Reviews…
Homesick: a woman’s search for livelihood and a home
A review of Catrina Davies’ book in which I highlight parallels with the Australian experience.
WHY do I find affinity with what Catrina Davies writes in her biographical Homesick-Why I Live in a Shed?
That was the question that bothered me when I started to read her book. Was it because I have lived in a shack? Okay, the shack was more comfortable than Catrina’s shed but far from what many would consider to be comfortable.
Was it because she had not long ago been living in a van while travelling from Norway to Portugal, where I had come off the good part of a year traveling in a minivan along Australia’s south-east coast?
Could it have been that her shed is close to a coastal town in the Lands End region of England and I, too, live in a small coastal town although on the opposite side of the world to Catrina where people also surf the local break?
Or was it because she describes a housing crisis that bears more than a passing similarity to that where I live? Here, house prices are high, let’s say extreme. Rents are likewise if you can get one that you can afford. It’s exacerbated by a shortage of houses for sale and rent. A classic case of demand outstripping supply and an example of chaotic capitalism.
All of those things — surfing the cold seas, a shed as home, the coast, finding a livelihood, the housing crisis — run as themes through Catrina’s book. Her description of her off-grid life on her tiny plot of land, of her attempts at growing a few vegetables, of the discomfort of the shed and fixing it up, her struggle with a council which wanted her to move because the shed was not a habitation (it was her father’s dilapidated shed that had stood disused for years), finding a low-paying seasonal job in a cafe, a better one as a gardener and questioning what work is for, her struggle getting started in writing a book about her travels, the value of local people, the break-in and theft of her laptop and other stuff, government policy that enriches the wealthy but no one else — these make for a reflective and politically astute biography spanning only a short time in Catrina’s life.
Catrina does a good job in keeping the interest of readers as she describes the details of her everyday life and the challenges she faces. I put this down, to some extent at least, to how she links larger patterns in the political economy to the details of her own life in adapting to them. Her troubles come across as local manifestations of these trends, linking the national macro with the social and personal micro.
A feeling of anomie runs through her story. Like so many others she has a sense of alienation from the mainstream social economy, especially its neoliberal manifestation. Perhaps this commonality also contributes to the way the book would speak to the personal lives of readers.
Off-grid, partially at least
Catrina’s life in her shed puts her among the ranks of the off-gridders, those disconnected from the water and power grids and sometimes from other parts of society. She writes that her use of the term refers only to people independent of the power and water grids — that’s also the Australian definition — whereas in the US off-grid can mean a deliberate distancing from the systems of society altogether. This broader understanding of off-grid was explored in Nick Rosen’s Off the grid: Inside the movement for more space, less government, and true independence in modern America (2010, Nick Rosen, Penguin Books. ISBN 9780143117384.).
“It is a movement with its roots in 1960s counterculture,” Catrina writes, “…there are already thousands in the UK who are living off-grid or who have incorporated off-grid into their lives in a combination of ancient wisdom and new technology. I had concluded that there are at least 25,000 households living off-grid all year round in the UK — perhaps 75,000 people.”
Catrina estimates there are between fifty and a hundred off-grid communities in the UK with residents numbering between a dozen and a couple of hundred. There are also semi-autonomous households outside of the communities. Much like the Australian situation, estimating the numbers adopting off-grid ways of life stumbles on the definition of the term and on identifying its participants.
Australian resonance
What Catrina writes resonates with the situation here. As in the UK, the contemporary phase of off-grid living started with the 1960s-1970s counterculture. It was known as the ‘alternative movement’ or the ‘back-to-the-land’ movement, the latter due to people quitting the cities for new lives on intentional communities or in rural towns or on farms. In his book, Alternative Australia — Communities for the future (1979, Cock P; Quartet Books, Melbourne. ISBN 0 908128 09 6), researcher Peter Cock estimated their number to be around 60,000. Those early tinkerers in DIY photovoltaic and solar hot water systems, rainwater harvesting and storage and DIY housing laid the foundations for today’s 2.6 million Australian homes that are fitted with photovoltaic panels and the 4.4 percent which are storing energy in home batteries. Here in Australia, it was the drought of the closing years of the century’s first decade that further stimulated the installation of rainwater tanks in suburban backyards and which got underway back to the late-1990s. Now, escalating domestic energy costs are driving people to photovoltaics. Change occurs when stimulus is sufficient. Then, what was difficult in the past becomes easy in the present. The technologies of the counterculture have become mainstream.
The back-to-the-land movement also stimulated a renewed interest in home and community food production, a theme that folded into the subsequent permaculture movement. Propelled by the rise of organic gardening and by information published in overseas and Australian magazines, the practice of growing some of your own food became a staple among off-gridders.
As for people living in vans and similar vehicles, after talking with some of them, Catrina estimates their number to be around 5000 and perhaps more in the UK. They are a segment of a larger off-grid circle. “The Office of National Statistics has offered a figure of 47,359 families living in caravan or other mobile or temporary structures”, she says.
