladesh), I have a perception of how I think Australia was. Um, and I think I felt that it was a country that very much, you know, knew what they’re doing, you know, there are some issues here and there, but like, more or less, people are equal, um, and treated as such. But I think coming to Australia and then especially coming to Dubbo, I’ve realised that there’s actually lots of um, inequalities within the system and there’s, um, I think people are, people in the city are oblivious to problems of people in the region. Um, and I think that was surprising.

For a lot of the um, students I teach in my school, thinking about climate change is like not even a thing to think about because they’re thinking about, ah like, food and safety in their own homes, and you know, um, making sure they have like a place to sleep.

And I personally feel that, you know, every single thing you do has an impact no matter how small. Um, and I do try and pass that message on to my…to the kids I teach, where it’s like, even if one, you’ve decided today I’m not going to take…I’m not going to buy another Aldi bag, I’ll take an Aldi bag from home. That’s one less Aldi bag and I think that that’s worth doing.

Madelyn Leggett, Wellington

My name is Madelyn Leggett. I live in Wellington NSW, and I go to school, I do extracurriculars, and I catch a very long bus home.

It feels a little bit like a homework assignment where people…it gets assigned at a certain date and then people procrastinate and procrastinate, and nothing gets done and then we reach 2049, December, and we go Oh! Nothing’s happened! (laughs). We still haven’t changed enough, there still hasn’t been enough policy or legislation passed to make an effective change or impact on the environment.

I don’t think goals in the future are necessarily helpful; I think action is helpful and not things that, oh we’re going to do this by this date, rather we’re doing this now, and current action that’s happening right now instead of, yeah, instead of future goals and lofty, you know, impractical goals.

In, in my opinion, we can talk about plastic straws and solar, you know, individual solar energy as much as we want but real change comes when we legislate against these large corporate, multinational ah, emitters, and these governments that are allowing it. To progress and to…kind of continue affecting the environment are at fault really, the onus falls on, on the legislators and the governments in order to, to regulate.

But I think the political push for a net zero world is, is there. And I think it does affect people’s outlook on how we see the future. And I think it affects the way that people consider not just consumerism but voting and democracy, and, and how they consider their political actions.

Aliya Aamot, Crescent Head

My name is Aliya Aamot and we are in the Goolawah Cooperative in Crescent Head, New South Wales.

Ah, we have no debt, ah, we’re living off-grid, we don’t get the monthly power bill or any sort of bill, um, which is great, which is what we want. Like, we have to do everything here, you know, to um…When we first got here it was like living in a third-world country, like, we were doing the laundry by hand, we had no hot water, we had no fridge, and we lived like that for a year? I think. Then we slowly got more and more comfortable with hot water and fridge and laundry, and um, things like that.

Well, I would be really happy if by the time our children leave home that they can grow their own food, they know how to preserve food, they know where to find food, they know which plants are medicinal, they know what to use, um, in specific needs. Um, if they know those sort of things, um, even like slaughtering and butchering an animal—just these basic life skills that we should all have. Um, if they know that, then I’ll feel very successful as a mum (laughs).

It really scares me. Sometimes I feel almost like a regret for having them. Like, I wish they didn’t have to face the challenges that they have to, because they will have to sooner or later. But at the same time, like, our oldest daughter, she wants to grow up and save the planet, you know. And we need these children. They are very important.

Crow Tribe, Crescent Head

Ah, my name is Crow Tribe. Ah, we are in Goolawah Community, ah, in Crescent Head, New South Wales. 

I have always been interested in living close to nature and living off the land. Um, I, I aspire to become as efficient as a human being, ahh, in being able to produce my own food, um, build my own shelter, and also pass all of this kind of information to the young ones. Fundamentally we need to, we need to ask ourselves are we aligned with nature? What have we abandoned and what have we substituted it with? How are these choices impacted our environment on a greater level? Um, who is, at the end of the day, picking up the bill? Are we, are we striving to ease the burdens on our children or are we increasing those burdens? Are we harmonious with ourselves firstly, and then in turn, reflecting that into the greater world?

This is, this life here is basically a product of me not fighting anymore with the world around me.

Does living in a lifestyle like this answer the questions, well, or does it actually raise more questions? Possibly both. And also possibly, helping me understand that there are conditions that are in place that are far older than this generation alone. 

I love, I love, I love life. I, I…all I care about is our species surviving. Sometimes the…our, our home is a bit of a war zone because I, I get very passionate about, you know, the carbon footprint of things. So, yeah I am, I’m very hopeful but somewhat pessimistic about what it would take to, to attain that, that optimism.

Economics is not gonna bring back the rivers that we’ve already poisoned. No matter how much money we throw at the situation it will not resolve itself. It’s not money that’s going to resolve any of these issues, it’s, it’s honesty—it’s human honesty.

Steve Williams, Dollys Flat

My name’s Steve Williams. I’m a woodfired potter—ceramics potter, and um, been here at Dollys Flat outside of Wingham for coming up 7 years now. And in that time, um, it’s been a commitment to living a more modest, off-the-grid life, and, and the house is getting closer to being finished, and it’s, it’s powered by the sun, and we collect water, and we’re growing more and more food. So, it is about a quieter life. And ah, my ceramic production is paralleling that in many ways, because I’m gathering timber as part of the management of um, this bushfire-prone zone that we live in, to um, fire the kiln. And um, and I’m crushing rocks and gathering materials to formulate glazes. And I get my clay from um, nearby— not on site, but um, but nearby. So I really do feel like the character of what I make is heavily influenced by umm, not just the materials, but the, the nature that I’m in every day.

The mindset is, I guess, it’s just part of living where you know the values that you have, and the values that have developed and changed, are about living quieter, and living with less impact, and living more sustainably, and um, making choices around all of those things. 

You know, with awareness and, and some bold thinking, we probably can coexist, right? But um, yeah, it needs to be less about profit, and um, much more about human health and well-being. I mean, I’m constantly making changes to my (laughs) be…my behaviour. But um, one, one of the things that I’m really interested in doing is actually making less work, and finding an audience for that work. And in a slow kind of way that, that’s happening for me. So yeah, the life I want to live is one that is joyful and, and creative and, you know, full of kind of energy, um, but it’s about one of balance, you know, where it’s not everything in my life. It’s a, it’s a small important part, but um, yeah, I want to, I want to swim in a clean ocean.

Andy Baker, Central Coast

I’m Andy Baker and I’m a groundwater researcher at UNSW (University of NSW).

How much water gets to the groundwater table and actually replenishes it and how often that occurs is really hard to measure. So, this is what we’re doing. We’re basically in the subsurface, using the caves. I like to say we’re using caves as observatories of groundwater processes and we’re actually watching the water moving from the soil into the subsurface to the groundwater.

By understanding how these things fit together in terms of the connectivity between the river, river water, and the groundwater, we can have better management into the future. But again, it’s the unknown, it’s the unknown connectivities. So how, yeah…the complexities are high

So, in terms of the groundwater history, which is like a tens of millions of years old history, the caves actually have a record of the ancient ah, groundwater levels.

Groundwater is hidden, you see lots of things written like as a ‘hidden’ resource or something like that—you can’t see it, you don’t understand it. And one thing we don’t understand, one thing we can’t quantify, is the variability of groundwater processes. And this thing called groundwater heterogeneity, variability of recharge and variability of the rock. Go into the caves here, you can see one part is massive limestone…it’s where the water goes, that variability means we have to be happy with uncertainty for us to even progress groundwater science.

So, uncertainty into the future is just another uncertainty, I think. And it, it’s just something that has to be embraced and tackled. I mean, I think I worry about the future but I don’t…maybe I’m less worried about the future because I know there’s…because I can understand the uncertainties.

Chris Robinson, Wellington

Chris Robinson, from Wellington. And I’ve been here probably over 30 years—came up from Katoomba. My partner’s a paleontologist, so I have a real interest in palaeontology and the environment.

I know that they talk about a tipping point, um, and whether that’s 2050 or earlier. I don’t know as humans, I know we talk about it, is it too much to change? Are we going to get rid of our cars? Are we gonna, you know, stop our gas, our fires, our…? It’s a lot to ask of humans who are very comfortable in our environments now, um, to do all the changes that are required.

As Australians, we bury our head in the sand, we don’t think it’s going to happen in our lifetime, or um, everything will be right, mate. I think that a lot of people still got that attitude, um, because it’s so incomprehensible that this could happen. It really is when you think that we’ve always been here in our little short period of time that we’ve been on earth, that we’re always here, and we’re always going to be here.

As humans, I think we can do some very little things that don’t take a lot of energy. I think, you know, someone offers you a straw in a milkshake or do you want a plastic lid on your coffee. Um, even those coffee cups that we have that are supposed to be, look recyclable, they’ve got a coating inside them, and I know due to Covid people used to bring their own mugs and we can fill them and we went away from that because, ah, of touching. But little things about, you know, if someone offers you something plastic, you know it’s only on there for two seconds— we’ve got a straw in our mouth for five seconds. Don’t have it! Drink out of a bottle.

Ian Eddison, Wellington

Ian Eddison. I’m um, an outdoors person, although I’ve also had plenty of years in um, the commercial world, ah, but I’ve always loved the outdoors, so I consider myself largely connected with the outdoors. Ah, I’m a caver. Umm, I’m a birder, I like birds.

Unfortunately, we have this argument that we’re making such an impact on the planet that there is a record in every landscape around the planet, from humans, and that’s largely because of plastics, but it’s not only plastics. So, we have an impact everywhere around the planet that we live on, and yet we’re only here for a very, very short period of time, so far. And I’m sure a lot of people would like to think we’ll be here for a long time yet. But what the windows to the past tell us is that things have come and gone, and it’s likely that we will too at some point in time. That’s a little ah, frightening for some, but you know, there was once a sea here. Will we be able to live in that sea if it returned? There were once megafauna here—big snakes and lizards. Will we be able to live with those if they’re here again? You know.

Our time is simplistic compared to those events that have happened. And those changes are going to come because we have an effect on speeding up some of those processes, and yet some of them are natural. Evidence is that these big natural events happened in the past. So, we need to adapt, and we are clever enough to adapt.

And I am not frightened of the ah, prospects of the change because I see that ah, there are plenty of people that are planting trees, and trying to do all sorts of wonderful things—pick up straws at the beach, and, you know, have our Clean Up Australia Days; do wonderful things, study the environment, ah, to learn more, to work out how to live in harmony with the environment. I’m, I’m comforted by that. I, I’m fearful for my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren, but, and how they’re going to cope with um, certain changes. But I’m also heartened by the fact that we’re clever enough as a people to do that. 

Bageshri Savysachi, Dubbo

My name is Bageshri Savysachi. I’m from Dubbo. I’m 25.

I feel a bit scared. I’m a bit anxious because I know that, I mean the people I’m surrounded with, know that we need to take action and we need to be aware of our impact on the environment. But the people in charge are…I don’t know, they don’t think that’s important. They think politics and power are more important.

So, my mother is very…like, she grew up in India where there’s like a billion people and climate change is not one of the issues anyone thinks about. We have way more issues like religion, casteism, politics, class, and poverty, food shortages. So, climate change is not even at the forefront of her mind, like she’s still getting used to how much, like, luxury she has living in Australia.

There are people that I have grown up with that have way more complex issues to deal with, just regarding their safety or the place that they live, or like politicians are trying to get them out of that area because they don’t fit into…It’s, yeah, it’s…climate change is a very privileged…like, it’s kind of the responsibility of the populations that have reached that stage where everyone kind of has electricity, power, access to education, access to food, access to a bank, access to…just access in general. But the paradox is that there are a lot of um, indigenous populations, where, when I grew up, grew up, I saw them, they so deeply knew how their life impact, their way of life impacted the forest, their surroundings. And we still travel all over India and that’s the difference I saw, like, it’s either really privileged populations that think about climate change, um, or it’s really people who are so, um, connected to the earth, people who have not accessed, like modern civilisation yet, who are really involved with their impacts on the planet. And I think it’s just somewhere in the middle, like we’re all probed by all these problems and we don’t really think about…we don’t have time to think about the planet because we’re too busy trying to survive, I don’t know, capitalism, (laughs) all these disparities in life.

I definitely think people who can make change are people with…people in positions of power, people with money, people with influence… I think we just need to really look at who we’re voting for, and kind of elect people who actually think about the future and the future generations.

Tsukasa Hiraoka, Dubbo

My name is Tsukasa. I’ve been in Dubbo for about three-and-a-half years. I first came to Dubbo, um, about 10 years ago and I lived here for about a year.

