Murrnong is a community, rather than a family farm. Many more people than those listed here, as interns and travellers and family members, have made enormous contributions over the past 20 years, crucial to the development of the property as it is today.
David Arnold
After his PDC in 1991, David started by permaculturing his back and front yards in West Preston, Melbourne. He has been developing Murrnong since 1996. Along the way he has done permaculture design and development work across North East and North Central Victoria.
Through these various projects he developed skills and expertise in design and development for home self-sufficiency, farm planning, farm scale tree and shrub landscaping, farm forestry, homestead orcharding, tree crops, ecological building, energy efficient retrofit of existing buildings, and a dabble in micro-publishing when he conceived and produced the Permaculture Calendar.
Through his experiences guest tutoring on Permaculture Design Courses that other people organised, David found that he prefers the ‘bite-sized chunks’, where PDC’s are scheduled over an extended period with breaks between course dates. He founded the Murrnong PDC in 2016, in response to a request for a “local course that we can understand”. These days the course itself has become something of an extended community, with many of the site visits being to the really good examples developed by previous course graduates.
Background
David was born in 1963 at Hay on the riverine plain in western NSW. His childhood and primary school years were spent on a sheep station near Carrathool called Gundaline, that his father Charles managed. In the 1970’s the station was bought by a US based agribusiness multinational, and converted by heavy earthworks to broad acre irrigated row cropping. As a child Dave observed the farm and these changes, usually when taken along as gate opener and companion for his dad. The remnant natural qualities – of what had been a well managed rich pastoral landscape before European settlement – were more appealing to Dave than the increasingly industrial agriculture. In the 1970’s the food self-reliance of the isolated homestead settlement, with butcher’s shed, vegetable garden and orchard, was fast giving way to weekly 180 km return shopping trips. Parental lessons about economy and care of things were still strong.
Occasional work at his parents’ farm near Violet Town in the 1980’s gave David opportunity to interact with that landscape and experiment with tree planting to improve the rural landscape. This lead to his more consciously permacultural journey that began in 1990.
Felix Arnold
Felix grew up alongside and as part of Murrnong’s development, as the site was purchased just after he was born.
His interests converge and diverge from Murrnong through working in outdoor education, working and sometimes living here, foraging, gardening, creative kitchen adventures, and bringing his terrific friends here to visit.
Through 2018 Felix took on the finishing of our cob and straw bale cottage.
Since 2023 he has lived and worked most of the year out of Alice Springs, central Australia
Grace Arnold
Grace is as old as the trees (most of the trees at Murrnong were planted 6 months after her birth) and, like Felix, she has grown up among them.
Her visual design skills have contributed to many a Murrnong sign and artwork, social media post, and also this website. She has done IT work with Open Food Network, the creators of the platform that Murrnong uses to sell produce online.
Grace lives in a RetroSuburban rental share house in East Brunswick, and in 2024 began studying contemporary dance at VCA.
Murrnong 