Forums
Gardening & Food for the Future Forum
What happens when the food system we rely on can no longer be relied upon?
As climate change reshapes growing seasons, disrupts supply chains and drives up food costs, gardening is shifting from a hobby to a necessity. Gardening & Food for the Future asks how growing food locally – in backyards, balconies and shared spaces – can become a critical response to climate uncertainty.
This forum invites us to rethink gardens as future infrastructure: places where resilience is grown, knowledge is shared, and communities prepare together for what lies ahead.
Forum Location and Time: The Hidden Theatre, 130-230pm
About the Forum Speakers
Helen Cushing – Host
I fell in love with plants at an early age and also loved literature and writing. After school, I studied horticulture and creative writing, and became involved in environmental activism. I became a gardening writer, had children, worked at ABC TVs Gardening Australia, became a yoga teacher, kept writing, teaching yoga and now I have grandchildren!
Matthew Evans – Guest Speaker
Gourmet Farmer Matthew Evans, Tasmanian chef, farmer, food writer, public speaker and broadcaster is the author of SOIL, a hymn to the remarkable and underappreciated bit of Earth that gifts us life and the completely revised cookbook The Real Food Companion. His most recent book, MILK, unpacks the truth and lies behind the original superfood. Matthew also founded and curated the GROUNDED farm festival.
Rees Campbell – Guest Speaker
Rees Campbell lives in Tasmania, where her deep connection to the natural world shapes her passion for conservation and native food. At Murnong Wild Food Garden in Wynyard, she and her husband Col grow and showcase more than 120 species of native edible plants alongside productive fruit and vegetables.
Author of Eat Wild Tasmanian, Eat MORE Wild Tasmanian, and The Seaweed Supplement, Rees shares practical knowledge and infectious enthusiasm for growing, harvesting and cooking Tasmanian native land and sea plants. Through her work as the Feisty Tasmanian, she champions native foods as a vibrant and essential part of our shared horticultural and culinary future.
Sheree McCammon – Guest Speaker
Sharee is passionate about the full diversity of collective climate actions and connecting with others who care about people and places. She grows food in a good enough garden and is keen to see Lutruwita expand our natural tendency for kindness and resilience.
Wasted Growth Forum
What are we really growing when plastic becomes part of the garden?
Wasted Growth explores how plastics have become embedded across gardening and food production systems and what we can do to grow differently. This 60-minute panel will uncover the impacts on soil, water, food, and climate, and highlight practical pathways to plastic-reduced and plastic-free gardening for homes, community gardens, and nurseries.
Forum Location and Time: The Hidden Theatre, 12-1pm
About the Forum Speakers
Alana Mann – Host
Alana Mann is Professor and Head of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Tasmania. She is a food systems scholar, a self-confessed foodie, and an avid gardener.
Darcy Pritchard – Guest Speaker
Darcy works in a marketing and sales role for Horticultural and Landscape Supplies (HALS), Tasmania’s largest horticultural growing media manufacturer. Darcy has over 10 years experience in the horticultural industry from a retail nursery to growing media manufacturing.
Allison Clark – Guest Speaker
With a focus on practical sustainability and circular‑economy solutions, Allison Clark excels in communication, engagement, and industry collaboration. She is widely connected across Tasmania and brings significant experience in waste and resource recovery, alongside strong board and governance credentials.
Margaret Steadman – Guest Speaker
Margaret Steadman has been involved with SLT for almost all of her 30 years in Tasmania. She seeks to help build resilient communities thriving in a thriving natural world. Circular economy is key.
She’s also a passionate (if not very skilful) home food forest gardener who is dismayed by the growing stash of black plastic pots in the garden corner.
Bradman Mashman – Guest Speaker
My family’s industrial empire spanned 3 centuries manufacturing for life times ceramic products. I’m experienced in designing making, engineering, resource recovery, history, circular economics and created the Tipshop concept
Speaker / Workshop / Activity
Session Title: From Intention to Action: The Psychology of Getting into the Garden
Short Description: We love the idea of gardening. Growing our own food. Saving money. Living more sustainably.
