When we first dug the post holes for the bee house, it was winter. It was a clear, sunny day, but only 30cm underground it was a river. Now, the soil has hardened again and already cracks are forming where the sun has touched between the tussocks. It is the time of insects: the long grass shimmers with the darting of grasshoppers and butterflies, the red gums are awash with ants and centipedes uncurl in dark, hidden places. It’s a good time to introduce our first livestock – bees – and to finally complete their shelter: the Bee House. Continue reading
The Bee House
03 Sunday Nov 2013
In The Biggest Estate on Earth (Allen & Unwin, 2011), historian Bill Gammage describes a detailed vision of Aboriginal land management prior to European colonisation of Australia. While many Australians have a broad sense that “fire-stick farming” was (and is) a tool used by Aboriginal people, The Biggest Estate on Earth begins to fathom how finely tuned Aboriginal fire use was. With fire as one of a suite of tools, Aboriginal people across the Australian continent carved the landscape into a mosaic of ecosystems, each harbouring plants and animals of differing sensitivity to fire, each maintained to maximise ecological diversity and each nested within the other to increase the ease of hunting or harvesting. For Gammage, Aboriginal land management across the continent was directed by three main principles: “ensure that all life flourishes; make plants and animals abundant, convenient and predictable”; and to “think universal, act local”. 
Yarnauwi Farm 
