Rosemary's Gardens - Encounter - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
Rosemary's Gardens
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show transcriptSunday 16 March 2008 7:10AM
IMAGE: ROSEMARY MORROW WITH TWO CAMBODIAN WOMEN *
IMAGE: ROSEMARY MORROW IN CAMBODIA *
IMAGE: ROSEMARY MORROW IN A GARDEN IN CAMBODIA *
IMAGE: ROSEMARY MORROW AND CAMBODIAN CHILDREN *GALLERY: ROSEMARY'S GARDENSRosemary Morrow is a Quaker and a Permaculture teacher and one of Australia's unsung heroes. From the chilly heights of NSW's Blue Mountains to the humid heat of Cambodia, Rosemary Morrow encourages people to plant food gardens. For Australians it's all about simplicity and sustainability, but for the developing world it's about health and making a difference.
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SINGING:
Every day I look around me
Everything seems upside down
Armies marching, children starving
People tearing others down.
Richard Corfield: Hello, and welcome to Encounter on ABC Radio National. I'm Richard Corfield and we're in the upstairs room of a pub in Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, where a group of singers has just started their weekly practice.
SINGING:
Look into myself and know it,
I can turn the world around.
Richard Corfield: Amongst the singers, not in any way standing out from the others, is a smallish figure. She's dressed simply and has the sort of face framed in a bob of silver hair, that seems to be searching for the amusing in all things. She is Rosemary Morrow, who sings, but is unsung.
An unsung heroine, in fact. One of Australia's grittier women. She should be better known. But those who do know her, and have felt the power of her work, will never forget.
SINGING:
Make your mind up to make a difference
And you'll see you're gaining ground
Look into yourself and know it,
You can turn the world around.
Rosemary Morrow:(LAUGHS) Yes, well my name's Rosemary Morrow. Most people call me Rowe. I have worked in Permaculture for 20 years. I'm a Quaker. Passionately love the environmental, the natural things of life, desperately and passionately. And the more I see of them and observe, the more I love them. I tend to work with people coming from war and civil war, but not always. In Australia I actually work with a program called 'Alternatives To Violence' in prisons. And I like best getting no money and being somewhere where the need is greatest. That's what I like.
Richard Corfield: This week, an Encounter with Rosemary Morrow, Quaker, gardener, peace activist, teacher. Rowe spends a good deal of her life overseas. We're going to meet her now in a small town in Cambodia, where she's been running aid projects for Quaker Service Australia.
MUSIC - Pren Noriey Cambodge
Rosemary Morrow:This is a country of fairly rich soil, huge rain, many, many species, and with war and population growth, genocide, destruction, the people haven't got enough to eat. So I just - I get angry. If it's necessary and you can't do anything about it, it seems to be inevitable, that's one thing. But this is not inevitable. This is something which is fairly easy to remedy in the short term, and I suffer from angry, angry injustice. If I see a family of seven kids and they're all hungry and diseased, I want to hit someone. I want to kick the wall, I don't feel like doing good. I say to someone, 'Can you get them into the project and get them fed?'
MUSIC
Richard Corfield: That's an extract from a short film I made with Rosemary Morrow a few years ago. I followed her around the warm and lush Cambodian countryside looking at her remarkable work establishing food gardens in remote villages.
Rosemary Morrow:So, small, small garden, but quite good garden. What can they eat, Tehn? Let's look. Mien water, mien chives, mint chilli ...
1992-93, there was an enormous amount of hunger and malnutrition. Huge. So we thought now if people could actually learn to garden we could get at the worst of the infections attached to nutrition.
Richard Corfield: And so, that's what she did, and does, all over the world. In countries like Cambodia, Vietnam, India, Afghanistan, Rosemary Morrow teaches people to grow food.
And if you think that's like taking coals to Newcastle, you'll be surprised. That's coming up later in the program.
Meanwhile I've got a date with Rowe in a leafy street in the Blue Mountains near her home.
Rosemary Morrow:OK, Morning, Richard. Is this your first time to a Quaker Meetings.
Richard Corfield: Yes, it certainly is.
