Chapter Five -
Connecting Sustainable Agriculture
and Psychosocial Transition
ORIENTING
This Chapter
explores the research question, ‘What were the theoretical and action
precursors firstly, to Neville Yeomans evolving the therapeutic community psychiatric
unit Fraser House, and secondly, to the ways of being and acting that Neville
Yeomans used in his life work?’
Some
aspects of Neville Yeomans’ way of thinking, processing and acting are
detailed, and their origins are firstly traced to the innovative work that
Neville did with his father Percival A. Yeomans and brother Allan (and later
with the younger brother Ken) in evolving Keyline, a set of processes and
practices for harvesting water and creating sustainable agriculture. The
chapter then details the influence on the Yeomans of Australasia Oceania and
East Asia Indigenous and grassroots ways.
INSPIRING
TRAUMA
Neville’s two
traumatic incidents mentioned in Chapter One also had a profound, though
different impact on P.A. Yeomans, his father (Mulligan and Hill 2001, p. 193). Neville’s father was, at the time
Neville was lost, a mine assayer and a keen observer of landscapes and
landforms. His father was deeply impressed by the Aboriginal tracker’s profound
knowledge of the minutiae of his local land, such that, in that harsh dry rocky
climate with compacted soils, he could so readily follow the minute traces left
as evidence of the movements of a little boy. The other thing was that upon
finding little Neville, the tracker was so intimately connected to the local
land and its form, he knew exactly where to go to find water. It was not that
this tracker knew where a creek or a water hole was, as there was no surface
water. He knew how to find water whenever he wanted it, and wherever he was in
his homeland. He and his people ‘be long’ there (40,000 plus years).
They were an integral part of the land. They were never apart from it. The
tracker and his community saw the Earth as a loving Mother that provided well
for them continually (‘The Earth Loves us’ – from Neville’s Inma poem). The
tracker was ‘of the land’. As soon as the tracker found Neville, he had
to find the right kind of spot for a short easy dig. Because of Neville’s
dehydration, the tracker needed water for Neville fast. He used his knowledge
of his place and quickly had Neville sipping water.
Mulligan and Hill
report that:
According
to Neville, it was probably this incident that gave his father his enduring
interest in the movement of water through Australian landscapes, because he
could see that an understanding of this would be a huge advantage for people
living in the driest inhabited continent on Earth (2001, p. 193).
In the years
after leaving mine assaying, P.A. Yeomans had moved on to having his own
earth-moving company. P. A. had just purchased the Nevallan and Yobarnie
properties in
WATER
TELLING US WHAT TO DO WITH IT
P. A. emulated the
Aboriginal tracker in becoming familiar with the landform of his two
properties. P.A. wanted to store or use all of the water that landed on
the properties. In the Forties, P.A. wanted to be able to water his two
properties so they were so lush and green all year round, they would be
virtually fireproof. When the families acquired the properties the soil was
‘low grade’. It was undulating hill country with plenty of ridges that were
composed of low-fertility shale strewn with stones. The following photo taken
at Nevallan, one of the Yeomans’ farms, shows the original poor shale and rock
‘soil’ throughout the two properties when the properties were acquired.
Photo 1The low fertility shale strewn with stones on P.A’s farm - from Plate 30 in P.A.’s book ‘Challenge of Landscape’ – used with permission (Yeomans
1958b; Yeomans 1958a)
Photo 11 shows a spade full of fertile soil after two years of the
processes evolved by P.A. and his sons. To clearly show the difference in the
soil, a clump of the fertile soil has been placed beside earth on the base of a
tree stump that became exposed when the tree fell over. This lighter low-grade
soil had not been involved in the processes the Yeoman’s evolved.
Photo 2 Fertile soil after two
years compared to the original soil -
a copy of Plate 30 in P.A.’s book ‘Challenge of Landscape’ - Used with
permission
Within
three years, Yeomans and his sons had energized what conventional wisdom said
was impossible; they had altered the natural system so that the natural
emergent properties of the farm, as ‘living system’, created ten centimetres (4
inches) of lush dark fertile soil over most of the property. What is important
is that the local natural ecosystem did the work. P.A. enabled emergent aspects
in nature to self-organize towards increased fertility. With the interventions
that P.A. introduced, the property became lush and green twelve months of the
year. It was virtually fireproofed!
In
1974, P. A described processes whereby 4 inches (10.16 cms) of deep fertile
soil could be created within three years (Yeomans and Murray Valley Development
League 1974).