Short Bio: A professional social worker I understand the cost of living is making life hard for us all but we are players not victims
We can create the world we live in and I have created mine over 70 years
Session Title: Eve’s Garden
Short Description: Self-described hopeless gardener Margaret in conversation with urban market gardener Elizabeth Owens. Elizabeth supplies city restaurants with beautiful fresh produce and local gardeners with seedlings as Eve’s Garden. She will share her tips for growing awesome tomatoes and other vegies (So envious – my tomatoes this year are a complete failure!) and inspire with her DIY drive. Come and ask your question or share your successes.
Short Bio: Elizabeth is an urban market gardener with hard-won skills in garden-making and producing plants and food. Margaret is a long-time member of SLT and in need of advice,
Session Title: Cook it all: The waste-free kitchen
Short Description: Food waste is a climate issue we can all act on – starting in our own kitchens. This session cuts through the overwhelm of sustainable eating with practical, budget-friendly strategies for the everyday home cook. From whole-ingredient cooking to repurposing leftovers and scraps, you’ll leave with simple ideas that make a real difference – for your household, your community and the planet.
Short Bio: Chelsea Goodwin is a bestselling cookbook author, food educator and founder of Food for Good, a Tasmanian social enterprise focused on building food literacy and community resilience. She began one of Australia’s largest online budget cooking communities and has spent years teaching practical, low-cost cooking skills that reduce food waste and strengthen households. Her work centres on using food and gardens as tools for connection, confidence and long-term resilience.
Session Title: Rethinking Food and Agriculture
Short Description: Food and agriculture accounts for around 30% of global emissions and is responsible for much of the biodiversity loss on the planet. Agricultural land is degrading at an alarming rate and yet we plan to increase food production by 50% by 2050. Our current trajectory is not sustainable. This talk is designed to encourage people to rethink food production in a way that has never been seen before. It will be confronting, controversial, exciting and hopeful.
Short Bio: Anthony Houston, a retired farmer, was the founder of Houston’s Farm, a national farming and food manufacturing company supplying fresh salad products to supermarkets throughout Australia.
Anthony is a passionate environmentalist and a strong advocate from climate action.
Session Title: Waste and Gardening – Plastics in food production
Short Description:
Short Bio: Allison is a member of the Waste and Resource Recovery Board, with a focus to support Tasmania’s transition to a circular economy. With an MBA (Innovation specialisation), her focus areas include waste reduction, resource recovery, and initiatives that prevent and better manage food waste
Session Title: Palawa Kipli – Bush Tucker Workshop
Short Description: This workshop offers an engaging, cultural and educational experience delivered by Kitana Mansell manager of Palawa Kipli / Tasmania’s only Aboriginal food business. The workshop will allow you to connect to palawa culture, sustainability, and local food systems, and has proven to be the most sustainable foods in Lutruwita / Tasmania for over 65,000 years. Food samples of Palawa food will be available to try.
Short Bio: Kitana Mansell is a highly inspiring young Palawa woman from lutruwita/Tasmania, renowned for her leadership in the Palawa food and tourism space, as the driving force behind palawa kipli — the Tasmanian Aboriginal food business she’s been part of since her teens. She has served as palawa kipli’s Business Manager, sharing her deep cultural knowledge of palawa bush foods and advocating for food sovereignty through culinary storytelling and community connection.
Session Title: What’s all the fuss about biochar?
Short Description: We’ll talk step by step through a low tech way to make biochar with a flame cap kiln, using garden waste. Then demonstrate crushing, sifting and innoculating biochar for garden use. We’ll make up a batch of potting mix and some soil blocks for seedling propagation, with recipes using biochar plus other sustainable and cheap materials.
Short Bio: Christina is a self confessed soil nerd and biochar enthusiast. She has been helping to empower people grow their own food through FIMBY for 18 years. She loves beetroot and leeks.