Rosemary Morrow:I think they've just settled. So it goes from 10 to 11, and this is Quaker Cottage at Woodford. And people will be sitting quietly and getting focused, and coming down into silence and stillness. And we will just go in quietly and settle.
Richard Corfield: Rosemary Morrow is a Quaker, a faith that came to her in mid-life, and it subtly guides her every move.
Rosemary Morrow:I've been a Quaker 30 years next year. And I realised that Christianity, which I never quite believed, it seemed much more mythological than it did a reality, for me. Other than the Christian thing to love your neighbour, it didn't give me enough to work with in life. It didn't provide a substrate on which I could work. So the Quaker testimonies to the importance of Peace, the testimonies to the importance of Simplicity, Community, Integrity, much more than Honesty, these things I've been able to explore as important to being a human, fully human.
Richard Corfield: If being a Quaker is one spiritual pillar that holds up her life, then the other supporting pillar is Permaculture, what Rowe could call a complete system for growing food, even for life itself. She's well-known as a superb teacher in the Blue Mountains, and that's where I also found her one Spring morning, about to start teaching a six week course in Permaculture Design.
Rosemary Morrow:OK, let's form a circle. What we're going to do now is go around giving our names, and we're going to say what our hopes are for this course. Now like the rest of you, I have hopes for the course, that we all turn into people with a low footprint, zero waste and a really good interactive community.
Peter: Yes, my name's Peter. I just hope to get out of this course, I've just got a block of land in Mount Victoria I'd like to have a permaculture design on, so that's about it, yes.
Liz: Hi, I'm Liz, and I'm trying to work out how to fit within a community and use the spot of land that I live on, and make that work with the lowest footprint possible. And with the least resources.
Dominica: I'm Dominica. We've got a block of land with a house on it, and just land that I have no idea how to use, because it's slopey and it's shady and I just want to be able - the whole family wants to live sustainably, and so I'm hoping to get a lot of knowledge out of this, and a new backyard as well.
Lynette: Yes, I'm Lynette. I hope to live in a permaculture community one day, or a community that is completely permaculture. Either or both. I want to refresh some old knowledge and fill some gaps. And I'm especially interested in watching Rowe's teaching here as well for the course.
Richard Corfield: What Rowe teaches and is the driving force behind all her agricultural work, is Permaculture. This is a system of growing food that mimics the way a forest grows, in that the plantings are largely permanent and self-managing. The idea came about in the '70s, from a Tasmanian forest worker, Bill Mollison, who became the founder of the Permaculture movement, and who is now seen almost as a prophet.
Rosemary Morrow:In the history of Permaculture, Bill Mollison took himself off and lived in a forest. This is after he was cutting down trees and milling them for houses. And then he said to all the guys on the mill, 'Which of you own your own house?' Not one of them did. And Bill said, 'That's it.' And he walked out.
He lived in a forest and he looked at the forest for a long, long, time. And he said, 'Now this forest doesn't need fertiliser, it doesn't need seed to be sown. It doesn't need pest control, it doesn't need artificial pollination. It doesn't need windbreaks, and this forest contains itself and lives.
So from that, he came back and somehow ended up at the University of Tasmania as an ecologist, and he said, 'Why can't we make systems that work like a forest?'
So it's not exactly a closed system, but it's a system that requires very few inputs from humans. Part of our design work is to move all the time closer to a forest. And we'll talk about that this afternoon, about getting the thing working with greater diversity.
So the reason he sat in the forest was he was so despairing of humans, and despairing of the state of the world. And out of that despair came the Permaculture ideas, let's start working on ecosystems that are actually perennial, diverse, self-sustaining in lots of ways.
OK. So now the hard part was, what do you think of some of the world problems that Bill was looking at when he went and hid in his forest? Yes?
Peter: We've been working every day at getting a step further away from a forest.
Rosemary Morrow:Absolutely right. Fantastic. Who else has got an idea?
Liz: I'm really worried about the introduction of genetically modified crops because -
Rosemary Morrow:Another one. Link it to your agriculture. What are some of the other problems facing us? Water problems?
Man: Resources generally.
Rosemary Morrow:Resource use.
Woman: And loss of diversity.
Rosemary Morrow:Loss of biodiversity, OK.
