#089 A Native Grains & Native Mills Resurgence (Part 2)
Ian Congdon & Courtney Young on making mills & the art of regeneration
Welcome to part 2 of A Native Grains & Native Mills Resurgence, featuring the young farmers changing the face of farming in Australia. Ian Congdon, Courtney Young and family are farmers, mill makers, artists and business people, and they’re exploring how all this connects with culture, creativity, and the regeneration of country and community. If you haven’t yet listened to last week’s episode with Gaala Watson and Rob Pekin from Food Connect, the trailblazing social enterprise and legendary community food hub in Brisbane, no fear. You can listen in reverse order, as it were. So given you’re here, stick around for this incredible story.
Courtney Young, Ian Congdon & family (supplied).
“If we’re looking at the mill as a lever for regenerating land, or rewarding proper regeneration of land, then we’re extending that further than the 2,000 acres at Berrigan, and then there’s this little patch at Rutherglen. And then there might be, either through our mill expanding more, or others doing the same thing more, but it’s pushing that further.”
It’s a serendipitous chain of events deep and wide across Country, that includes connections with elders, native grains off Bruce Pascoe’s farm, this podcast, and this young farming couple who wondered if they could build the first Australian mill in who knows how long, and how that might help leverage the sorts of systemic changes so many of us would like to see.
Join Courtney, Ian and I, on what happened to be settlement day for their own farm, and would you believe, the day they finished their first mill!
This episode was recorded on Monday 28 June 2021.
And hats off to Andrew Heyn from New American Stonemills and Don Hearn from the Noteworthy charity, the organiser of the Angie McMahon gig at Little Pork Deli, Barham.
Click on the photos below for full view, and hover over them for descriptions where they’ve been added.
Get more:
And to listen to Part 1 of this series, A Native Grains & Native Mills Resurgence, featuring Gaala Watson and Rob Pekin from Food Connect.
You can hear my conversation with Tyson Yunkaporta, that Courtney refers to, on episode 70.
And as it happens, that one was just after my conversation with Mark Taylor from Miller and Baker on episode 69.
Music:
The System, by the Public Opinion Afro Orchestra.
Faraway Castle, by Rae Howell & Sunwrae.