I don’t know if there’s much security anywhere, um, in terms of climate, in that it’s quite unpredictable whether you’re on the coast or inland, or you know, somewhere hot, somewhere cold. Personally, I just don’t think there’s much security anywhere really, yeah. In terms of climate, I tend to come from a social and human rights perspective, because of my previous work, I guess. I think that it’s a global issue that we all are a part of and can’t really escape from, and it affects people in all sorts of ways including housing security and ah, health, and migration. You know, all the problems that already exist and have existed but can potentially affect us in other and new ways, or people who have felt safe from it in the past might not be as safe from it because it’s potentially less economical and more geographical, which is quite a new thing maybe, due to climate change. I think we all have a responsibility but it is a global issue that we need to tackle together.

On a personal level, I try to keep my carbon footprint, footprint at a minimal, and do as much as possible to live um, a life that’s sustainable, um, make, make better choices, like consumer-related choices, and transport-related choices. Yeah, I’ve also started a service in transport with the hope to reduce carbon footprints of other people, because public transport in this area is not very good. But hopefully encouraging more people to share rides, it makes a small contribution.

Craig Bennett, Wellington

Craig Bennett’s my name. I’m a Landcare Coordinator at ah, Mid-Macquarie Landcare, also for Lower Macquarie Landcare based in Narromine. Mid-Macquarie is in Wellington.

Those from a farming background who are interested in regenerative agriculture, um, or just plain trying to make things better for their grandkids and their kids, their grandkids and their great-grandkids, and have sustainability in agriculture, um. In the Landcare-sense people are, you know, renewable energy part…yeah that, there’s, there’s a big focus ‘cause we have that in our area. One of the first Renewable Energy Zones in…well, it is the first in Australia apparently, so yeah. So, there’s a lot of that thing but there’s other things too that people are interested in, you know just plain out planting new trees.

And there’s the divide of um, farmers and people who want to go into the renewables, saying, Oh you know, you’re taking good farming land out. Ah, but my personal view is I think we could probably work together in that. I’m not sure about the other environmental sides of it, like where they’re getting rid of, you know, the vegetation and all that sort of stuff, but I think they can actually work together personally, from what I’ve seen. Well personally, I think we need to, we have to for our kids and our grandkids. You know, realistically we can’t continue to, to ah, wreck our atmosphere, wreck our environment, and not and not have a change somehow. Because we can think of ourselves if we want, but realistically we have to think of kids and our grandkids and their futures and, and what it will be like for them.

Matt Hansen, Dubbo

My name’s Matt Hansen (from Dubbo). I am um, the founder of Inland Waterways Ozfish. Um, I’m a keen recreational fisher, um, and yeah…and born and raised in the Central West and um, love all things fishing and the river.

The intensity of the last drought we had here, and the turbidity of that water once that sediment washed in, was absolutely terrible. It was like somebody’d put a magnet over the top of the river (Wambuul Macquarie River) and sucked all the fish up to the top. And they were doing what we call ‘cheezeling’, where they put their lips to the top of the water, just gasping for air. The shrimp, and not just a couple—millions upon millions of shrimp, diving out of the water. It was, it was the colour of a terracotta pot, and it was so thick and so soupy that nothing wanted to be in it. So, to see that happen, um and to see, you know, fish potentially older than me, turning over and rolling and dying…they’re fish that have survived the last three or four droughts before it. That one killed them.

So, is climate change a very real thing? You know, the Lismore floods, um, the bushfires that we’ve seen. Um I think, you know, and just look, I’m all about following the science—good science, and the science says that climate change is a very, very real thing. I think anyone who denies it now, um, yeah…I wouldn’t agree with that.

Um, but, you know, some catch on quicker than others and I think social license is, is a word we’re hearing more and more of. And I think that there’s some really, really exciting things again as we see, um, the improvement of battery and solar technology, and all those sorts of things. It’s um, I think the next 10 years will be a very, very exciting time in that space.

I think, again, we’ll see a second solar revolution. Uptake for solar in Dubbo is very, very high on a nation, um sorta, on a national perspective. But the next wave I see as a real estate agent and a property manager is if we can get the battery technology up and really harness the power of that sun in a cost-effective manner, I think we’ll see Solar Mark II (two) again take off in our region.

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…it’s really hard to imagine a post-carbon world when we live in a world that is so absolutely carbon…

Fiona Aveyard from Tullamore in Central NSW, about an hour southwest of Dubbo. I’m a, ah, fifth-generation family farmer on a property called “Westpoint”. We farm, ah, do cereal cropping, er, Merino sheep for wool and prime lambs for meat production. Mother of four—ah, eldest is 17, youngest is 10.

We really are probably on that cusp of having to imagine what farming is going to look like for the next generation and start to make those movements towards it. And it is, it’s really hard to imagine a post-carbon world when we live in a world that is so absolutely carbon—from our machinery to our vehicles are all diesel driven. You know, we use fossil fuels for our energy, um, we’re on the grid so we don’t use generators or anything like that. It’s all…our fertilisers are, you know, um, we predominantly use nitrogen. It’s made from a fossil fuel industry…although it is probably moving gradually to, you know, thermo / kind of chemical production…although that’s a long way off.

So, everything we do is going to change dramatically and it’s very hard when you’re successful in a business and doing things well, to change from that to do something really different. So that, for us, that’s um, quite a fundamental shift. And it’s also really hard to imagine what it’s going to look like and is it the stuff we do now, is a bridge too far? Like, we’re trying to implement technology and data that doesn’t match our environment. We don’t even have decent roads, we don’t have reliable data or phone service. We live in a modern world but we don’t have anything that’s reliable. So, we’re also stepping over that to get to the next stage, which is a post-carbon world.

As landholders, we definitely have a greater responsibility than your average Joe Blow down the corner, without a doubt. The thing is, we’re at the start of a journey. When I’m talking to people, I always liken it a bit to…in agriculture, like when the first tractor got here, and there would have been guys just going, ‘Yeesss, this is the best thing ever! Oh my god, I can’t wait to sack my horse! I’ve been dreaming of something that was this great…’. And on the other hand, there would have been the naysayer farmer going, who could only see the problems around tractors and where the shortcomings were, and what would hold that up. And they’re both right, and that’s where we are today, in that, that original tractor wasn’t perfect but what it did was, it was very much the beginning of the innovation to get to the tractors that we have today. And now we’re at another completely fundamental shift, a paradigm change of we’re right at the start…we’ve got technology like wind power, wind turbines, like solar power…all that sort of stuff. A lot of people can see the faults with it, the problems, but that’s not what is going to get us to a post-carbon economy, but what it is it will start us on that journey. And I think if getting that message to people is really key, because it’s for people like myself, it’s really, really hard to make that paradigm shift. But it’s not their fault, it’s not even a problem really, because they just can’t imagine that they will exit the industry. There will be other factors and our industry will move, like it or not, very much towards a post-carbon era. But that journey is going to be challenging on a lot of levels.

We have an older population as well who have already been through almost an industrial revolution, now they’ve been through a tech revolution, now they’ve got to go to the next level—a carbon revolution and it’s really…it won’t be for everyone. And with that, going into a post-carbon world, we are going to have a lot of governance, we’re going to have a lot of compliance, and you know, it doesn’t sit well with farmers. We don’t like it. But once we understand it well, where we’re going, we can imagine it, we can envisage that, it will be a lot easier. But at the moment, it’s almost a bridge too far. We can’t quite see it. But I hope that with good governance and really good leadership, we can get there. But it’s going to…there’s going to be a bit of a…there’ll be a carrot approach and there’ll be a stick approach. And, you know, we’re going to have to get there but not everyone is going to love it.

We’re generational farmers, so I actually, I do feel that burden reasonably heavily. On one hand, we’re incredibly excited about the future and the opportunities that come from change. There’s a lot of…you know, the potential is limitless and to be a part of that is really exciting. But on the other hand, ah, the unknown is really daunting, and you know, I think, we’ve discussed it, and said look, if the kids aren’t interested in farming in a modern world, is that going to be terrible? Because it’s actually going to be really hard. It’s…time will tell. The kids are still young. I think we’ve probably got one or two farmers amongst them, but you don’t want to push them into that kind of a field. So, I do…I feel the burden quite heavily and there’ll be opportunities but there’ll also be a lot of risk.

I think the customer really has to understand the power they have, because they are very much on this journey with us. You know, we live in a free country and to make the changes that we have to make, like I said, there’s going to be a carrot and there’s going to be a stick. But part of that carrot is very much the consumer and them making good choices at a retail level, and that will drive the market. And as someone like myself, who really believes strongly in free market, that’s where it’s got to go. Because currently, we are in a situation where food is a commodity and people want really cheap food and they really, genuinely need to understand about the true cost of production and who’s paying that tax already, on carbon. Is it being paid on the farm gate, is it being paid past the farm gate. It’s being paid now, but who’s actually paying it? And invariably it is the farmer who’s paying it.

And I do think, there’s a big role in good governance here because, again, I’m a real believer in free market economies, but in a change like this, in a huge paradigm shift, you want to encourage innovation. And with innovation comes risk and if Government wants people to be brave and bold and lead the way, there needs to be a mitigation of that risk—whether it be in farm insurance or whether it be in income insurance, or whether it be in subsidies in some way. And I really hate to say it, but that’s how we’re going to have to get there, because to meet a commercial world is not going to be easy. Change is quite unsettling for everybody but sadly I think it will be the stick that will push people out of the industry. It is really unsettling, and it’s hard to imagine, but we…the science is true and we really have to rely on the data that’s being presented to us that it’s crucial that our greenhouse gas emissions are cut. And we are, as landholders, we’re a big part of that story and we can do really positive things to change that, but it means that everything has to change and the consumer is a big part of that story.

I take a strong view that the best connection to country is people and that active involvement of people in our landscape is the key.

I am Bruce Maynard. I live ah, outside of Narromine in Central West NSW on my fourth-generation property called “Willydah”. The drivers for me and ah, my immediate family to change were partly push and partly pull factors, in that ah, we did have some financial pressures on us but also the first changes ah, majorly in climate that we were seeing. So, this goes back to the 1980s and ah, early 90s. And so those factors were push on us to actually do something different, but deeply I always felt if we wanted a very ah, significantly different outcome we would need to adjust our systems, not just try and improve on things that were already leading in a path that wasn’t going to fit long-term goals. And often times I often see that ag systems nowadays are implemented or designed in ways that are actually the opposite of where people, if they’re expressing what they desire in the long run, ah, those systems are the opposite to those expressions.

I see myself as ah, as just a custodian on a long lineage of 47,000 years of people that have trodden around these parts of the world. Ah, significantly different then as it was now and the future will be different. So, my place is to, ah, as best I can, ah, produce more, consume less and expand the biodiversity while I’m here.

I look at agro-ecosystems and agroecology as being totally integrated and ah, not ah, piece driven but actually the connections between all the pieces. So, in order to make systematic change, then ah, one must really see how the machine works, as much is as reasonably possible because it is impossible to know everything about biological ah, systems. That will never happen. But ah, the base on which we work as ah, farmers, we can either decide to be exploitative or constructive, and my path is hopefully constructive, and that is broadening the biodiversity base means that I broaden the productive base for the future as well.

I do feel ah, ah, somewhat challenged and pessimistic about rural communities in Australia in particular, it is exhibited worldwide, in that they continue to shrink. I think ah, ah, the reason for being is really community, so I put people, people first, landscape, and then business third as serving those other two main factors. So, that’s my priority list. And in order for ah, any of our efforts out here to be worthwhile, I believe it needs a thriving community. So, we start on that, that basis, and make it exciting and interesting and rewarding, and then we can do great things in the landscape and the business provides the means to that end.

Rural industry, in general, I would think is usually epitomised by more pessimism and ah, cynicism going forward rather than creativity and excitement. And that, I believe is, is a sad ah, thing. Ah, in our family, we’ve ah encouraged our, our children to have the, ah, a positive viewpoint but without ignoring ah, the very real and increasingly large challenges that they might face in their lifetimes, ah, but trying to be um, optimistic but realistic.

The two main challenges ah, I see are inexplicably linked, are species decline and climate change. That’s going to bring about factors that, that are well outside our immediate control and that I believe applies to anybody around the world now. And we are all interconnected, so that’s going to require some substantial change for all of us to adopt a feedback model which assumes we are all interconnected rather than individually doing our own things or directing our own actions for our own desires.

I am an optimist about people’s ah, ability to change but I do think that there has to be a value proposition for them individually, and ah, the ones that they care of as well. So ah, yes, I believe it can ah, happen but um, the value proposition is not for me to put to them, it’s for them to say what they find of value.

