Getting to Know Lolo Houbein - Author of One Magic Square

Here’s the interview with Lolo Houbein AM that I promised to post when I wrote about her book One Magic Square: Grow Your Own food On One Square Metre Lolo is 76 and so engaged with life, ideas and issues that after an hour of chatting we had only just started.

Lolo arrived in Australia in 1958 from The Netherlands, with her then husband and young family. She was 24 and spoke no English. Since then Lolo has gone on to achieve so many things. (See her biography at the end of this interview.) Lolo’s an amazing Australian woman quietly going about adding to the fabric of our society. She has achieved so much for herself, her community and our environmnet and yet not many of us would have heard about her at all.  Just the sort of woman I love to talk to and feature on WomensNook.com!

Chatting with Lolo was so stimulating and enjoyable that I hope you’ll feel the same way after reading her interview - so make a cup of tea and take a few minutes to get to know Lolo Houbein AM.

To start growing your own food without delay, put down this book, go out in the garden and select a spot in the sun - from this very first sentence of One Magic Square there is a sense of urgency Lolo - is this what you intended?

Urgency, yes. I want to alert people - to wake them up about food security. No matter that you see shops full of food now, this won’t last.

I’m only too aware that such observations make me sound like a maniac, full of doom and gloom when actually I’m pretty optimistic.

In the media now, almost daily, such things as food supply, food security, and the like are openly discussed so I feel that my concerns are becoming more mainstream or at least being aired.

What inspired you to write One Magic Square?

If I want to go right back I do remember a little school garden in Holland, when I was about 11.

But I guess it really came out of a gardening course for non-gardeners that I wrote and presented during the 90’s in South Australia. I’ve always felt that most people start out with a big plot - far too big in fact - so I wanted to identify the smallest, most realistic area in which one could grow some food easily and successfully.

That course was a great success so I realised then that if people were open to the urgency, necessity and responsibility of growing at least some of their own food in a small plot in their backyards back in the mid-nineties they are probably more so now in2010.

What is the single most important point that you want us to take from your book Lolo?

The time is coming when it won’t be as easy to obtain our fresh food, let alone in the abundance we are now use to. I don’t necessarily mean we’ll be worse off and totally without food but by becoming a little more self-sufficient and growing our own we will be providing some fresh food for ourselves and our families, giving richness and variety to our diet. Our carbon-footprint will be less and the whole experience of gardening - and following the seasons - will be rewarding.

Often, when talking with women the theme of happen-chance comes up - something unexpected that changed the course of their lives. Did that happen to you along the way?

I’ve had many such occasions but there’s one ‘turning’ that just happened by absolute chance and it became a really important one in my life.

Around the mid-70’s I was on an airport stopover in India, after visiting my mother in Holland, when I met a young American girl and we just started talking. Our planes were delayed and so we decided to share accommodation for the night. After talking for hours more she said I just had to go to Dharamsala in the hills of northern India before continuing onto Australia.

I was aware of the area since I’d been in contact with a group of Tibetan refugees there and was importing their carpets into Australia, as well as assisting with a nursery for babies, so I probably didn’t need much convincing.

With almost no money left and after her persistent urging I headed off by bus. I finally got to meet the Tibetan group I’d been dealing with and that was wonderful. What came next was a complete surprise however.

The leader of this group offered, after a day or two, to take me to meet the Dalai Lama. Dharamsala is where he has lived since leaving Tibet. I remember walking there, being received and amazingly, having a private audience with him.That event changed me.

I was carrying the usual ballast of personal problems but in his presence everything bothering me just fell away, leaving me feeling ‘empty’ but clear. I knew I wanted to re-orient my life to positives and hard work and this became the touchstone within myself from then on.

We lost much more than a pleasant ramble through the fields when we started to live in big cities. This sentence really touched me in your book. Can you explain what we’ve lost?

We need to reconnect with the soil and we can do this by recreating the ‘peasant countryside’ in our ownbackyard.

We can ramble in our yard, forage for little bits of food and in doing so keep our carbon footprint as low as we possible.

Did you know that there are over 5 million backyards in Australia - a cautious estimate - and most of these are on ground that is perfectly arable?

So why not measure off a square metre and reconnect with the earth?

Lolo, what are you passionate about?