Session Title: Growing natives with Nipaluna Nursery
Short Description: A practical introduction with a tour and activities such as making seed bombs and plant propagation.
Short Bio: Nel is the convenor of Nipaluna Nursery a volunteer run native plant nursery
Session Title: Youth Forum- Climate Action
Short Description: A Youth Forum for the Tasmanian Youth Climate Leaders Program on planning climate action for 2026 including food security, biodiversity, transport and energy.
Short Bio: Supporting oung people to take action on climate change.
Session Title: Making compost
Short Description: Composting workshop-how to feed your garden!
Short Bio: David is a legend- set up 7 community gardens around Hobart.
Session Title: Welcome to the Imaginarium
Short Description: Voyage through our time travel portal to explore a future of your deep longing. Write and draw your stories and dreams. Listen to the voices of the earth and express their messages. Together let’s create a room filled with heart-warming possibility to inspire you on your next steps forward.
A calm welcoming space for all ages, to dream, imagine, and create.
Short Bio: Presented by Dr Sue Stack and Moran Wiesel, through Planet Song, AAEE, and Nipaluna Nursery.
Dr Sue Stack is an experienced educator, deep ecology facilitator, storyteller, artist, poet, and organic gardener. Moran Wiesel is an eco-somatic counsellor, Ho’oponopono practitioner, poet, storyteller, and earth lover.
The Planet Song project explores how governance can emerge from right-relationship with earth-spirit kin. Offering training, consultancy, creative activations, and research, Planet Song asks how we can embed the relational future we long for into our everyday here and now.
AAEE advocates and supports sustainability within education. Nipaluna Nursery grows Indigenous plants together to support biodiversity.
Session Title: Garden tool maintenance: Sharpen, restore, reuse
Short Description: The demo will cover the practical maintenance of hand pruning tools and knives. Including cleaning of rust and resin build-up, sharpening blades to a working edge, adjusting tension and blade alignment in bypass pruners and lubrication of moving parts. All helping to keep tools cutting smoothly and lasting longer.
Short Bio: A botanist and conservation professional with roots in native and environmental nurseries across Melbourne and Hobart, Jamie is currently completing a Masters of Protected Area Conservation and is fresh from a field season of botany with the University of Tasmania. Whether restoring habitat or propagating natives, he’s learned that taking care of tools and keeping them sharp makes all the difference.
Session Title: Propagating natives from cuttings
Short Description: A hands-on workshop on propagating Coastal Saltbush – an easy and affordable way to reproduce numbers of this attractive, fast-growing and water-wise Palawa food plant for use as screening or shelter in your garden. You’ll take away a punnet of cuttings as well as information about other native species that are most suited to this method of propagation.
Short Bio: The Warrane Community Garden provides opportunities for social connection, skill sharing and education, within our productive and joyful food growing space. We have a thriving Tasmanian Native patch with over 50 species, to showcase what grows well locally and provides diversity, ecological services and Palawa cultural connection to home gardens.
Entertainers
Short Description: Enhance your connection to the plant world by listening to and helping them turn their internal biology into music
Short Bio: Science PhD, author and artist with an interest in how plants sense and interact with the environment.
Short Description: Catch a glimpse of the rare Giant Leafy Stick Insects. If you’re lucky you may catch a glimpse of some unusual acrobatic behaviour.
Short Bio: The Sands Family Circus have been entertaining Tasmanian crowds with their unique family entertainment for the past 30yrs. They also teach a wide range of Circus skills at public events, and have been involved in teaching the Tasmanian Youth Circus (1991-1998), and running Circus Art Tasmania (2018- present)
Session Title: A Garden for All and other Magical Places…
Short Bio: Tamas is a skilled traditional Hungarian storyteller and the founder of Roaming Trees Storytelling, captivating audiences across Europe and Australasia with his engaging retellings of folk tales, myths, and legends. More than simply telling great stories, Tamas seeks to nurture a sense of connection and explore alongside his listeners what it truly means to be human.