A funny old saying I use from time to time is, if I can’t be a wonderful example at least I’ll be a horrible warning! So um, people will draw lessons from ah, our efforts. And ahh, in my life what I’ve, I’ve gained personal reward and inspiration from, is assisting with agro-ecology methods that help others, and not just a self-promotion on, yes we have been successful with what we’ve done. That for me would be too narrow a result. I think there is a broader good to be done and looking at human achievement as collaborative rather than competitive.

Collaboration and working within systems, especially agroecology ah, ah systems is exactly where I sit. Ah so, I’m not if you like, somebody who would advocate completely rewilding everywhere, because then that, that gives a lesser range of results out of that landscape than if we actually have humans actively engaged. So, not everything can be as wild as could be and still have agriculture ah, and human needs within it. And ah, and so, it’s driving on the broadest possible freeway but we’ll still going to have guardrails in there for our human survival, as well as for, might I say, the broadest biodiversity result actually resides where we have humans active in the environment, but looking to achieve that.

I think ah, as an organism, we’re ah, an interesting ah, evolution and ah, our self-awareness is an interesting evolutionary ah, thing that has developed out of this wonderful little ah, blue rock out in space. And so ah, I believe the science and the practice demonstrates that we can get either ah, less biodiversity or more biodiversity if humans are involved. So we don’t concentrate on the, on whether it’s a black or white answer on humans, yes/no, in the same way that I would argue ah, that a tool such as livestock can either be detrimental or advantageous to the landscape depending on how it’s used. So, there might be the answer for us humans. Well we’ve, we’ve got decisions and we can make those decisions positive or negative, and it will be up to us collectively as well as individually.

I take a strong view that the best connection to country is people and ah, that active involvement of people in our landscape is the key. Not just necessarily larger population centres scattered across the landscape, but actually people ah, integrating with the landscape, which in the end, ah, really benefits the humans involved. If the more that humans are completely taken away from natural settings, the science is clear that the worst that is for their mental health.

I see a, a great resurgence or upswelling of interest in all sorts of methods that we can produce what we need without harming ah, the global environment and the, the settings in which we live. I think it’s an exciting time because of that, because there is a strong interest. So for city people that, that ah, don’t have access to rural settings, I think this works both ways. It’s not just on their shoulders to integrate with country folk, it’s actually ah, country folk, ah ah, welcoming that ah, that possibility and ah, finding ways that ah, that not every person can be a farmer, but ah, perhaps we can make it that every person can know a farmer.

…with energy and food we need to have a more interconnected or integrated way of thinking, so that, you know, we can do both in this region.

Karin Stark. We’re in Narromine NSW.

There’s a lot of farmers and they’re involved in groups like Farmers for Climate Action that can see changes that are happening on their properties that they’ve never seen before and there’s an acceptance of climate science and a wanting and desire to do more and see more action. But then also in some regional communities, such as the one that I live in, I think there’s still a bit of climate science denial and people thinking that they’ve seen these types of events in the past and it’s not caused by human activities. So, there’s a bit of a split and I often wonder what that denial, you know, who, who does that serve really when there’s climate science denial, because farmers are really at the coalface of climate change.

At times I feel hopeful because I think things are changing, you know, that there’s a lot more education in schools around looking after the environment compared to when I was at school. You know, technology’s changing at a pace that we require, so even with governments not necessarily um, following suit with seeing that type of change, with costs dropping of renewables and the desire to move forward—consumer desires as well. But then at other times, I feel less hopeful, I suppose, when I see what is happening to our natural world. So, I think doing the work I do (cough) helps a little bit in terms of trying to feel that I’m doing something small towards addressing climate change.

Really, it comes from um, the concern around climate change, what it’s doing to the planet, to animals, but also really wanting to help farming families with building resilience for the tougher times ahead. We’re having a climate change crisis as well as a biodiversity crisis and those two are obviously linked, but there’s also separate actions that are required to stop our mass extinctions and look after the environment. It’s a very complex world, so the impact that humans have, you know, that impacts everything really, and things are so interconnected that if we lose one species that’s going to have pretty big ramifications on other species, even in the smaller insects we might be losing now, or frogs. So, I think there needs to be more discussion around that complexity and the impact that humans are having on it and how do we value the environment in a, in a monetary way because it’s kind of not involved, you know, not included in um (cough), the GDP or you know, in economics. So, it’s voiceless and it’s not valued in the way it should be.

I try and say to my daughter…and as children, you know, you want certain things and you want toys or whatever it is…but that takes the earth’s resources and we’ve just got to be careful with buying too much because that is also driving the destruction of our natural world. So, I don’t want to give her too much to worry about it—she’s only nine, but also I think it’s really important to start to consider, you know, do we really need that or is it something that you want and also what’s the impact of that. You know, trying to do things that are going to have a less impact on the world.

I think with food supply, you know, I think it’s important that agriculture does continue to develop and adapt to, to different technologies, different weather events, in order to secure our food supplies. But I think really with energy and food, we need to have a more interconnected or integrated way of thinking, so that, you know, we can do both in this region. So you know, something like agrivoltaics as an example of that, where you grow food on the same parcel of land that you have solar panels, and they can actually be benefits to agriculture and crops that have partial shade—particularly in a warming climate—um, they’re mostly horticultural crops. But you know, maybe we could be looking at doing cropping, you know, wheat and barley between solar panels, which is done overseas but hasn’t been done in Australia. So, you know, integrating that and ensuring that our food productions, um, our food production is also powered by renewable clean energy so that we’re decarbonising and able to continue to trade overseas. And also showing consumers that we’re a green, clean sector as well.

So, slowly I think we are being set up with the Renewable Energy Zone (REZ) to do that, but I think there needs to be more focus on the distribution level of allowing farmers and regional communities to produce the energy themselves rather than these kind of massive solar and wind farms. Like, allow the community to also produce that energy, or farmers, ah in particular, to put into the grid and trade with their neighbours, or sell to local communities and then use when they can, when they’re pumping or whatever it might be. So, I guess I see it as quite, um, interconnected.

Consumers have a lot of power but in the end I think the cost, unfortunately, is something that (cough) a lot of consumers will end up really prioritising over whether it’s, it’s a green product or not. You know, I think there is more desire to see greener products. And I know a winery in the Hunter Valley that went carbon neutral, they were the first winery to do so, and there, they said that their sales increased about 200%, which is an unexpected benefit of doing that because people wanted to support a winery that is, is proactively addressing their carbon emissions.

You know consumers, but regional communities as well, need to be involved in, you know, how is this region going to be producing a power station’s worth of energy to the rest of the State. And you know, how do we benefit in meaningful, long-term ways? That conversation needs to be very much integrated into the transition and governments need to be talking to communities, developers need to be talking to communities, communities need to be talking to communities about what do we want, how do we improve the lives of people in this region through what is going to be the Renewable Energy Zone. There’s a few groups, one called RE-Alliance for example, that works to try and build knowledge and organise the community to work together to be ready for these conversations that we’re having with governments and industry, and you know, what is it that we see in our future that investment in the REZ could help. You know, is it local green ammonia to urea plants that could then provide fertiliser to local farmers and then secure, secure up supply, we’re not always depending on imports for that. Or is it, you know, better telecommunications and more locally owned power, so the profits stay local? It’s just starting to consider these things, because they are going to be important, they are going to be part of people’s lives, so…and talking to others and getting involved in local groups as well.

As humans, if we’re on the earth, we have an impact. The same as animals, animals have an impact. We’ve just got to learn to live with each other and with the environment.

I’m Simon Barton, living ahh, just north of Wellington, at Bodangora. Ah, running sheep and cattle ah, farm with a few horses, and also host, hosting a few wind turbines.

Living in this region, I’m born and bred here, so really don’t know anything different, umm, but certainly love where I live. Umm, really enjoy the landscape, ah, enjoy the people, enjoy, enjoy the lifestyle and the farming at the moment. Yeah, everything seems to be, um, you know, going along harmoniously. Umm, you know, we all go through our challenges and we’ve been through a few of those in the last few years with droughts, and mice, and umm, pandemics and all sorts of things and who knows what’s going to be the next thing to be thrown at us. But yeah no, I guess it’s the cycle. You know, we just, we don’t know what’s around the corner. Umm, you know it’s very hard to plan, you know plan for, if someone said you were going to have another three or four-year drought, we’d go, Oh ok you know, we could plan for that. But we actually don’t know how long it’s going to be when it starts, ah, and you know, we, we try to do our best ah, and look after the landscape and look after animals. Um, but yeah. Look, you know, there’s been droughts for hundreds of years, um, there’ll be droughts in the future, you know—same as floods, same as good seasons. Ah, you know, you’ve just gotta roll with what you’re given.

Ah look, I’m optimistic at the moment. Umm, stock prices are good, people need to eat. Umm, we’re generating renewable energy so that’s also a plus ah, for the environment as far as I’m concerned. Ah, it also helps our business, so we actually don’t have to run our, our agricultural business quite as hard as we might’ve in the past to make ends meet. Um, so we can look after the country a little bit more that way. So, you know, that’s, to me that’s a win-win situation for us, ah, our business and the environment.

Ahh, with these wind turbines, you know, you just go…people, some people like them, some people don’t, um, some people, y’know. We know we’ve got to move forward, ah, rather than backwards in…ah, for our energy generation and for our environment, but who knows what’s around, y’know,  two years time, 10 years, 20, 50 years time, you know. There’s things like, you know, the hydrogen starting to come, come on board. You know, nuclear’s still there, and to me, that’s probably the most efficient way of generating electricity but just doesn’t seem to be popular with, with a lot of people. Umm, but to me it’s, it’s the one thing that probably has the less ah, imprint on the, on the environment than anything to generate our electricity. And (sighs), and let’s face it, everyone wants their lights on, and their TV going, so you know, it’s something that we can’t do without and, and I can’t see that we’ll ever be able to do it out. 

As humans, if we’re on the earth, we’re, you know, we have an impact. Ah, but the same as animals. You know, animals have an impact, ah. Ahh um, you know, we’ve all just got to learn to live with each other and with the environment. So, the less impact we can have on, detrimental impact on we can have on the environment the better.

The biggest thing ah, that the, the community needs to know, ah, what’s happening, how it’s happening. Um, so yeah. Getting the community to understand, you know, the basics of it. Umm, the other thing that the wind company does is, you know, they actually pour quite a bit, quite a few funds into the community, as in, as in a benefit fund. So each year, um, various organisations can apply for, for grants. 

I hope that, that we’re not completely becoming an, an industrial landscape, um, that we still, people still need to eat, um, and wear clothes and, so you know, we’re producing fibre and meat, um, and you know people will still need to have that. So, I would hate to see our landscape become a industrial landscape where it’s just all solar farms or wind farms to generate power for, y’know, say, New South Wales being Newcastle, Sydney, Wollongong. Umm, you know, I think we’ve, we’ve just gotta be… tread a little bit careful and not go too heavy-handed with degenerating our agricultural land to the point that we go, Ohhh, y’know, we’re running out of resource that we used to have.

Man is perhaps the most destructive of the beasts on the planet; we need to learn from our past to be able to plan for our future.

My name’s Margaret Clark. I’ve had a long association with the area (Wingham) because we came up here as children since my father was born locally, my grandmother also, and we came for holidays during my childhood. I was brought up out west—er, Narrandera, out near Wagga and came to university where I studied education and became a teacher, moved into working with trade union movement, and then, um, joined the Department of Education, ahh, working with training programs for unemployed people.

And taking early retirement when our department was abolished, moved back up to where my father came from. Became heavily involved here with the museum, specialising in writing and doing research into both First and Second World Wars. We try to give her a balanced view here of the development of the area, ah, focusing on not only the natural environment but also the development of the area, the industry of the area—um, in particular, of course, dairy and the forestry. Some of the early settlers experimented with crops which certainly, definitely failed. I mean, er, one person arrived from Jamaica thinking that this area look very similar, and therefore he would try to grow sugar—which was fine the first year because I think he must have arrived in a La Niña event and there was plenty of water, plenty of rain, but that didn’t last. Um, that was a sign of an industry that failed. And so we’ve seen also how dairy has gone from being, err, the responsibility of small individual farmers, to now being large corporations, because a small farmer simply can’t cope—the size of the farms are too small.

