Noel Blencowe was among 40 locals who took over the rent-free lease on a decommissioned tip in Brunswick on March 26, 1982.
They were idealists seeking to create a social, green utopia providing employment in the inner-north. They backed their dream with years of hard yakka and their project, the CERES environment park, survived and thrived.
CERES stood for the Centre for Education and Research in Environmental Strategies, but it soon became known by its acronym. Ceres is also the Roman goddess of agriculture.
The four-hectare organic farm, on the banks of Merri Creek, is now the place where 65,000 schoolchildren a year learn where veggies come from, what compost is and how to recycle.
Locals tend garden plots, buy organic produce from markets and attend festivals, as well as courses on everything from art therapy to cheese making.
The site has become a testing ground for technologies such as electric cars, solar and wind power, and biofuel.
Technically, Blencowe, 67, is due to retire on June 30 after 30 years’ involvement - 29 of those years as a paid employee, initially as its first teacher and recently as one of CERES’ three team leaders or managers. But he has decided to continue on as a volunteer, two or three days a week, because there is still so much to do.
He’s helping set up a three-metre-tall Scheffler solar energy dish in the CERES front yard that will have the capacity to power six houses.
In its car park, CERES is trialling a cutting-edge, solar-powered recharge station for electric cars. And it is also constructing a biofuel plant in a shed that will convert food waste into methane to power on-site barbecues.
Blencowe also wants to continue to lead annual trips he has made for the past eight years to three villages in India, where eco centres have been built based on CERES practices.
He was teaching community studies - involving teenagers in community projects - at a small Brunswick alternative school when he heard about plans for CERES in 1980.
Local unemployment was high and youth leaders, academics, teachers, council workers and environmentalists held a meeting at the Warr Park hall to brainstorm solutions.
He says the tip site, donated by Brunswick Council in 1982, provided a home for their aim of ”creating a place where the community can come together and think through the issues that are happening in the local area and create positive solutions”.
It was desolate and stony, but job-training scheme labourers and volunteers toiled for years tending farm animals to eat the weeds and clearing junk and enriching the soil with worms and compost.
Blencowe headed the first schools program in 1983.
That year, CERES also started what Blencowe says was the first kerbside recycling program of bottles and paper in Melbourne. CERES also advocated home energy auditing and organic gardening.
In 1992, the Kennett government cancelled CERES’ $70,000 in annual funding, but Blencowe says it was a blessing in disguise ”because these days we’re not really dependent on government funding; we are, on the whole, self-sufficient”.
CERES had to start charging schools a fee and that income now brings in $1 million a year.
Under government job creation grants, the cafe and the nursery were built in the mid-1990s and both became million-dollar businesses.
In 1996, a group on an unemployment training program organised an organic vegetable stall, which has grown into a twice-weekly market from which CERES profits.
Blencowe says Ceres now has a turnover of $8 million a year.
Last year, Van Raay Centre - three two-storey buildings - opened following a $4.5 million donation from philanthropist Leonie Van Raay.
The buildings house a reception centre and shop, offices, rooms for corporate conferences and courses, plus a community kitchen and catering business.
Blencowe says about 100 volunteers and 150 paid staff now work at CERES and 50 different projects run across the site, from a bicycle recycling group to a business delivering organic food to 600 households.
Ceres made headlines last year with claims that toxic chemicals in the soil had contaminated vegetables grown on the site. But CERES’ landlord Moreland Council and the Health Department and Environment Protection Agency found no evidence of public health risks.
Blencowe is satisfied CERES’ future is secure. And his enthusiasm for the place remains strong. ”I’ve been very lucky to have spent my life in creative, optimistic, positive activities,” he says. ”It’s a very rewarding place to work. There’s no end to the new things that can happen, no end to the possibilities.”