The
balance of this chapter will specify the processes the Yeomans evolved and
applied on their farms and the Indigenous precursors they drew upon. It then
briefly introduces the ways Neville evolved in adapting his family’s farming
processes to psychosocial change.
Keyline Emerges
Over
thousands of years, if this continent’s Aborigines wanted to spear fish in the
shallow creeks and rivers, they would copy the behaviour of the wading birds
that wade slowly, and then react extremely fast with their long beaks. The
Aboriginal hunter with his spear mimics these waders. Resonant with the
continent’s Indigenous ways, P.A. and his sons engaged in bio-mimicry - letting
the water, the landforms, the soil biota, and the balance of the local
eco-system tell them what to do. Neville told me (July 1998) that P.A. would
take Neville and Neville’s younger brother Allen out onto the farms as they
were growing up whenever it rained so they all could learn to see directly how
the rain soaked in at different times, how long before run-off would occur on
different land forms, and what paths down the slopes the run-off moved on
different land shapes. Like the Aborigines, they were learning to have all of
their senses focused in the here-and-now, attending to all that was happening
in nature. As action researchers, they became connoisseurs
of their land and all life on it (Eisner
1991, p. 176). Whatever action P.A. and his sons did, they always observed how
nature responded.
P.
A. obtained contour line maps with a useful scale of his property to further
aid his understanding of landform. According to Ken Yeomans in an October 2003
phone discussion, the map scale was typically 1
in 25,000 with 5 metre contours. Neville said that his father constantly referred to
the three primary landscape features - the main ridge (elevated from the
horizontal), the primary ridge (lateral to the main ridge) and the primary
valleys (lateral vertical cleavages). The farm was perceived by P.A. as a
cleavered unity, a feature pervasive in nature. P. A. discovered where the best places
were to store run-off water for maximum later distribution using the free
energy of gravity feed. It was high in a special place in the primary valleys.
Overflow from dams high in the primary valleys were linked by gravity-based
over-flow channels to lower dams.
Below
is the most succinct statement I have found written by P.A. Yeomans about what
he called ‘Keyline’. I have extracted it from P.A.’s speech at the UN Habitat
‘On Human Settlements’ Forum in
Keyline
relates to a special feature of topography namely, the break of slope that
occurs in any primary valley. Primary valleys are the highest series of valleys
in every water catchment region and lie on either side of a main or water
divide ridge. They are widely observed as the generally smooth or grassed over
valleys of farming and grazing land but are often overlooked and disguised in
the city. On either side of the primary valley is a primary ridge. Of the three
basic shapes of land, namely, main ridge, primary valley and primary ridge, the
primary valley shape occupies the smallest area of land and the primary ridge
shape, the largest. In the rural situation irrigation is a matter of watering
the large primary ridge shapes, even on land which appears flat.
All of the structures, processes
and practices that P. A. Yeomans evolved he also called Keyline (Yeomans,
P. A. 1971b; Yeomans, P. A. 1971a). Diagram 1 shows the main ridge (the dotted
line along the left), two primary ridges (with the arrows) and two primary
valleys.
Diagram 1 – Photo from
P.A.’s UN Habitat Speech (1976, p. 9)
Note that the Keypoint is on the fall line
on the contour above the first wider gap between the contours. The fall line is
marked on Diagram 1 above as the dotted line through the Keypoint. This wider
space between contours indicates less steepness on the slope.
Above the Keypoint is typically an
armchair-shaped land form that directs the water run-off so that most of it
ends up arriving in an area that may be as small as a square metre (the
Keypoint) – sometimes the very start of the typical creek as creek.
P.A. found that the optimal locations for
dams along the Keyline are where it crosses the drainage lines within primary
valleys. As stated, he called these the Keypoint for that primary valley.
P.A.’s
‘On Human Settlements’ Forum speech contains another description of Keyline:
It will be observed that in the
primary valleys the first slope falling from the ridge above is short and steep
– usually the steepest slope in the immediate environs – while the second slope
is flatter, much longer and extends to the watercourse below. The point at
which the change occurs between these two slopes is named the Keypoint; the
Keyline extends on the same level on either side of this Keypoint and partly
encloses a concave shape on the land. Only primary valleys have Keylines (see
contour diagram above) (Yeomans, P. A. 1971b; Yeomans, P.
A. 1971a; 1976, p. 7-8).
Ken
Yeomans in a December 2005 email referred to the above quote:
I question the technical accuracy of saying it ‘partially’ encloses
a concave shape on the land. Actually the Keyline occupies all of the concave
shape of the contour line curve. The change of direction of the contour from
concave through the valley to the convex curve of the ridge
defines the end of the Keyline on either side of each primary valley.
