Hidden Valley Sustainable Living Workshops with Bonnie Bickle
Q: When did you first get interested in living a more grounded and sustainable lifestyle?
A: I was doing my politics degree at Melbourne Uni and I was in a shared house and I was feeling really stifled by the way that everything that you do costs money. It was so hard to do anything that didn’t cost money and it just felt like I was really trapped within this capitalist system.
I wrote this essay on globalisation and really discovered anti-globalisation movement and how that turned my thinking on its head and discovered Vandana Shiva and the importance of subsistence work in communities and a life grounded around subsistence work within a family unit just being so much more meaningful. I really just connected with that. I was just like, right, I’m moving to Tassie.
I retrained, I did my apprenticeship as a carpenter joiner because that’s kind of subsistence work is building structures. And then I kind of went away from that because it was just so much toxic building materials in there and also fairly toxic workplaces.
So ended up deciding that I would just be centred around the home and just work around the home. Whether that was building and it’s the whole thing, growing the food as well as cooking; it takes ages if you’re not just chopping up a few washed things from the supermarket. And I feel like that’s something that’s often undersold, is that it is a lot of time. You know, like when people are trying to sell the lifestyle, they’re like, it’s so easy. You know, it’s not easy and it’s not quick. And that’s the point. And it is easy to start. And then there’s so much to learn.
As you grow and as you develop and you work out how you want to spend your time and what you want to do. Because you can’t do everything. And you shouldn’t do everything. You shouldn’t feel like you should do everything. I just kind of tried everything, to try to work out where I wanted to focus. I tried dairy goats and we had meat pigs and we were dumpster diving to feed the pigs and things like that. And I’ve just come back to the fruit and veggie garden because I just feel like a healthy diet should be almost all fruit and veggies. And by focusing our energy there, we’re providing most of our diet.
And some things are just better For large scale, like with dairying, it felt like it was just really inefficient. You know, with all the sterilising and all the work and you can’t go away and things like that. Whereas with the fruit and veggies, you know, and then you can do the preserving from those and the veggies don’t have to be milked at 4am.
Q: So that first spark, how many years ago was that to now?
A: We had our starter property in Hobart, which was like a demolisher’s delight and renovated that. Then that meant I could dabble with everything and different gardening systems and then I could leave all my mistakes. Then with this place here I could start with everything I’ve learned and set up really efficient food production systems.
Q: Did you have any mentors along the way. In this process of building your home and gardens that make this lifestyle possible, has there been anybody that’s been a particular inspiration to you along the way?
A: I guess probably my parents. Bit cheesy. I grew up in bush, in off-grid place in Jackie’s Marsh, which is just down the road. I’ve come back home. They did all their own building around the place and did their own plumbing and their own electrical stuff. They just did everything and that was a real lesson in life, like, when people are always paying for things, they expect things to be perfect. It’s a bit the same as with your veggies, isn’t it? You know, people are expecting perfect veggies and everything but, when you’re doing things yourselves, it’s often not going to be perfect. And if you’re doing your own building thing for the first time and you’ve never done it before, it’s probably not going to be perfect. And there’s some magic in there.
Of course that’s the anti-capitalist thing, isn’t it? It’s like, but I did it. And they kind of taught me about how all the things you can do without as well. And that that’s part of enjoying things. Like I just love eating seasonally because it restricts your diet. It’s so much easier to meal plan because you go from what is there in the garden to so, we have these meals at this time of year. And then you don’t eat strawberries again for nine months. And then you have buckets of them. You know, it’s great.
Q: Do you have any advice for people that want to shift into a less commercial and hectic lifestyle into kind of a more balanced, healthy one, like you’re living now?
A: I would not underestimate the time involved in setting up. I think almost all the work is in setting up your systems. And I think it’s really important to design it and plan a good system before you start. I don’t think you should just jump in with a few garden beds because then you can start to get a bit trapped into what you’ve already done and you have too many failures, and it makes you feel bad, and then gardening becomes this thing where there’s weeds everywhere and you feel bad and you feel trapped in these systems that are really inefficient. No, I really think it’s so great to design a really good system to start with. And I guess that could be staged if you don’t want to start with some enormous garden.