Woman: Convergences, peak oil and global warming.
Rosemary Morrow:Absolutely. And they are related probably to? Climate change, air pollution, soil pollution, water pollution.
So it's a really bleak scenario, but to despair is a sin. You can write that up somewhere. And what we do have is a huge amount of knowledge. We don't need any more knowledge to be able to turn things around. And that's a relief, too. Certainly some of it can be fine-tuned, but on the whole we can do it.
MUSIC
Richard Corfield: And she herself has done it, by living the Permaculture way. For years, Rowe's picturesque house and garden, deep in the Blue Mountains bush, was the training ground for many a permaculture hopeful. Now, aware of the relentless march of time, she's downsized. Her new place, smaller, is in suburban Katoomba.
There she continues to live according to the Quaker Testimony of Simplicity.
Rosemary Morrow:To live simply is to live as much as I can from the garden. To live simply is to be a very low consumer, like not to consume packaging and be part of the big buying thing. To live simply is also to consume locally and support local people. To live simply is to try to speak simply and to think more purely. In fact, it's a joy, it's so less cluttered. Your shopping list goes down to about six or eight main things, and that's it. Most of your supermarket is in your garden. No, life is much, much better, living simply.
Liz: I'm a bit like you as well, I want to do everything, and I think that's actually the crux of it. But I'm trying to work out how to deal with my greed. Because I just want everything in life all the time, straight away. And Rowe strikes me as somebody who has worked out how to deal with that aspect of your personality. And so I kind of want to be near Rowe just so I learn how to be less greedy and learn to just kind of go with it, and not force everything. Because I'm so worried about what's happening with the planet that I've been rushing like mad, trying to do something about it, and persuade other people to do something about it. And now I have to look back at my own family life and my children and think, how do I work with my own family and with the natural environment and with my community and relax into this a bit, and not try and force it so much, because I'm so worried about it all. But I feel that maybe Rowe is so calm.
And I just like to kind of, she's been in situations that are much worse than what we face in Australia with the drought. And I want to understand how you can stay positive and be a happy person with your family and with your community within that, and still keep acting. And how you work through that to live a balanced life that works with the planet for the future, because I don't think the way we're doing it is working. And I know that my greedy approach isn't really a good way to do it, either. So I'm just trying to work out how to kind of chill, and do things properly.
Rosemary Morrow:What I'd like you to do now, is someone that you heard say something that's interested you, can you put yourself beside them for a minute? Walk across the circle and just find someone that maybe similar to you, or different, or you'd like to know more about. Just chat for a minute.
GROUP CHATTING
Student: I think it's really important that people become self-sufficient and sustainable themselves. Because with the way the world's going, we're going to have to look to local communities to support each other and just sort of survive, I think.
Student: Yes. I was thinking, I've got a two-and-a-half-year old. So I mean, you know, I'm often so concerned you know, like I'm sort of thinking, what kind of world is he going to grow up in.
Rosemary Morrow:the biggest thing I've noticed in this group compared with all other groups is the level of anxiety is higher. It's there on a personal level. And the anxiety comes down to the human. Who are we as humans? If I summarise why we consume endlessly, why we don't share, why we're greedy, why we want, it seems to be to me a bigger question, a more philosophical, perhaps psychological question of who are we as humans. We've got ourselves into this situation. I don't think we can answer this, but people might come to it a bit through various things they do in the course. It will be action side that will bring them into a new place.
Liz: Yes, I think she's really inspiring. I'd heard about her from lots of people in the Blue Mountains before I initially met her. And then I started reading about her, and how she's worked in places like Vietnam, and South America and worked in a lot of Third World villages where she's really helped people learn to set up Permaculture. And I think that, to me, has been one of the inspirations, that she's gone to places that are in a much grimmer situation than even the worst places in Australia, and yet she's helped people remain optimistic and learn how to grow food in very inhospitable environments, and how to clean water; and basically I think she understands how to really live on this earth and inspire people to live well, and live co-operatively. And I think that what she's done internationally is absolutely mind-boggling, and really incredible. And I think that if we can start to live that way here, then we're setting an example for the rest of the world, that it's actually nicer to live with less, and since I've been reducing my consumption, I've actually become happier, and saved a lot of money, too.
