Co-op Originator - Lorna (Wilson) Huston
Lorna has been an inspiration to many of us, for leading the Co-op through it's difficult 'birth' back in 1978/9. This piece below written by Lorna in 2011 gives a raw account of the start of the Co-op and gives the reader a real insight into the trials and tribulations of setting up Maple Street Co-op. On this blog there is also a video clip is of an interview made by local oral historian Lindsay Kruger in 2023.

Starting the Co-op
At first it was just about food
In 1979 Maleny already had an Arts & Crafts group and a Film Society, but you couldn't buy a chick pea anywhere in town. Every couple of weeks, a bunch of us alternate/vegetarian types would carpool down the hill to the health food shop in Nambour, and we'd come back with little bags of brown rice and lentils and such. We were accustomed to teaming up for these journeys; carloads of Maleny folk used to drive down to watch movies at the Majestic Theatre in Pomona too.
So a portion of the town was ripe for a food co-op. We had the networks; we were used to doing things together; and we wanted healthy foods. ...closer.
Some of us wanted to keep it informal, and it almost happened that way. We thought we might chip in to buy basic foods in bulk and distribute smaller portions out of my garage on Cedar Street. But then we were offered the lease on the ground floor at 48 Maple Street, across the road from the present location. Over 30 of us met in my living room one night and worked out that we wanted to take up that lease and run the co-op like a proper shop, selling to the public, not just to members. Which meant we'd have to jump some hoops and form a registered co-operative. We thought, "How hard can that be?"
Pretty soon, it was about the work too.
Maleny didn't have much work in 79-80. Some of us were scraping a frugal living together with arts or crafts. A few had found a little niche to run a trade or small business. Some worked out of town: down the coast, Brisbane. For the rest, there was the dole.
The start of the Co-op sent a little wave of prosperity across the more alternative side of the community. Within a year we had four employees. (Don't get too excited: we were paid award wages for a few hours a week. The rest of the time we were "required to volunteer".)
But very soon we also had 40 or 50 consignors. People sold vegetables, baked goods, plants and crafts through the shop. A few of them were making their entire living off the Co-op.
The Maple Street Co-op
We had chosen the Co-opts name very deliberately. Many of us had known group houses and community centres that were known by their street names — in Sydney and around unit s. "Maple Street Co-op" had a friendly, community ring to it. The name committed and limited us to this town. We felt that small was beautiful, and local was good.
And there was a little more to it than that. You have to understand that back then, many of us felt a bit like second-class citizens in Maleny. The farmers and rural businesses, the old families and the National Party were the insiders. We sensed that a lot of them saw us as hippy interlopers. So when we chose our name it was an assertion that we would start and stay on Maleny's main street that we belonged in the heart of town, not the fringe.
It was never just a shop
And then, as now, the Co-op was a social centre, sometimes even a social services agency. New people to Maleny found accommodation on the bulletin board, and friends on packing nights. Sometimes the back room was more like a crisis centre than a packing room.
It was almost a religion.
Those of us who carried the ball in the early years came together from different directions.
We came as environmentalists, psychologists, permaculturists, artists, Buddhists, new-agers, left-wingers, liberal humanists, & peace activists. We found we were putting together a mix of concepts and ideals that released energy when they touched. The Co-op sprouted in rich ground and drew from all those thought-lines. On good days, our emerging ideology kindled a kind of zeal for what we did. We believed in community, in consensus, that the whole could be greater than the sum of its parts. And it was.
The Process
Of course there were all the human and group failings too. There were issues, disruptions, personalities, bust-ups, and occasionally, disappointment and disillusionment.
One early issue related to our identity. Were we a co-op, or were we a health food shop? The discussion arose over the sale of cigarettes, which we did in our early years. Some thought it was immoral to sell them and moved to ban them. But a number of our members smoked and wanted the co-op to get the profits. You might be surprised to learn that, for that time, the cigarettes won out. We decided together that we were not a health food co-op, but a co-operative that sold some health foods. Out of these discussions, we came together to the understanding that as a co-op, we could also choose to do other things. We might, for instance, open a child-care centre or a gym or a restaurant!! Whatever members needed.
