We talk with local residents who have embraced environmentally friendly lifestyles and practices, and invited them to give their tips on how you can do the same!

Elizabeth, Surrey Hills 

Lifetime volunteer and green open space advocate

Meet Elizabeth, our Green Living Champion and recent recipient of a Whitehorse City Council 2024 Civic Award – for a lifetime of volunteering in the community. She’s in her 90s and is a retired biological scientist and educator, and values Australia’s open, sunny and green lifestyle. She’s spent the last 60 years living in Surrey Hills and has seen enormous change over that time - population growth and an ever-increasing density of living – with more townhouses and high rises. 

Elizabeth is doing many sustainable living actions – including having rooftop solar, composting garden waste and food scraps, insulating her house to improve comfort and energy efficiency, and restricting the use of plastics. She has a small vegetable patch and grows lettuce, snow peas, silverbeet, tomatoes and beans. She also has lots of trees and shrubs, including lily pillies, to cool her home and increase privacy. She has planted two deciduous robinia trees on the north and west for summer shade and winter sun once the leaves have dropped. They have “beautiful golden green leaves and are a pleasure to look at from the living areas”. She also thinks that paths and driveways should be porous where possible to absorb rain, “our driveway has small river pebbles.”

Sustainability for Elizabeth also means thinking about the wellbeing of current and future communities. Connecting with and spending time in nature is important, “I have learnt, and it is also supported by research, that green open space is really important for the development of children, including their mental development.”

She’s spent a lifetime volunteering and has been involved in community groups that have advocated to all levels of government to retain, maintain and improve open space – and keeping it available and accessible for all parts of the community. 

The community groups she has been a member of have worked closely with Council to help produce positive outcomes for the community. Historically “In working with Council, we have managed to retain the Gardiner’s Creek parklands, and even our own small park. It was to be built over, but as locals we managed to save it. And then, working with Council we now have a delightful small but loved open space, always in use”. Grevilleas which flower all year round were planted to attract small birds and provide shelter for them.

Sometimes she feels a bit shaky for her 90-plus years, but that’s not stopping her, “I have an appointment to talk with a local MP about the possibility of some new open space in Surrey Hills”.

Elizabeth shares a few of her tips to help us with our own individual sustainable living journey.

• Join a group whose interest overlap with yours. As Helen Keller said – “Alone we can achieve little; together we can achieve much”.
• Work WITH others.
• Even as a volunteer, be prepared for some setbacks, and stay in for long-term outcomes.