Welcome to Roon Soup, a weekly podcast about magic, culture and the paranormal.

My name is Gordon and I shall be your host.

This week it is my extra special pleasure to be speaking with one of the co-originators of permaculture itself, David Honggren.

David is an author, educator, designer, activist and permaculturalist, obviously,

with many decades experience. He joins us today to talk about his fantastic new project

and accompanying book retro suburbia.

David Holngren the one and only thank you very much for your time.

Pleased to be here.

All right, all right. Well, we have a traditional first question for first time guests David and that is, were you a weird kid?

Yes, I suppose I wrote about that to some degree in the essay I contributed to the book Permaculture

pioneers in explaining, I suppose, my ambiguous relationship to the emergence of the permaculture movement.

I certainly came from a family of radical political activists. My parents were atheists from a strong

left-wing background. I grew up in a family that was right in the start of the campaign against the war in Vietnam and before that the ban the bomb movement.

And I was definitely had a self-confidence and the gift of the gap to just stand up, I suppose, against the herd mentality and that I suppose got me into a bit of trouble, especially amongst their kids

rule, which I didn't sort of really understand at school so in that sense I was weird but I I didn't

really have anything like the Aboriginal children or some of the migrants that you know forced me to be

targeted or or picked on it was really my own difference that you know became the that I chose

so you brought some of some of the teasing on yourself?

Yeah, yeah, because I was, yeah, I was different.

You know, like I didn't stand up for the National Anthem in the at Anzac Day and I'm bored.

Wow, that's difficult to do even now.

Well, that was known in 64. I was the only kid apart from a couple of others who didn't go to a religious instruction and yeah but so that sense of not

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