We don’t have a figure for people living in vans and caravans in Australia. Author of The Nomad At Large, Monte Dwyer, says that the number of grey nomads has doubled since he wrote his book in 2013. They are mainly retired folk with sufficient wealth to invest in a caravan and tow car or in a motorhome. There are many whose caravan or campervan is their permanent place of residence.
Grey nomads are only one segment of people living a mobile lifestyle, however. There is now a younger cohort on the road but their motivation and number remains elusive. The Australian Bureau of Statistics has no figures on the numbers of mobile dwellers across the country, however it reports that 772,627 caravans and campervans are registered in Australia. The vast majority would be used only for holidays.
How we define off-grid living is complicated by which grids people remove themselves from: the energy grid, the reticulated water grid, the electronic communications grid, the government grid, the social grid. In his book about off-grid living in the USA, Nick Rosen describes how people disconnect from the grid of government because of the deep distrust of it in that country. Like most off-gridders, Catrina doesn’t want to remove herself from the grids of modern life entirely, even though she says that modern society has stripped us of the power to manage our own lives sensibly. She eventually connects the shed to the power grid because of the advantages electricity offers. She is not affluent enough to afford a photovoltaic system and house battery.
Liberating rather than enslaving — technology and the off-grid life
Catrina speaks of how technology enables us to live off-grid with today’s more-powerful batteries, more-efficient solar panels and wind turbines. “Fuel cells will soon replace our century-old battery technology. Wireless broadband Internet and other innovations aimed at marine and camping communities have given us the means to live luxuriously in the middle of nowhere… a mobile signal can be found pretty much everywhere. You could argue that the wireless grid is all-pervasive… the wireless phone allows you to get off the grid and still earn a living. I see its liberating rather than its enslaving effects.”
Off-grid technologies enable her to live in her rural shed without farming the land. So it is with others. “Many of the people visited were not farming. They worked remotely… and relied on broadband connection to clients. They were into off grid living rather than agriculture.” Catrina writes how modern technology enables them to live “…that life promised at the dawn of the internet age of rural offgrid living and remote working thanks to the internet and broadband communication.”
This was a trend already underway that was accelerated by the lockdowns brought by the pandemic in Australia. Workplaces decentralised, their staff working from home and connected by the national broadband network. Now, many say they will not go back. As Catrina found, a computer linked by digital communication networks has become the key technology to realise the promise of rural living of the internet’s early days, a means to living in the country without becoming a farmer.
Was Catrina exchanging one grid for another in her shed at the road junction? Whether and how to do that is a question most off-gridders negotiate. She rationalises it by saying that the roads, the mobile phone and the internet became more important as her use of mains power and water declined. That is nothing new to off-gridders in Australia who know the importance of communications to dispersed, rural living.
“Now that mobile technologies and renewable energy are quickly becoming more sophisticated and widespread, it is harder to define where the grid begins and ends.”
Catrina cautions that owning a large area of land around your house is as much a burden as a pleasure. She quotes Marcus Tribe, saying that he worked on so many steep hillsides in his years as a forest warden that he learned the most important thing is to have land that you can easily manage, especially as you get older.
Although Catrina found that most places she visited had vegetable gardens, just as here in Australia, rural people eat much the same food as city people and buy from the same supermarket chains.
“The best way to live off-grid is in a group,” Catrina writes. “Not necessarily a commune… but an alliance of like-minded people, a buying co-operative and a skills bank.”
How would these things be made to happen? Nothing new is required, The models already exist and have done so for some time. Catrina is talking about bulk-buying to reduce expenditure — a consumer co-op. My memory of bulk buying goes back to the 1970s. Her idea of a skills bank would rely on a local network perhaps linked through a community exchange system like the Local Exchange and Trading System of cashless trading that reached its zenith in Australia during the 1990s and that still may exist in diminished form.
Even without going off-grid, she recommends that people with gardens or a community garden allotment can prepare for times when power and water are disrupted. Even if it never happens the exercise is still worthwhile, she says. “It means collecting rainwater from the roof and finding a way to pipe it from the water butt to the bath, shower or kitchen.
“Without going as far as buying a solar panel, it might be worth making sure you have the rudiments of a twelve-volt power system — a car battery charged up, wired to an inverter and preferably a few ultra-low-energy lights. You might want a Freeplay DAB radio, run off the battery or powered by the wind-up handle when all else fails. Another worthwhile precaution might be to ensure you have at least one solid fuel heating source which can double as a cooker.”
That is all good advice other than using a car battery. They are designed for the high-discharge of power needed to start a vehicle, not for continuous drain. Better to acquire a deep cycle or a lithium ion battery that are designed for continuous current draw.
Learning about and practising skills such as bushcraft and foraging are useful for off-gridders. So is bartering for the things you need rather than working for money to buy them.
