Green Harvest
A History of Organic Farming and Gardening in Australia
by Dr Rebecca Jones
published by CSIRO publishing | AVAILABLE NOW!
Green Harvest is the story of organic farming and gardening in Australia; a conversation about human health and its dependency on the natural environment. This history explores ideas of health and environment which have shaped Australian organic growing from the interwar years to the present day, engagingly told through interviews with growers and interpretation of historical documents. Green Harvest is an environmental history and a health history but one which takes us into the future of humans’ relationship with the environment by questioning the way we have imagined nature over time.
Green Harvest explores the ideas and practices that have shaped organic farming and gardening in
Australia from the interwar years to the present day. It reveals that Australian organic farming and gardening societies were amongst the first in the
world, being active as early as the 1940s.
In what way does human health depend upon the natural environment? Green Harvest traces this idea through four themes of Australian organic farming and gardening—soil, chemical free, ecological wellbeing and back to the land—each illustrated with a case study profiling an Australian organic farmer
or gardener.
Personalities in Australian organic gardening, such as Jackie French and Peter Bennett, talk about organic growing. The book also features extracts from early organic magazines and interviews with current organic growers, including banana and macadamia farmers, managers of outback sheep stations, dairy farmers and self-sufficiency gardeners. All of these tell the story of Australian organic farming and gardening: past, present and future.
About the author
Rebecca Jones’s exploration of organic farming and gardening began when she dug up her front garden in inner city Melbourne and planted a vegetable garden. Needing more room, she moved to a small property in rural Victoria where she now has a big vegetable patch and orchard. Besides being a keen organic grower, she is a historian and researcher of environmental history and the connections between human health and the environment. She has published on topics ranging from soil and organic farming to oral history and mental health and well-being. She has completed a PhD about Australian organic growing and currently lectures in Health Ecology at Monash University Department of Rural and Indigenous Health (MUDRIH).
