What’s your café?

In all communities, large and small, we choose ways to define ourselves – where do we “belong”, who are “our type of people”? There are many ways to do this. In the many small towns of my youthful wandering around the country, people were usually a “top pub” or a “bottom pub” person. And like all ways we define ourselves in the sub groups of our communities, these decisions become self-reinforcing as your type of person would be found there and so friendships networks are formed and familiarity grows, making us feel like we belong.

As towns change and new people arrive, preferences adapt. When I lived in Kuranda in Far North Queensland in the 1970’s, the bottom pub was where the hippies and blackfellas drank and the top pub was referred to as the place where “the locals” drank. The irony of this given the blackfellas had been “local” for quite a few thousand years wasn’t lost on us in the bottom pub!

I noticed moving into the Cygnet area some years ago how strongly people can connect to “their” café. Given in small communities this is often a place you drop into during the day and meet people spontaneously, picking the place where “your people” hang is quite important and again becomes self reinforcing. And of course, all this is on top of the rather significant issue of the food and coffee that you like!

Posted by Paul Gilding

Writer, corporate advisor, father, grandfather, Uni of Cambridge Fellow, living really down under (southern Tasmania)

Strange days indeed

It was one of my stranger days. Early afternoon I was with the extended family setting up the paddock for new baby pigs, including chasing an escapee across the paddock! A few hours later I was sitting on a plane disguised as a corporate guy, sipping champagne and flying to Amsterdam to give a speech to bankers on sustainability and finance. I suspect I was the only person on the plane who had crash tackled an escaped pig that day.

Expanding our pig herd seems like a sensible way to go. Asher has an endless need for them at The Apple Shed and given we feed our pigs the scraps from there, there’s a nice circle of life connection. As you can see, our pigs don’t do it very tough. We love them and they get spoilt rotten with lots of contact, fresh pasture, great messy digging opportunities and total freedom to “express their full pigness”, as Joel Salatin calls it.

Posted by Paul Gilding

Writer, corporate advisor, father, grandfather, Uni of Cambridge Fellow, living really down under (southern Tasmania)

Necessity, the mother of creative invention

Necessity as the mother of invention is on display every day with Tasmanian food producers. Over the coming months we’ll tell many stories about their creativity not just in their food but in making a living! The necessity is clear – living on an island at the edge of the world – with long distances and high transport costs – really eliminates commodity agriculture as viable way to earn an income. So even if you wanted to be that kind of farmer, and there’s plenty of other reasons not to, you can’t really do it anyway because to overcome the challenge of distance you have to have a niche that stands you out from the crowd and preferably a way to add extra value to your crop.

Posted by Paul Gilding

Writer, corporate advisor, father, grandfather, Uni of Cambridge Fellow, living really down under (southern Tasmania)

No more posts.