Michael Green

Writer and producer

Otto sausages

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I MADE sausages from Elizabeth’s bull, Otto. I’ve got a brother-in-law called Otto and he’s vegetarian. Sorry, Ottos. 

As I pushed the meat through the mincer, small pieces stuck to my fingers. I felt like Lady McBeth with King Duncan’s blood on her hands. “Out, damned spot!” I cried, rubbing my hands, but the tiny mincelets stuck fast.

I’ve been a polite semi-vegetarian for a few years. I don’t buy and cook meat for myself, but I’ll eat it when I’m a guest. It’s not that I don’t like the flavour of meat, but that for me, it’s better to go without if I’m not sure where it’s from, how it was raised and how it died.

Elizabeth showed me photos of the way Otto died. They hired a “bush butcher” to kill and cut him up. He was in the freezer by the time I arrived, but he’d spent his life grazing happily on their land and servicing the cows a little too often.

While I was mincing, Elizabeth came in and told me that six turkey eggs had just hatched. In the last week, three pregnant goats had given birth to several kids. The young billy goats would be slaughtered, processed for cheese-making rennet and eaten; the she-goats kept or sold.  

“Gee, there’s a lot of birth and death going on,” I said.

“Isn’t there?” Elizabeth replied. “It must be spring.”

When I finished the mincing, she added cassava flour, garlic and herbs to one batch, and curry spices to the other. We used hog intestine for the casing. It was – yes, it was – like an endless slimy condom. An unpleasant animal smell overwhelmed the room. When making sausages, you must twist each one the other way to the last, so they don’t unravel. I wasn’t very dextrous, but I got the job done: two big batches of snags made. 

Before I ate, I gave thanks to Otto. I don’t terribly much fancy butchering, and I’m not yet sure how much meat I’ll eat as time goes on, but the sausages did taste good that night. And at least I knew how they got there, and what was inside them.

Mincing Otto

Me mincing, all crazy eyed.

No impact November

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During No Impact November, you can look at your lifestyle anew.

MARA Chambers has decided to change the way she shops – and she’s starting with a weeklong challenge. From November 11 to 18, Ms Chambers, from Altona, will skip the supermarket altogether.

“I’ll buy what I need from organic shops or farmers markets,” she says. “I’ll also have to nut out what to do if I need things like toilet paper or washing liquid. I’m hoping to change my habits for the long-term, so I need to look for something else that’s achievable.”

She’s avoiding the well-trodden aisles as a part of No Impact November, run by the Ethical Consumer Group.

In the lead up to the challenge, participants have been meeting to devise their individual goals. The ideas for action range from switching off electronic gadgets to using a composting toilet.

Ms Chambers chose a supermarket-free week because she’s become increasingly dissatisfied with the lack of transparency in the provenance of house brands in the large chain store where she’s been shopping. “I feel like there’s a lot of greenwashing with their organic produce, and they don’t seem to stock many smaller suppliers anymore,” she says.

“I’m really conscious that my power is where I spend my dollar. There are lots of things I can’t control, but I do have freedom over where I spend my money.”

No Impact November is the third annual household action challenge run by the Ethical Consumer Group. In previous years, the participants sought to eat from within one hundred miles, and to produce no waste for a week.

Nick Ray, from the group, says the hard work of changing habits is made easier by doing it together. The people taking part are planning to gather for a meal at the start and end of the week to share their experiences.

“We all have impacts in our everyday life,” he says. “Often people are unable to minimise them because they feel overwhelmed, or because they’ve tried and burnt out. The idea of our household action challenge is to choose something that’s manageable. It pushes us hard for a week, but then we can digest it.”

This year, Mr Ray and his family have come up with a three-pronged challenge: to bake their own sourdough bread, to forgo driving their car, and to cut their electricity consumption by one-third.

“The average Australian citizen consumes an amount of energy equivalent to nearly 50 people pedalling bicycles non-stop, day and night,” he says. “That statistic makes me think twice about our energy use. Do we want to be dependent on oil, or on slaves when oil runs out? Or is there another way?

“We need to really pioneer new ways of living that aren’t fossil-fuel dependent, and that’s why we’re not going to get into the car for the week,” he says.

