Cate McQuillen and Hewey Eustace are life partners, business partners, permaculture farmers and co-creators of a new, green, kid’s TV series that is taking the world by storm: it’s called ‘dirtgirlworld’ and it truly is a milestone in regional Australian arts, film and TV.
Kid’s TV goes green with dirtgirlworld, a production combining animation, education and entertainment with an environmental focus. This brand new program invites children to be involved in a world where “nature first is second nature”, as the creators say.
The ‘green’ factor has attracted the interest and support of public broadcasters throughout the developed world, including the UK, Canada and here in Australia, where the program’s ratings have soared beyond belief. It’s a production that Cate and Hewey hope will inspire generation after generation of pre-school age kids locally and globally (and their parents!) to start living more sustainably.
Hailing from the Victorian city of Melbourne, Cate and Hewey met and discovered their mutual love for not just all things arts but also, all things green (and each other!). They decided they wanted to escape the rat-race of city-living and lead a life of much greater simplicity and self-sufficiency in the rainforest, making their tree change to the beautiful north coast of New South Wales where they’ve lived and worked on a property 50 kilometres north of Grafton, just outside of Whiporie, for the last couple of decades. It was the region and the lives they’ve been leading on the north coast - permaculture farmers by day and community volunteers & local performers and musicians by night – that inspired their idea for dirtgirlworld in the early naughties. They haven’t looked back since.
dirtgirlworld was dreamed up during an afternoon chat on the veranda and first started as an award-winning, ARIA-nominated music album. Then the couple had the idea to turn the album into a TV show for kids and for the past two years they’ve been working extremely hard, out on their farm, to make their vision a reality.
“Hewey and I always envisaged something truly beautiful,” said Cate, “a world that blends the real with the unreal, a world inhabited by characters who celebrate life outside and connect with children in a profound way.”
The main character “dirtgirl” is beautiful and clever too. She’s a gumboot-wearing girl who’s great at growing vegetables - awesome tomatoes and the biggest pumpkins - knows cloud names and drives a big orange tractor. The TV series is set in a small, permaculture garden setting and dirtgirl shares this love of producing food with kids – she invites them to learn and participate about the joys of living a simple, sustainable life.
Cate and Hewey built into the show messages, ideas and ways that all kids - whether they live in an apartment block in the city or a cattle property in the bush - could care for and look after themselves, their planet and their futures. The show’s main themes include recycling (there are a couple of lines abut how the planet is filling up with rubbish), gardening, sustainability, habitat, energy sources, water conservation, weather, worms/composting, chicken poo brew, food sources, swapping, trading and sharing… the list goes on.
“Everything’s easy in dirtgirlworld,” says Cate. “If families care enough, they can see how doable and possible all these things – like growing a tomato plant in a pot on your terrace or a veggie patch in your backyard - truly are. Like dirtgirl, kids can be happy to get up and live a lifestyle just like hers – to wake up and not switch on the TV but rather head out to the chook pen and collect eggs for breakfast.”
The program teaches kids values too, about the importance of the Earth and that the planet is our home so we have to care for it, not take it for granted. And that living a simple, self-sufficient, sustainable lifestyle is fun, easy and good for us.
Cate and Hewey know that their show will not be just a fad or a trend - it will continue to grow because it’s responding to the environmental education needs of the community. Apart from the 52 episodes they’ve already created - each one 11 minutes long with a song in every episode (that’s 532 minutes of green kids TV in total!) – the dirtgirlworld team has demonstrated its commitment to the environment through the adoption of best possible environmental business practices.
“We looked at everything from producing the TV series to the manufacture and sale of consumer products because the last thing we wanted to do was add more to landfill,” Cate says. “We buy green power, we reduce flights where possible and communicate with our overseas staff as much as we can on Skype; we use recycled paper, double-sided printing, reward car-pooling. If we have a launch or an event, we make sure our catering food never gets wasted (leftovers go to homeless shelters etc) and on top of all of that, we’re carbon offsetting everything we do. It’s hard but for us, it’s worth it and we take pride in our efforts to reduce our environmental impact.”
Be sure to tune in to this beautiful, positive and inspirational creation! dirtgirlworld returns for another series on March 8 and Cate says they’ll have a host of exciting new episodes ready from the middle of 2010 onwards.
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Kid’s TV Goes Green!
Cate McQuillen and Hewey Eustace are life partners, business partners, permaculture farmers and co-creators of a new, green, kid’s TV series that is taking the world by storm: it’s called ‘dirtgirlworld’ and it truly is a milestone in regional Australian arts, film and TV.
The main character “dirtgirl” is beautiful and clever too. She’s a gumboot-wearing girl who’s great at growing vegetables - awesome tomatoes and the biggest pumpkins - knows cloud names and drives a big orange tractor. The TV series is set in a small, permaculture garden setting and dirtgirl shares this love of producing food with kids – she invites them to learn and participate about the joys of living a simple, sustainable life.
