Ron Shannon

I was raised on a wheat and sheep farm in the WA wheatbelt and watched my father, an excellent motor mechanic, utterly destroy some of the most fertile soil in the district over the course of thirty years by not understanding that you cannot continue to take, take, take without putting something back. He couldn’t see it. He’d just slather on more superphosphate. He didn’t notice the four lovely, freshwater lakes on our property, which contained four types of edible fish, coonacs, gilgies and giant freshwater clams, each clam a feed for a grown man, rapidly turning into salt marsh because of fertiliser run off. He destroyed them in three years. We also had an engine driven electricity supply whose noise drove me nuts at night when trying to sleep. I resolved to have a silent one when I grew up. And I did, twice! I enjoyed gardening, even as a little kid, growing lettuce, radishes and tomatoes. These were rare treats, as decent fresh produce was just not available locally. You HAD to grow your own, raise chooks for the eggs, slaughter sheep, pigs and cattle for your meat. On special occasions, we had roasted chook! I learned early that everything had to be sustainable and locally available. In the mid eighties, I attended, with my wife, a Bill Mollison public lecture about Permaculture. We were not too impressed by the man, but his message resonated with us. We had just had built a lovely modern home in one of the better riverside suburbs in Perth, but we were not happy there. Having both been raised as ‘country kids’, we decided to sell up and move to the Perth Hills, a place filled with ‘small-holdings’, and bought a five acre property on which we grew sandalwood trees and practised Permaculture principles in setting up to be ‘sustainable’. I put in lots of water tanks, even though we had available dangerously, ‘chemicalised’, mains water on site, and ended up with 88,000 litres worth of rainwater storage so that I could set up a small, professional-level, aquaculture system and have decent drinking water. We also had one of the first solar power systems, with battery. Ross Mars was doing a lot of Permaculture courses and we became his representative permaculture property with our swales, sustainable aquaculture and permaculture gardens, not to mention our myriad wild life, especially birds. We had fourteen species of honey eaters on our place, along with blue wrens, two types of ‘robin redbreast’ and all the usual cast of corvids, cockatoos, parrots, etc. We were also Ross’s source of sandalwood and quandong seedlings. We had our chooks in three separate yards that we could close off to them so as to provide an annual rotation of garden crops through each yard, then let the chooks clean up, fertilise and till next year’s garden plot. Those chooks were actually horrid little dinosaurs. They would catch and fight over mice, and they would corner any goannas that were foolish enough to enter their domain and attack them until they either were killed (and eaten!) or managed to get away. Yes, we did feed them properly!! Our cattle dog was afraid of them. He’d seen what happened to a few goannas. At age seventy five, the five acres had become just too much work for us, so we sold it and moved to our self-built new home in Northam in 2020. Still have our own rainwater and power supplies, though!