If you’d prefer to start with a shorter challenge, November 27 is Buy Nothing Day, an international day of protest against over-consumption.

Alternatively, to find out the facts behind your regular buys, check out the Ethical Consumer Group’s Guide to Ethical Supermarket Shopping. The fourth edition will be available shortly, as both a booklet ($6) and an iPhone application ($4).

“It’s great for people who are looking for something with an ethical edge for Christmas stockings or to buy for their friends,” Mr Ray says.

Black Mountain sauerkraut

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ELIZABETH and Frank Fekonia live on a thigh-tremblingly steep block on Black Mountain near Cooroy on the Sunshine Coast.

Frank is an eccentric, longhaired septuagenarian who long ago escaped from the army in communist Yugoslavia and landed in Sydney a refugee. He moved to Cooroy in the early 1990s (Elizabeth arrived soon after) and built a series of concrete structures, culminating in a concrete castle at the top of the block. The home has commanding views over the green hills towards Gympie. “Everything you see here, Michael,” he says to me often, “I built it. Every bloody thing.”

Together, Frank and Elizabeth have established systems that provide nearly all their food. This morning Frank pointed down at two nearby houses with large lawns. “They’re English. Strange people, the English,” he said. “Always mowing the lawn. Mowing, mowing. No food, just mowing.”

After a lifetime of labour, Frank’s lost his kick. He’s still got his raucous, squealing laugh, but he’s too sick to work. Elizabeth keeps their challenging block going, on two parts will, two parts faith and one part strong arms.

Each morning she does her rounds, down and up the hill, calling out to her cows and goats as she goes. They call back, and the singsong echoes around Black Mountain. She waters the veggie patch, milks the goats, checks the chooks, waters the pigs, looks in on the tropical vegetable food forest, and collects a bucket of pollard to keep Lydia the cow happy while she milks her.

Elizabeth is mad for ferment food. Every day she mentions in passing yet another product she makes or ferments herself. Yesterday it was vinegar; the day before, a kind of fermented tea called Kombucha. She makes her own cheese, yoghurt, kefir, sourdough bread, sauerkraut, butter, ghee, soy sauce, miso, tempeh, lemon wine and soap. I’m sure there’s more. She teaches short courses in nearly all the above, as well as her TAFE classes in organic gardening.

Before I left Melbourne I made a mouldy attempt at sauerkraut – much to my housemates’ disgust. Here I did it better, and it turns out to be very simple.

I cut up two cabbages finely, added half a tablespoon or so of salt and crushed the cabbage in my fists until my fists were sore and there was a puddle of cabbage-water in the bowl. Then I packed it into a huge jar, pressed it all down and put a couple of the outer leaves on top to keep the cabbage submerged in its juice. We left it for days to ferment – usually about five days, depending on the season and how tangy you want it – then drained the juice and stored the sauerkraut in the fridge. 

Elizabeth and Lydia

Elizabeth, Lydia and the new milking machine.

The rainforest, the reef and the ringer

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I’M wwoofing once more, this time near Cooroy on the Sunshine Coast. My host, Elizabeth Fekonia, is a fermented foods guru. I’ve been making and eating all sorts of fermented food. And how!

It’s just as well. I caught a long lift with Phil – a ringer, roofer and mechanic – from Tully, two hours south of Cairns, all the way to Cooroy. We left at 7 am and Phil dropped me off at lunchtime the next day, after stopping for the night above a rundown pub in Rockhampton. Along the way, as I ate oily roadhouse food, I consoled myself with the thought of freshly picked vegetables to come.

I stayed in Cairns for longer than expected, and I was a dutiful and astonished tourist. I visited the Daintree Rainforest, gasping as I drove the stretch of road between Cairns and Port Douglas. It tracks the coast, with forest on one side and deserted beaches and aqua-clear water on the other. I did an introductory scuba dive on the reef one day, and drove on the lush Atherton Tablelands the next.

As always, I kept my eye out for the rivers. Up there, rivers have Apocalypse Now foliage: trees and vines of the darkest green, growing so thickly they extend from the shore and hover well over the water’s edge.