SINGING:
Fear and anger can overwhelm me
Or I can choose to stand my ground
Look into myself and know it
I can turn the world around.
Richard Corfield: It's Sunday in the Blue Mountains. And I'm in a quiet room in a pleasant house set in a leafy garden. There are maybe a dozen people, including Rosemary Morrow, sitting in a circle, absolutely still.
They are the Blue Mountains Quakers. And they meet here each week.
Sabina Erika: So I'm Sabina Erika and at the moment I'm Clerk of the Blue Mountains Meeting, which, you know, we don't have ministers in the meeting, we believe there's that of God in everyone, and we can all minister to each other.
In being together, it's a bit like where two or three are gathered together, that of God can speak to us, and we try to centre down, as we call it; doesn't always work, of course. All the bits and pieces of our daily life keep intruding. The things that are on our minds, we try to put aside and let the spirit speak. And sometimes that results in someone speaking out loud. And when that happens, we think of it as a very gathered meeting. We've really gathered together in the spirit and allowed the spirit to speak.
Rosemary Morrow:There is a spirit which is divine and placed in the human heart by God, and denied to none by age or creed and which is available to all those who have a sincere heart. That's paraphrasing a Quaker and that's where I sit with God and God for Quakers is in that quote. Where the heart is sincere then there is a divine spark working through a life and you always live and behave so as to enable that spark to grow.
Richard Corfield: You were an atheist once, weren't you?
Rosemary Morrow:Yes. It didn't work for me. Because I probably had nowhere to put the transcendent sense. Where do you put it?
I was at university in England doing a Masters in Development Studies, and I met a student there who said, 'Go and stay in Jordan's Village of my family,' and that was a Quaker village. I realised that silence is the right medium for meeting the spiritual. And I really think some of the hymns and prayers are so beautiful that I get a lovely warm, fuzzy feeling. But the real sense of being in a gathered meeting in silence, focused on those things that can't be named, is probably for me anyway, it's the only real source of worship. Getting beyond words is a source of worship.
That is probably where I am now. If I go back to where I was, it was an Anglican church, kindergarten, those little badges, slogans. It was little songs about 'my cup is full and running over.' It went through various progressions at church schools where I got an increasing sense of something special.
But I'm not sure that I ever believed that there were burning bushes on the mountains, or that Moses came down with ten tablets, or two tablets with all these restrictions on. And when I did hear things like the Ten Commandments, I didn't think they were probably the most important things anyway. It seemed to me that it was a whole lot of negatives; and that was from an early age. None of it had relevance to what I was living, which was probably out in the bush and in the Swan River at Perth, and gardening, and becoming aware of good and evil in people, and when they were able to move away from that, or master it, or whatever.
I did at one stage in a crisis, when my nephew was dying of leukaemia, do a whole lot of begging to a God who perhaps I didn't really believe in, and a whole lot of prayerful stuff to save the child's life. And it didn't happen, and it didn't exactly make be bitter, but like so many others, I knew that that was actually for me, a phoney road. And so from the age of about 21 I knew that I wasn't into intercessionary or begging prayer of any type for myself. So self went out, in terms of religious experience, and instead I'm much more a receiver of what is wonderful about being alive.
MUSIC
Richard Corfield: This is Encounter on ABC Radio National, and we're in conversation with Quaker and Permaculture practitioner, Rosemary Morrow.
Permaculture is often lumped in with the more flighty New Age arts. But in fact Rosemary's discovery of this new gardening philosophy came straight out of a strong science education. She was a brilliant student. She could have been a doctor, but chose agricultural sciences instead, because, she says, the course was shorter. She was anxious to get out into the real world.
Rosemary Morrow:Going through agriculture was a good basic understanding of sciences. However when some years later, I got to Africa and I was working in Lesotho for many years, I found I was utterly useless.
Richard Corfield: Can you explain that a little bit?
Rosemary Morrow:Well, the people were hungry, and one thing they hadn't taught us anything about in agricultural science, was how to grow food. We learnt how to grow commodities, and how to put phosphorus on soils and how to leave, maybe, seven trees per acre, which was the rule then. And how to pull down trees the most efficient ways, and the speed of a chainsaw, but we never learned how to grow food.