The series of consultations and the meeting that led to this conclusion and the eventual metasolution was one of the best examples of consensus and the gestalt of the group that I've ever experienced. Most of us expanded our understandings in the process. We changed our minds. It was inspiring.
It was also exhausting. Sometimes in those early years, we'd go all through a decisionmaking process on an issue, and everyone would be on board with a particular outcome. Then a new director or member would want to re-open the whole debate. The old-timers would feel weary and reluctant to go through it again. And the new-comer would feel shut down. From what I hear, this problem continues to plague us. Group process works more easily when there's continuity amongst the participants, but it stagnates if it's closed.
...and the People: Who started the Co-op?
I was Lorna Wilson when the Co-op started. I was the driving force at the very beginning and one of the main culprits for the first four years or so. My mother used to send me clippings about the Mondragon Co-operative in Spain, and my older brother was in the big Berkeley Co-op in California, so the idea ran in my family. Before starting the Co-op I was making stained glass windows & jewellery boxes. I quit that work to bring us through the legal formation process. Then I was the Co-op's first Secretary, one of the first directors, and later I managed the shop.
To get things going, I met initially with Jan Tilden, Gary Blisner and John Gilpin. They were enthusiastic and started working on things: John sent off for information about co-op formation. Gary found us our first premises. Jan found us Bill Kidston, the head of the Cooperative Federation of Queensland. I went to see Bill and continued pumping that wonderful man for advice across the next couple of years. Then I started arranging publicity for a wider meeting.
Matthew Davies became interested and he designed some signs to help spread the idea around town. (He was to become one of the longest serving directors in Co-op history.) Richard Giles was editing a little alternative paper called The Sunshine News; he joined our core group and gave us invaluable publicity.
By the time of the second meeting, in my house, Meg Kelly (now Meg Weymark) had joined the core group too. I always felt she was the heart of the co-op. She gave us courage.
At the first advertised meeting in my house about 15 people decided to do a feasibility study amongst ourselves. We each did a self-survey of what products we had to buy out of town, and approximate amounts of each per year. I went away and gathered current retail prices for what I thought we might be asked to provide.
At the next public meeting we collated the surveys and made the decision to "go legal", and have a shop in town. At this point Gary, Meg, Richard, and I were meeting weekly at my house, Jan and John sometimes present too, so the public meeting authorised us to go ahead and take the steps toward formation and everybody promised to join.
Jill Jordan had been out of the country but returned at this point and sent word to us asking if she could run the shop part-time (she had other work in Brisbane.) When we agreed, she joined the group and did become the first shop Manager and a director too.
Within the first year, we hired Annemarie Jacob and Mandy Lamont to work part-time in the shop. Annemarie used to design our beautiful windows. And Mandy specialised in making all the customers feel special.
We had some very high times with the whole community involved. Among the best for me were the bush dances we held to raise funds. We all danced barefoot blisters into our soles.
There were a few crises that might have shut us down before we even had our Formation Meeting. We nearly lost the building lease a couple of times. And once, when our feasibility study was almost due at the Justice Department, the guy who'd promised that he would do it for us decided to go on a holiday out of state. I borrowed an accounting book and taught myself enough to project predicted forward statements for the first year's operation. We had to laugh. I was pulling figures out of the air, but our actual results were very close to my "forecasts ".
By the end of my 4 or so years at the centre of things, I'd given myself a predictable case of burnout, working 80-90 hour weeks for much of that time and going to the meetings. I used to say that if your'e going to be in a co-op, you'd better just love meetings. At the end I thought, "If I have to go to another meeting, I think I might vomit."
As I write now, almost 32 years from the beginnings, I'm well past the nausea, and I think of the Co-op experience with pride in myself, in Maleny and in all of us involved, back then and up til now My own involvement has been one of life's highlights. I hope the same for you.
Lorna Huston
March 2011