My Background
I am a retired natural resource manager with 30 years’ experience in diverse environments ranging from coastal areas in the far east of Russia, through Chinese wetlands, the mountains of the Laos-Vietnam border, peat swamps in Indonesia, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, to Antarctica. This work was at a diversity of scales, from development of national policies (e.g. wetlands in the Philippines and China), to protected area management, and working with small coastal communities to develop participatory management of their resources.
My interest in permaculture grew out of this work with people in developing countries. The assignments that I particularly enjoyed typically involved helping communities or stakeholder groups to analyse their situation in order to separate out actual problems from the symptoms arising from those problems, and then to identify feasible and sustainable solutions to those problems. Often the issues were related to movement away from a sustainable lifestyle as a result of pressures to “modernise” (which often meant acquisition of the possessions that aid agencies counted as measures of development), or pressure on resources from increased population levels. Of course, this is a vastly simplified description of varied and complex situations, but the overall effect was that I came to recognise that traditional approaches often held the clues to establishing sustainable futures.
A three-year break from consulting to work with my wife and friends to build a house and workshop on our land at Vinegar Hill provided time for reflection on my priorities and a rethinking of my approaches to sustainable development.
Qualifications to Teach Permaculture
I have completed a PDC course (under Tom Kendall – whose permaculture training was under Bill Mollision and Geoff Lawton), and this is the only qualification required for teaching permaculture, including PDC courses. It also allows me to use the term “permaculture” professionally though I have never done this and don’t intend to teach.
Sustainable @ Lockyer Valley 
Hi Mell. Thanks for the nice words about the blog. I’m not currently running training courses -still figuring out how to do it in a way that matches with my ethics, the positives and negatives of our site, and what people need. However I’m always happy for people to drop in here and have a look at what we are doing and talk about their properties. If you are in Ipswich that isn’t too far from here, and not out of my way on infrequent trips to Brisbane. You can contact me on smokespotters at gmail dot com if you want to take it further. I don’t charge for discussion or advice.
Hi, your blog is excellent, it’s refreshing to read about permaculture with a good grounding in reality. Are you currently training? I’m based in Ipswich with what sounds like similar climate and soil type to where you are in the Lockyer, so it would be good to learn from some one who,is working with these conditions first hand.