So, you learn you have to adapt and adjust to suit the market, suit the environment. I think, er, we’ve become particularly focused here because ah, 2019 was a massive drought followed by devastating fires, which destroyed a lot of properties in the area, and I think, disturbed a lot of people because there was a real fear that this town would be affected. Following that of course, we had the switch to La Niña and we had significant flooding, and the army had to come in to help with the clear-up. And of course with COVID. So, you’ve had three major crises over the last three years, which I think has focused people’s attentions very strongly on the problems that we’re facing and what will continue to occur. And I think that there is a growing feeling that insufficient is being done to prepare for the future. So, at the point that we had the drought, the council (Mid Coast Council) was starting to investigate umm, desalinisation. But of course, once the drought, the drought finished, well, that was the end of looking at that as a potential alternative. And yet, we could be back in drought in, in a short period of time.

And you look around the world, we’re having severe weather disruptions, all around the world at the moment that has never happened before. And it seems to be escalating and becoming much, much more prevalent and more, more common. In the past, Australia has depended very heavily on its natural products. We rode on the sheep’s back for many years. We’re now fully dependent, it appears to me, on what we dig out of the ground. We’ve allowed our manufacturing sector to, to fall by the wayside. We’re not thinking as positively as we should be about alternative energy, although the current government seems to be moving towards that. Um, and some individual towns and regions are taking matters into their own hands because the, the governments are not providing enough incentive for people to, to go ahead. And the government itself is, of course, not being proactive enough in my mind. So, I feel there’s a long way to go there.

In terms of other countries, like France, which I have a particular attachment to, you can see in little tiny villages, there are wind farms everywhere, that ah, entire barns are covered in solar power panels, which are powering the entire farm and the neighbouring farms as well. So, I feel that we have a long way to go here.

We’ve got the potential; we’ve certainly got the sunlight to utilise for solar, but doing it in as great or as quickly as we should be doing it. Particularly after the last three years and devastation that’s occurred in this area, is that there’s a growing realisation of the need to look to a sustainable future. And because it’s a rural area, because it’s dependent on agriculture predominantly, ah, then the concern is that much greater. And that’s why there was such a strong opposition to the concept of fracking (coal seam gas), which could well of destroyed the subterranean water and had other effects that we don’t really know.

I think that there are a number of people that are taking direct action. Um, people are installing solar power. If you look around at the town, every second house has got solar (batteries) on the roof and there’s a growing move to, ah, install batteries, which I’ve done. Ah, now the other thing is you’ve got towns such as Glouster, which are moving towards establishing for the township, their own power plant—predominantly solar. And we’re having discussions here with the Wingham Advancement Group, and with Council, as to whether we can do something similar here. So, therefore, it is coming from the grassroots up, it’s not coming from government down. And you’re penalised in, in many ways because er, once you start to sell to the grid, you’re, you’re selling at a pittance, and you’re being disadvantaged because then they make random…they make minimum, minimum charges even if you’re not present, if you’re not in the house! You’ve got $100 worth of usage, which you didn’t use because there’s a standard $1.50 charge per day, whether you’re there or not, whether you turn the electricity on or not.

So, I feel in that sense, mmm, perhaps there needs to be intervention to stop this double-dealing by…Well, I can understand the energy companies being worried! If they are not in the forefront of moving into renewable energy, then they’re going to be disadvantaged in the long-term. And I think governments need to be aware that you can’t rely, and you should not rely, on companies to drive change. That it has to come, in that sense, from top down. 

Currently, anyone who’s renting, who doesn’t have solar power, is paying a lot more in electricity charges than those who own their own property and who are able to make the decision to go into solar. Um, from time to time, governments have initiatives, as they did in the past, where they would subsidise you to put on your solar. Um, but they come and go, those, those incentives, and they’re not available if you don’t own your property. Um so, I feel that er, a lot of people will yes, be left behind because at this stage it seems to be an individual choice and not something that’s universal.

We don’t know what other critical events will occur in the future, which could be of significant damage to the environment. Yes, we have to take these steps, we have to hope that we can plan for a tradition, er, for a transition, but we can’t rely on it. Man is perhaps the most destructive of the beasts on the planet; we need to learn from our past to be able to plan for our future.

I can see a future where it’s not going to be survival of the fittest, but it’s definitely going to be the haves and have-nots, and it’s going to be related around power and energy.

Stephen Callaghan. I’m currently living in Dubbo. I’ve been here for about 5-6 years. Ah, Newcastle born and bred. Ah, my mother was Welsh, from a Scottish father and a Welsh mother, and my father was Australian from a Wonnarua lady and an Australian man.

The house we bought had solar panels on it. The area is ex-housing commission and pretty much every house has solar panels that just feed into the grid. When we got there, the feed-in didn’t seem to be as much as it should be, and of course, you get pittance now from the energy companies. We get 4 cents a kilowatt (kW) feed in and they charge us $0.30 a kW.

Um, I got a guy in to look at the panels and he told us it’s old technology, where basically, we got a tree and he said that if that tree covers part of one panel, that panel, one panel only operates at the percentage and all the other panels operate at that percentage too—they all go down the lowest common denominator. But there’s a new way of arraying them that it doesn’t matter if one panel’s blocked out or whatever the thing.

So we got…we looked at systems and we looked at rebates and we looked at what our electricity bill was (half laughs), and it was just climbing and climbing. And we thought we can’t keep paying, you know, $6,000 a year ah, on electricity, and it’s only going to get more expensive. So we looked and we got quotes and quotes, we got a…we ended up getting a 7 kW solar array, which is ah, 5 kWs facing north and two 1 kWs, um, facing um, east and west. So even right at sunset, on the west panel we get, we still get 500 watts trickling in ’til it’s dark. And we also got a 12.8 kW battery and a smart inverter, and the app that comes with it, you can see what electricity is being used. And it’s been, it’s an epiphany of how we’ve been wasting electricity, and I’m sure everyone does the same, and when we use electricity.

I got into the habit because we were once, a long time ago, on a time-of-day ah, rate for electricity, we got cheaper electricity at night. So I’ve been running the washing machine all night just out of habit, and that’s what I do. That’s not when you do your stuff with solar, and now I’m up every morning at 8 o’clock, as soon as the panels start generating—they start generating from sun up, but as soon as they hit 2000 Watts, ah, I got the washing machine on, I’ve loaded the dishwasher, vacuuming, doing all the power intensive things. Now, we’ve had the panels on and the battery on, for what, 80, getting on for three weeks now. When we were just on the grid, we were using 55 kW a day, which is excessive but we’ve got two teenagers living at home who, have no idea. You know what they’re like, and ah, air conditioner on when it’s -2 degrees and stuff like that. Since the panel’s been on, we have used the total, so we have bought a total of 82 kW, in nearly, somewhere between, 16 and 20 days.

I looked at everything we did and when we did it. We had a chest freezer going, and we looked at it and we thought, ok this fridge we’ve got is on its way out, let’s get a bigger fridge that’s more energy efficient, which we did. We emptied out and turned off the chest freezer and put all the stuff in the side-by-side freezer, and once it cools down, fridges are incredibly economical to run—like 150kW hours. I can isolate everything—ceiling fans…Um, it’s funny ’cause the kids had heaters in their rooms and I jokingly, WHO’S GOT THE HEATER ON!, because I can see it spike!

But’s what happening is we are doing most of the stuff during the day and I understand it’s going to be different in summer when we’re using air conditioning and things like that, but the aim is to not use any grid electricity and to go to sunset with the battery 100 percent full, 98.9 is all it goes up to, but…And then we have, and I know what we have overnight, and if we don’t run any heaters or air conditioners, we can live a normal life—the fridge, cook, watch TV, the kids can have their computers on gaming, whatever, we can live a normal life overnight completely off-grid and still wake up in the morning with anywhere between 40 and 60 percent of the battery capacity left. 

Couple of times we’ve had one, two really rainy days and that’s when we use the majority of that, that 80-odd kW. We have used electricity overnight because the battery’s run out by midnight. I’ve changed the off-peak hot water to just heat up in the day because now it heats up off the solar. 

Changing them, for me, has been very easy, ’cause I’m motivated and Tracy’s (partner) motivated because we pay the bills. Getting the kids motivated and getting them to change—because they’re teenagers and they do school, one, ones, the eldest one’s got a part-time job and she does TAFE. Um, they’re nocturnal, basically. So, they come out of their rooms at like 7 or 8 o’clock and they want to use the air fryer, they want to cook something in the oven, they want to wash their clothes for the next morning. So it’s getting, and I’d say to them, I’ve given them a couple of weeks grace, but now I’ve said, If you want your washing done it’s got to be out in the hallway by morning and I’ll do it, but no more washing at night. ‘Cause we’ve got a front loader and it’s, it’s horrendous—it uses 3000 kW hours and the cycle’s like three hours. So, that’s practically one battery, gone. 

Ah, so we’ve managed. Um, I’m still working on our plan for winter and how we’re going to ah, adapt then. Beause again, and we’re guilty of it, you know, just whack the air conditioning on and just cool down, but now what we can do as we can have the air conditioning on low during the day and then still have enough once the sun goes down, have enough power in the battery to run it. So if we run it half and half, you know, we might get two or three hours out of the battery.

It can be done. It’s, it’s the changing of the, the mindset of when to use power. Because, you know, we’re pretty privileged. You just, it’s there, you just switch it on, you just use it, you’ve never worried about it before. People are worrying about it now because it’s getting damn expensive.

The only reason we were able to do this and get the system we wanted was because Tracey’s father died and he left me $17,000 and we spent it on the, on the…Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to do it,  just wasn’t an option. Um, we were going to get the solar panels replaced next year but we were able to get the battery, the inverter, the smart inverter and the panels. 

You’ve got a wonder why, even now, this should have been made mandatory on all new buildings years ago. It saves money, it saves pollution. The grid, I gather the people who run the grids, own the grids – electrical grids, are pushing against it because obviously they, they lose money, um, and they’re also having trouble. When we got it installed our electrician told us, ’cause there’s so much sold in this area, we were getting into our house 258 volts or something, and he said that’s because everyone’s feeding back into the grid. And they’ve got to come up with a problem…a solution for that. But the solution is hubs. We could, we could all have batteries on our houses and we could share them into a mini-grid. Or, we could have a large battery that everyone’s solar panels feed into, and you know, we, we pay for the electricity out of that but at a decent affordable rate.

We live in a very low socioeconomic area, I honestly don’t know, looking at our electricity bill, how some of our neighbours are coping. Because of Covid, we found out that we didn’t get our meter read for a year—a year and a month, and then they read it and they went, Oh you’ve used a lot more electricity than we’ve expected. And we were hit with a $2,800 bill in one go. And we thought, OK, that’s cause they didn’t read the meter, blah, blah, blah. We wore it. And then the next month, when they did read the meter, it was still like $1,300. And we’ve got two kids, and I know a lot of my neighbours, they’ve got kids. I just don’t know, maybe they’re not paying the bills. Maybe electricity’s being turned off.

We’re constantly told by, I gather and I suspect vested interests, that the technology’s not ready and baseload power—you still need coal and everything like that. And yes, for industry, you do. But we, I can see it, I’ve, I’ve, looking at my phone app for my, my solar install, my virtual power plant, that they call them, it, the technology’s here now, to ah, to provide that to everyone.

Everyone could do this for, and if it’s mass-produced, everyone could do this for probably $10,000. And let’s face it, $10,000 a household in the great scheme of things, giving money away, you know, for different things, will make it not, you know, that much of a huge difference in the long-term, considering the coal. But, then you’ve got coal miners who are out of jobs and transport and things like that. But they didn’t seem to worry when it was car workers or dairy farmers or anyone else, so I think we’ve just got to adapt to a new economy. 

We’re privileged enough to have had the opportunity to get this, and also, ah, our background—I’m long been an early adopter, you know, what’s called an early adopter. And even though I didn’t early adopt solar, I’ve got into it the first chance.  And we’re, we’re…Our car, this car is due for renewal in March next year. It’s on a salary sacrifice lease and we’re definitely going EV, um, and we’re going to charge it from solar from the house—trickle charge. We don’t do that many ks now, around town, it could be virtually zero cost to run, as far as fuel goes. But at the moment it’s not economical for the average person to do, little own people on government benefits and, and casual work. Their first priority is a roof over their head and food on the table. And electricity seems to, the way they, and I’m guilty of this too in the past, the way they bill it—it’s sort of like, you use it then you get the shock, and then you negotiate and you pay it off, and whatever. I’ve been there, I had to pay off electricity bills. Now my main concern, and I think this will be a concern even if with big take up, is the, the homeowners won’t be getting equitable value from the, the um, from the power generators.