Diagram 1 above shows Ken Yeomans point
mentioned above - that the Keyline extends either side of the Keypoint for a
particular distance along the contour line running through the Keypoint.
P.A
then goes on to give a key point summary (1976, p. 9):
The
Keyline is significant because:
1. It
is the first place in any valley where rain run-off water, concentrated from
the higher slopes, can form a stream.
2. It
is also the first place where run-off water disappears when the rain stops
unless the water is contained.
3. It
is the highest possible storage site in any valley of the land.
4. It
is often the highest point at which good construction material for earth dams
is available (higher up the earth may be less decomposed and less suitable for
dam building).
5. It
is the essential starting point for a water control system in any landscape
that produces run-off; and
6. It
is the line of change when the three shapes of the land merge and readily
disclose the geometry of land contours and the behaviour of surface flowing
waters.
The Keyline is thus of major
significance to any concept that aims to enrich the environment by controlling
and using all available water.
Note
point six above - the Keypoint in nature is saturated with information carrying
capacity. On this typically square metre of land is the junction of all three
land forms. Information distributed through each landform is present at the
Keypoint. The Keypoint, for those with eyes to see, is the place that reveals
the interaction of water with land. There is a confluence at the Keypoint of
all the water runoff from the main ridge and adjacent primary ridges down the
curved slope at the head of the primary valley.
Lincoln
and Guba made a similar point about distribution of information within a system
(quoted in Chapter Four):
Information is distributed
throughout the system rather than concentrated at specific points. At each
point information about the whole is contained in the part. Not only can the
entire reality be found in the part, but also the part can be found in the
whole. What is detected in any part must also characterize the whole.
Everything is interconnected (1985, p. 59).
The
Yeomans’ genius was that they spotted the information distributed throughout
the three landform systems and saw how the distributed information
inter-connects and interacts at the Keypoint. Keypoints are saturated with
information that is distributed in the system. Sensing and observing the
Keypoint may reveal insights as to how the whole complex dynamic system works.
Resonant with the above, Neuman also makes the observation that at
each
point in a living system, information about the whole is contained in the part (1997, p. 433).
Not only can the entire reality be found in the part, but also the part can be
found in the whole. What is detected in any part must also characterize the
whole. Everything is interconnected, inter-dependent, inter-related and
inter-woven.
Also
resonant with Yeomans and Neuman, Joseph Jaworski (1998, p. 80)
writes of a conversation with theoretical physicist Dr. David Bohm:
We
were talking about a radical, disorientating new view of reality which we
couldn’t ignore. We were talking about the awareness of the essential
inter-relatedness of all phenomena – physiological, social, and cultural. We
were talking about a systems view of life and a systems view of the universe.
Nothing could be understood in isolation, everything had to be seen as a part
of the unified whole.
Jaworski
writes of Bohm saying that it’s an abstraction to talk of nonliving matter:
Different
people are not separate, they are all enfolded into the whole, and they are all
a manifestation of the whole. It is only through an abstraction that they look
separate. Everything is included in everything else.
Yourself
is actually the whole of mankind. That’s the idea of implicate order – that
everything is enfolded in everything.
While Jaworski and Bohm were
talking about a ‘radical, disorientating new view of reality’, this view has
been the natural view of Australian Aborigines since antiquity, and it was this
view that the Yeoman’s used to perceive inter-related things that Western farmers
had never seen before. Barabasi (2003)
in his book ‘Linked - How Everything is Linked to Everything and What it Means’
also explores the same theme. Consistent
with the foregoing, for the Yeomans, the farm was a living system made up of
interconnected, inter-related, inter-dependent and interwoven living systems
and associated inorganics. I have been referring to this as ‘connexity’; this
term was not used by Neville or the other Yeomans, although it connotes their
understanding of system linkages well.
Where the context around a
Keypoint made it possible P.A. placed a dam wall so that the dam could fill to
that Keypoint. He designed his farms Nevallan and Yobarnie to fit nature. All
of the dams were placed so as to simultaneously get water run-off, pass
overflow to a dam below by gravity, and by gravity-based irrigation, pass on
the water to the soil when desired. Neville (August 1998) and Allan (May 2002)
both confirmed that they were with their father at the moment when they
recognized what he called the Keypoint and the Keyline in landform – the
central concepts in Keyline (Yeomans 1955a, p. 118). The very spot where they
realised the significance of the Keypoint is where the closest water is in the
closest dam in photo 12 below; the primary
ridges are on the left and right of the primary valley.