Someone said to me, 'I think you should teach the Basuto in Lesotho to grow asparagus, because then they can send it to South Africa for canning. And I was walking past the market, looking at women sitting on the ground, and each one had little piles of tomatoes, about five tomatoes and one cucumber and one onion. That would have done a family here, and that's what they were being forced to sell. So there wasn't the food. They had only that dreadful corn mealie-mealie, or pap, as they call it. And lots of meat. But there wasn't food as we know it, variety and range for different circumstance. And I didn't have any skills to know where to start. And at that point, something happened with me: I knew food and in subsequent years, water, they are the issues.
MUSIC
Rosemary Morrow:I came back to Australia and I learned horticulture, the horticulture certificate, you know, the TAFE certificate. And that was terrific because at least our first day, they put out five different hoes, and said, 'This is what you do with them.' And they showed us the Dutch hoe and the English hoe, and the weed hoe as well; very practical and good, you know. It wasn't best done through physical theory any more, physics. However, with that course, gradually we become more and more industry oriented. The sprays and the pesticides, it was about selling flowers and selling plants, and getting them in pots. And suddenly I realised this was a whole commodity thing as well, but I learned skills to grow food, and so that was when I put down my really first garden as an adult.
Richard Corfield: And how did permaculture come into your life?
Rosemary Morrow:Oh, through my personality really. People saying, 'You should do Permaculture', and I did another imaginative leap and thought, Oh, that's just New Age garbage, you know, that's just wishes and hopes, and nothing substantiated. I'm a scientist. And then I thought, If you think that, you'd better go and do it, because you don't know what you're talking about. And I've done that again and again, I've gone and talked to the Rhododendron Society after deciding none of them were environmental. So I did Permaculture, and found it really was the whole jigsaw framework that I was able to put in people, and growing food, and looking after the environment, and the soil.
Richard Corfield: And that's what's driven Rowe through the years, as she travels the globe. The simple issue of enough food and clean water.
One of her biggest and most successful projects has been in Cambodia.
Rosemary Morrow:Cambodia's so beautiful, and so tragic. During Pol Pot times, millions of people died, they were killed. And following that, there was civil war and so much turmoil. Which the world forgets, but the people struggle on.
MUSIC
Richard Corfield: We find Rowe with a group of women walking through a village near the town of Pursat, in the middle of the country. Small houses line the leafy streets. Many are wooden, on stilts. Other dwellings are thatched with walls made from woven palm leaves. There is green everywhere, bananas and jackfruit trees.
The women head down a path towards one of the houses. It's rickety and the occupants are obviously quite poor. Rowe opens a gate into a small, fenced enclosure.
Rosemary Morrow:Look at the soil. Yes, small, small garden. Mint, little dracuan, cassava, beans on the living fence. Very often there's a little pot somewhere that's full of urine, and it's just sitting there.
Richard Corfield: The garden is about ten metres square, and is full of plants. Some in rows, some in exuberant tumblings over the beaten paths. New seedlings jostle with mature and extravagant bushes of eggplant, climbing beans, and other, less familiar vegetation. There's a rich and heady aroma of compost in the air.
This is one of Rowe's project gardens. Set up under the auspices of Quaker Service Australia, it's a scheme to get better nutrition into rural Cambodian families.
Rosemary Morrow:Well there's a very careful selection of plants. First of all we've chosen the ten hardiest vegetables that are nutritionally valuable. So we haven't tried to grow cabbages which are extremely difficult, or cauliflowers or carrots. We're growing the things people can grow. So that means everyone says Yes, I can do that. But their nutritional content is extremely important. The other thing is they're fairly small gardens, so they don't feel they're burdened when they have to go and transplant for hours in the rice field. So they can do it, and they require minimum care, close to the house, usually close to compost or toilet, see the straw over there, or toilet, they use urine. Permanent, they won't change this place, so over years, they build up the soil.
Richard Corfield: This is Permaculture?