I used to think that if someone saw the writing on the wall and saw heading straight into a brick wall at 100 miles an hour they might think about putting their foot on the brake or veer to one side. Doesn’t seem like we’re going to do that. Um, I can see a future where it’s not going to be survival of the fittest, but it’s definitely going to be the haves and have-nots, and it’s going to be related around power and energy.

There is definitely work to be done in making people think more widely about their impact on the world…

My name is Idishta and we’re sitting in Dubbo. I’ve lived in Dubbo for coming up to three years soon, um, and I’ve lived in Australia since 2015.

I think in terms of the climate, ah, the recent floods were a bit unsettling, um, because I think it felt like no one knew what to do to manage them. And I think that was a bit interesting, ‘cause I thought um, that people would be more prepared than they were. The thing is coming from a developing nation (Bangladesh), I have a perception of how I think Australia was. Um, and I think I felt that it was a country that very much, you know, knew what they’re doing, you know, there are some issues here and there, but like, more or less, people are equal, um, and treated as such. But I think coming to Australia and then especially coming to Dubbo, I’ve realised that there’s actually lots of um, inequalities within the system and there’s, um, I think people are, people in the city are oblivious to problems of people in the region. Um, and I think that was surprising.

For a lot of the um, students I teach in my school, thinking about climate change is like not even a thing to think about because they’re thinking about, ah like, food and safety in their own homes, and you know, um, making sure they have like a place to sleep. So I think, yeah, they’re not even thinking about climate change. And like, I’m a Geography teacher so we do talk about climate change quite a bit, um, and sometimes kids will be like, Miss! What does this matter? Like, it just doesn’t matter, Miss. I’m like, It, it does! because I think sometimes they don’t understand that, that the climate actually affects other parts of their life, that they don’t realise.

I don’t know, I think the age that I teach, they’re ah, in Year 7 to Year 10, you think, you know, even if I think about myself at that age, I ah had, the most important thing in the world was me (laughs), and not really much else. Um so, I think it’s not, it’s not that alarming. It’s, it’s fine because it’s like, oh, you’re at an age where that’s what you think about. I think it would be more alarming if I had children who were saying, Oh, climate change isn’t real. I think that would be more of an alarming statement.

Renewables will be a good thing. The…A few months ago I was driving out to Cobar with a friend and we went past the solar panels in Nyngan, um, and we stopped there and we read the little, like, all of the good things it’s doing, which gave me a lot of hope. I was like, Oh yeah, it’s actually doing a lot of cool things. Um, but I think I hadn’t thought about like, the impact it has on animals and whatnot. And I wonder if, um you know, our politicians are thinking about those impacts, um, or are they just like me and don’t think about it all.

I think the environment is just like a blanket statement we say about ah, everything, but I don’t think we have a good understanding of all the…or a good um, awareness rather, of all the different things that make up the environment, like earthworms! Like, I would just never think of that um, when it comes to wind turbines. There is definitely work to be done in making people think more widely about their impact on the world, ’cause I think…I consider myself to be an environmentally conscious person but…

And I think the arts really play a big role in this. There was this exhibition at the Cultural Centre (in Dubbo), where school kids made these, like, sculptures out of trash. And I think that like if I did that in a classroom, like yeah, some kids would be like, Oh Miss, what are we doing?, but I think some kids, like, that would be a point for them to think about the environment and their impact.

Um, we do this thing in school, where we watch…they collect all the waste in a school for a period of time, and then they count it and then the children are amazed at ah, how much waste we create. Um, and we watch that video, we don’t actually run that program in our school. But, yeah, I think things like that are a good way, ah an accessible way for children to understand the impact that they have on the environment so that they can hopefully, as they get older, think more widely about their impact.

I think some young people have a very strong sense of personal responsibility. But I think, especially in Dubbo—like just comparing it to Sydney, in Dubbo people feel that the Government should have the responsibility to do things. And I…It may be because of the, I guess, there’s a lot of intergenerational trauma in Dubbo, which was inflicted by the Government, and so I think, a lot of people in Dubbo, kids in Dubbo, feel that it’s the Government’s job—they’re the ones who messed it up, so now it’s their job to fix it, and not so much the children, or like their personal responsibility. Um, but at the same time, there are definitely other kids. And I personally feel that, you know, every single thing you do has an impact no matter how small. Um, and I do try and pass that message on to my…to the kids I teach, where it’s like, even if one, you’ve decided today I’m not going to take…I’m not going to buy another Aldi bag, I’ll take an Aldi bag from home. That’s one less Aldi bag and I think that that’s worth doing.

I’m almost afraid to imagine one future, in terms of limiting myself or getting wrapped up in one idea or the other…it’s a matter of fear, I think.

My name is Madelyn Leggett. I live in Wellington NSW, and I go to school, I do extracurriculars, and I catch a very long bus home.

It feels a little bit like a homework assignment where people…it gets assigned at a certain date and then people procrastinate and procrastinate, and nothing gets done and then we reach 2049, December, and we go Oh! Nothing’s happened! (laughs). We still haven’t changed enough, there still hasn’t been enough policy or legislation passed to make an effective change or impact on the environment.

I don’t think goals in the future are necessarily helpful; I think action is helpful and not things that, oh we’re going to do this by this date, rather we’re doing this now, and current action that’s happening right now instead of, yeah, instead of future goals and lofty, you know, impractical goals.

In, in my opinion, we can talk about plastic straws and solar, you know, individual solar energy as much as we want but real change comes when we legislate against these large corporate, multinational ah, emitters, and these governments that are allowing it. To progress and to…kind of continue affecting the environment are at fault really, the onus falls on, on the legislators and the governments in order to, to regulate.

I do feel disempowered, in kind of in general. I, you know, with social media and, and technology we have…we can witness the vast expanse of the world and feel how small we are, but I think the engagement that I have and the investment that I have in my community really helps me feel like I am an important part of my own small special way. Umm, and it’s the grounding of, of communities. And, and I think that’s what’s unique about regional communities as well, as it does offer that grounding of being so tight-knit with everybody else that um, there’s no kind of room for that ah, exi…existentialism.

My local community is very, kind of older in age and a lot of people don’t consider what…if young people are going to be living in the regional communities or what they’re going to be doing. And I think that causes a sense of, kind of not…non-consideration of the future and this kind of, just unawareness in general.

I, I’m almost afraid to imagine one future, in terms of, of limiting myself or, or getting wrapped up in, in one idea or the other, um, positive or negative, and restricting myself to that idea of going one way and then finding out that it’s completely different and facing that is really…it’s a matter of fear, I think. When I’m old enough to, kind of, pursue tertiary education and vote, the future and climate change, and, and even living in the regions, personally, will affect my life. Um, it is, it’s such a big part, it’s really my only life right now. And, um, going ahead it’s going to be really interesting, the differences that I have with, with other people and how I view things.

My advice is, I think, to engage with your community…with, um, the kind of touch grass movement is, is a little bit cliche and, and overdone at this point. But really it’s, it’s all you can do is, is engage with your local community and exercise your right to democracy, which is (laughs), it’s dry and overdone, but it’s, it is what we have. And volunteering and, and engaging with, you know, community service organisations or working bees and things like that, it’s what pulls you back into reality almost and, and saves you from that doom and gloom of spiralling down into what, what lies ahead in the future and are these empty promises? But I think the political push for a net zero world is, is there. And I think it does affect people’s outlook on how we see the future. And I think it affects the way that people consider not just consumerism but voting and democracy, and, and how they consider their political actions.

The future in terms of the regions is a really interesting thing because when we do consider what a post-net-zero world will look like, it’s often eco-cities, and with Saudi Arabia, with, with their new ah, sustainable city and everything, it tends to be focused around population density. And on the regions, we have the agricultural industry, you know, one of the…it’s the lifeblood (laughs) of modern society. And I think how that will…It’s, it’s often not considered in policy—in progressive policy, which I hate to say, it’s, it’s not considered of how will the agricultural industry continue on. How will it survive and, and what will happen to it in, in these pushes for climate change? Will it eventually become considered? It’s what’s going to feed us, it’s what’s gonna clothe us. It, it starts at the agricultural industry, and I don’t understand why there isn’t…why the climate movement doesn’t start at the agricultural industry, because it, it seems like the natural progression to go from there.

There’s just so much nature will teach the children just by letting the children be in nature. There’s so much to learn.

My name is Aliya Aamot and we are in the Goolawah Cooperative in Crescent Head, New South Wales.

Ah, we have no debt, ah, we’re living off-grid, we don’t get the monthly power bill or any sort of bill, um, which is great, which is what we want. Like, we have to do everything here, you know, to um…When we first got here it was like living in a third-world country, like, we were doing the laundry by hand, we had no hot water, we had no fridge, and we lived like that for a year? I think. Then we slowly got more and more comfortable with hot water and fridge and laundry, and um, things like that.

But yeah, but here we have to look after everything from our um, poo, and yeah…It would have been a lot better if there was more people working on the same things. Because everyone here is just like a nuclear family, you know, there’s no united…yeah, I think we would have loved to have more of that. Um, we probably had more ideas of more community living when we moved here, but the reality is not really like that.

We’re always trying to improve and make ourselves more efficient in the way we’re doing things. Um, from small things like the watering systems—how can we, how can we water the whole garden without spending the whole day watering, like, um, making easier ways. And Crow (partner) is always doing lots of improvements.

We’ve been extremely, um, lucky that we haven’t had the fire come through our property. Um, so yeah, I mean people around us will say we’re crazy for staying here while the fire is coming through, um, that we’re crazy to stay here while it’s flooded, but it’s just a part of the life here. I think if we panic about anything they (the children) will panic as well.

I mean, they (the children), they watch a lot of documentaries as well and sometimes they’re scared there’s going to be a, you know, like a tsunami for instance. Because we went to Thailand and we were where the tsunami hit back in 2008 or something…um, so they’ve been really worried about that. So they’re, they’re facing um, fears of change and climate here as well, and…But just staying calm, and you know, if something happens, it happens and we’ll deal with it when it does happen.

Well, I would be really happy if by the time our children leave home that they can grow their own food, they know how to preserve food, they know where to find food, they know which plants are medicinal, they know what to use, um, in specific needs. Um, if they know those sort of things, um, even like slaughtering and butchering an animal—just these basic life skills that we should all have. Um, if they know that, then I’ll feel very successful as a mum (laughs).

It really scares me. Sometimes I feel almost like a regret for having them. Like, I wish they didn’t have to face the challenges that they have to, because they will have to sooner or later. But at the same time, like, our oldest daughter, she wants to grow up and save the planet, you know. And we need these children. They are very important, not just the, the children in the cities that, you know, have no life experience at all—they think fish just live in a tin can, don’t know where the fish comes from, you know. These children that grow up, um, in the bush, or like, even just with parents who are teaching them life skills and…this is what the planet needs for the future.

It’s very important for us, especially ah, kids in cities to know this process of where the food comes from, how it’s been grown, um, what’s the spray on it, like, what kind of impact does that have, have on their health, ah, on the planet’s health…and all these um, process from the farm, and the travel all the way to their place. Um, and even parents that live in, in apartments, they can also teach children, like just basic food growing on their verandah, on a balcony, you know, with like small ah, tower systems, growing worm farms, things…And there’s a lot of things they can learn in that too. Um, and I’m not, I’m absolutely not saying that all families in cities are like this, because that’s not true at all. And we need the research people, and we need children to go to university and, and learn. They learn so much here just by being here, they’re just…by looking at bugs, looking at the birds, catching the bugs, and you know. Um, there’s just so much nature will teach the children just by letting the children be in nature. There’s so much to learn.

It’s not money that’s going to resolve any of these issues, it’s honesty—it’s human honesty.

Ah, my name is Crow Tribe. Ah, we are in Goolawah Community, ah, in Crescent Head, NSW. 

I have always been interested in living close to nature and living off the land. Um, I, I aspire to become as efficient as a human being, ahh, in being able to produce my own food, um, build my own shelter, and also pass all of this kind of information to the young ones. Fundamentally we need to, we need to ask ourselves are we aligned with nature? What have we abandoned and what have we substituted it with? How are these choices impacted our environment on a greater level? Um, who is, at the end of the day, picking up the bill? Are we, are we striving to ease the burdens on our children or are we increasing those burdens? Are we harmonious with ourselves firstly, and then in turn, reflecting that into the greater world? 

