Leigh Bramall and Peta Khan - Good food stories

Leigh Bramall and Peta Khan work together as video artists and documentarians for the media collective Maitree House.

They specialise in working with urban and remote communities to produce creative and authentic multimedia stories and installations. Based in the Blue Mountains but working throughout Australia and internationally, their video work explores the intersections of cross cultural storytelling, empathy and beauty in the everyday.

From past to present, the story of food and growing in St Marys is a reflection of an ever-shifting landscape of cultural and political change but one that is bound through common stories and practices of sharing the seeds and the knowledge with friends and neighbours. Using three different forms of documentary film, Leigh and Peta’s work for Sharing the Seeds explores the meeting point of the culture of urban food production in St Marys, the beauty of the growing process and their direct link with community vitality.

Tending Time

The ritual of growing plants to eat or to admire has been part of human culture around the world for thousands of years. Each community and culture has their own form of knowledge and stories connected with the plants they have grown for centuries - knowledge passed down through each generation. By spending short moments of time with three growers from St Marys, each from diverse cultural backgrounds, the Tending Time video series explores this cultural knowledge but shows that there is also one consistent element of growing – the slowing down of time and the ritualistic, meditative quality of tending to plants from seed to flower.

Good Food Stories

Sharing food and stories is something we do on a daily basis but rarely stop to recognise its value in our own lives and in our community.  As part of a filmed public installation, the Good Food Stories team set up a conversation table in Coachman’s Park in Queen St, St Marys, asking community members to sit down with a friend or a stranger and take a moment to think about and share stories of the important role food and sharing food with others has played in our lives.

Growing in St Marys: Past to Present

The fields and plains of St Marys have a long history of providing for its community.

Sharing the story of food production in St Marys is presented in the form of an old fashioned slideshow with accompanying audio titled Growing in St Marys: Past to Present.

Storytellers Norma Thorburn and Carol Volkiene from the St Marys District Historical Society step us through their knowledge and memories of different phases in the story, from Samuel Marsden setting up his experimental farm at his Mamre property through to the development of Queen St and the railway as a hub of transport for food in St Marys.