Rosemary Morrow:This is Permaculture, yes. It's not the way you'd see it in Australia, but it's definitely what I'd called 'indigenised' for the people, it's like an indigenous Permaculture. But there's choices. And these are permanent. You see the chilli, this mint is permanent. The amaranth is self-seeding. So they don't have to constantly dig up garden beds and rake and hoe, and then plant out seedlings, because we don't want to add to the burden of their work. Life's hard, hard when you walk into town, or you're out in the field, or you're getting wood or carrying water. We really can't burden them with a garden system that's a lot of work and actually might make them sick.
Richard Corfield: Rowe is with staff from the Provincial Department of Women's and Veterans' Affairs who she has personally trained in the art of growing Permaculture food gardens. They in turn have taught the skills to selected families, like this one.
Rosemary Morrow:This man is the gardener. So he does the garden here, together with his daughter.
Richard Corfield: The man is thin, white-haired, stately and upright. Around him are his family, there's quite a lot of them, and a few neighbours. There's an air of excitement around the project's visit. Rowe's eyes are on the children.
Rosemary Morrow:There are five people in this family, but I can only track down three, and for my eye, there's a considerable difference in their health in three years, so that you can the daughter sitting down, she's got a whole glow, and I think that's what we're starting to see about people with gardens, is this clear, fresh sort of look within a fairly short time, if they eat regularly. And I think we're starting to get that look.
Richard Corfield: Is it as simple as that? Just diet?
Rosemary Morrow:No, it won't make them fat, and it won't provide energy. Or, very, very tall. But it will provide lack of infection, clear skin, coughs, you know before everyone coughed all the time, and big, bubbly yellow noses. Now they're starting to go. Well they're pretty much gone. I might run my eyes around, there's a boy standing there, just look. None of that bubbly yellow, no eye infection. So you're starting to get the impact just in general wellbeing. It's a vitamin-mineral thing, it's not protein and energy, though of course all this contains some energy and small amounts of protein, especially if they're eating beans.
Richard Corfield: After three years, this is Rowe's final tour of inspection of the project. It's been a difficult time, what with language problems, dealing with reluctant government officials and delicate local politics. But much of her success is down to the Quaker ideals of trust and honesty that Rowe offers to everyone she comes across.
Rosemary Morrow:It was within Quakers I understood that society starts unravelling if you can't trust people. So therefore your truth and what you say, needs to be important. So I guess that Quakers - and their foundational belief of that, of the spirit in everyone, is really important in approaching people. You tend to see them as approachable and trustworthy, rather than possibly dangerous and untrustworthy. So you know, if we listen to the anthropologists, they say we basically distrust strangers. I'm quite inclined to trust a stranger, and I think it helps that you've got this belief that there's potential, good or value in everyone.
I think I'm lucky to be in this situation; someone's doing something interesting when I come through the gate, and they welcome me and I feel gratitude for that. But it is rather if something's going wrong, I'm able to think, There's potential good here that somehow I'm not tapping into. And then there's that lovely little exercise in finding the potential good.
Richard Corfield: And what is that?
Rosemary Morrow:Well it's just bringing to mind, it's mindfulness. This person has had probably one hell of a life and they're tired, and then they're being nice to me. You know, you take it round to something appreciative and that's reflected in you to them, or whatever. I mean I'm sorry I'm a little bit inarticulate but Quakers don't talk about these things too much usually, so I can't articulate it, except it's very important in all sorts of situations. Certainly it gives you a joy in other cultures and so in Afghanistan you're able to see how wonderfully they do hospitality. How wonderful the sharing is, and how wonderful the joy in life is. You know to be so accepted in a country where your soldiers are bombing them. Well, it's really a privilege isn't it? And I think that foundational belief I think does carry you through.
MUSIC
Richard Corfield: We set off again on foot and soon find ourselves on a muddy track inside a small patch of forest. We spy two young women, busy with the fallen branches of a tree, giving us a clue why Cambodians have never really had a tradition of vegetable gardening.
Rosemary Morrow:See this would have been the traditional way of getting food. She's picking tamarind from a branch that probably she cut, or fell down last night, and may take it to the market. So that was really, really traditional nutrition for a long time. And then she peels them, and there they are ready to go to the market. When there was a lot of jungle like this, there was much more food available to people than presently. So people would actually go out and pick for themselves from the forest. So you can see here, they can eat that leaf, they might roll that one in something, and picking the tamarind seed. Now that was very good nutrition and sufficient, but it's going and largely gone in some places. That's why we do what we do.