I could have stayed longer, but Phil called me. He’d given me a lift on the way up, from Ingham to Caldwell. He was driving back down again, all the way to the Gold Coast. Would I like a lift?

So I traversed the giant state again, at an unexpected pace, entranced by Phil’s tales of life on cattle stations throughout Queensland. He’s a tall, solid man, with goofy enthusiasm and long, gentle eyelashes. The kind of guy who’ll spend days helping you – or driving you – and ask for nothing in return.

He told me about mustering wild bulls and riding them in rodeos; about the time he made a plucky pass at a tough cocky’s daughter and later scored a punch in the head in return; and about vomiting blood and passing out alone in the middle of a highway, hours from death, after his appendix burst. (Maybe that’s how he learnt about the kindness of strangers.)

He told me about Clint, his force-of-nature friend, a sometime hunter, cattle dog breeder and free-diving spear fisher who could hold his breath and plunge to prodigious depths. In the two weeks that elapsed between my lifts, Phil had been offered land on Clint’s property near Tully, home of the big gumboot, the wettest place in the country. “Yeah, they say it rains 360 days a year,” Phil laughed. “At least it’s a bit cooler than other places up north.”

Soon he’ll drive back up the coast and begin building a new home for his young family. He’s planning to use Besser blocks, with a wide verandah all the way around and a roof strapped down and set in concrete: protection from the sun, rain and cyclones.

One reason Phil wants to move to Tully is for the community. “I’ve only been visiting there a while,” he said, “and already it seems like everyone knows my name.” I’m not surprised though – he’s a good man to meet.

Planning for sustainability

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Better planning controls can add to household sustainability.

From next May, new houses and renovations must reach six stars. Even so, our building standards will still be full of gaps, according to Alan March, senior lecturer from the Melbourne School of Design at University of Melbourne.

“The current star rating system measures the performance of buildings. That’s good – it means they don’t let heat pass through windows or walls as badly as in the past. But there’s a whole range of opportunities to make them perform even better,” he says.

In a forthcoming research paper, co-authored with Christina Collia, Dr March found that the building code skips over bigger picture concerns, including the location and materials used in the home, as well as waste production and links with public transport and bicycle paths.

Even simple things, such as clotheslines, are left out in the cold. “If people want to dry clothes outside, it’s no good if the backyard or the balcony never gets sunlight. They’ll buy an electric dryer instead, and all the building technology goes out the window very quickly when you start using electricity from Hazelwood Power Station,” Dr March says.

He believes it would be simple to peg extra features onto existing planning controls. Those guidelines could encompass native habitat, rainwater tanks, fixed heating and cooling systems, lighting and daylighting, and even food growing and composting areas.

“We could go beyond a technological view of individual houses and start to create whole communities,” he says.

The Moreland City Council is already hoisting homes above the average with STEPS, a web-based tool that assesses residential sustainability. It covers five areas: greenhouse emissions from operating energy, peak energy use, water use, stormwater and building materials. The program also considers bike storage and space for waste and recycling.

Shannon Best, from Moreland City Council, says STEPS predicts household energy use more accurately than the star ratings. “If you install a lot of lights or an inefficient hot water service and air conditioner in a five-star house, you can end up with a much worse result than an existing home. It’s important to look at the whole product, not just the thermal efficiency.”

A group of 14 Victorian councils – the Council Alliance for a Sustainable Built Environment – is now promoting STEPS as a voluntary measure for residents submitting planning applications.

Mr Best says the tool’s key benefit is to begin conversations about sustainable design. “If you’re going to build a house, ask your architect or designer to put it through STEPS to see how it performs,” he says.

“Last year alone, we calculated that the savings were equivalent to one-third of council’s greenhouse emissions and water use. That comes from getting people to talk about sustainability initiatives in their buildings – people can and do learn.”

Dr March says that while STEPS opens up a path to greener homes, a more comprehensive, compulsory scheme would be easier for local governments to enforce. “It’s a simpler and better outcome if the process is standardised across Victoria,” he says.

“Whether it’s sooner or later, we will do these things – and we as a community will be better off. People will be happy not to have to switch on their lights. Developers will enjoy the certainty that it provides, and they’ll have a better product to sell.”