This is, this life here is basically a product of me not fighting anymore with the world around me. I am, I’m trying to make do with what is available to us and provide for our family as best I can, but in essence, really, I call these secular homes/environments a monstrosity. Because the, the amount of waste we produce building a house or home that houses so little people…Ah, generally if we were talking about a modern size family, we’re looking at, what, five—two parents and possibly three children. Where, the energy that goes to producing these kind of settings, if we were to combine our efforts, we could house possibly 10 times that in, in the same area. And if we were to just give up the idea of ownership and maybe establish stewardship, then we will, we, we could quite easily go back to living in a tribal setting, where we shared everything.

I have this saying, ‘cause I come from a construction background, our toilets are constantly on holiday because, I mean, we produce toilets to serve one or two people in, for instance, in a unit. I worked in high-rise apartments where there would be 200 units there. Now when these people are out and, you know, working and acquiring money to sustain their lifestyles, their toilets are basically doing nothing. They use it once, they have a shower and that’s the end of the story. Um now the energy that it goes to produce one of these toilets is immense—human power, the environmental cost, etcetera, etcetera.

So, does living in a lifestyle like this answer the questions, well, or does it actually raise more questions? Possibly both. And also possibly, helping me understand that there are conditions that are in place that are far older than this generation alone. 

Since the industrial revolution began, almost 1.5 million species of animals, birds, insects, microbials have died. Extinct—never to come back into this universe ever again. Why is life sacred? Because every life has a signature and that signature only occurs in certain areas of the universe. And humans are sacred because there are no humans anywhere, I believe there are no more humans, of our signature anywhere else in the universe. We are very unique. So we should, we should strive to preserve everything, including ourselves. And at the end of the day, money doesn’t keep you warm, it’s that gentle smile that you see on the side of the road that glances at you, and you know…those eyes that turn upwards.

I love, I love, I love life. I, I…all I care about is our species surviving. Sometimes the…our, our home is a bit of a war zone because I, I get very passionate about, you know, the carbon footprint of things. So, yeah I am, I’m very hopeful but somewhat pessimistic about what it would take to, to attain that, that optimism.

Before we try and band-aid everything just ask…view things for what it is, merely see it for what it is, and then find the solutions through that. Rather than looking at, oh, economically what how’s it going to affect us. I mean economics is not gonna bring back the rivers that we’ve already poisoned. No matter how much money we throw at the situation it will not resolve itself. It’s not money that’s going to resolve any of these issues, it’s, it’s honesty—it’s human honesty. Ultimately it’s, it’s about, it’s about honesty and love and beautiful things. But then don’t forget to, yeah, just smile (smiling).

…the life I want to live is one that is joyful, creative and full of energy, but it’s about one of balance where it’s not everything in my life…but yeah, I want to swim in a clean ocean.

My name’s Steve Williams. I’m a woodfired potter—ceramics potter, and um, been here at Dollys Flat outside of Wingham for coming up 7 years now. And in that time, um, it’s been a commitment to living a more modest, off-the-grid life, and, and the house is getting close to being finished, and, and it’s powered by the sun, and we collect water, and we’re growing more and more food. So, it is about a quieter life. And ah, my ceramic production is paralleling that in many ways, because I’m gathering timber as part of the management of um, this bushfire-prone zone that we live in, to um, fire the kiln. And um, and I’m crushing rocks and gathering materials to formulate glazes. And I get my clay from um, nearby— not on site, but um, but nearby. So I really do feel like the character of what I make is heavily influenced by umm, not just the materials, but the, the nature that I’m in every day.

My own work production is, is very much about innovating and inventing and less is more and having less influence. Like I choose not to know what anyone’s doing, and that’s partly why I’m here at Dollys Flat, um, and there are no potters within coo-ee. So there isn’t a community of potters here, certainly not a community of woodfired potters. But that’s really important. And I don’t, I choose not to subscribe to magazines. I, I don’t want to know what people doing. I don’t want that kind of subconscious influence to affect what I do. The flip side of all of that is um, if you choose to live in isolation and you’re kind of innovating, inventing, then there’s, there’s constant failure. But that’s something, that’s just, that’s part of what’s new in the creative process.

The mindset is, I guess, it’s just part of living where you know the values that you have, and the values that have developed and changed, are about living quieter, and living with less impact, and living more sustainably, and um, making choices around all of those things. So that, my mindset is very much in sync. In fact, production, my, my studio is, is open to the elements, and um, I choose to make when it’s comfortable to do that. So, I don’t, I don’t force the production outside of whatever is comfortable and natural for me. And um, and that kind of relates to the, the firing of the kiln as well. Like the kiln just is part of a seasonal work cycle. The kiln is never fired after October and it’s never fired, you know, before April because in that time period, like it’s hotter and it’s dryer, and you know people, including myself, ah, are not going to be comfortable, yeah, seeing smoke.

Until recently I had a gas kiln that I was using to um, support workshop that I was doing with people, and I did some important fire recovery workshops here, um, where, where people had an experience of, you know, using natural materials and wood ash as a byproduct of, you know, really hot fire. But that gas kiln is now disconnected and I am removing it from the property. Partly because there’s, there’s a shift happening, partly because it costs a bomb to fill a gas bottle, but um, partly because I want, you know, I want everything I do to um, to utilise available energy here. And I’m sustainably, I mean I call it sustainably kind of harvesting timber to fire the kiln—it’s part of managing the bushfire-prone zone here, and um, I make decisions and I tread as, you know, as lightly and as carefully as I can.

You know, I have, I have some despairing thoughts about the future, and um, and I, you know, I have, I have some fears. And um, there are more and more people involved in ceramics—it’s, it’s kind of popular at the moment, and there’s um, you know, there’s more kilns being fired and there’s more, you know, fossil fuel being kind of consumed. But in a world where there are lots of human beings—and you know, one could argue that there are too many (laughs) human beings, you know, people are doing their best. But it, you know, my fear is it may not be best enough—you know, the pressures are enormous.

You know, with awareness and, and some bold thinking, we probably can coexist, right? But um, yeah, it needs to be less about profit, and um, much more about human health and well-being. I mean, I’m constantly making changes to my (laughs) be…my behaviour. But um, one, one of the things that I’m really interested in doing is actually making less work, and finding an audience for that work. And in a slow kind of way that, that’s, that’s happening for me. So yeah, the life I want to live is one that is joyful and, and creative and, you know, full of kind of energy, um, but it’s about one of balance, you know, where it’s not everything in my life. It’s a, it’s a small important part, but um, yeah, I want to, I want to swim in a clean ocean.

So, uncertainty into the future is just another uncertainty…it’s just something that has to be embraced and tackled.

I’m Andy Baker and I’m a groundwater researcher at UNSW (University of NSW).

So here, we’re just working at Cathedral Cave (Wellington NSW), but nationally we’re working at a number of sites all the way from Western Australia through to the Mid North Coast of NSW. And we’ve got these data loggers, they act like a drum, a vibrating drum. So when the water hits the top of the drum, there’s a vibration that’s recorded as an electronic signal and it basically counts the number of drips. And we can put these into different depths below surface and under different vegetation types, and we can then see when the water actually comes from the surface, from the rain, through the soil into the subsurface. And then we can relate that back to the climate at the time. How much rain has fallen over the preceding days or weeks and we can work out something, which in groundwater is called a rainfall recharge threshold, but in layman’s is how much rain do you need to actually get groundwater to recharge? And that’s the most important thing we need to know for groundwater in this country if you’re going to manage it sustainably over time.

So, if you’re farming on the land, you dont…you might use the groundwater for extraction, and for some crops you might just use the soil water. And there’s two different…soil water, soil moisture, easy to measure—it’s there, you can put a probe in. How much water gets to the groundwater table and actually replenishes it and how often that occurs is really hard to measure. So, this is what we’re doing. We’re basically in the subsurface, using the caves. I like to say we’re using caves as observatories of groundwater processes and we’re actually watching the water moving from the soil into the subsurface to the groundwater. And I’m working about three metres above the groundwater table, sometimes below the groundwater table when it comes up. So working South Passage (inside the Cathedral Cave), you know the water that reaches South Passage would have reached the groundwater. So, that’s why we’re working there.

I mean, the Bell River here comes from Orange direction, flows over the limestone and starts to sink underground and then reappears further down towards Wellington. And a lot of it goes through the alluvial system here, which is then used for agriculture…heavily used for different agriculture, different resources. And part of it actually goes through the Cave and the groundwater you see here in the Cave actually goes up and down in tune with the groundwater in the alluvium and with the river. So, it’s the same system that’s going all the way through here.

By understanding how these things fit together in terms of the connectivity between the river, river water, and the groundwater, we can have better management into the future. But again, it’s the unknown, it’s the unknown connectivities. So how, yeah…the complexities are high and it’s very hard to actually know exactly what’s going on in any one location, so you can have that general, you know the connectivity to the river and the alluvial system, between the alluvial gravels, which is just the other side of this building, right, on the edge of them, and then it all goes on to the limestone. You know, you wouldn’t know. And it’s very expensive to then go and do all the tests and traces, to go and do that.

So, these caves here are quite interesting. The expert on this is a guy called Armstrong Osborne at Sydney University. And he’s developed a whole series of theories about how a lot of caves in south-east Australia aren’t formed in what’s like a classic thought of how they form, which is how water comes to the surface, seeps through the soil and erodes the cave from above. His argument is that actually most of these caves are from groundwater from below, and you only see these caves when the landscape lowers down to a point in time where you happen to be alive, and the landscape’s come down and the cave happens to be protruding. And that’s what’s happening here.

If you walk up to the Cathedral Cave entrance, that’s completely the wrong place for a cave. It’s on top of a hill. It’s got no catchment. You know, it can’t form anymore. You know, it’s the same with all the caves here—they’re misfit caves from an ancient landscape. We don’t know how old, but it could be tens of millions of years old. You would need a lot of time for the landscape to change.

If you go into the Cathedral Cave, and you go down to the lower levels and you start looking up, you see these tubes or cupolas, l-shapes in the roof, and the argument is they dissolve out from gasses that are coming up from the groundwater beneath there. So, that’s an upward vibration, the caves have actually formed upwards through time rather than downwards through time. It could be thermal, it could be acids, and it could be condensation just from temperature. The high CO2, it could actually corrode and form weak acid and corrode the limestone. And it’s an ancient sort of process. So, we don’t know when this happened through any time in the past. And in that South Passage where I was today, I’m crawling back underneath that big crystal formation, the Alter, and if you walk through there, you get to the end of that and you can look up, and even within this whole formation, there’s these upward tubes. So, you can start to get a timeline of the history of the cave and groundwater, which is where you started from, which is we’ve got this groundwater effect happening, and that happened after the crystal and that alter formation formed which now reaches all the way to the surface and is the main attraction of the cave.

So, in terms of the groundwater history, which is like a tens of millions of years old history, the caves actually have a record of the ancient, ah, groundwater levels.

I think, what we can do from background on the drip loggers here now and think about working out how much rainfall is needed to actually recharge the groundwater…once we get that value that should be a relatively fixed value that relates to the geology and the fractures, and how it’s connected to the surface, and we can do this at a number of sites. And then, if you know how much rainfall is needed, what type of rainfall over what time period, then we can go through the climate models and future projections. And then we can say, okay, groundwater recharge will occur maybe at Wellington once or twice a year on average and in the future it might get higher or lower depending on what the climate models predict.

So, that’s the futurecasting. We haven’t got to that point yet, and I don’t think we’ll know the answer. You’d hypothesise as it gets warmer, you get more evaporation from the soil, as it gets warmer, so you’d have to have more rain water to fill up the soil water before you get the recharge. But we have no idea what’s going to happen with climate change and warm oceans. And I saw a media release just last week from some colleagues in the Climate Change Centre…Centre for Climate Extremes, an Australian Research Council Centre, where they are saying that La Niña events on the east coast may be much more common in the future because the oceans are warmer and these wet winds that we’re seeing may become a feature of climate change. In which case, you might get more groundwater recharge, including in this region. In which case, it might be you’ll have a more sustainable resource than we have now because we can actually use it better, more efficiently, if it gets recharged more. Um, we don’t know.

Because groundwater is hidden, you see lots of things written like as a ‘hidden’ resource or something like that—you can’t see it, you don’t understand it. And one thing we don’t understand, one thing we can’t quantify, is the variability of groundwater processes. And this thing called groundwater heterogeneity, variability of recharge and variability of the rock. Go into the caves here, you can see one part is massive limestone…it’s where the water goes, that variability means we have to be happy with uncertainty for us to even progress groundwater science.

So, uncertainty into the future is just another uncertainty, I think. And it, it’s just something that has to be embraced and tackled. I mean, I think I worry about the future but I don’t…maybe I’m less worried about the future because I know there’s…because I can understand the uncertainties.