P.A. wrote:
Once the eye becomes trained to see these simple land
shapes, and the mind has selected and classified one or two, there is a
fascination in the continuous broadening of one’s understanding and
appreciation of the landscape (1958, p. 56)
In
December 2005 Allan Yeomans told me that the special properties and
significance of Keypoints and Keylines as well as the associated design
principles such pattern cultivation, and placement of roads, fences and
irrigation channels were slowly realised over a number of years. Photo 14 below shows strategic design of tree plantings as
windbreaks and shade for livestock.
The Social Ecologist, Stuart Hill and I visited Nevallan for
the first time in 2001 and I took photo 15
below showing the place where P.A. and Neville first spotted the Keypoint and
Keyline. Like all Keypoints, the one in the photo is on the drainage line. Photo 15 shows one of the primary ridges on the left
near the top of the primary valley. Photo 3 in
Chapter One was taken looking up towards where photo 15 taken.
Stuart
Hill, in Chapter Eight of his book on Australia’s Ecological Pioneers, outlines
some aspects of the process P. A. and his sons used (Mulligan and Hill 2001, p. 193):
What Yeomans senior discovered through
such patient observation was that there is a line across the slope of a
hillside where the water table is closest to the surface. The ground along this
line looks wettest and is reflective when it rains heavily.
Photo 3(Yeomans, A. 2005, p. 137) – Used with permission
Photo 4 down towards the Keypoint at the top of the dam.
It is the line along which it makes most
sense to locate the highest irrigation dams within the landscape, because this
is where the run-off water from above can most effectively be collected and
subsequently used at the most appropriate time to irrigate the more gently sloping
land below. Yeomans called this line the Keyline.
Yeomans first outlined his ideas about
water movement and how to detect Keypoints in a book entitled, ‘The Keyline
Plan’ (1954). The books,
‘Challenge of Landscape’ (Yeomans
1958a), ‘Water for
Every Farm’ (Yeomans,
P. A. 1965), and ‘The City
Forest’ (Yeomans,
P. A. 1971a) followed. Three
of P.A.
Yeomans’ books, ‘The Challenge of Landscape’ (Yeomans
1958b), ‘The
Keyline Plan’ (Yeomans,
P. A. 1955), and the ‘City Forest : The
Keyline Plan for the Human Environment Revolution’ (Yeomans,
P. A. 1971b), including all of their diagrams and photos, are now
on-line on the Internet through the Soil and Health Organization.
In
1993, Ken Yeomans, Neville’s younger brother published his book, ‘Water for
Every Farm: Yeoman’s Keyline Plant’ (Yeomans and Yeomans 1993). This book clarified some aspects of Keyline.
Alan Yeomans in a phone conversation
(December 2005) noted that the Keypoint and Keyline in successive primary
valleys along a ridge have an ascending (or descending) elevation as occurs in
Diagram 1 above. Allan spoke of regular patterns in nature; as an example, the
Yeomans’ experience was that often the height of the bottom of a dam wall below
a keypoint in a primary valley been the height of the top of the dam wall in the
next lower primary valley (refer Diagram 1 above). This has implications for
linking the two dams by over-flow channel along a contour.
A
key aspect of Keyline was how the Yeomans changed the interaction between water
and soil. P. A. used chisel ploughing parallel to the Keyline, allowing the
natural self-organizing flow of water to run into these chiselled grooves. This
is not the same as contour ploughing as ploughing parallel to the Keyline soon
goes ‘off contour’ in a gentle downhill direction with an important effect.
This chisel ploughing results in shifting the direction of flow of surface
water around 85 degrees to flow down hill more slowly along the sides of the
primary ridges on each side of the primary valley. In contrast, contour
ploughing has the reverse effect, namely directing water towards the bottom of
the primary valley (from a phone conversation with Alan Yeomans Dec, 2005).
Keyline ploughing stops an eroding rush of surface water down to the valley
floor, slows the flow, spreads the soaking, and allows for a massive increase
in the moisture levels in the soil without water-logging. Consequently, water
is ‘stored’ as it slowly filters through the soil, as well as being kept in all
the dams. The chisel plough that the Yeoman’s developed was called the Bunyip
Slipper Imp with Shakaerator (that is it shakes and aerates). This shaking
action reduces soil compaction. P. A. Yeomans won the
Prince Phillip Agricultural Design Award in 1974 for his design of this plough
shown in photo 16.
The
plough has the effect of placing a loose cap on a chisel groove so there is air
and space for water run-off to run along in the grooves underground. This cap
on the top of the groove minimises evaporation by sun and wind (Foster 2003). These changes to the soil and water interaction are
vital in the driest inhabited country in the World. P. A. did not use ploughing
that inverted the soil as he found that it damaged soil ecology.
