WHEN I first wrote about the Urban Bush-Carpenters, I described us as “a revolutionary organisation”. Scratch that. Now we’re celebrity revolutionaries.
Two weeks ago we found out that not only we had been nominated for the Earth Hour Awards, in the ‘Future Makers’ category (by Andy’s wife, Josie), but that we had been named as finalists. Gosh. You can vote for us here.
(Otherwise, I suggest you vote for Beyond Zero Emissions, an extraordinarily effective volunteer group, which has produced a blueprint for Australia to convert to renewable electricity by 2020.)
Associated with our unexpected nomination, we have done some media interviews. We appeare on The Circle, a morning TV show on Channel Ten. We sawed and hammered, and carried chickens for the camera. Un-missable TV.
But enough of that. You’ll be relieved to know that we’ve also been keeping it real, salvaged timber style. We built a schmick planter box from a pallet and a bed base, for the Where the Heart Is Festival, a celebration for people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness.
And last week we constructed a frame and lid for a bathtub wormfarm for a community garden in Clifton Hill. We picked up the timber – old hardwood framing timber – from my mother’s friend Pretam, who is renovating her house. She had a pile of the stuff, all in great condition. (She also gave us dozens of apples from her tree.)
We made the frame with a three-part lid, each a neat prop, so the gardeners can feed their earthworm livestock in stages. Geoff described it glowingly, as “maybe the second best thing we’ve ever built”. Andy wasn’t so sure:
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But the bathtub wormfarm is so alluring, in fact, that it was all we could do prevent the Lovely Melissa from planting herself on top of it for all time. The revolution I spoke of is not a violent one. We originally described it is as the three S’s: salvaging, socialising and sharing. To that, we now add a fourth: sex appeal. (Note the matching red sock on the clothes line.)
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