…is it too much to change? It’s a lot to ask of humans who are very comfortable in our environments now, to do all the changes that are required.

Chris Robinson, from Wellington. And I’ve been here probably over 30 years—came up from Katoomba. Ah, I worked as a manager in town until I got made redundant. I’d always done a little bit of work at the caves (Wellington Caves), um, even though I had the other position in town, and um, as guides have come and gone, I’ve got more hours. And ah, my partner’s a palaeontologist, so I have a real interest in paleontology and the environment.

My great love is animals and ah, when I see ah, a bunch of or a mob of kangaroos jumping around, or the bird life um, and thinking that this is their environment, and we’re only really visitors. And I get concerned about the impacts that we make as tourists, um, and also you know concern about the Cave (Wellington Caves). Um, it is a natural asset that we’re given and how we look after it into the future—will it be here for other generations? And I’m not even talking about kangaroos and big things that we see, um you know, the ants that are for the echidnas and people get concerned coming from Sydney that an ant might bite them or, and I think you know if we destroy those things because ah, it may hurt a person…this is their home. We can make tracks around ants’ nests and we don’t have to, you know, kill the birds because they’re breeding and they’re trying to protect their young. Go another way!

And my big concern about here is that we’ll go the way of a lot of places where people have destroyed their environment in whatever…I used to live in Katoomba, so I see people loving the Blue Mountains, coming up from Sydney and almost like… then they make it like a suburb of Sydney—they chop all the trees down, don’t want fires, don’t want wildlife near them and um, you know, ruin the environment. We’re destroying the habitats of living things for other humans to just come and enjoy.

I know that we’ve had five major extinctions. I really believe from all the material that I’ve read, we’re in the sixth extinction. Ah, we’re losing wildlife. Our koala population, they’re specialists, they need certain trees. Ah, I was in Adelaide Zoo a few years ago at a 40-degree temperature and they were spraying their koalas to keep them going. And I think any specialists in the environment will struggle. Ah, I think our koalas are under stress. I think there’s a lot of things that are under stress.

I think that for the 19 years that I’ve been here, there’s no-one’s really done anything on the reserve, as such. But someone did destroy a big beautiful tree the other day that must have been over 200 years old, and I get concerned about…um, I know they talk about burning the reserve and I don’t know if that’s the right thing or the wrong thing to do, but I know that um, and it’s part of the law um that if there is a burn on the reserve that they clear around the habitat trees, so that they don’t get destroyed. Because hollows go up and it takes a long time for a hollow to appear in a tree. So I think we, you know, we just can’t do anything unless we get advice. It’s not wrong to ask for advice when you’re doing something that could harm the environment.

I know that they talk about a tipping point, um, and whether that’s 2050 or earlier. I don’t know as humans, I know we talk about it, is it too much to change? Are we going to get rid of our cars? Are we gonna, you know, stop our gas, our fires, our…? It’s a lot to ask of humans who are very comfortable in our environments now, um, to do all the changes that are required.

I know that people are concerned about losing their jobs with the coal industry and things like that. I don’t think, I don’t think it’s happening too early. I think it needs to happen. I think there needs to be something in place so it’s more acceptable to people. Ah for example, like the fluorocarbons years ago, they knew that they were causing a hole in the ozone layer and so they had um, which was, you know, refrigerators that had that gas in them—and so they have refrigerators ready to go to replace the old ones. And I think that needs to happen with any renewables, that we need the transition to happen but at a pace that we can keep up with it.

So I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of a lady called Mary White, the paleobotanist, she has a paragraph in one of her books that I’ve got at home— it’s very long-winded. But she says that humans have reached plague portions and we think it’s our God-given right to destroy the habitats of other living things. And we don’t know when those scales will tip but look, but look to the rocks and see the past. And if you look at the record here, on the reserve, of animals that have come and gone and the fossil record. See we’ve just lived in this last, you know, human history has just been really the last 10,000 years and it’s been a stable environment. Before that, you know, continents were splitting apart, volcanoes, lots of things happening causing the extinctions. 

There are a lot of people out there trying to do the right thing, I know that they have got something um, that filters the ocean to get the microplastics out, and since they stopped using plastic bags—one-use plastic bags in this country, I think the oceans have cleared by about 29 per cent. 

As Australians, we bury our head in the sand, we don’t think it’s going to happen in our lifetime, or um, everything will be right, mate. I think that a lot of people still got that attitude, um, because it’s so incomprehensible that this could happen. It really is when you think that we’ve always been here in our little short period of time that we’ve been on earth, that we’re always here, and we’re always going to be here.

As humans, I think we can do some very little things that don’t take a lot of energy. I think, you know, someone offers you a straw in a milkshake or do you want a plastic lid on your coffee. Um, even those coffee cups that we have that are supposed to be, look recyclable, they’ve got a coating inside them, and I know due to Covid people used to bring their own mugs and we can fill them and we went away from that because, ah, of touching. But little things about, you know, if someone offers you something plastic, you know it’s only on there for two seconds— we’ve got a straw in our mouth for five seconds. Don’t have it! Drink out of a bottle.

Um, but also I think that we’ve lost 80 percent of all trees on the planet and if we can plant some trees even, because they’re big sinkholes for CO2 that can help the environment—just planting trees.

…change is certainly going to happen and whether we’re part of it or not, that’s up to us.

Ian Eddison. I’m um, an outdoors person, although I’ve also had plenty of years in um, the commercial world, ah, but I’ve always loved the outdoors, so I consider myself largely connected with the outdoors. Ah, I’m a caver. Umm, I’m a birder, I like birds. I’ve always had a soft spot for, an interest in birds since I was a kid. I was a boy scout, a cub scout, um, and so all those influences I think help me ah, both socially ah, but also environmentally.

People that live and work in rural settings are very connected to nature as well. They have to work with the weather and the soil, and the…they have to understand that well to make their livelihood. Whereas you can get it such a big city that you can find it hard, you can find the nature but because nature can adapt to us, but you have to search a little harder.

What’s unique about Wellington (Caves) is that there are two windows into the past, and they are significant ah, visions of the past at Wellington Caves. Ah, on a worldwide scale, they’re significant. So the laying down of the bedrock of limestone that you’ll get in most Caves ah, is the marine environment—it’s usually the crustaceans and invertebrates from the sea, but Wellington Caves has an exceptional number of species. And often when people are studying the Devonian period, some 400 million years ago, they will not surprisingly to me, come across that a particular species is identified and is the type fossil. And so research was done in the mid-1800s at Wellington Caves, and ah, often it is the type fossil recorded. So, there’s a great number of species and a lot of them.

The Pleistocene epoch of the late Quaternary ah, is the megafauna. Australia’s megafauna was first found at Wellington Caves. And it’s very exciting because it’s big stuff, like giant wombat-looking things, or giant kangaroos, big snakes and lizards, and a big brown bird—the ‘Duck of Doom’. But they’re being found across the country and other places too, but again Wellington Caves is where they were first found, and we seem to have a great diversity of species and a lot of them.

There are sections of caves at Wellington Caves where you can be looking at a wall of sediment and realise that there’s all these bones sticking out of it. And um, you’re truly blessed to be able to see those bone fossils. It’s a reminder, these different windows of the past, even if they’re totally different periods of time—the Devonian being 400 million, and yet the Pleistocene epoch is really not that long ago at all…millions of years, geologically it’s nothing. What it tells us, is that it’s a little bit too humbling, it almost makes us a little bit insignificant. But that in itself is to remind us that we can still make an impact and we do. Unfortunately, we have this argument that we’re making such an impact on the planet that there is a record in every landscape around the planet, from humans, and that’s largely because of plastics, but it’s not only plastics. So, we have an impact everywhere around the planet that we live on, and yet we’re only here for a very, very short period of time, so far. And I’m sure a lot of people would like to think we’ll be here for a long time yet. But what the windows to the past tell us is that things have come and gone, and it’s likely that we will too at some point in time. That’s a little ah, frightening for some, but you know, there was once a sea here. Will we be able to live in that sea if it returned? There were once megafauna here—big snakes and lizards. Will we be able to live with those if they’re here again? You know.

Our time is simplistic compared to those events that have happened. And those changes are going to come because we have an effect on speeding up some of those processes, and yet some of them are natural. Evidence is that these big natural events happened in the past. So, we need to adapt, and we are clever enough to adapt. We can adapt to instead of having a paper bag where your groceries fall on the path to having a plastic bag, which is strong enough to support it and get you all the way home with your goodies. But we also now realise that we can’t necessarily have that last for a long, long time, ah, we need to have that break down and be gone, because we don’t it to become a burden on our environment.

So we, we can adapt and we can make change. And we have the ability to do that and we are doing that. And I am not frightened of the ah, prospects of the change because I see that ah, there are plenty of people that are planting trees, and trying to do all sorts of wonderful things—pick up straws at the beach, and, you know, have our Clean Up Australia Days; do wonderful things, study the environment, ah, to learn more, to work out how to live in harmony with the environment. I, I’m comforted by that. I’m fearful for my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren, but, and how they’re going to cope with um, certain changes. But I’m also heartened by the fact that we’re clever enough as a people to do that. 

The human population has created a huge ah, pace of change. I was recently admiring a steam engine, but it’s that period of time that we had great impacts of industrialisation, but we moved forward through that industrialisation. And we also have better standards in workplaces that came about because terrible things happened in workplaces. People made change for the better, for the people as well as the outcome of the products that the industrialised world created for us. And so, with everything we do as a people, um, there are positives and negatives and then we work on reducing the negatives and improve the positives as much as we can. And we can change things for the better.

I think there’s a greater desire of…by more people to do that, to live in harmony. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people that don’t connect ah, and it’s going to be hard to get everyone on the same page in that regard. And probably the, the saddest example is having gone through a pandemic and people discarding their masks on the ground and they becoming the straws at the beach, um, because people have protected themself but they’ve not protected the environment. So, we have these challenges, there’s no doubt about that. But I also am still heartened that there are plenty of people that are trying to make change.

When people are proud of their place in society, they’ll do better to look after that. And so, there are periods of time in the record that show us a glimpse of the past, and that’s not necessarily a reflection of the future, but change is certainly going to happen and whether we’re part of it or not, that’s up to us.

I think we just need to really look at who we’re voting for, and kind of elect people who actually think about the future and the future generations.

My name is Bageshri Savysachi. I’m from Dubbo. I’m 25.

I feel a bit scared. I’m a bit anxious because I know that, I mean the people I’m surrounded with, know that we need to take action and we need to be aware of our impact on the environment. But the people in charge are…I don’t know, they don’t think that’s important. They think politics and power are more important. And I’ve kind of experienced that here where when I ask, when I speak to politicians and I ask them, What would you do to prepare regional New South Wales for climate extremes?, they would just talk about building higher bridges or better roads. That’s not going to fix the future problems we’re going to face. I feel like we need to…I also spoke to a climate expert and he said, you know, that all these updates to infrastructure were definitely part of the solution, but the main solution is to reduce our emissions and to do that we have to kind of acknowledge that we’re having this drastic impact on the planet and if we don’t take a step towards correcting that impact or even acknowledging it, I don’t, I don’t feel hopeful.

Community, especially in Dubbo I think, people are very proactive when it comes to how they want to live their life, and they really take it into their own hands and they do things when it comes to storing water, saving water, um, solar energy, um, saving electricity…All of those things, I feel like they do in their own personal lives, but I don’t know if, you know, if there’s a collective approach to having an impact on climate change in a positive way. Obviously there are environmental groups and there are individual people and families, but I don’t know if there’s a collective approach. I’ve just lived here for a bit less than a year.

So, my mother is very…like, she grew up in India where there’s like a billion people and climate change is not one of the issues anyone thinks about. We have way more issues like religion, casteism, politics, class, and poverty, food shortages. So, climate change is not even at the forefront of her mind, like she’s still getting used to how much, like, luxury she has living in Australia. And maybe now, like, in her late 50s, she’s kind of thinking about it now. So, I don’t think she does, but I think my Dad is…um, he’s kind of…as a kid he always told me we need to make sure we leave any place better than we found it, or at least don’t damage it! (laughs) So yeah, like, just you know, don’t cut down any trees. I would always know cutting trees is a bad thing.

He definitely does not agree with, you know, fossil fuels um, being mined and using non-renewable energy. But yeah, he kind of works in that industry to pay for my education. So, he’s kind of saying, You know, I’ve sold my soul to capitalism, so you better do something about this, so I could get you educated. Now it’s up to you to take responsibility and do something. 