In
Diagram 2below, the red lines depict rainwater
run-off as it happens without the chisel ploughing. Once the run-off hits the
chisel ploughing it is turned around (approximately) 85% and runs out along the
ridges on both sides of the valley.
On the ridges, chisel ploughing
is carried out parallel to a selected contour line as depicted in Diagram 4. Notice that
the fall-line and the chisel grooves are again at around 85 degrees to each
other. This ploughing pattern on the ridges also turns the rain or irrigation
water flowing on the ridges from running straight off the sides of the ridge.
The chisel cuts have the water again turned so that it runs at a much shallower
slope along the side of the ridge. This again slows the speed of run-off
and allows the water to be stored as it passes through the soil.
Creating
Deep Soil Fast
There is fractal like repetition in nature
(Mandelbrot
1983) and in
the Yeomans’ designs. Neville said that one of his father’s design principles
was ‘work with the free energy in the system’ (Dec 1993, July 1998). This was
evident in the Yeomans use of gravity and the design layout that maximized the
capacity to use gravity. Another example of thriving free energy is creating
the context for the massive increase in detritivores (worms and other organisms
that break down detritus - decaying organic matter) for generating new soil
(discussed later).
P.A and Neville did not rest with the
notion prevailing in most quarters, that it can take up to 800 years to make
ten centimetres of soil by rock erosion and other breaking-down processes. They
asked how they could create ten centimetres or more of new topsoil in a few
years. They reasoned that soil could be created by constituting an
underground context/environment bringing together detritivores with ideal
combinations of air, moisture, seasonal warmth and a steady supply of organic
detritus (dead organic matter).
They knew that cropping a certain height
off grasses and plants just before flowering/seeding either by grazing or
cutting created a shock to the plant and a comparable size of dieback in root
systems. The energy that the plant had geared up for flowering and seeding is
diverted into rapid growth for survival. The roots that die create the organic
material for decomposing. What’s more, the dead organic root matter is already
spread underground through the soil where it is needed. The space previously
taken up by the roots become air chambers. The cut vegetation material was also
recycled into the soil. The plant responds with vigorous new growth that is
strategically irrigated. Keyline chisel ploughing and flood-flow irrigation
would increase soil moisture content and reduce compaction. This combination
supplied the conditions for a massive increase in detritivores (Yeomans,
P. A. 1971b; Yeomans, P. A. 1971a; Yeomans and Murray Valley Development League
1974; Yeomans 1976).
Ten
centimetres of new topsoil was created in three years – something that
was previously thought to take around 800 years! Earthworms emerged in
abundance, the size of which (over 60 cm or 24 inches) had never been seen
before in the region. The Riverland Journal carried an article stating that H.
Schenk, head of the Farm Bureau of America described Nevallan earthworms as
being among the best he had seen. His words were, ‘Boy this must be the best
soil ever was’ (Yeomans 1956; Yeomans, P. A.
1971b; Yeomans, P. A. 1971a). Neville told me (December 1993) he heard one
well-travelled visitor saying that the only other place he had seen comparable
worms was in the fertile fields of the Nile delta in
Thirty
years after P.A.'s death, the system he established on the farm still works by
itself with little maintenance required. As can be seen from Photo 18 below that I took in July 2001 when I
walked the farm with Stuart Hill, the farm still looks like sweeping gardens or
a golf course. The surrounding farms were covered with dry brown grass.
Photo 6 effect and the water harvesting
achieved – Photo from P.A. Yeoman’s book ‘City Forest Plate 1 – used with
permission
Diagram 2
– adapted diagram from P. A. Yeomans’ book ‘Water for Every Farm’ (1965, p. 60) –
used with permission
Diagram
3 Rain and irrigation water being turned towards or away from ridges
– adapted diagram from P. A. Yeomans’ book ‘Challenge of Landscape (1958b, Chap 6, Fig. 5) –
used with permission
In
Diagram 3 note that the contour lines above the Keyline are closer to each
other in the middle of the valley and get wider apart as they go towards the
primary ridges. Below the Keyline is the reverse pattern. The contour lines are
wider apart in the middle of the valley and get closer towards the primary
ridges. This difference in form gives the Keyline a property that no other
contour line has. Note that in the upper section of Diagram 3 contour cultivation
is parallel downward from a Keyline contour and the furrows track water (the
direction of surface water flow is depicted in top left of diagram 3) out
towards the ridges. Note also that the second set of furrows upward from a
lower marked contour results in water flowing towards the centre of the
valley and that this would create the potential of erosion. Any ploughing
parallel to any contour above or below the Keyline in the valley has the
effect of tracking water towards the bottom of the valley rather than out
towards the ridges. The lower segment
of Diagram 3 shows the effect of Keyline cultivation working parallel to the
Keyline both up the slope and down the slope of the primary
valley. All of these furrows track water out along the ridges aiding the
slow passage of water through the farm. The arrows in both diagrams show the
downhill direction of the furrows.