Richard Corfield: Further on down the path we find another project garden. There's an old lady offering rice to a group of Buddhist monks. Rowe sets off to inspect the garden and is pleased to see a sturdy fence around it.
Rosemary Morrow:Now the garden is really well protected, which is good, because once an animal gets in, it will demolish it in a few hours. Here's the gardener.
LANGUAGE
Richard Corfield: The old lady, brightly dressed, has the gnarled feet and hands of someone who has known only constant toil.
Rosemary Morrow:So Dalah, ask her when did you start your garden? (LANGUAGE) How long ago? Two years ago. Did you have a garden like this before? Before the project, no. This is her garden, oh, OK.
The thing that most people can't see is the question I would say, 'What will this family eat tonight?' What are they going to eat today?
Richard Corfield: That's what you ask them?
Rosemary Morrow:That's what I ask people like you, who say, it's all green, why are the people so thin? And I say, Well you tell me what they'll eat. And unless you can see, you have the skilled eye, you don't know about the nutrition of the people. So I've heard people say, You know Vietnam is so green, Cambodia is so green. So why do they have the problem? Actually most of the time these vegetables are missing. So the green you see is the bamboo, or the tamarind or the flowering tree, or the bananas out of season, but there's nothing actually to eat in all that greenery.
What does she eat from the garden today? What will she pick today for lunch? Soropus, that's a nutrition vegetable. What else? Dracuan. What will she cook today, in this family for lunch? Bamboo shoot and this.
Rosemary Morrow: A nutrition garden needs to be complex. There's no such thing as a simple nutrition garden. Banana is an energy and vitamin source, but doesn't supply enough. By using this array of materials she's getting the right amounts of vitamin A, vitamin E, vitamin D, all that sunlight. There'll be some B vitamins in here. The soluble, insoluble vitamins, micro quantities of magnesium, of calcium. So what we're doing actually is making whatever rice and whatever meat they can get, work for good health. They won't get fat, but they'll be healthy.
Is this your granddaughter? She looks lovely. She's got the eyes and hair, everything we're looking for a result. Looks beautiful.
Richard Corfield: When the project was set up back in 1998, and with very limited resources, Rosemary Morrow and her colleagues set off to recruit just a few of the most capable women in the district. These they would train and ask them to grow their own gardens so others could learn from them in the hope that they would copy.
Rosemary Morrow:So the whole thing involved breaking everything down into tiny, weeny, little bits. How to build the fence was a three-day course I think; whether you use bamboo, whether you use bamboo with the big spines on it; whether you can keep a chicken out or a pig out, the discussion was endless, and it was minutiae of a fine, fine degree. The same with the compost, the same with which vegetables are hardy and keep growing if you have to go to the field, like now, for three weeks. Now our criteria were small enough not to be inhibiting; close to the house to be useful, so not behind that bamboo hedge. Not so much of a workload that they wouldn't want to do it. Provide vegetables all year round, some, and we didn't really mind too much about the quantities for a family. And then we would see where women went with the gardens.
Richard Corfield: Rowe is talking to one of those early gardeners.
Rosemary Morrow:We've been getting some statistics here from figures. And this woman has taught 20 other poor women farmers. Of them, 20 are still doing the garden a year later. Hundred percent. Of that, all of them sell something. So not only is it a nutrition program,. It's also income generation. And that will make a big difference to a small family like this, or single women.
Richard Corfield: From the example and inspiration of these pioneer gardeners, more than 800 nutrition gardens were established in the three years of the project. It's a remarkable vindication of the idea that one person really can make a difference.
MUSIC
Richard Corfield: It's three years now since Rosemary Morrow's direct involvement in the project ended. Since then, the Cambodians have carried on, running what's now become thousands of nutrition gardens, and the ideas are being carried to neighbouring provinces. Rowe's syllabus is even becoming part of the job description for some provincial government staff.
