Localising Leanganook, established as a community initiative in 2016, emerged out of the Local Lives Global Matters conference held in Castlemaine in October 2015. Centred in Mt Alexander shire, Localising Leanganook brings community members together to further explore themes central to the conference: sustaining viable local economies; acting on social and ecological justice; reclaiming democracy; and revitalising spirituality.
 
Community conversations are held every six weeks. These include presentations which challenge existing paradigms, which showcase creative and sustainable local initiatives, and which incubate ideas and strategies to strengthen community connection and resilience.
 
 

Special Bulletin- Palm Sunday Peace Walk in Castlemaine

Dear Localising Leanganook e-newsletter subscribers, Please find below a special e-news bulletin about next Sunday’s Palm Sunday Peace Walk in Castlemaine. Localising Leanganook wishes to support this important local initiative. Please Note: Our usual monthly e-news will be published at the end of March. Palm Sunday Peace Walk- Castlemaine When: Sunday March 24, 2024,...

February/March 2024 newsletter

I think the task before us is to re-learn what it means to walk as if everywhere is a temple. To approach how we are in relationship to the Living Earth as if it were a temple. Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee- Emergence Magazine Welcome to the February/March edition of Localising Leanganook’s e-newsletter. There’s lots of local...

January/February 2024 newsletter

I will train myself to look deeply to see your true nature: you are my loving mother, a living being, a great being—an immense, beautiful, and precious wonder. (From Ten Love Letters to the Earth, Vietnamese Buddhist monk and Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh- cited in Emergence Magazine 24/12/23) Welcome to the January/ February...

December 2023 newsletter

Some thoughts on what Localisation means (from Local Futures November 2023)  A cultural turning towards Nature, towards community, towards diversity – towards life. An expression of our need for connection – both to others and to all living beings. A renewed respect for the feminine, the indigenous, the embodied, the whole. An embrace of...

October/November 2023

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are in shock and are grieving the result(of the referendum). We feel acutely the repudiation of our peoples and the rejection of our efforts to pursue reconciliation in good faith. That people who came to our country in only the last 235 years would reject the recognition of...

September/October 2023 Newsletter

The horizon is one of the perceptual fault-lines that runs between white and Aboriginal ways of understanding country. There’s an assumption amongst white observers of traditional Aboriginal painting that the horizon is absent. But it is omnipresent, hovering in the space around the paintings. If you sit beside the painters while they work, you...

August/ September Newsletter

Basically a privileged person is somebody who in fact doesn’t have or doesn’t need community because they can meet all of their needs with money. Because if you have enough money in modern society, you don’t need anybody or anyone or anything. You don’t need the people around you because you can pay somebody...

July/August newsletter

“My blood”, writes Stan Grant, who has both Irish and Wiradjuri forebears, in ‘Talking to My Country’, “the blood of Moyne and Belabula. White and black: two worlds that even within me, bend to each other but still can’t quite touch”. / And is that not us too? – two worlds, bending, but never...

May/June 2023 newsletter

We are not precisely who we thought we were. We are composite creatures, and our ancestry seems to arise from a dark zone of the living world, a group of creatures about which science, until recent decades, was ignorant. Evolution is trickier, far more complicated, than we realized. The tree of life is more...

January/February 2023

The Seven Sisters Songline is a tale of tragedy and comedy, obsession and trickery, desire and loss, solidarity and sorrow that touches on life’s moral dimensions: how to live with each other on this earth in a sustainable way; how to care for each other and share resources equitably. It also instructs on gender...