Diagram
4 Keyline Ploughing Process for Ridges - from P. A. Yeomans’ book ‘Water for Every Farm’ (Yeomans, P. A. 1965, p. 60) – used with permission.
In his 1971 ‘City Forest’ Book P.
A. acknowledges the seminal supporting role Neville played in the forming of
his ideas, ‘as psychiatrist and sociologist, for keeping me up to date on the social
and community implications’. He had Neville write the forward (Appendix 4) to
this last book – The City Forest – about adapting his ideas to the design and
layout of a city (Yeomans,
P. A. 1971b; Yeomans, P. A. 1971a).
Photo 7 at the left of
the dam
Neville had evolved Fraser House
back in 1959 when P. A. had Keyline well under way. Neville worked closely with
his father throughout Neville’s years at Fraser House and Fraser House outreach
in the years 1968 through 1971 when the City Forest Book was published. In the
Forward to the City Forest Neville sums up Keyline’s soil approach in these
terms:
‘The soil which gives us life must
be developed in its own living processes so that it grows richer year by year
rather than poorer.’
In
the 1970’s, Neville wrote a weekly column in the Now Newspaper (a Sydney
suburban paper) called ‘Yeomans Omens’ (Various Newspaper Journalists 1959-1974). In
this column he wrote that between 20,000 and 50,000 acres of Keyline forest
could totally absorb and purify the liquid effluent of
Photo 8The Header to Neville’s Newspaper column in the Now Newspaper
The
Yeomans let nature tell them what to do. They always attended to nature and
respected the design in nature, and designed and redesigned their interventions
in a way that melded in with nature’s design, ‘design principles’ and emergent
properties (Capra
1997, p.28). The Yeomans used ‘dynamic living
systems’ as a strategic frame in their thinking, design work and action. They
also used bio-mimicry (mimicking nature) (Suzuki and Dressel 2002, p. 66, 110) in their designs. They engaged with all
of the inherent aspects of the farm as a holarchical living system (Holonic Manufacturing Systems 2000). They were ever aware that the ‘wholes’
in the living systems of the farms were made up of parts, and these parts were
themselves wholes made up of parts. The Yeomans were very connected to this web
of linkages.
After the Yeomans had introduced some changes to the soil
environment the massive changes were self-organizing. The soil, organic
matter, water and detritivores, as naturally occurring integrated systems, had
emergent qualities; that is, aspects started emerging, or coming into being,
which had not being present at lower levels of organization.
Designing
Farms
A
fundamental aspect of Keyline is that it involves design, and not just any design;
rather, a design guided by nature in the local place and context, such that the
resultant design superbly fits the local natural system.
Keyline insights and design
principles guide placement of paddocks, rows of trees as windbreaks and shade
for stock (see Photo 14), fences, gates, and roads. Landform and flood
irrigation flow are also taken into account in designing where paddock
boundaries are placed. Before P. A. and his sons’ work, Australian (and other)
farms had rarely been designed.
They tended to evolve in a haphazard or
‘traditional’ way – ‘this is the way we always do it’. Farmers would impose
their will on nature (‘dominion over’ in the Jewish and Christian tradition).
If something was ‘in the way’, farmers would ‘bulldoze’ it out of the way.
In designing and using Keyline,
things are placed relative to other system parts and place for maximizing
working well with nature, functionality, emergence, inter-related fit, and use
of free energy in the system (for example, using gravity and the transformative
energy of the detritivores
that break down organic matter). Neville spoke to me (Dec 1993) of his father
constantly fine-tuning things till they would fit. Neville described this as
‘the survival of the fitting’. This is discussed more fully in other places (Yeomans
1954; Yeomans, Percival. A. 1955; Yeomans 1958b; Yeomans 1958a; Holmes 1960;
Yeomans, P. A. 1965; Yeomans, P. A. 1971b; Yeomans, P. A. 1971a; Yeomans 1976;
Yeomans and Yeomans 1993; Hill 2000; Holmgren 2001; Yeomans 2001; The
Development Of Narrow Tyned Plows 2002).