It's a remarkable success story and much of it is down to Rowe's belief in the right of all to have access to the sorts of skills and knowledge that she herself has accumulated in her lifetime. And it hasn't always been easy.
Rosemary Morrow:Yes, I mean I'm in a village, it isn't just there, it's also with the diarrhoea and they've just cancelled the program because there's a festival and I had to spend three days walking round and round the pagoda with an artificial tin thing on my head in the mud, which I don't want to be doing. I think the sustenance is that sense of doing what somehow, I mean this people, it's all the Christians say God sent you to do this, but it's just doing what the sense of what you're meant to be doing. I think some people who garden at home and grow roses with that same sense; and mine is about food and inability to get the information and resources. So yes, it does matter to be a Quaker because on Sundays I'll often sit by myself for an hour in Quaker silence and I'll mentally put myself into a meeting somewhere that will be meeting on that longitudinal line, and I'm with a meeting, a gathered meeting, in the silence.
MUSIC
Richard Corfield: Back in Katoomba, the Permaculture course is nearing completion. The students have learned how to design and lay out a garden, taking account of water, soils, local climate and plants. And as a practical exercise, Rowe has got her class actually building a food garden at the house of one of the students.
Rosemary Morrow:Well we're at Dom's house at Hazlebrook, and she wants us all here to do a site analysis and a garden for her in the next few hours. It's giving them the skills to do sheet mulching, a little pond, a herb spiral, and get all that right.
Richard Corfield: You're certainly getting into it now, is it a very positive idea of what's going on here?
Student: This is, I'm just sort of creating an outline of what's going to be our bed. And Lynette's pulling out the weeds here. And Dave's doing some watering. So that we're getting it all together. We've got other people in another part of the garden there, pulling out weeds, and we'll be laying down paper here, old newspaper. That'll be sort of sheet mulch. And so already the weeds are going to be used as active mulch.
DIGGING
Richard Corfield: There's a very cheerful air about the place today in contrast to the rather dark world view I heard expressed on the first day. The Permaculture course itself seems to have gone down very well.
Liz: It's been far more intense and far more comprehensive than I thought, but even dreamed it would be. It's I think one of the really amazing things about it has been that it seems to have - it's got such a strong ethical and principled base for how to attack life and how to attack human longevity, so it's really looking at every aspect of what humanity needs to live well, and how to do that, and it comes up with solutions, like Permaculture seems to have the solutions for all the crises that we're facing in the future, and that's really exciting for me, because with young children I really want to know how to show them how to live. And I feel that through permaculture, I'll be able to give them the skills and the right attitudes to life.
Man: You can't help but have a bit of depression about the way things are going, but at the same time I find it all pretty exciting really, because my view is that the only way we can make a difference is individually. And through myself doing it and Liz doing it and people seeing us doing it and walking past. Today you saw a whole lot of people looking in and going, 'What's going on there?' And I'm sure Dom's going to have plenty of people stop and chat to her about what's happening in her front yard, and all that helps, you know. So I've got plenty of friends who think in a similar way to me, but probably need someone like myself to get out and do it and stimulate them to do a little bit as well. So I think it's quite exciting really.
SINGING:
Make your mind up to make a difference
And you'll see you're gaining ground.
Richard Corfield: Another year, another country. Rowe is now about to head off to Africa, funding the trip entirely from her own resources.
SINGING:
You don't have to move around ...
Rosemary Morrow:Ethiopia next. There's huge need there. I think I want to be where there's need. I'm going to teach Permaculture and go to Ethiopia, and then I hope Northern Uganda if all the fighting has stopped. It's a bit nasty.
SINGING:
Though that voice may be small and quiet
It can make a mighty sound
Find it in yourself and try it
You can turn the world around.
Richard Corfield: This week's Encounter, Rosemary's Gardens, featured Rosemary Morrow and students from her Permaculture class. We heard from workers at the Pursat Department of Women's and Veterans' Affairs; the Blue Mountains Quakers; and the Blue Mountains Trades Union Choir.
My thanks also to Kerry Hannan. Sound Engineering by Louis Mitchell. I'm Richard Corfield and please go to our website abc.net.au/religion for lots more. Thank you for listening.
Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash
