In the garden, hope emerges, not as a feeling or wishful thinking, but as a practice for imagining the future by enacting an ethic of care, as captured so evocatively by a gardener in Warrnambool who, responding to Sustain’s 2020 Pandemic Gardening survey, writes that ‘every seed I plant is a wish for tomorrow.’ In the same vein, another gardener from Hobart says that ‘[t]here is a future when you garden’.

We're at the cusp of an urban agriculture revolution in Melbourne. There are hundreds of abandoned and vacant sites around the city. Most of them are growing weeds behind cyclone fences and locked gates. In some, residents and friends are mobilising to transform these sites into flourishing spaces of healthy food production, education and connection.

This is a revolution in the ways in which we inhabit and relate to our cities, the ways in which we produce, consume and relate to our food, and the ways in which we relate to each other and ourselves. This revolution has millions of human agents, and trillions of non-human ones, all over Australia, and across the world. Transforming spaces, one by one, united by a shared vision and belief that secure access to good food is everyone’s birthright, and that bounteous edible gardens and urban farms are a great way to bring its full realisation closer to reality.

This film captures a chapter in one part of this revolution. In June 2021, the Melbourne Anglican Church, encouraged by the City of Darebin, granted a 2-year lease of its empty vicarage and garden at St Mary’s Church, Preston, to the national sustainable food systems organisation, Sustain: The Australian Food Network. The perspectives and images captured here tell the story of the first part of the site’s transformation, from an abandoned and unloved space, into a centre for connection, education and healthy food growing.

While still in its early stages, the film offers a tantalising glimpse into what’s possible, not just at this site in Preston, but in thousands of others like it across the whole country. With commitment, energy and political will, we can have an Australia in which our towns and cities are brimming and bursting with gardens and verges and parks and orchards full of delicious and fresh produce. An Australia in which no-one is hungry, in which Indigenous sovereignty is acknowledged and shapes our political culture, and in which an ethic of care for all - human and non-human - is the cultural norm.