permaculture farming hiawatha almost near yarram gippsland australia

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Andrew Jeeves ruminates about the writing of the Permaculture Designers manual:
I worked with Big Bad Bill for 10 years or so and was in the first group of three that were more or less apprentices to him and we worked out the curriculum 
for the first Designer's Course then in Stanley TAS. The PCDs were then 3 weeks long. The process for writing the DM was thus: Bill sat at his desk mulling
 and musing and reading and cursing and drinking cups of tea and looked after his ailing mother and wrote on scraps of paper and idea or two and threw these 
in a big old wooden tea chest. When he saw an interesting article, he ripped it out of the magazine and threw it into the tea chest. At times he went out to
 "The Swamp", our wonderful property across the road, and planted trees, or directed our drott driver to build dams and swales and drains and islands. 
At times we went fishing and hauled the net on Godfrey's beach, he on the shore end and me on the deep end and then we had a big feed on poddy mullet or 
salmon. Eventually the tea chest was full. So, we all got together (Bill, Reny, me, Simon Fell and sometimes visitors) and started putting the upended tea chest
 into themes. We ended up with a dozen or so. Bill then started writing to the themes using the ideas and info collected and drawing it all together, linking, 
theorising, all in his chicken scratch writing. Reny Slay was one of the only people in the world who could read his writing and being a very efficient person, 
typed it into manuscript on our early Apple computer. Reny and I then edited it and tried to get some organisation into the themes and removed opinion from
 each theme and put it into an introduction. I also removed libellous and defamatory writing. Sometimes I had to shuffle things around to keep things on theme. 
We had another look and refined the DM into its present chapters. Bill would then scribble up a drawing to go with a piece of writing and I would decipher 
it and draw up, by hand (no digitising tablets, etc in those days) a drawing. This was edited and reviewed and redrawn as necessary. Eventually we had a book. 
We had the typestting done and I laid out every page by hand with a waxing machine and off it went to the printer. Now, as to whether things were made up. 
All of you are right to some extent. Some drawings were more or less taken from existing descriptions or historical material. For example, chinampas are 
thousands of years old. Many drawing were extrapolations of others' work. May were flights of fancy (but based on existing or practically possible work). 
Some were from my imagination based on Bills' description, original drawings, our photographs, our research and/or world-wide travels (I travelled with Bill 
to the USA and Europe, apprenticing as a PC teacher, and later teaching 3-week PCD courses by myself. Many's the time I had to extract Bill from interesting,
 difficult or compromising situations - I have many stories to tell, e.g., drinking moonshine in Tennessee with the big ol' boy we met who was at the time venturing 
into marrajeehuuana as a new product line; dodging sea snakes off Maui with Chuck the Hawaiian; getting Bill out of scrapes with very enamoured females 
and/or their irate partners after talks or courses; seeking funds from the nephew of the ex-Shah of Iran in a million pound apartment in London with the secretary 
to the boss of the UN Environment Fund (or whatever it was called) with Bill in thongs and Tasmanian shirts... Anyway, long story short, those were the days. 
So, whilst the DM is not the best indexed or referenced work in the world, it was produced by three people with next to no money in between trips out into the 
big wide world to make more money to support our fledgling intentional community, pay for landscape development and fund the book (and without a lot of material
 on which to base the innovative fields with which we grappled). So, anyone who would like to take the time to reference, index and make it a better book I'm pretty 
sure Lisa at Tagari would welcome approaches. Less social media commentary might also be another benefit? Well, apart from this long-winded monologue. 
Regards, to all.