The idea of growing your own food and living a more simple, sustainable lifestyle is something that more and more people are aspiring to do – but it’s certainly not a new concept.
One study by the Australia Institute found 23% of Australians aged 30 to 59 had decided to “downshift” in some way, reducing their work hours in order to pursue other aspects of life that were important to them.

Leigh Davison said it was called “voluntary simplicity” in the early 70s and, after spending time in Asia, he knew he wanted to make a change in the way he lived his life.

“I was an engineer by profession and spent a few years living in India and Indonesia and was impressed by the fact that people who lived very simple lifestyles, you would probably call them poverty-stricken, seemed to be a lot happier than myself and many of the others living so called wealthy lifestyles,” Leigh said. “I was doing PhD at the University of NSW and got interested in agriculture and organic farming. I rented some land outside Sydney and started growing organic vegies and making compost.”

By the late 70s he had met his wife Ellen in the United States and convinced her to come and live with him on a “hippy commune” at The Channon. Thirty years on and the community is close to providing all of their own food, shelter and power needs.

“We do buy some food, but if Woolworths closed down tomorrow, we would very quickly be able to get to a point where we could be self-sufficient… If you look at your dietary needs, you need carbohydrates and we have a variety of pumpkin that is very sustainable, because it has no pests. We grow potatoes, although we do have to import the seed from colder places like Dorrigo… Sweet potato is very well adapted to this climate, sweet corn, and bananas, they’re God’s gift to humanity. Goldfingers do incredibly well here in the subtropics,” he said. “Then there’s protein; that all comes from the dairy – we make two 3kg cheeses a week. And we make yoghurt, butter, cottage cheese and feta cheese.”

There are 18 permanent residents living in eight houses on the property, as well as a guest house where WWOOFers (Willing Workers on Organic Farms) regularly stay and help around the gardens.

There is also a communal house where five times a week they get together for communal meals and sort out the rosters so work is shared in an equitable way.

“One of the main purposes of the place is to explore this idea of living more simply and there are three fundamental principles: respect for the land, respect for each other and to grow as much of our food as we can on the property,” Leigh said. “You have to work really hard to live more simply... Every Saturday morning is garden morning. It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but everyone who is here goes down to the garden and we work on whatever patch (is needed). Each person has one or two crops that they’re in charge of and that (produce) gets shared around. Rather than everybody growing a little bit of everything, it’s much more efficient to do one or two things. At the moment I’m doing winter zucchinis and potatoes… My wife Ellen does broccoli and a few other things.”

Composting toilets are a particular passion of his and grey water systems feed the gardens and orchards. Leigh and Ellen recently upgraded to a solar system on their house, but for many years their electricity was generated by a hydro system made with an old Holden alternator.

The property is 102 hectares and there is ongoing maintenance work on roads and dams and watering systems that are generally done on Fridays. One of the other conditions of being a member of the community is that you can’t be on the dole; you have to have an income from outside the property. Leigh is a senior lecturer at SCU’s School of Environmental Science and Management and also the director of their Centre for Eco-technology.

His university work is about 20 hours a week and the rest of the time he spends working on the property.

“It’s a former dairy farm and about 20% we have dedicated towards farming and the rest we are restoring to native forest. Bush regeneration is my hobby, so I don’t have to belong to a golf course or a gym,” he said with a laugh. “One of the ideas that came along with voluntary simplicity was the idea of ‘creative leisure’, so you don’t have to spend a fortune (on leisure activities), you can get your kicks out of growing vegies.”

Leigh said he sees an important educative role for himself and others with similar experiences teaching people about growing food and community models in the future.

“Peak oil is probably happening about now. Peak phosphate is probably going to happen in about 20 years time. Conceivably you can replace oil with other things, but you can’t replace phosphate and the world’s agriculture runs on phosphorus fertiliser… The price of food is going up and will continue to go up. When my mother was born in 1913 the average Australian working class family spent 40% of its income on food. By 1950 it had come down to 20%, by 2000 it was 10%. We’re spending all our money on overseas trips and electronic gadgets, but food is going to go up because it’s very dependent on fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources… You can’t have a sustainable planet with 10 billion people and a lifestyle anything like the one you and I enjoy now... If we want a sustainable society there’s got to be a lot more equity, not just internationally, but inter-generationly. My generation has consumed 50% of the world’s non renewable resources in just 50 years.”

Although he has been involved in establishing a sustainable community, Leigh is very aware it is not a model that can be replicated in many other places.

“The reason we are here is because it was cheap. (When it was bought) in 1972 the land had no agricultural value… Land around here these days is much more expensive and the planet’s not big enough to give everyone 100 hectares. But you could do what we’re doing on a lot less.”

He said some of the lessons they have learned about communal living are already being replicated and will need to be a part of the future if we are to combat urban sprawl taking over prime agricultural land.

“As part of my work with the university, I’ve visited places in Denmark where they call it ‘co-housing’. Basically urban or suburban areas where 40 families have got together and bought some land and built these very interesting communal dwellings… There is a zone for teenagers so when they get to a certain age they’re not at home blasting the walls down.

“Everybody realises we’ve got to be less car dependent. We’ve got to make our urban environments cycle-able, walkable or public transportable and I think one of the plusses that’s going to occur when petrol becomes too expensive for the average person is we’ll be forced to do things more communally,” he said.

Leigh is currently on Lismore council’s sustainable environment policy advisory group and last year he gave a presentation on sustainable settlements for the NSW North Coast at a climate change forum at SCU. In that presentation he asked, amongst other things, what a sustainable Lismore would look like.

“Human settlements are going to have to get more compact… I think you could do some of the sorts of things we’ve done here on the MO (multiple occupancy), but closer to town. There is a movement towards communal gardens and I think we should be identifying sites where market gardening could be conducted. The ideal site in my view is opposite the showgrounds. There is some country there with a few cattle on it, up the hill there are gullies that could be dammed to have gravity fed irrigation. It’s not suitable for residential development because of the saleyards and the speedway and you could get the poo from the saleyards as a resource. These are the types of places we should be identifying now.”