About Us
FINDING YOUR GRASS ROOTS
Grass Roots is Australia’s go-to magazine for those who wish to live a more productive and fulfilling life. Articles in the magazine are written by diverse authors who offer a wealth of experience that can be relied upon. Day to day experts share achievable projects to increase self-reliance, save you money and improve your lifestyle.
In a typical issue you might find articles on:
- fruit and vegetable growing,
- renovating
- upcycling
- poultry keeping
- small farm stock selection
- organic garden and farm management
- value adding and marketing of home grown produce
- preserving the harvest
- selling at a farmer’s market
- healthy delicious recipes from the garden
- crafts
- and so much more!
The reader is drawn into warm community of DIY inventiveness, making, sharing, recycling, cooking and in the end celebrating the greater degree of independence and satisfaction this lifestyle engenders in every member of the family.
While many articles are practical in nature, in between the lines you can feel the infectious spirit of those who do, who love what they do. It is this supportive spirit that encourages us all on our journey to a healthier, happier hands-on lifestyle.
Grass Roots is published by people who live the life the magazine celebrates, and readers of its pages have been sharing their knowledge and stories for nearly 50 years.
Enjoy!
A Short History
GRASS ROOTS BY DAVID MILLER
Megg and I first met at a mutual friend’s party in the late 1960’s in North Melbourne, Victoria, and realised we had many common interests including agriculture, traditional crafts and the pioneering lifestyle.
Megg was studying to gain a secondary art and craft teaching qualification. This included learning traditional crafts (spinning, weaving, embroidery, etc.) as well as academic study and art theory and practice. I was working in administration, playing the guitar and singing around the coffee lounges in the evenings and crafting leather belts for sale in a Melbourne boutique store.
The depth and breadth of our common interests quickly led to Megg and I spending more and more time together. When she complained of not being able to obtain coloured wool for her craft work, I suggested we establish our own flock of coloured sheep. Soon we had a small flock of rare black sheep at Kilmore on agistment. Strangely one of the farm’s owners had a business publishing short histories of country towns which he printed himself using his collection of small letterpress printing machines stored in an old farm shed.
Once qualified, Megg found a job teaching in Shepparton and I attended agricultural college. Living in the country, we could now indulge our interests in pioneering crafts and began making bread, butter, cheese, soap, and anything we could from scratch, returning to Melbourne to research old recipes and remedies we thought would be useful.
When it became known we could demonstrate pioneering skills, we were quickly invited to appear whenever a historic home held an open day. It was surprising how many people showed an interest in what we were doing, with many enquiries of where these skills could be learnt.
Gradually we became aware of the great interest in craft, self sufficiency and a natural, more peaceful way of living. This led to organising evening classes where we taught everything we knew in the years before adult education became the norm.
At home, we kept up the pace making ginger beer, raising ducks, chickens and calves on the bucket, tanning sheep and fox skins and breeding Deerhounds. Our small cottage was festooned with wall hangings made from wool of all colours and clothes making projects in progress. The next move was to lease a farmhouse on a small property where we could extend our interests: more dogs, chickens and sheep with some goat milking and the establishment of an apiary honey business. Our spare time was filled with the sound of hammering as we struggled to keep up the production of boxes for our apiary.
On one trip to Melbourne, we had a discussion with Jim (the farmer-publisher) about producing a publication on the skills we had acquired. This resulted in the first issue of Grass Roots in early 1973. Its production was ably assisted by generous friends John and Sue Bryant and Gary Edwards – the magazine was printed on a small letterpress machine in an old farm shed.
When the first copies of Grass Roots were available, I tossed them into the farm ute, combed my hair, shined my boots and took off to visit likely stockists in Melbourne and Sydney. This was the beginning of our own distribution system that eventually sent copies of the first 18 issues around the nation. It was promoted on the famous Don Lane Show where we milked a goat at the start of the program and during the show made cheese from the milk, then served up cheesecake to Don at the end. We even took our pet piglet to Sydney for the week to promote the lifestyle.
