Paul and Sally Johnson have both had a long experience with nature through their personal and professional lives. Along with their two daughters, Elly and Jessie, they have been quietly and modestly working towards a sustainable existence.
In this edition we take an Up Close look at their lifestyle and why they decided to home-school their daughters.
“The most revolutionary thing you can do is to provide your children with a connection to nature. If you feel you are a part of something, you will naturally respect it,” says Sally Johnson. She says it in a way that tells you that this is a statement made after many years of searching and learning.
Elly and Jessie play under the shade of a tree. Image: greghardwick.com.au
With so much news bringing almost daily predictions of pending doom, climate change has caused many people to simply switch off. Crowded by a growing population, along with an increasing trend to self-impose busy lifestyles upon ourselves, many people are starting to perform a collective head-in-the-sand reaction.
“It’s getting a bit depressing and we’re getting a bit immune to it. People don’t want to listen to it any more — it all sounds too bad to do anything about it,” says Sally.
However, she believes there is something we can all do — change the way we relate to the environment.
“I feel that there needs to be a shift, you push something on people through fear, and it never works. People have to make a shift inside themselves and let that gradually take over”.
Local academic and author Dana Thomsen recognises our disconnection from nature as a major problem. She wrote, in her recently published book Sustainability innovators: Agents of change on the Sunshine Coast: “ Media coverage of climate change has raised awareness of human-environmental interactions on a scale not seen in recent times where the general trend has been an ever-increasing disconnection with our natural surroundings.”
Sally, her husband Paul and their two young girls, Jessie, 4 and Elly, 6 have lived on their property in the Noosa hinterland for the past seven years. Paul and Sally, both in their late thirties, have that healthy look that comes from years of eating well and spending time outdoors keeping active. Both of them have a keen interest in creating a sustainable lifestyle for their family. Their girls have a youthful sparkle in their eyes and they seem equally as relaxed handling the chickens, helping in the gardens or doing as children do, playing together under the shade of a tree.
Driving down their dirt driveway, cone-shaped piles of mulch are waiting to be placed around native plants. The familiar deep-green-leaves of local Lilly Pilly species line the left of the narrow driveway and on the right, healthy looking chickens quietly graze under a home-made dome, inspired by Linda Woodrow’s The Permaculture Home Garden.
The last big rains flooded the local area earlier this year and now the ground is dry and almost scorched in the midday sun. Trees, lining local streams, still have flood debris lodged a metre or so up the trunk, yet the stream beds are now dry with dead leaves and branches, all poised to be washed away by a summer deluge.
Paul and Sally Johnson. Image: greghardwick.com.au
Fruit trees dominate a northern slope close to their house as lorikeets swoop down to feed from a native grevillea. Despite the dry, hot and sometimes energy-sapping weather, the house and the surrounding land provide a calm retreat from the Sunshine Coast’s growing population.
Pointing towards the north-facing slope, with a keen smile on his face, Paul tells me of his future plans.
“We would like to do more with the gardens, like they do in Bali with directing water, playing with swales and deep ripping, so that the water stays in the ground rather than having to store it in a dam.”
The size and the number of fruit trees, along with the vegetable gardens displays just how much work they have done.
“Its small steps,” says Sally. “While we still look at the big picture, at times it’s easy to think you’re getting nowhere. But we can now look back and see how far we have come.”
We sit down in the shade of the veranda. The modest timber clad house is cooled as an easterly breeze flows up the valley. The corrugated roof above us supports a 2 kilowatt grid-connect solar power system which sits beside a solar-hot-water panel and tank.
They chose the property due to its location. Few neighbours surround them and yet the area is known for its strong sense of community. For Sally, there was something more.
“The reason for wanting to live here, for me, was my childhood link with nature. What I connected to in my childhood is what I want for my children. To allow Elly and Jessie to have the same connection with nature is very important for me.”
Paul, has worked in the landscaping industry and now works for a tree-lopping business and Sally, who has studied applied science and wilderness management spends her weekdays home schooling her daughters.
Home schooling the girls, says Sally, gives them time to continually connect with nature.
“At that young age the connection with nature is the most important thing. There’s plenty of time for the computers and watching TV when they’re older.”
There aren’t any concrete statistics in Australia for the number of children being home schooled, yet some believe there could be between 17,000 – 40,000 school-aged students, nation-wide. While the Sunshine Coast is thought to contain the highest number of home-schooled children in the country.
The most frequently asked question about home schooling is a concern about socialising. Yet local gatherings with up to 10 other home-schooling families, just in the Cooran area, means their children often get to mix with different age groups, free of the usual and sometimes difficult peer pressures of the school yard.
Through home schooling Sally wants her daughters to experience the small subtleties of nature. As she points out, if your first experiences are the bright flashy lights of new technology, then nature can seem almost dull and uninteresting.
It’s a problem that is recognised around the western world. “Right now children are spending their days inside and their evenings and weekends plugged into electronic media,” said Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club — America’s oldest grassroots environmental organisation.
“They are missing out on the daily childhood joy of playing outside that their parents’ took for granted just twenty years ago,” he said.
According to the 117-year-old conservation organisation, research shows that when children spend time outside they are more creative and better focused.
“Children also have that curiosity of the world, that sense of wonder. They like to see how things connect,” adds Sally.
“We’ll go for a walk with the girls and Elly, the eldest, will say; ‘Oh, that’s why that happens’ — she is putting things together that she learnt a few weeks ago. “
“We’ve learnt so much too,” says Paul.
“Children are so simple and uncomplicated — they often live in the moment.”
They also make interesting and quite profound comparisons. After watching a kangaroo with a joey in the pouch, Elly quickly noticed how differently we humans live.
“We need prams and lots of other stuff,” she said. “I think it would be better if we made things from nature and lived in smaller houses”.
Further information
Motivation and inspiration: Hunter Campbell “Patch” Adams, M.D.
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Walden: or life in the woods (Henry David Thoreau)
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