More than just a garden…

This story is evolving as I write.

One day 2 years or so ago a woman came to the Cygnet Community Garden for the first time. She was from Queensland, she said, and was here doing some house sitting. The regulars at the garden showed her around and she knuckled down amongst us for a couple of hours gardening. She was nice to be with and was most impressed with our lunch spread when we stopped work at 12 noon. I hoped she would come again. She did and she continued to, whenever her house sitting brought her close enough to Cygnet.

Then, one day she said she was going back to Queensland to see her family and may or may not come back to Cygnet, depending on if she could find more house sitting. We missed her a lot and every week we asked each other if anyone had heard from her. It wasn’t long before someone had a phone call and someone else had an email, all suggesting that she was returning soon, and that her daughter and grand children would be coming for a visit too, in a new house sitting arrangement she had found in Randall’s Bay, not far from Cygnet.

She had found a little house by the sea and decided she wanted to stay….. forever. It soothes your soul by the sea and she had become quite fond of us at the community garden and some others in a craft group she had joined.

To cut a long story short, she has sold up in Queensland and bought a house in Cygnet, not Randall’s Bay, after all. She is arriving this week and we have some house warming surprises for her; I dare not say what they are as she may read this blog piece! But I suspect the best present will be seeing the faces of friends she has already made and knowing that they will help her settle in and adapt to her new life.

Community gardens are deep. Rivers run through them and energy flows in many directions. Our community garden is a haphazard, grass-infested, quite unkempt looking garden that those who look with their hearts, minds and souls (rather than just their eyes) see as a wonderful, strong, peaceful web where the food produced is only a part of the story.

Imagine a Tasmania….

Imagine living in a place where 100% of the power generated was from renewable energy and owned by the state plus having spare to sell and send across an existing undersea cable to the mainland; where medicinal crops (including poppies and hemp) were billion dollar industries and outstripped the old income from forestry a thousand times over; where wind farm construction was on the cusp of employing the entire workforce (and more) from collapsed mining; where bio mass energy heated schools and pools and buildings all over the state; where dairy farms and vegetable farms were feeding the people near and far…..

Imagine eco-tourism, organic farms, in fact every industry, business and household being able to claim that 100% of their electricity came from sustainable sources…. imagine the tourist potential….. imagine the income from selling such technology and insight all over the world….. imagine the future….

Imagine governments being so ignorant that the mere mention of hemp had them closing doors to businesses ready to start planting; imagine governments taking away renewable energy targets and making the construction of all future wind farms, ready to start building in the next few weeks, impossible to finance…. imagine them not standing tall and claiming credit for tossing aside the woes of a crumbling Tasmania and grasping these chances that have fallen like mana from the heavens….

Imagine how sick we feel and how angry we are to see unsustainable fish farming practices and other ridiculous developments taking precedent. Imagine if they privatise Hydro Tasmania and, like the gas fields of South Australia, investors suck the state dry.

It is hard to write these words. It is incomprehensible that such opportunities are not being grasped. Tasmania has a chance to leapfrog much of the rest of the world but those in the hot seats of power seem incapable of understanding. Imagine how they will be remembered in history. Imagine how it could be…..