Some themes, items, displays etc. observable.

• Displays and diagrams showing global resource scarcities and distributions, especially re C02 emissions and petroleum.
• Low dollar and resource living costs per capita.
• Self-sufficiency, do-it-yourself, home-made things, living simply.
• Various alternative technologies, including solar panels, windmills, garbage gas, water wheels (one 4.5 metres tall), solar panels, river tide mills, pelton wheel, teaspoon turbine, two windmills, one home-made on a 17 metre tower, 12 volt electrical circuits and machinery. (Soon to add a solar thermal technologies section, including Stirling engines, trough, dish and central receiver system working models, solar chimney model, distilling, light pipes, fresnel lenses, and stem power, water recycling via reed beds, straw bale building, earth oven.)
• Effectiveness of hand tools. Pedal-powered grinder.
• Earth building. Animal sheds illustrating different techniques, mud brick making.
• A very cheap house (built to council standards in 1989 for $8,000.)
• Gardens, animals, poultry, sheep, goats, bee hives. (Fish tanks soon.)
• Various arts and crafts, include sculpture, painting, model making, blacksmithing, wood turning, bush carpentry, pottery, stone work, candle making, paper making, leather work, rush and basket work. Home-made large ornamental garden pots and columns.
• "Non-alienated" labour; collapse of the work/leisure distinction. The highly varied work day.
• The sort of neighbourhood workshop we should have on every suburban block.
• Overlaps; e.g., how the garbage disposal problem can solve the fertiliser problem.
• Environmental connections; ecologically appropriate ways. Environmental sensitivity items; e.g., walks along the scale of the planetary system, and the evolutionary time scale.
• Some Permaculture themes, including organic gardening, composting, zoning, stacking, zero-energy inputs, integration of animals into the local productive scene, tree crops, forest-gardens, seed saving, propagation, water plants, nutrient recycling.
• Re-use of old pavement for paths, rockeries foundations.
• Bush carpentry; use of saplings, adze work, stick furniture.
• Shingle making.
• The importance of the "commons" cooperative village plantations, ponds, forests, orchards workshops etc.
• Recycling, using local waste material, scavenging, a recycling area.
• Rough but adequate standards; things that are convenient and functional but not elegant. Cheap and simple things are often quite good enough.
• Implications for Third World development. The distinction between capitalist development and appropriate development. Illustration of appropriate technologies, economies and systems for resource poor regions.
• The crucial importance of local economic self-sufficiency, and the abundant scope for it.
• Large scale models showing the way neighbourhoods could be redesigned to become highly self-sufficient, and the basic form of a highly self-sufficient 1000 person rural village, illustrating "footprint" implications.
• Principles for the new economy required, especially localisation and large non-monetised sectors (e.g., free goods from the commons.)
• Extensive landscaped leisure areas, showing how neighbourhoods could be made "leisure-rich", stocked with active and passive sources of recreation, (e.g., flying fox, ropes, caves, castles…)
• The new political situation; self-government of/by small communities is essential. Dependence on each other and on local ecosystems prompts cooperation for public interest, synergism, consensus seeking.
• "Wealth" exists in social capital, landscape, community, commons, traditions…not in money.
• Above all, to show that the required simple and self-sufficient way of life could be highly interesting and rewarding. Many people mistakenly assume the "limits to growth" case means we must make sacrifices and reduce our "living standards" in order to solve global problems. They do not realise that The Simpler Way could provide a better quality of life than most people experience in affluent consumer-capitalist society.