The pet was with us in an inner city hotel where the staff loved animals and had a collection of birds at the back. Piglet was hidden in a wicker carry basket and every time we were in the lift with other guests, we held our breaths waiting for her to make a sound to expose our little secret.
Back home on the farm, I was still building more beehives when visitors appeared. Bob and Judy Willis worked in PNG and were some of the first readers. They were on holiday in Australia and went on to write some very practical articles in subsequent issues.
All those mentioned in the early years of Grass Roots gave us very welcome assistance in answering the flood of letters that arrived after each issue and for weeks in between. New readers not only enjoyed the magazine but eagerly shared their knowledge and experience to help create a magazine that was fun to read and practical to use. We have always appreciated their generosity, especially when their strength is the practical and writing often the challenge. These contributions large and small have come together to make something quite unique – a magazine written by its readers and a healthy number of informative “feedback” pages in each issue.
We were thrilled to welcome our daughter Jessamy to our back to the land life. She thrived on the farm raising all sorts of stock, then chose secondary boarding school followed by a degree in publishing. She now has her own family, productive backyard, works on the magazine with us and gives talks on backyard poultry.
On one occasion, Jessamy and I were on our way to collect the mail when we saw a huge yellow Ansair bus with a collection of kid’s bikes on the roof. We wondered how many children might be in the travelling family and decided to stop by and meet them. Thus we met the Boyd family who came to stay often and whose kids loved the farm and would arrive and cart the chooks around as if they were all pets. Their dad, Ian, was a commercial artist and it was he who developed the GR logo and design for those early covers of the magazine.
In the years that followed, we were able to purchase our own small farm. We bred and milked Saanen goats, milked Daisy the cow, had a small herd of Dairy Shorthorns, Highland cattle, carpet wool sheep and a migratory apiary of 150 beehives. We even had two hives in a Carlton backyard which produced good flows of honey. Megg made lots of our clothes (even down to the buttons) and we lived in a four roomed home where one room and the hallway were lined with boxes of Grass Roots. You had to squeeze past them to go from the lounge to the kitchen.
One of our most remarkable pets was Daisy the crossbred cow we milked daily. We could walk down to the paddock, slip one leg over her back and ride her to the milking bail. If we did not milk her on time, she would arrive at the fence near the kitchen window and bellow out a reminder.
These days Megg and I don’t live together. She has developed a career in poultry and produces a magazine, Australasian Poultry, which is published bimonthly and distributed in Australia. She has an encyclopaedic knowledge of chickens which includes backyard, small farm and commercial as well as the history of their development. She is famous within the extended family for being able to describe the history of the world through the evolution of poultry breeds – where they originated, who conquered whom and thus introduced them to a new country, and how they evolved from there. For example when Caesar conquered Britain, his troops brought with them a five toed fowl which evolved into the Dorking which still has five toes today.
Apart from being a core member of the Grass Roots production team, she also judges eggs at poultry shows, actively supports many poultry societies and still makes the time to keep her own chosen breeds. Her dedication has been such that she was awarded the Order of Australia in 2019 for services to the poultry industry.
Meanwhile I have been living on a small farm raising Salers cattle, Ultrawhite sheep and managing an organic vineyard. Over the years I have made red wine which has been exported to five countries.
Megg, Jessamy and I have always worked together in a very compatible way. We share a deep interest in craft, agriculture, sustainability and natural living, and are dedicated to bringing Grass Roots readers useful, factual information and innovative ideas that are designed to improve all our lives from the practical to the spirit. The reason Grass Roots has always been popular is because its readers are happy to share their knowledge and experiences. The magazine was embraced in the 1970s because folk were seeking a happier, more creative and less stressful lifestyle. Today readers are still searching for the same but also wish to contribute to a safer, more sustainable world for future generations.
