Back L-R: Emily, Nicola, Sam, Kimberley, Carol Front L-R: Sonia, Lucy, Ruth, Milo.
For one of SHA’s social media people, I’ve gotta level with you that really suck at the technical stuff. For the past ten years I’ve spent most of my time with my hands in the soil, so it’d be a fair assessment to say I’m a bit rusty when it comes to typing with more than one hand. All this to say that I needed to recruit Ruth to operate the timer on my phone camera one fine December eve so we could all, staff and volunteers, pose for a photo at our first ever SHA staff meet-up. All nine of us, lined up together on a log like a kids in a school photo, waiting for the timer to go off as Ruth dashed back to take her place in the front row.
Looking back through the photos I took of the pot luck evening we spent together, I am kicking myself that I hadn’t had the brain space to think of taking one of Ruth on her own on the log as well, just to show a visual of how much the SHA staff has grown in the past six months. That disappointment aside, it was a great evening. We started the evening off by taking a tour of the wild flowers and incredible bush regeneration happening at AWOL, a permaculture demonstration site in Wamboin that has been lovingly built by SHA market manager Sam Hawker, her partner Frank, and Frank’s parents Pip and Ted. We then shared a potluck dinner outside while the sun set and talked about our individual food stories and our hopes and dreams for the work we’re all doing with SHA. The evening ended with AWOL’s resident goats being put to bed for the night with a level of shrieking and giggling that goats in all their ridiculousness surely deserve.