Neville’s father made repeated use
of ‘do the opposite’ type lateral thinking. For example, P.A. experimented with
putting a pipe through dam walls – something conventional wisdom said was never
done because of ‘inevitable’ wash out along the outside of the pipe.
Neville’s father solved this
problem by putting baffles along the outside of the pipe. Water running along
the outside would carry with it small gravel and soil particles that would be
trapped by the baffles and fill in any gaps and compact the soil around the
outside of the pipe and therefore strengthen the seal around it. All the
Yeomans had to do was turn on the valve on the outside base of the dam wall and
they had gravity fed flowing water.
Diagram 5 marked by the square
So far in this chapter we have
summarised the Yeomans family’s evolving of Keyline and discussed aspects of
their farm designing and the way they worked with nature to foster the
self-organizing emergence of abundant fertility. The next section explores some
of the Indigenous origins of the Yeomans’ ways.
LINKS
BETWEEN SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE, PSYCHOSOCIAL CHANGE AND INDIGENOUS
SOCIOMEDICINE
Indigenous
influences on the Yeomans’ ways will now be considered. Through P.A.’s work in remote areas across
the Top End of Australia and
For
Indigenous people living as nomadic hunter-gatherers on this continent, social
cohesion is a central component of healing and vice versa. The concept of
Indigenous ‘sociomedicine’ is implicit in psychiatrist Cawte's book, ‘Medicine
is the Law’ and other writings (Cawte 1974; 2001).
Neville
spoke (Dec 1993) about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living
traditional lives – for them, bush remedies for a wide range of troubles are
both widely known and widely used. This was confirmed by Geoff Guest (Aug
2004). However, if in these contexts sickness is deemed to have its source in social
trouble - if social cohesion is under threat - sociomedicine is used by
only a few law people who know the ways.
Neville understood the pervasive way
Aboriginal sociomedicine is linked into social cohesion. The focus for healing or
prevention is the whole group, and all become involved (Cawte 1974; Cawte 2001). Neville had firsthand experience of Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander artistry - stories, sand drawings, rock paintings, songs and
dances - and how all are used to maintain social cohesion in being well
together in community. Neville
evolved his social action on his understanding that for Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander people, social cohesion among one's people is paramount and
isomorphic with the cooperative inter-relationships found in nature.
Neville and his father had been linked
into these ways of thinking and experiencing each other and the World. Through
his life Neville had been accepted into Yolgnu Aboriginal Communities living
traditional lives in their homelands in Arnhemland in the Australia Top End.
Neville told me (July 1994), he had experienced the storytelling and the
singing and the corroborees. He had gone hunting with them and participated in
ancient ceremonies associated with a person’s death, as well as other
ceremonies. Neville said that these psycho-physical and metaphysical
experiences profoundly linked him into extremely rich antiquities. Neville
described these experiences as equalling any of the wisdom literatures he had
read, and certainly having the richness of the mythologies of Grecian, Indian,
Mayan and other cultures.
It is very easy to get lost in the
Indigenous people constantly ‘absorb’ their land through all of
their senses. Being in their land has emotional tone; the land is in them and
they are in it, and of it. Neville acted from deep within this rich sensuous
emotional consciousness of connexity to and with land.
Neville spoke of all manner of artistic
expression and borrowing from nature being used by Indigenous people of the
Australasia Oceania Region to sustain and enhance the social cohesion in their
way of life. This artistic expression and social action is called by some
Indigenous people in the Region, especially those in Vanuatu, ‘cultural
action’, a term now being used throughout the Oceania Australasia East Asia Region
(CIDA
2002; Queensland Community Arts Network 2002). Neville adapted this
‘cultural action’ into ‘cultural healing action’ (Yeomans
and Spencer 1993). Neville described
(December, 1993) Cultural Healing Action to me as combining and embracing the healing artistry of
music making, percussion, singing, chanting, dancing, reading poetry,
storytelling, artistry, sculpting, puppetry, model making and the like - and
using any and all of these for increasing wellbeing. Neville
was adept at using and enabling Cultural Healing Action and he enabled me to
gain competences in using it as well.
Before, during and after
Fraser House, Neville had an increasing realization of the resonance between
Keyline, Cultural Keyline and Indigenous Self-Earth Mother unity, and unity
between and within all human and non-human life forms. All of this
experience was melded into the way Neville and his father used in evolving
their farms. As well, Neville’s experience with Indigenous people had helped in
the forming of his way-of-being-in-the-world (Wolff
1976, p. 20) and social action in
Fraser House and beyond. Neville constantly engaged his way
towards evolving diverse social life worlds while enacting values that were
based upon mutual caring, loving respect between the sexes and the generations,
peacefulness, economic equity,
social and political dignity and ecological balance (Yeomans 1974; Plumwood 1993;
Plumwood 2002).