There are people that I have grown up with that have way more complex issues to deal with, just regarding their safety or the place that they live, or like politicians are trying to get them out of that area because they don’t fit into…It’s, yeah, it’s…climate change is a very privileged…like, it’s kind of the responsibility of the populations that have reached that stage where everyone kind of has electricity, power, access to education, access to food, access to a bank, access to…just access in general. But the paradox is that there are a lot of um, indigenous populations, where, when I grew up, grew up, I saw them, they so deeply knew how their life impact, their way of life impacted the forest, their surroundings. And we still travel all over India and that’s the difference I saw, like, it’s either really privileged populations that think about climate change, um, or it’s really people who are so, um, connected to the earth, people who have not accessed, like modern civilisation yet, who are really involved with their impacts on the planet. And I think it’s just somewhere in the middle, like we’re all probed by all these problems and we don’t really think about…we don’t have time to think about the planet because we’re too busy trying to survive, I don’t know, capitalism (laughs), all these disparities in life.

I definitely think people who can make change are people with…people in positions of power, people with money, people with influence. Social media is a very big space right now, and narratives there literally reach people in every, you know, country, every town in the world. Like one meme, one TikTok can reach anyone, anywhere. So, I feel like people need to connect this wonderful access that we have to everyone, with people who would be motivated to…kind of take a step. I feel like it’s really up to politicians, like, I mean, billionaires, there are only a few of them who actually want to do something, everyone else is just trying to get to becoming trillionaires. So, I don’t know what we can leave it up to rich people. I think we just need to really look at who we’re voting for, and kind of elect people who actually think about the future and the future generations.

In terms of climate, I tend to come from a social and human rights perspective…I think that it’s a global issue that we all are a part of and can’t really escape from, and it affects people in all sorts of ways including housing security and health, and migration.

My name is Tsukasa. I’ve been in Dubbo for about three-and-a-half years. I first came to Dubbo, um, about 10 years ago and I lived here for about a year. And yeah, when I first arrived I was surprised at how remote it was. It felt, um, very far from Sydney, which is where I’m from.

The last three years has…um, it feels very different to the time I first came. It feels a lot bigger, um, in terms of population diversity. I do get to interact with a lot of people from different walks of life, and people come to Dubbo for all sorts of different reasons. Um so, it’s, it’s mixed but I do feel that a lot of people come with a bit of anxiety and uncertainty about what life would look like in Dubbo. A lot of people move here without ever having visited Dubbo before or even regional New South Wales. Um, so people are a bit, um, yeah, a bit worried about, you know, whether they can find people to be friends with, things like arts and cultural activities, and yeah, hospitality and things like that…just the. People are, um yeah, I guess, a bit worried about what there is to keep themselves happy and lead a meaningful life when they, when they reach Dubbo.

Some people are nervous about the heat of Dubbo, and people when they arrive, are surprised by how cold it gets in the winter. But generally speaking, most people are pleasantly surprised by just how fresh the air is, the, the, how healthy people feel, and the activities that, that are available in Dubbo are quite active and sporty. You know, people try sports, different sports, for the first time in their lives. Yeah, and there’s not a big drinking culture for example, compared to Sydney. You often hear people who say they don’t drink at all in Dubbo, and um, so yeah, there’s lots and lots of alternatives to the type of life you would live in Sydney.

I don’t know if there’s much security anywhere, um, in terms of climate, in that it’s quite unpredictable whether you’re on the coast or inland, or you know, somewhere hot, somewhere cold. Personally, I just don’t think there’s much security anywhere really, yeah. In terms of climate, I tend to come from a social and human rights perspective, because of my previous work, I guess. I think that it’s a global issue that we all are a part of and can’t really escape from, and it affects people in all sorts of ways including housing security and ah, health, and migration. You know, all the problems that already exist and have existed but can potentially affect us in other and new ways, or people who have felt safe from it in the past might not be as safe from it because it’s potentially less economical and more geographical, which is quite a new thing maybe, due to climate change. I think we all have a responsibility but it is a global issue that we need to tackle together.

On a personal level, I try to keep my carbon footprint, footprint at a minimal, and do as much as possible to live um, a life that’s sustainable, um, make, make better choices, like consumer-related choices, and transport-related choices. Yeah, I’ve also started a service in transport with the hope to reduce carbon footprints of other people, because public transport in this area is not very good. But hopefully encouraging more people to share rides, it makes a small contribution.

I hope to see carbon footprint reduced in terms of transport, and yeah, electric vehicles and so on. I haven’t seen it personally. I haven’t met too many people who want to make that change in the region. I think, out here, it is important for people to have a four-wheel drive, to have that freedom to move around with their vehicles. But it is definitely my hope that things change towards that way.

We have to do our best to, to not impact, to not create…make bigger impacts to the world and the environment. I, I come from a human rights perspective, I think every human life is as important as each other, and we all should be working towards, towards people having safe living conditions. But at the same time, humans being responsible for the state of the planet. I don’t think humans are more important on this planet than everything else that is here, and I don’t think that humans are more worthy of saving than the planet. Having said that, yeah, I don’t think that some humans should be more protected than other humans either. Whatever we do, it should be equal and fair.

We can think of ourselves if we want, but realistically we have to think about kids and our grandkids and their futures and what it will be like for them.

Craig Bennett’s my name. I’m a Landcare Coordinator at ah, Mid-Macquarie Landcare, also for Lower Macquarie Landcare based in Narromine. Mid-Macquarie is in Wellington. Um, I grew up ah, about 15 km west of Wellington on a wheat/sheep property, ah, so I’ve lived here all my life, 56 years. Um, I started out when I left school, I started working in agriculture, as in on the family property and I also became a shearer. So for the first 10 years of working, I worked as a farmer and shearer. I left the farm after that 10 years and then just went full-time shearing. Ah, another 10 years later I became a Weeds Officer at ah, Wellington Council. I don’t think there’s a better place to live personally, you know. I love Wellington itself, I couldn’t move to a city.

Um, and as I said I like the outdoors, you know, there’s so many different things that you can do outdoors in our region, ah, like there’s Burrendong Dam, there’s the Macquarie River—the river system, and all sorts of other things you can do outdoors and yeah.

The biggest conversation with Landcare, or the biggest issue with Landcare, is connecting—connecting with people, as in, connecting people who want to do environmental stuff and, and you know, getting groups together. And that, to me, that’s one of the biggest issues with Landcare that, or problems we need to solve…ah, and that’s part of my job, as how Landcare has been set up. Landcare coordinators’ jobs have been set up to actually try and get community involvement and different people connected to each other and for projects and, and all sorts of things Landcare, which is pretty broad-range—that’s agricultural people, townspeople, ah, traditional owners, yeah the, the whole spectrum of society really, yeah. 

Those from a farming background who are interested in regenerative agriculture, um, or just plain trying to make things better for their grandkids and their kids, their grandkids and their great-grandkids, and have sustainability in agriculture, um. In the Landcare-sense people are, you know, renewable energy part…yeah that, there’s, there’s a big focus ’cause we have that in our area. One of the first Renewable Energy Zones in…well, it is the first in Australia apparently, so yeah. So, there’s a lot of that thing but there’s other things too that people are interested in, you know just plain out planting new trees and just…

I actually talked to a local farmer who has a solar plant close to their property and they believe that, that’s changed the actual way water runs from their property. You know, I haven’t actually seen that and I’m not sure they’ve done any studies on that. They believe that the area around the solar itself can cause ah, temperatures to rise. So yeah, I’m not sure if anyone’s done any studies on those locally, but yeah, but some, there’s a little bit of angst in that sense. Ah you know, but there’s obviously also others who think it’s a great thing.

And there’s the divide of um, farmers and people who want to go into the renewables, saying, Oh you know, you’re taking good farming land out. Ah, but my personal view is I think we could probably work together in that. I’m not sure about the other environmental sides of it, like where they’re getting rid of, you know, the vegetation and all that sort of stuff, but I think they can actually work together personally, from what I’ve seen. Well personally, I think we need to, we have to for our kids and our grandkids. You know, realistically we can’t continue to, to ah, wreck our atmosphere, wreck our environment, and not and not have a change somehow. Because we can think of ourselves if we want, but realistically we have to think of kids and our grandkids and their futures and, and what it will be like for them.

The food and fibre and that, that’s pretty much how Australia’s been able to, to be sustained for the 200 years we’ve been here, as a general rule, because we’re self-sufficient if we want to be, and, and we do a lot of exporting and, and those sort of things, but.

There’s lots of people that do the tree change and the sea change overall, and, you know, tree change has become one of the big fads of the last 10, five years, especially given prices of housing and that along the coast. They would probably be big drivers of, of Landcare, especially if they, yeah, moved from the inner city or a, or a city itself. Yeah, some of those people are actually probably the best, the best people to get involved, or, or most interested in getting involved because that’s part of the reason they moved out.

It all takes time. Realistically, yes I believe, you know, we can do a good thing for our future, especially in the Landcare area and the environmental area, ah but, yeah but, I don’t think we can do it all overnight. 

…if we can get the battery technology up and really harness the power of that sun in a cost-effective manner, I think we’ll see Solar Mark II again take off in our region.

My name’s Matt Hansen (from Dubbo). I am um, the founder of Inland Waterways Ozfish. Um, I’m a keen recreational fisher, um, and yeah…and born and raised in the Central West and um, love all things fishing and the river.

The intensity of the last drought we had here, and the turbidity that water once that sediment washed in, was absolutely terrible. It was like somebody’d put a magnet over the top of the river (Wambuul Macquarie River) and sucked all the fish up to the top. And they were doing what we call ‘cheezeling’, where they put their lips to the top of the water, just gasping for air. The shrimp, and not just a couple—millions upon millions of shrimp, diving out of the water. It was, it was the colour of a terracotta pot, and it was so thick and so soupy that nothing wanted to be in it. So, to see that happen, um and to see, you know, fish potentially older than me, turning over and rolling and dying…they’re fish that have survived the last three or four droughts before it. That one killed them.

So, is climate change a very real thing? You know, the Lismore floods, um, the bushfires that we’ve seen. Um I think, you know, and just look, I’m all about following the science—good science, and the science says that climate change is a very, very real thing. I think anyone who denies it now, um, yeah…I wouldn’t agree with that. I think we’re all seeing the devastating effects of climate change, and I was only reading an article this morning where coral trout, which are usually abundant in the Great Barrier Reef, are being caught off the waters of Sydney because that water is, is warming at, at such a pace it’s bringing species all over the place.

Um, but, you know, some catch on quicker than others and I think social license is, is a word we’re hearing more and more of. And I think that there’s some really, really exciting things again as we see, um, the improvement of battery and solar technology, and all those sorts of things. It’s um, I think the next 10 years will be a very, very exciting time in that space.

I certainly have no problem with the agricultural sector and I think they’re making rapid improvements, but I would love to see, um, better use of arid land with things like solar and wind farms, where they’re able to be used because it’s a big country and we’ve got such a small population base here. Um, and look I think it’s something like, what is it, 90 percent of us live on the coast, so we’ve got a really big backyard! So look, I’m all for it, but I’d like to be seeing it done in, in areas, um, that didn’t compromise, um, our best agricultural, um, opportunity.

Look, I’m a huge advocate of, um, of residential solar panels. Um, so I’ve got a 10 kW solar panel system on, on my house; we had one on our last house, we had 6 kW on our house before that! And I think, you know, talking to the general community, everyone’s a huge fan of solar, ’cause who doesn’t love a cheap electricity bill at the end of the day? That’s fantastic. I think what everyone’s waiting for is for the battery technology to catch up and, and be so well developed that we can run our houses at night, but it still be cost-effective. Because every time I’ve looked at battery solar in the last little while, it’s been a case of the batteries will need replacing within 10 years and your expenditure will outweigh, um, any benefit towards you right now. So, I think, again, we’ll see a second solar revolution. Uptake for solar in Dubbo is very, very high on a nation, um sorta, on a national perspective. But the next wave I see as a real estate agent and a property manager is if we can get the battery technology up and really harness the power of that sun in a cost-effective manner, I think we’ll see Solar Mark II (two) again take off in our region.

I think Dubbo is extremely liveable. Um, we’ve got a lot of ah, great things happening out here, and it’s…we’ve got a lot of room to move. I think it’s, it’s such a pleasant place to live. You know, it, it’s effectively a 10-minute city, um, you can be from one side to the next, and, and even go home for lunch! It’s, um, a great place to live and I think, um, with a few more major repairs to our Macquarie River here, and the continuation of the, the work that so many groups are, are doing, um, I think it’s only going to get better.