The city to rural drift has its downside
Just as in Australia where like-minded permaculture people cluster in particular towns like Castlemaine, Nimbin and Cygnet, so has Wales evolved as the geographic focus of the UK off-grid movement. “Partly thanks to devolution, and, thanks partly to successive waves of hippy migration in the 1960s and 1970s.”
Now, they are being joined by people moving out of the cities. It was a move already underway before the pandemic hit in 2020, however in Australia it accelerated as the threat of the virus increased in 2021. It seems that city people believe rural towns and the countryside are safer places to live although the move from city to country pushes up real estate prices, creates a shortage of properties for sale or rent and prices-out lower-income locals. There has been a similar process going on where Catrina lives in the UK. It is town people buying farms after farmers retire who have become the main opponents of off-grid living, Catrina reports.
Permaculture was practiced in a number of places she visited, relations with local commuities being variable. Winning over those who oppose off-grid living — politics, she says — is key to a happy and peaceful off-grid life.
The “obnoxious doctrine” of self-sufficiency
The conversation in Australia has shifted from the mythical notion of self-sufficient living prevalent among the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s to the realisation that local self-reliance is the way to go.
Catrina is scathing of the notion. “…the obnoxious doctrine of self-sufficiency that has permeated the drop-out movement from the 1960s to the present day… the baseline rationale is something like ‘If I can’t do any good, at least I can go somewhere where I won’t be doing any harm.’” Catrina says it took her a long time to realise that this attitude is offensive. “The trouble is that it allows its adherents to adopt an ‘I’m all right, Jack!’ attitude to the looming energy crisis.”
Local self-reliance gets back to what Catrina’s friend told her about having a local network of people with a range of skills. This is an alliance to fall back on when we are under threat, “…whether from the council planning department, angry NIMBYs or marauding foragers looking for free food. In more normal times a group is a skills bank and a buying co-operative, bringing economies of scale for everything from food to renewable energy.”
The challenge: access to land
I want to see the countryside become vibrant again, Catrina writes, by being used to the full rather than preserved for the few. Presumably, she refers to wealthy townspeople and others buying-up properties in rural towns and farms in the countryside, people who get more than the occasional critical mention in her book.
Access to land and the housing crisis resurfaces from time to time, whether it is the affordability of land, how townsfolk move to rural areas, some of them bringing their NIMBY attitudes and who seek to control how others live, or local government planning regulations. She talks of what we in Australia know as intentional communities as solutions and mentions the idea of a friend who wants to adopt the model of the caravan park to build a sustainable community.
“As property prices continue to rise, so does the importance of the caravan as a shelter for those with limited funds who perhaps cannot get their head around the idea of living under canvas. Paul’s design for caravan-sized eco-homes means his eco-village will be a housing association on a caravan site, thereby benefiting from caravan park planning permission, which is less stringent than for a normal housing development. It also means they do not have to conform to fully fledged building regulations.”
What value?
After reading Catrina’s book I went back to an earlier book review of Nick Rosen’s How To Live Off-Grid, his investigation of off-grid living in the UK published in 2011. As I read through, some passages started to sound familiar. Then I realised what it was. Catrina reiterates sentiments and observations made by Nick Rosen. These include Rosen’s critique of wealthy townspeople buying farms and then opposing off-grid living and development, her remarks about the “the obnoxious doctrine of self-sufficiency”, quoting from Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down, her comments about rural people eating much the same food from the same supermarkets as city people, of broadband connection enabling off-grid remote work, her quoting Marcus Tribe about owning only the area of land you can manage and the idea of caravan-sized eco-homes in an ecovillage.
It was a bit disappointing to see this wholesale lifting of text because Catrina has enough experience and has made sufficient observations to write about the same things in her own words and to use examples known to her.
Are off-grid communities of any real value to the society they exist within? That is where Catrina refers to Thomas Homer-Dixon , the author of The Upside of Down (2006; Thomas Homer-Dixon, Random House Canada. ISBN 978 0 676 97722 6), and his writing on resilient societies. He writes that a large-enough off-grid population improves our resilience in the event of a crisis brought on by a trade war, global warming or terrorism.
Homesick-Why I Live in a Shed is at the same time the story of Catrina’s personal journey in search of a place to call home, descriptions of the history of her region and its geography, the impact of tourism and people with money moving in, her struggles as a writer and in making a living — interspersed with her relationship with the coast and surfing its cold seas.
The book resonates with the situation we find in Australia, where the escalating cost of land and a home and the move of cashed-up city people to coastal and rural towns is pushing up prices to the detriment of less-wealthy locals and others who would make the move, and where people are looking increasingly to off-grid living as a solution.
Homesick — why I live in a shed; 2019, Catrina Davies; Riverrun, UK; ISBN B07KQH4R4F
WATCH AN INTERVIEW with Catrina Davies about her book, Homesick, and what home means to her: https://www.amazon.com.au//Catrina-Davies/e/B00TR1DIZM?ref_=pe_26773672_423225352
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