I have three issues I’m passionate about -

• It’s obscene to me that there is hunger in the world. I wish the world could get together to solve famine. I’m a famine survivor myself (from the blockade of Holland during WW2) and that has formed and informed my life.
• I’m also very concerned that countries and territories of people are still taken over by bigger, stronger nations. Their cultures and liberties are undermined and the fact that neo-colonialism is still happening is so distressing and I can’t be silent. Indeed, the Australian continent was once the Aborigine’s continent until a stronger nation came along. The situation has changed in the half century I have lived here and now I place great hopes in the younger Aboriginal generation to take us on our good words.
• My last great passion is the care of our environment by which I mean the land, the animals, the birds … all have been so much affected by the impact of human activity. Along with my partner Burr Dodd I started the Trees For Life movement in South Australia in the early 80’s. It’s a community-based tree planting movement and has been so successful that millions of trees have been planted and the group is now functioning with wonderful input from professionals and the public.

I feel my personal happiness is difficult to attain in a world where these concerns are still requiring urgent attention.

Where do you seek inspiration?

I’d have to say that music and books inspire me. I come from a family of violinists so music has always been in my life. I’m the only writer in the family. Reading is my pleasure.

I really enjoy non-fiction at the moment so I read everything by Michael Pollan, Peter Singer, Colin Tudge and Callum Roberts (short video). They all write about sustainable living and being in harmony with nature - concerns that I deeply share.

As for fiction I love Arundhati Roy and Wole Soyinka.

What are 5 food facts that you think we all need to be aware of?

1. The big seed companies only produce hybrid seeds that will not perpetuate therefore they want you to keep buying their seeds. For your little food garden you must buy ‘open - pollinated seeds’. Thankfully there are a number of sources for these in Australia now. My book lists many contacts for the reader to follow-up.
2. Grow organically because chemicals destroy the biodiversity or your backyard. Let the ‘whole world’ come and visit your garden - they all sort themselves out eventually! I’ve not used spray for 30 years.
3. Protect your food crop from the weather and create your own ‘climate’ by using shade cloths and umbrellas. Because you’re ‘farming’ such a small area you can adjust the ‘climate’ to help your particular ‘crop’ requirements.
4. Share seedlings with other people in your area - meet like-minded people and share your knowledge as well as your seeds. It’s a great way to pass on the message too. Most local councils are now very supportive and can help - many are actively helping to establish community gardens.
5. Finally, eat green leafy vegetables and garden salads every day and less grains, nuts and seeds, to prevent modern lifestyle diseases. This is based on recent research into fatty acids that indicates that Omega-3 that comes from leaves is good for us whereas Omega-6 that comes from seeds is not so good.

What is your philosophy on life?

I’m just an ordinary Buddhist.

Many women say they have moments when they feel overwhelmed and … frazzled. What do you do to maintain your equilibrium?

I meditate. I’ve learned to become ‘empty’ and try to stay that way if I need to create distance from my involvements and the things that are bothering me. Meditation helps to create this space and then I can proceed again.

Do you have future plans and projects?

Well, writing this book and the subsequent publicity has meant that it’s taken almost 14 months to settle down. It still hasn’t really. Thousands of copies have sold and a third reprint is due out next week. It really struck a chord with people because it is so practical and makes growing your own food so possible.

It’s been wonderful but at 76 I feel I need to take a little break!

However, arising out of the book’s success there are a few possible projects in the pipeline. They are fairly large ones but if the book has provided the vision for some really wonderful things to happen then I hope to be involved with them if they eventuate.

Maybe I’ll also get around to writing some more too!

31 May 2010

Lolo Houbein’s Bibliography

Lolo Houbein has a B.A. in Classical Studies, Anthropology and Australian Studies, did postgraduate studies at the University of Papua New Guinea in the literatures of the Pacific and Africa, and has a teaching degree.

Her novel Walk A Barefoot Road won the ABC/Bicentennial Award and became an 18-part radio book reading and a travelling exhibition by the Australian Tapestry Network in 1990. Wrong Face in the Mirror was awarded the Dirk Hartog Award for Migration Literature and translated into Dutch.   Lily Makes A Living was ‘Commended’ for the Jim Hamilton Award.  Everything Is Real (2nd edition The Sixth Sense) contains award-winning stories.   Her multicultural writers’ bibliography was included in Deakin University’s Bibliography of Australian Multicultural Writers and the Australian Literature Data Base.

Lolo’s most recent books areTibetan Transit (travel & history), One Magic Square, Grow Your Own Food on One Square Metre (Wakefield Press), and Island Girl (Hybrid Press, Melbourne) a young adult novel.

She writes a regular column for the magazine Sumptuous and gardens in the Adelaide Hills.   Her interests are travel, reading, listening to music, growing flowers, birds, drawing, and embroidery.   She loves good movies, the tropics, long temple crawls, incense, chai, and cooking peasant dishes from any culture. -

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