You could design it in two halves and then set that up properly and put in your watering before you start planting because you just don’t want to be trapped into negative cycles and it’s the same with weeding.
Get your border around that garden, you know, like I’ve got a gravel strip with geotextile fabric underneath and around my garden so there’s no weeds running in. Otherwise you’re just going to spend hours all summer, with all the weeds that are running in from the edges. And once you eliminate those things, the maintenance is so much easier.
Then you can enjoy it so much more and then gardening can be this joyful activity, not this list of stressful jobs. The other thing I would say is I think that people talk about, “oh, we’ll start small when you’re starting,” but often that compromises the vision. So why not start big, but plant with easier crops that are easier to look after when you’re learning? And avoid the diva crops like celery and cauliflower and things and stick to easy ones. You could have a whole bed of potatoes.
I just discovered onions last season. I never grew them before and they are like the best. And they don’t go off and like pumpkins and zucchinis and garlic and broad beans and there’s so many easy things that you could grow in your backyard.
Then from there … fruit trees. So many people plant really marginal fruit trees, and then they have unhealthy fruit trees that don’t produce well. And I just feel like maybe let yourself have one of those, but you should really be sticking with what’s going to be really safe and happy in your climate.
Why push the boundaries so that you can have five Japanese plums a year, when you could have a whole tree full of European plums. And people talk about, I don’t like apples. Like, really? Why not? We’re in the perfect climate for apples. You can grow six different heritage varieties. They all taste completely different. You can have storers and cookers and you can have apple sauce and you can have dried apples. And they’re so delicious. Like, I wonder if they’re people just coming from what they know from supermarkets.
Q: What are some of the biggest challenges that you’ve faced along the way to get to this point?
A: Biggest challenges, I guess the biggest challenges are the failures. When I was first learning, my first crop of seedlings that I grew, everything was from seed. I was so proud of them. I picked them all out and I potted them all up. And then Mum came and she said, “Bonnie, you realise that’s all sorrel?” None of my original seeds had come up at all. It was just really depressing and embarrassing. I think the real challenges come when you’re starting out. Maybe it’s the same with parenting, you know, when you’re just kind of feeling your way.
Q: What are some of the most rewarding things about your life and work here in Golden Valley?
A: Meaning, I think. You find your life has a purpose. Having a self-directed life as well, even though it often doesn’t feel like that. I have to do this and I have to do that, but that’s all my choice. Having like a really old-fashioned life, trying to reimagine that life, full of amazing different healthy veggies and interesting things you can do with them and then having fun family time centred around slowly eating and doing things on the property as well. It’s being centred in place as well. Like really being a part of this place and understanding it and belonging here and working with it.
Q: That lifestyle of being more centred and grounded and have a sense of place. What advice would you give to that person?
A: We did that in the suburb of Hobart and I guess we just started to centre around the home. It was like coming back to the home and then developing spaces around the home where we could work and where we could have fun. Because you’ve got to have both.
We had to work with the developing the block and developing the garden and everything. But you’ve got to have the fun. You’ve got to have the beautiful seating area in the garden where you can look at what you’ve done at the end of the day.
You’ve got to have the shady pergola and you’ve got to have scones and tea on a Sunday morning in the garden. You’ve got to have all those things because that’s the meaning. I think a lot of the American kind of homesteading self-sufficiency ethos is like work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work.
You spend your whole life working, and that’s not the point. Going back to the indigenous ethos, there should be a lot of leisure time in life, shouldn’t there? And that doesn’t have to be capitalist pursuits. That can just be time with family and friends. Those things are basically free. You’re not spending money out at the movie theatre. You’re having a cup of tea. And that gives the rest of it meaning. …And you know, the vibe can be different for everybody as well. That’s just my style.