Neville had firsthand experience of the
destructive social fragmentation occurring in Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Communities; the aggression, the abuse of women and children,
alcoholism, destructive eating habits, high mortality rates, criminal and
psychiatric incarceration and the like. And yet for all this, Neville saw in
their traditional life-ways, processes that may have the potency to have
Indigenous peoples transform themselves towards being well, and in
addition, for this to be a model for fostering transition towards a humane
caring Global Epoch.
TIKOPIA - CELEBRATING DIFFERENCE TO MAINTAIN UNITY AND
WELLBEING
Inspired
by the community feel of small village life (Tönnies and Loomis 1963), Neville searched the anthropological and social
psychological literature for models of ‘community’ that were constituting and
sustaining a way of life (culture) based on social cohesion and well-being. He
found that the Tikopians were exemplars. It was the healing feel of the
communal village life on Tikopia depicted by Firth and its resonance with
Neville’s notions of Cultural
Keyline and his own childhood experiences of Indigenous healing ways that so
attracted Neville to use Tikopia as a model for setting up Fraser House like a
small Tikopia Village. None of staff and residents I interviewed knew of this
Tikopia connection except Margaret Cockett; however, Neville’s younger brother Ken’s
first wife Stephanie Yeomans confirmed to me personally in 2001 in Cairns that
Neville regularly spoke to her about his evolving Fraser House based on Tikopia
lifeways. Stephanie was a psychiatric nurse at
Drawing The
Firth
wrote that Tikopian community processes repeatedly involved
‘unifying-cleavage’. For example, they would engage in ceremonial distributions
of property, where the principle was that as far as possible, goods go to the
villages on the opposite side of the island - to those most different. There
would be periodic friendly inter-generational competitive assemblies among
those from differing villages, clans, and valleys. At these periodic friendly
competitive gatherings and assemblies among those differing from them, the
Tikopians would engage in competitive dancing, games and dart matches, as well
as share food and friendly fireside banter – what we have referred to as
‘cultural action’. An orchard of one clan group would be within the territory
of another clan group, bringing regular contact in day-to-day life. There were
multiple unifying links between valleys and across ridges.
According
to Firth (1957, p. 88):
Still
further are the cohesive factors of everyday operation, the use of a common
language, and the sharing of a common culture…
The
men from the East could only marry the women of the West. The opposite applied
to the men of the West. That is, people could only marry those most
different. The new brides would live with their husband’s family. As all land
was passed from mother to daughter, the couple would set up gardens on land
belonging to the wife’s mother (Matrilineal) - that is, on the opposite side to
where the couple were living. Each morning all the gardening couples from the
East would get up at sunrise, bath and have breakfast. They would then make the
climb through gaps in the volcanic ridge. They would also exchange news and
banter with couples going in the opposite direction before going to their
respective gardens. The process was reversed in the evening. The sun would set
first for those gardening in the East. So they would climb first and again meet
people going in the opposite direction. There would be more chatting, drumming
and dancing in the late afternoon light. As the tropical sun set in the West,
they would all return to their respective villages. There they would have
exchanges of vegetables for fish with the villagers who were the seafarers -
another different group to celebrate with. Often these beach exchanges were
occasions for more dancing and friendly play. After dinner, the interaction
would resume on the beach, or perhaps some would walk across the smaller ridges
to visit villagers in the neighbouring valleys.
Firth
made no comment throughout his book that the Tickopian communal village
life and mores may be helping to constitute and sustain individual and communal
psychosocial wellbeing. More importantly in the context of this thesis, Firth
makes no comment about the potential of the Tikopian’s way of life as a
practical working model for restoring psychosocial health and wellbeing in
dysfunctional people, families and communities. This possibility was recognized
by Neville.
Firth
discussed cohesiveness within the exploration of clan membership as one
framework for having an anthropological understanding of the Tikopians. Firth
uses notions of unity and cleavage in his book, ‘We the Tikopia’ (1957, p. 88):
A
still further complicating factor is the recognition of two social strata,
chiefs and commoners, which provides a measure of horizontal unity in
the face of vertical cleavage between clans and between districts. In
former times there was even a feeling that marriage should take place only
within the appropriate clan. Important, again are the intricate systems of
reciprocal exchange spread like a network over the whole community, binding
people of different villages and both sides of the island (the
two major regions) in close alliance (my italics).