More than four decades of Whole Life Times
Beginning in 1982, Whole Life Times has followed an extraordinary period of change in our understanding of health, consciousness, ecology, sustainable living, human potential and our relationship with the living Earth. This archive is being created to make that history accessible again — not simply as a record of the past, but as part of a living and evolving field of knowledge.
Whole Life Times began publication in Fremantle in 1982, at a time when many of the ideas that now form part of everyday discussion were still emerging at the edges of mainstream culture. Across the decades the magazine has provided a meeting place for writers, practitioners, researchers, activists, educators and readers interested in healthier ways of living and in the larger cultural and ecological transformations taking place around them.
Looking back through those issues is therefore rather like looking through a series of windows into the changing consciousness of the times. Subjects once regarded as alternative or marginal have entered wider public life; other questions have become more urgent; and ideas separated by disciplinary boundaries increasingly reveal themselves as interconnected.
Our intention is to preserve that history while also releasing it from the confines of the printed page. As the archive is digitised, individual articles will progressively become discoverable through the subject pathways of Whole Life Times, allowing a reader interested in a question today to encounter relevant voices and perspectives from across more than forty years of publication.
The Whole Life Times journey
The founding years
The beginnings of Whole Life Times and its early exploration of holistic health, personal and spiritual development, peace, ecology, community, social change and new directions for humankind.
A widening field
A decade in which many complementary health, environmental and consciousness movements continued to develop and enter broader public awareness.
Entering a new century
Whole Life themes increasingly encountered a rapidly changing technological, social and planetary context, while questions of sustainability and global interdependence became more pressing.
Connection and transformation
Health, ecology, consciousness, culture and the future of humanity became increasingly difficult to consider in isolation from one another.
Towards the Whole Life Universal Field
The contemporary period connects the quarterly magazine with WLT Dialogues, WLT Connect, subject exploration, Gaiarcadia and the wider developing Whole Life Universal Field of Knowledge.
Issues will appear as they are prepared
Rather than creating links to material that is not yet ready, each period will become browsable as scanned issues, readable PDFs and article-level records are checked and prepared for publication.
There will be more than one way to explore
Opening the early Whole Life Times collection
A major digitisation of the earlier printed issues is now underway. Once those issues have been scanned into high-quality PDFs, their text can be recovered, analysed and classified so that articles can be connected with the subjects, people and ideas they contain.
This is an important transition. What began as shelves of printed magazines can gradually become a searchable and interconnected body of knowledge — preserving the integrity of the original issues while enabling new pathways through their contents.