Category: Farming
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Seeing Landscape
A lot of Yeomans’ criticisms of city design are based around the idea that we’ve lost our ability to “see” the landscape. (I’m still exploring ideas from his book The City Forest, 1971…) His argument is that a farmer living on an acreage for some time (if s/he is that way inclined) can get to…
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Making Dirt
Yeomans’ Plows… Gotta love that slogan! A catalogue of options, in case you wanna buy one, is here. With any luck, we’ll be exhibiting one in the exhibition at ACCA in October! Continuing my harvest from Yeomans’ book The City Forest… I’m trying to get down some key ideas before their freshness runs away from…
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The Family Farm
I reckon Ian’s broad definition of art is a useful provocation: 1. Art is action which changes the culture. 2. This action can be undertaken by anyone. When operating with a definition like this, it’s perhaps worth reiterating point 2: cultural change is not the sole domain of special professionals from the current narrowly-defined “artworld”.…
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Heritage versus subdivision
We were hoping to go back to Nevellan this week to interview Bob Peel but he rang to say he didn’t want to talk because he didn’t run the property according to Yeomans’ original principles and so he didn’t really have anything to say. It was disappointing because we wanted to discuss in more detail…
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Truly it can be said, that when the worm turns, it’s a good turn for the farmer…
Here’s a film from 1955 on Yeomans’ work in developing the Keyline farming system. It was made in 1955, and uploaded a year or so ago thanks to Darren Doherty, who runs workshops in contemporary keyline farm design: One of my favourite lines from the film is this: He’s ready with cold logic and forceful…
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Support GetUp
GetUp has a campaign going on water and sustainability in the Murray Darling Basin, a contemporary issue at the heart of Yeomans’ program for better use of water in agriculture. It needs more support so sign up here.
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Time Team
The late 1970s were a long time ago and it is sometimes a bit difficult to remember exactly what happened. My original proposal for an exhibition about PA Yeomans at the Art Gallery of NSW in 1976(?) seems so lost in the mists of time it’s hard to get much together about it. Maybe it’s…
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The Yeomans Real Estate Stoush
The above video documents a community meeting up near Richmond, in north-west Sydney, a couple of years ago. The meeting was held to try and halt development on the piece of farmland that Yeomans had designed and set up with his trademark series of interlinking dams. Bob, the farmer we met yesterday, said that the…
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Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
as Gauguin put it in the title to his greatest painting. Well, I’ll try and give a quick summary of what we are doing here and what we hope to achieve. This blog is an exploration of the work of the Australian agriculturalist and engineer P. A. (Percy) Yeomans but that is just the starting…