Our Story

Whole Life Times began in Western Australia in 1982, but the story behind it reaches further back, into a remarkable period when many people were beginning to question established assumptions about the way we lived, worked, learned, healed ourselves and related to the Earth.

The environmental movement was gathering momentum, new approaches to health and psychology were emerging, and there was growing interest in meditation, consciousness and personal development. Alongside these were experiments in intentional community, organic agriculture, renewable energy and alternative technologies. The first photographs of Earth from space had also given humanity an unforgettable image of our planet as one beautiful, finite and interconnected whole.

In Australia, many of these currents came together within the alternative-lifestyle movement of the 1970s. The Aquarius Festival at Nimbin in 1973 and the Down To Earth ConFests that followed brought together people interested in ecological living, community, personal growth, spirituality, appropriate technology and new ways of organising society. Whole Life Times grew from within this ferment of ideas, initially through the newsletter of the Down To Earth Association in Western Australia.

The Association had developed a lively network of people and activities around alternative and holistic approaches to living, including the volunteer-run Moontime School for Alternatives, which began at Hollywood Senior High School and subsequently extended activities into other parts of Perth and Western Australia. Behind all this activity, however, was a larger question: how could useful ideas and information move beyond the people who were already part of the alternative movement and reach the wider community?

That question was especially important to Whole Life Times founder and publisher Denis McCarthy. Before becoming a psychologist, Denis had worked as a reference librarian, and his understanding of librarianship was never simply about looking after books. At its best, the reference librarian helped people find their way through a rapidly expanding world of knowledge, connecting a person with an idea, a book, an organisation, another person or a source of information that might help them see something differently or take the next step in their lives.

By the late 1970s, that understanding had become entwined with another idea: community and adult education could happen well beyond universities, schools and libraries, and a publication could itself become a kind of community reference service. It was from this background that, in 1982, the Down To Earth Association newsletter was transformed into Whole Life Times.

The choice of name expressed something that had been taking shape for years: the recognition that the subjects we usually separate into different compartments are deeply connected. Personal health cannot finally be separated from psychological wellbeing; psychological wellbeing from relationships and community; community from culture and economics; economics from ecology; ecology from climate and water; and none of these from the larger living systems of the Earth upon which every human life depends. Whole Life Times was therefore never intended to be a specialist publication about one subject. It was conceived as a place where the connections between subjects could be explored.

The early publication described itself as a free “directory and journal of ideas and activities for personal growth, spiritual experience, healing and social transformation.” It circulated widely throughout Western Australia and beyond, carrying articles alongside information about organisations, activities, events, books, services and resources. In this sense, the publication became something like a community reference library in motion.

A reader might encounter an article about nutrition beside one about meditation, permaculture, psychology, renewable energy, community living or social change. Someone who picked up the publication because of an interest in personal health might unexpectedly discover an environmental idea, while someone concerned about the state of the planet might encounter an approach to personal or spiritual development. A book, an event notice, an interview or even an advertisement might open another door. This kind of cross-pollination was not incidental to Whole Life Times; it was part of what the publication was there to do.

During the 1980s Whole Life Times developed from its tabloid beginnings into a magazine while continuing to reflect the extraordinary diversity of the emerging holistic, environmental and transformational movements. Regular print publication eventually ceased in 1989 as Denis increasingly concentrated on his work in clinical psychology, but the idea behind Whole Life Times did not disappear, nor did the questions that had given rise to it. As the decades passed, many of those questions became more urgent.

From the WLT archive

The story in Denis's own words

In this introduction to Whole Life Times, founder and Publisher-Editor Denis McCarthy looks back at the beginnings of the magazine while sharing some of its early issues. It offers a personal glimpse into the alternative, environmental and transformational culture from which Whole Life Times emerged, and into the ideas that have continued to shape its development over more than four decades.

Some of the early issues shown in this video are now being prepared for inclusion in the digital Whole Life Times archive.

Climate change, biodiversity loss, pressures on freshwater, ecological degradation, social fragmentation, chronic disease, mental-health difficulties, accelerating technological change and growing uncertainty about humanity's future increasingly revealed how inadequate it could be to treat complex problems as though they existed in isolation. At the same time, the Internet was creating possibilities for sharing knowledge that could scarcely have been imagined when the first copies of Whole Life Times were distributed around Western Australia.

A publication no longer needed to be constrained by the cost of paper, printing and physical distribution. Conversations could be recorded and shared internationally, archives could become searchable, and readers could follow an idea from an article to an interview, a book, a research paper, an organisation, a course or another person working on the same question. Whole Life Times gradually found a new life within this digital world and today is again published as a free magazine, continuing a tradition that began in 1982 while allowing that tradition to develop in ways that were not previously possible.

The magazine itself is now increasingly one expression of a larger purpose. Whole Life Times Dialogues allows conversations with people whose experience, research and ideas deserve to be heard at greater depth, while Whole Life Times Connect creates opportunities for readers to meet around some of the subjects explored in the magazine. Special Editions, articles, books and publications, events and learning opportunities, an expanding resource centre and other pathways can help readers move from encountering an idea to exploring it more deeply and, where appropriate, becoming involved themselves.

In an interesting way, this brings the story back towards its beginnings. The technologies have changed enormously since 1982, but the underlying purpose remains remarkably familiar. The printed directory can become a searchable digital resource; the reference desk can become an intelligent guide available to people around the world; and what began as a largely local network of readers and contributors can become an international network of people, organisations, conversations and knowledge. Through all of this, the task remains to help people find their way through knowledge.

That means doing more than accumulating information. It means helping people discover relationships between things that are too often considered separately, introducing ideas, evidence, experience and differing perspectives without telling readers what they must think, and seeking out not only the problems confronting humanity but also the people, knowledge, experiments and possibilities that may help us respond to them.

This is also why Whole Life Times is now becoming part of something larger: the Whole Life Universal Field, an evolving constellation of publishing, dialogue, education, resources, projects and participation concerned with human flourishing and planetary wellbeing. Within that wider field, Whole Life Times has a particular role as an editorial doorway through which people can encounter ideas they may not otherwise have come across and then follow the connections into other areas of knowledge, conversation and participation.

That movement from one subject into another has always been part of the Whole Life approach. A question about health may eventually lead to soil, a question about water may lead to climate and forests, psychology may lead to relationships and culture, and consciousness may meet science. In the same way, concern about the future may lead not only to greater understanding but also to involvement in the people, projects and communities trying to shape a wiser response.

More than forty years after the first Whole Life Times appeared, the publication is still exploring these relationships, even though the world around it and the means by which knowledge can be found and shared have changed almost beyond recognition. What has not changed is the underlying conviction that seeing the connections matters. The need to understand ourselves, one another and the living Earth as parts of a larger whole may, in fact, be even greater now than it was when Whole Life Times began, and it is from that continuing need, together with everything learned along the way, that the next chapter of the story is beginning.